Realizing we needed to rescue Robin was the easy part. Working out exactly HOW we were going to do it was much harder.
“Maybe we could break in and steal him back?” I suggested.
Jess raised an eyebrow. “Like prison food, do you?”
“OK, we could BUY him back then. Make Mr Burton an offer he can’t refuse!”
“Great idea! How much have you got?”
“Well … not so much at the moment, but I’m sure Mum owes me some pocket money.”
My sister snorted.
“So what ARE we going to do?”
“If you could possibly stop talking for, like, FIVE SECONDS, I might actually be able to think!”
I pulled a face. I was beginning to realize that the hardest part of this whole thing was going to be spending time with Jess. But if we wanted to get Robin back we were going to have to work together.
After a bit more arguing – sorry, discussion – we decided to try a TWO-PRONGED ATTACK: I’d talk to Dad while my sister worked on Mum.
“We need to get Robin back from Mr Burton.”
“Who?” As usual, Dad was a little slow on the uptake. His driving job meant he was away from home a lot, so he was often a bit behind on current events.
“The robot babysitter Grandma made for us,” I reminded him.
Dad frowned. “You mean the maniac who trashed my tomatoes?”
“That was an accident. He … got wet when we went swimming, and it made him go a bit funny.”
“A bit FUNNY?!” Dad’s eyebrows quivered as he gazed at the destruction. “He murdered my tomatoes and obliterated half your mum’s paintings!”
“I know, but … he didn’t MEAN to.”
“I’d been growing those tomatoes for months,” Dad said, going all misty-eyed. “I raised them from seed, you know.”
It was obvious I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him. Maybe Jess would have better luck with Mum.
“She just kept going on about how we could’ve been hurt,” said Jess. “‘What if he’d set fire to the house? What if he’d gone crazy with a shovel instead of the hose?’ She wouldn’t even listen to what I had to say.”
“You reminded her about the cakes though, right? How if we got Robin back she could eat delicious muffins every day!”
My sister pulled a face. “Mum said if Robin came back she’d get fat.”
I let out a groan of frustration. “What is WRONG with these people?”
“We’ll just have to think of a way to get him back ourselves,” said Jess. “Any ideas?”
Sometimes the best way to find a solution to a problem is not to go looking for one. You can be banging your head against a brick wall, trying SO HARD to think of something, and get nowhere. But if you stop trying – if you forget about it for a while and do something else – a strange and magical thing can happen, and the answer just pops up all by itself!
I decided to play some Revenge of the Robots to clear my head. While I was playing, I remembered what Robin had said about being ashamed of the robots in the game and how they’d misbehaved…
And that’s when I had my genius idea.
“You want to get Robin to trash Mr Burton’s house like he did our garden?” I couldn’t tell if Jess was impressed or about to start laughing.
“If we can make Mr Burton think that Robin is really dangerous,” I said. “Well … he won’t want to keep him then, will he?”
Jess frowned. “That’s actually not such a bad idea…”
“It’s genius!”
My sister snorted. “OK then, Einstein, so how are we going to get Robin to deliberately malfunction again? We can’t exactly go next door and ask if we can give him a bath!”
“Um … I haven’t worked that bit out yet.”
Jess rolled her eyes.
“What? I’m supposed to think of EVERYTHING now, am I?”
I put Grandma on speaker so Jess could hear too.
“First you let Donald Burton steal my lovely robot and now you want to make him DELIBERATELY malfunction!”
I was glad Grandma was on the phone and not within swiping range. I also wondered how she knew Mr Burton’s name was Donald, but now probably wasn’t the time to ask. She was NOT using her happy voice.
“I programmed layers of safety code to make sure something like that DIDN’T happen,” she said.
“Now I didn’t say that, did I?” Grandma’s voice softened a little. “Let me have a cup of tea and a think. I reckon it could be a THREE-CUP PROBLEM, this, so you’d better give me at least an hour.”
Three cups of tea and half a packet of Jammie Dodgers later…
“It goes against the fundamental Laws of Robotics for a robot to act against its owner,” said Grandma, still crunching on the remains of a biscuit, “but there is a way you could control him remotely.”
I grinned at Jess. “How?”
“I programmed a fail-safe to allow remote access in an emergency,” said Grandma. “It’s paired with your games console, so in theory you could control him from there. It would be just like playing a game.”
“Brilliant! So what do we do? What are the controls?”
“One step at a time!” said Grandma. “First you have to ACTIVATE remote access.”
“OK, so how do we do that?”
“You have to sing to him.”
“Pardon?!” said Jess. “I think the phone went funny just then, Grandma. It sounded like you said we have to SING to the robot.”
“That’s right.” We could hear Grandma chuckling to herself. “I told you it was an EMERGENCY measure. I didn’t think you’d ever have to use it! I programmed Robin’s fail-safe to respond to your voices, but it couldn’t just be your normal speaking voices or you could have set it off accidentally. I used that recording you sent for my birthday – the two of you singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.”
“So we have to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the robot?” I said. That recording had been Mum’s idea. A painful half an hour of my life that I was in no hurry to revisit. “There must be another way!”
“I’m afraid not. If you want to take control, you’re going to have to sing to him.”
Suddenly the plan seemed a lot less brilliant.