The kids at SM&LL — the school of Science, Mathematics, and Local Languages — had a lot of weird projects. One of them was a robot skunk, with an onboard AI, who was their ambassador to the local wildlife. Peppy could inhabit different machines, with varying capabilities. Tonight the kids were testing a cargo drone, a quad-copter with a bucket hanging below it on a cable.
Actually, they were testing their latest hologram projector, and their neighbors’ network hygiene. Could they get someone’s attention through the doorbell camera? Could they get someone to come outside and witness their laser-light show? Would they contribute to the school? Would they at least drop some candy into the bucket? And how long would all this take? How much time did Peppy need to solve a bad password, a stupid password?
Not very long, it seemed. Their candy haul was not good, but they had enough financial data to bankrupt everyone on this cul-de-sac. Which would have been fun, in a way. The normies were not always nice, and petty revenge was definitely a temptation.
Plus, they needed money to run the school. But their more prosocial plan A was to use the data to sell security consulting services. Hey, look what we found, just floating around out there on the dark web. What would you give us to plug the holes in your security?
But tonight was about the projector. They showed selected scenes from mythology:
Coyote (or Raven), stealing fire from the Sun;
Brer Rabbit, making the Tar Baby;
Reynard the Fox, with a mouthful of chicken feathers;
Anansi the Spider, ballooning onto a slave ship and poisoning the sailors’ grog with his venom;
Loki Laufeyson, turning himself into a mare to seduce Odin’s horse and birthing the eight-legged colt Sleipnir;
upping the antisocial ante to keep people compelled whenever Peppy needed more cracking time, backing off when the marks’ facial expressions shifted too far towards disgust.
It didn’t always work. They had some slammed doors. But only once did a jock get salty and dump about six pounds of candy into their bucket, grounding Peppy. He thought that was hilarious, and stood there with his smartphone, filming her struggles to lift the mass of packaged sugar.
Which just made him a better target for Peppy’s response, a squirt of artificial thiols so potent that the Army had tested them as crowd-control weapons. The jock dropped his phone and started gagging. Peppy made sure to film that part with her own onboard camera, jettisoned the cable attaching her to the bucket, and flew away into the dark of the autumn night.
The SM&LL kids laughed about that one for years.
This series is a bit inspired by Bertrand R Brinley’s Mad Scientists’ Club, which I read and enjoyed as a kid.