30

Sir Beeps-A-Lot Makes Progress

Beeps drifted silently, twenty-three miles above Earth, staring down at the swirling white clouds that blanketed his objective, somewhere down on the watery, backward planet.

He would not disappoint the Federation.

His mission was clear.

(Of course it was clear; Beeps could see it perfectly, probably because he’d printed it out on one of his extra-special “This is your mission!” notecards.)

THIS IS YOUR MISSION!

OBJECTIVE: (1) FIND THE CHIP BEFORE (2) IT FALLS INTO THE CLAWS OF THE GREAT FELINE EMPIRE AND (3) ENABLES THEM TO LIVE FOREVER (4) LIKE US.

Beeps shuddered in horror. Cats with infinite lives? Can you imagine? The havoc they would cause!

Beeps had been reviewing the files House had sent, and while Beeps could now believe such a chip existed, he had a hard time believing such a backward planet had created it.

Regardless.

Organics now possessed the power to put a soul in a machine, a way to create a copy of a feline mind that could be placed in a robot body and exist without the weakness of flesh and bone.

(And by the way? That’s totally our thing!)

The best part of being a robot was knowing you would outlast your enemies. No disease, no aging. Time was always on your side.

The kicker was that the chip doubled as a power source. One that never ran dry.

Now, that was something the Robot Federation could make use of.

Beeps thought about what to do next. This was definitely his problem to solve, as Number Two. Number One—SLAYAR—was a big-picture kind of supreme leader. He wouldn’t want to get caught up in the details.

Beeps ran one of his standard mission diagnostics, reviewing his progress. He had accomplished much since he arrived—that was conclusively true.

For one thing, he’d printed out that mission card and found the tape, hadn’t he?

For another, he’d established contact with his agent. House. Odd name.

With the help of the “House” sympathizer, Beeps had successfully lured the human guardians of the chip and sent them halfway across their planet, far from the facility site. With any luck, it would now be temporarily unguarded.

All that remained was for the Federation to find and infiltrate the location and recover the Singularity Chip itself.

Beeps was close to victory. Very close. And yet, there was a bug in the code. A fly in the ointment. A cat in the . . . well, a cat anywhere in anything was bad enough, wasn’t it? Somehow, Sir Beeps himself was being outmaneuvered, because two Feline agents were already inside the target site, and he had no idea how they had gotten there.

Especially not before he himself had . . .

This has POUNCE written all over it.

Sir Beeps cursed.

Four-leggers!

Even the rogue “House” was concerned. Apparently, the four-legger agents had already created much chaos. Two felines had been discovered sniffing around the site, marking items with their fluids, and generally leaving the mission in great jeopardy.

Sir Beeps reached to touch his mission-statement card with one grasper. He cringed at the thought of failing his Number One. He cringed even harder at the thought of what SLAYAR would do to him, if Sir Beeps were to fail in his mission.

This “House” was an excellent ally, but it did have one major weakness. No hardware. No graspers, treads, wheels, gears, or motors of any kind. He was . . . soft.

And software is just pathetic. Number Two sighed. It was also practically useless when it came to stealing stuff.

The rogue House claimed to have “tools” at its disposal and said it was willing to do the heavy lifting. The House also insisted it was confident its own agents—the Protos, it called them—would find the Singularity Chip before the cats ever could.

Still.

Beeps himself was less optimistic. A veteran of years of conflicts between the Cats and Robots, he knew how dangerously unpredictable his furred four-legger adversaries could be.

Beeps had a flawless memory—a googolplexabyte internal drive, big even by Number Two standards—which meant that when it came to the Great Feline Empire, he remembered enough to be uneasy.

And so, in the very last, the very sub-iest of his sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-routines, Beeps began preparing a worst-case scenario, a plan so dastardly that even he hoped he would never need to use it . . . but better to be prepared when it comes to the four-leggers . . .

“So be vigilant,” Beeps repeated to “House,” in his last Earth-bound message. “We must get the Singularity Chip before the cats, and get out before the guardians return.”

“Affirmative,” the next message from Earth said.

“If we don’t recover the chip, we must destroy it.” Beeps sent a detailed readout of the fleet following close behind, including the unreasonably large number of space-to-Earth missiles.

“Affirmative,” the next-next message from Earth said.