“Announcement: Doctor Lobe needs help.”

“AAAHHH!!! Get out! Get out of here!”

“Request: Please do not throw wet sponges at Unit Dooley. Unit Dooley is moisture sensitive.”

“Get out or I’m gonna splash this whole bathtub on you!”

“Reminder: Moisture Sensitive. Moisture Sensitive.”

The robot named Unit Dooley frantically backed its way out of the bathroom. The red plastic tub skittered out on its wheeled legs while the animated baby doll that served as the machine’s face and hands slipped on the wet floor and was dragged out on its little plastic bottom.

Piper kicked at her bathwater in outrage. She wanted to sulk, but she knew something bad must have happened for one of the robots to come up to the second floor. They hadn’t left the basement since Uncle Seven moved in three weeks ago. Piper dunked her head under the water to rinse the shampoo out of her hair, then she climbed out of the bath.

“What happened, Dooley?” Piper said. She felt soapy and cranky as she wrapped a towel around her hair and pulled on her thick terrycloth bathrobe.

A tiny doll hand with metal joints reached around the doorframe. “Report: Doctor Lobe has...”

“Stay in the hallway!”

The hand retracted. “Repeat: Doctor Lobe has attempted a dangerous procedure. He is not in control of himself and may do harm.”

Piper joined the robot in the hall. “Well, at least the house isn’t on fire.”

The doll rose up, lifted by its laundry tube, until the baby doll dangled in Piper’s face. Little camera lenses in its eyes whirred as they focused on her. “Reassurance: The house is intact.”

Brrrrr! Piper shivered. Three weeks and these things never got any less creepy. “Take me to Uncle Seven,” she said.

The baby doll dropped onto the top of Unit Dooley’s plastic container. The box then trotted down the stairs like a very square horse carrying a very tiny cowboy.

Uncle Seven’s robots just didn’t belong in the normalness of the upstairs hallway. Piper wondered if it would be worse if they actually looked like robots instead of somebody’s garage sale come to life. The plastic storage tubs were the cheap kind you could buy anywhere, so there was no way anyone would think that inside each one was a high-speed supercomputer capable of artificial, autonomous intelligence. The baby dolls would have been hideous even without all the mechanical joints and circuitry Uncle Seven had built into them, thanks to the marker scribbles and missing hair chunks provided by their previous toddler owners. Uncle Seven had found the dolls in trashcans and city dumps while looking for spare parts. He kept them, saying, “They shouldn’t be condemned just because some child’s first experiment on them left them unlovable.” It was a strange tender spot in the man.

The first floor was dark and empty. Piper’s parents were out on a date tonight, their first in weeks. They hadn’t met Uncle Seven’s creepy robot assistants yet. Apart from being caught off guard by Piper that first day, Uncle Seven was very good at keeping secrets. Piper’s mom would have screamed if Unit Dooley had crept up to tug at her pant leg this evening, probably almost as loudly as she had screamed when she and Piper’s dad found out that their daughter had let Uncle Seven into the house. It had taken hours of convincing and not one but two Disarming Little Girl Smiles to calm them down and let him stay. Their date tonight was the first time they’d felt secure enough to go out and leave Uncle Seven in the house without parental supervision. Since Piper was being fetched to help him, it was pretty clear that was a mistake.

Piper walked through the open basement door and looked out over the banister as she followed the robot down the steps. The storage shelves had been moved aside to make room for Uncle Seven’s laboratory and bed. Beakers, Bunsen burners, and strange little machines lined a workbench that was sturdy and practical. Uncle Seven looked up from his laptop computer. He waved at Piper before returning to his work.

Piper didn’t bother waving back. She knew the truth: this wasn’t Uncle Seven. It was a recorded holographic image -- a lie.

An orange-striped construction barricade was mounted across the base of the stairs. A sign written in a child’s scrawl was taped to the beam: “Do nOt enter! Sientest at wOrk!”

Unit Dooley scampered under the beam and disappeared into thin air, just as Piper knew it would. She climbed down to the third step before the little barricade and stopped as she thought Y’know, I really didn’t have a good reason to come down here. If there’s something I need, Uncle Seven can get it for me.

In a moment she would feel the urge to go upstairs, but she knew that now was the time to whisper, “Open Sesame.”

The little barricade clicked as it stopped projecting subliminal messages from the oversized “O’s” of the fake sign. The striped beam rose up like a train crossing and Piper walked down the remaining steps.

As she moved past the holographic projectors, sound dampeners, and other electronic doohickeys tucked under the stairs, the image of the quiet little room fell away and Piper walked into an entirely different and amazing basement.

The noise hit her first. It was always louder than she was prepared to hear. It took a moment for her ears to adjust to the bubbly rumble of chemicals and machines.

The room seemed larger than it had been three weeks before--because it was. Two walls had been covered in sheets of Uncle Seven’s Spatial Reinterpretation Wallpolymer-- stick it to the wall, turn on the power, and the sheets tweaked dimensional space to create extra feet where the wall should have stopped. In this case, they moved the walls back fifteen feet each. The last time Piper was down here Uncle Seven was thinking of making a carpet of the stuff to lower the floor. Since the floor was still floor-level, he clearly hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

Even though the basement had been expanded, there still wasn’t room for all the technology Uncle Seven had crammed into it. Tanks of burbling acids fought with mysterious gadgets for space. Power cords and electric wires wove across the room like spider webs. It smelled of oil and metal and vats full of chemical goo...and Piper loved it! She came down here every chance she could, always surprised by some new device or a murky tank with something wriggling inside.

The huge car on legs that Piper had begun thinking of as the ‘TimeCrab’ stood in another corner, covered by a large tarp. Uncle Seven had skillfully found ways to dodge her questions about it, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge the second floating rod that was now hovering by the boxes of Christmas decorations, but Piper knew Uncle Seven was warming up to her. She’d get the truth out of him eventually.

Five nightmare babies and their plastic tubs scuttled around the base of the TimeCrab. It wasn’t hard to see that they were guarding it.

She addressed the robot with the biggest doll. “Unit Betsy Wetsy, where’s my Uncle Seven?”

The baby girl doll pointed a stubby wired finger and droned in a deep male voice, “Report: Doctor Lobe is behind the fusion reactor.”

The fusion reactor was a repurposed refrigerator covered in pipes standing off to the side of the room, turning the garbage and sewage of the Lobe household into enough energy to fuel Uncle Seven’s laboratory and lower the monthly power bill for the house. The catbird that Piper had met in the back of the moving truck now lived on top of it in a comfy nest she had made out of Christmas wreaths and old blankets. Seeing Piper, the beast flapped its wings and swooped down onto her shoulder.

“Hey, Kittyhawk,” Piper cooed. The miniature griffin was skittish. Bird talons poked nervously at Piper’s shoulder blade. She was glad her robe was thick.

Piper took a few more steps to pass the reactor...and there stood Uncle Seven, twitching and sweating profusely. There was a metal ring floating around the top of his head, circling his unruly hair like a ring of Saturn. His eyes were closed and he shuddered repeatedly as if he was having a bad dream. Unit Dooley skittered about the scientist’s feet, preparing to catch Uncle Seven with tiny doll arms if he fell.

“Uncle Seven?” Piper asked quietly. “Are you okay?”

The twitching man was silent for a moment, then... “’Unnnn-cle Seven,’” he said in a strange voice. “Why do all my brothers insist their brats call me that? I’m not the seventh uncle, I’m the seventh brother. You each have six uncles and one father. Ergo I’m actually ‘Uncle Six.’ Bzzt!”

His body twitched. The halo of circuitry briefly faltered as it spun around his head. He opened his eyes and saw Piper. “What was I talking about?”

Piper backed up a step. “You were complaining about being called ‘Uncle Seven.’”

“Why should I mind that? It’s like a nickname for Steven. Bzzt!” Uncle Seven’s head tilted and his eyelids flickered shut. When he opened them again, he seemed to look at Piper with different eyes than the moment before. “Piper! What are you doing down here...dripping water over everything?”

“Dooley was worried about you.”

Uncle Seven scowled down at the robot. “Unit Dooley, remind me to remove your emotion board.”

Unit Dooley stopped skittering and crossed its stubby arms. “Observation: At this rate, Unit Dooley will have an empty storage container by Tuesday.”

Piper stepped closer. “What are you doing to your head, Uncle Seven?”

“What, this?” He tapped the hovering ring. “This is for controlling the nanites I injected into my brain...ooh.” He stumbled a bit as the circling ring wobbled slightly. “Don’t let me tap that again.” He squinted uncertainly at Piper then began a lecture. “Nanites are microscopic robots that can be programmed to perform tasks...”

“I know what they are,” said Piper, trying to remain calm. “But why would you put tiny robots in your brain?”

Uncle Seven rolled his eyes. “Well, obviously I’m getting data on my electrochemical and cytoarchitectural construction. How else am I going to record my personality as a program that I can download into my robots?”

“Uh huh...and why do that?”

“They don’t function effectively unless I’m paying constant attention to them. For example, they run off and fetch wet girls to drip all over my fragile equipment when they’re not needed. When--Bzzt!”

Again, Uncle Seven twitched. “Oh, hello, Piper. What are you doing down...?”

“You put nanites in your brain,” said Piper, cutting to the chase. “Now you’re acting strangely. Why?”

“Oh, well, the gyroscopic balance of one of the nanite swarms might not be properly aligned...”

“Observation,” interrupted Unit Dooley, “Doctor Lobe failed to clean the orange juice residue out of the test tube containing Nanite Swarm 004.”

“...And,” continued Uncle Seven, “they’ve been bumping into my neural tissues and causing...bzzt!...some slight problems.”

“Well, then,” said Piper, a forced smile masking her horror, “let’s get them out!”

“No, no, no,” said Uncle Seven, “at this stage, it’d be more dangerous to interrupt them than to let them finish their job.” He picked Kittyhawk from Piper’s shoulder and held the catbird in his arms. “Besides, think of the benefits! Think how much more productive this lab would be if I had little programmable ‘me’s’ running it.”

Piper looked around the crowded chaos of the lab. “It’s plenty productive as it is.”

“It took me two solid months to manipulate the genomes that produced this flawed little lady.” He scratched Kittyhawk between her wings. “I could assign an assistant ‘me’ to work on the next generation. All the projects I never find the time to finish, I could...”

Uncle Seven stopped moving. He stood like a statue holding Kittyhawk awkwardly in his hands.

“Uncle Seven?” whispered Piper.

“Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!”

It was a big one. The scientist’s entire body seized up in a spasm, causing Kittyhawk to shriek as his grip tightened. The catbird became a flailing mass of feathers and claws, scratching Uncle Seven twice across the chest before he dropped her. The mini-griffin spread her wings and flew back to her nest, hissing at Uncle Seven in anger.

He gaped in shock at the bloody scratches on his chest, but it was only for a moment as a series of “bzzt’s” sent him laughing madly, weeping uncontrollably, and then staring slack-jawed at a lightbulb above a nearby workbench for ten seconds.

Piper was about to touch his arm when another “bzzt” sent him into a panic. “Where am I? What is all this?” He gasped at the lab around him, at the blood on his chest. “What happened to me?! Who are you?” He took a step toward Piper, and then stopped at the sight of Unit Dooley.

The doll tilted its head.

“AAAAAHH!!!” Uncle Seven screamed in terror and ran to the stairway, tripping over cords and bumping into machinery with every step. On the stairs, the sight of his own holographic image waving goodbye sent him shrieking out of the basement.

Piper remembered to breathe. She turned to Unit Dooley in horror. “I’ll call 911!”

“Objection: No! Doctor Lobe’s secrecy must not be compromised.”

“But he could hurt himself! He could die!”

“Observation: The nanites will complete their job in twenty-six minutes, forty-seven seconds. If Doctor Lobe is kept calm and/or distracted during that time, he may be fine.”

“Are you going to help me?”

“Query: Would offering you a dry pair of pants be considered as ‘help?’ ”

Next Chapter: Chapter 5 - Beach Party On The Moon