Chapter 1

Seriously? Mom and Dad expect me to get up and go to school the morning after a 329,000,000,000,000,000-mile road trip across the galaxy? And I’m not even a morning person to begin with. I can’t fake being sick, either. Not with the sterile environment of the space station. No germs = no sickness. Ever. Not even the sniffles. At least I got a good night’s sleep. The zero-gravity pods in our LIV spaces are waaaay more comfortable than regular beds. And you can sleep standing up, so they take up less space.

Oh, hold on a second. I guess I should explain. My name is Kelvin, and I’m about to start my first day at a new school, which is nothing new to me. Our family moves around a lot, and this is my fourth new school in the past five years. It’s just that this one is 56,000 light-years from the last one.

And this is my family. My mom and dad are scientists, really smart ones, which is why we’re moving around all the time. They keep getting new projects to work on, and we have to go where the projects are. In this case, that’s the other end of the galaxy. Oh, and down on the end there is my little sister, Bula. Unfortunately, she had to come along with us. So I guess there really is one germ on this space station.

Robotics is Dad’s specialty. You may already be familiar with some of his work. Like the X9000 PulverBot he designed for Global Mining, Inc.

Then there’s the PL370 Rootin’ Tootin’ Asteroid-Shootin’ Bot he created to keep foreign objects from colliding with the earth.

And, of course, the NIVEN6000 All-Terrain Fully Armored Nuclear-Powered Rescue/Bake Bot…

Dad feels that anyone in dire need of rescue must also be in dire need of a warm, freshly baked chocolate chip cookie.

Then there’s my mom. She’s a neuroscientist, which means she plays around with brains.

No, not like that. She works with the brains while they’re still inside the heads. At least, that’s what she tells me. Although it would be pretty cool to have an evil scientist for a mom!

Since my mom and dad are both supergeniuses, that obviously makes me a supergenius, too, right? Nope. It makes me a double supergenius! Or what I like to call a Mighty Mega Supergenius! It also makes me the smartest human being in the world. There’s really no arguing the fact. It’s simple math.

And this is our new “home”…