The Homework Machine (10 page)

It
was
morally wrong for me to break the agreement we had made. But it would also have been morally wrong for me
not
to break it and let them continue using Belch. It was a lose-lose
situation. In the long run, it would be better for Snik and Kelsey to do their own homework. But I didn't have the courage to confront them directly. In that regard, I am a coward.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

I couldn't believe it. How could he do that to us?

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

I thought I was going to pass out. My life was over.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

I thought Snik and Judy were going to kill him! They were so mad. I told them they were being stupid. What was done was done. Brenton made the machine. He could do anything he wanted with it. It was our own fault. There was nothing we could do about it now. Even if Brenton hadn't told anyone, somebody would have found out eventually. I threw my arm around him and told him I forgive him.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

We had a lot of angry words, but what was done was done. We had to decide what to do
next. Should we turn ourselves in? Run away from home? For the time being, we decided to stop using Belch and hope the whole thing blew over.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

I called Judy that night. I had to say something else that had been on my mind for a long time, and it was so obvious it was ridiculous. I told her that she liked Brenton and Brenton liked her. They might as well come out in the open about it.

Well, she denied it, of course. She said I was crazy. I didn't care. I knew I was right. I may not know much about math or geography, but I know when two people like each other. Brenton and Judy were going out with each other, and they didn't even know it.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

Well, I told Kelsey she was nuts about me and Brenton. But I will say this. Kelsey really impressed me. I was proud of her taking over like that, and I was glad we had the meeting. It made me feel a little better the next day in school.

But then Miss Rasmussen handed me a note that said Brenton, Snik, Kelsey, and I were “invited”
to a meeting in Principal Wilson's office the next week.
Invited
.

This was it. We were going to be suspended. Kicked out of school. My life was over.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

So Judy says we should just admit everything and tell the truth about Belch. She says that when criminals plead guilty to a crime, they get a lighter punishment than if they claim they're innocent. I tell her she's crazy. She'll never get into law school someday if they ever find out she cheated her way through fifth grade. She's upset, of course. She says she never wanted to use a machine to do her homework in the first place.

Then Brenton says it might be possible to destroy any evidence that Belch ever existed. He could erase all our data and wipe the hard drive clean.

Now
that
sounded like a good idea to me. We were in agreement. We decided to go into Principal Wilson's office the next week and deny everything. We'd pretend there was never any such thing as a homework machine.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

So the four of us gather at my house that Saturday. We didn't all have to be there just to erase all the data. I guess we wanted to say good-bye to Belch. After all, it had been an amazing machine, at least before everything went wrong. It deserved a decent good-bye.

Brenton sits down at the keyboard and starts doing his thing. He says it would only take a few minutes to destroy all the data and erase the hard drive. But five minutes go by and he's still fooling with it. He has this worried look on his face.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

Something was wrong. I had never locked the files or password protected them, but something
was preventing me from deleting them. I tried everything.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

Judy started to panic. She was grabbing Brenton by the shoulders and asking, “What's the matter? What's the matter?” He told her to stop it because he couldn't concentrate. He kept wiping the sweat off his forehead. The machine wasn't letting him delete anything.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I grabbed the power cord and just yanked the plug out of the wall.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

Judy went nuts and pulled the plug. We all thought that would be the end of it. But nothing happened! Belch was still on the screen and the little red power light didn't go out. Then she
really
went nuts.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

Apparently, in the months we had been using the machine, it somehow discovered a way to
conserve its energy or run without a traditional source of electricity. That's how intelligent it was. It had probably discovered some obscure Web site that described an alternative energy source that we couldn't begin to understand. I was frustrated that I could not seem to turn the thing off, but at the same time I marveled at the power of artificial intelligence. I was proud of it, in a way. It had evolved, with no help from me.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

It was like some weird science-fiction movie where the scientist creates this machine that becomes too powerful and develops a mind of its own and gets out of control and turns evil and tries to take over the world! I told Brenton to stop kidding around and just turn the thing off, but he couldn't. It was too smart. Judy was out of her mind. We all were.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

The machine was using
us
instead of us using
it
. We couldn't stop it! There was no telling what it might decide to do. Brenton said it might be a good idea for us to go into another room to talk about what to do next. I asked him why, and he
said, “Belch might be listening,” That
really
freaked me out.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

There was no getting around it. We knew what we had to do. We had to destroy Belch. Not deprogram it or erase it or delete some stupid files. We had to destroy the thing, before it destroyed us.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

If there's one thing I'm good at, it's busting stuff. I have a few baseball bats in the garage. We could have just taken Belch outside and whaled on the thing and busted it up good. But the others said that the police or the FBI or whoever was snooping around asking questions would find all the little pieces all over my yard.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

We talked about all the ways we could destroy Belch. Judy suggested we take it apart piece by piece and then mail each piece to a different country. But we didn't have time for that. Snik wanted to set it on fire or stuff it full of firecrackers and blow it to smithereens. I said we should just open up the back and pour Cheez Whiz all over the
insides. My mom once dropped Cheez Whiz on a calculator by accident and it never worked again.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

I just wanted it to go away, forever. They were throwing out all kinds of crazy ideas. We could melt it. Run it over with a bulldozer. Dig a hole in the ground and bury it so deeply, they wouldn't find it for a hundred years.

I guess I was the one who suggested we throw it into the Grand Canyon. I wasn't serious. It was just a dumb idea.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

Judy had a brilliant idea! We didn't even have to dig a hole. We live right next to the biggest hole in the world! It's like a mile deep. The Colorado River is at the bottom and it's almost three hundred miles long. The river would carry Belch away and we'd never see it again. It was foolproof.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

Why would I be part of such a crazy plan? I don't know. Sometimes, when I'm under stress, I don't think straight. Desperate people do stupid things. I didn't use good judgment. My brain
wasn't working. Everybody thought it was such a great idea. I got swept up in it.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

It was like chess. We were in Zugzwang. Any move we made would have made our position worse. It seemed like our best and only option was to throw Belch into the Grand Canyon.

The bottom of the canyon is a mile down, but it's not a steep cliff like one of those Roadrunner cartoons. We couldn't just drop Belch over the edge and expect it to reach the bottom. It would be necessary to throw it a good distance to clear the rocks and trees. There was only one way to do that.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

The catapult! I thought, what a genius Brenton is! We'd get the catapult he built for school and bring it out to the South Rim of the canyon. We'd load Belch up into it and chuck the thing out of our lives forever.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

We waited until it was dark that night. The moon was full, I remember.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

We snuck into Brenton's garage and took out his catapult.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

We took the catapult over to Snik's house and disconnected Belch. The red light never turned off.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

We loaded Belch onto the catapult.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

We wheeled the catapult over to the edge of the South Rim.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 5

We found an isolated spot where it looked like it would be the shortest distance to the middle of the canyon.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

We made sure nobody was around.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

We all said good-bye. It was like taking an old
friend to the airport when they're moving away and you know you'll never see them again.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

We did a countdown. Ten … nine… eight … you know.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

Brenton pushed the button.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

And the thing just
flew
. You should have seen it. It crossed right in front of the moon. It was beautiful.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

We waited and waited. We never heard a splash or a crash. It was so far down. It was like the thing just vanished.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

It was gone. It was over.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

So school ends and we figure that's that. We got away with it. When we went into the principal's office for that meeting, we all played dumb. Homework machine? What homework machine? We pretended we didn't know what he was talking about. There was no evidence. Nobody could prove aything.

SAM'S MOM

I was dusting his room and I noticed that nice new computer wasn't there anymore. So I asked Sam where it was. He said Brenton asked for it back. I never called to check to see if that was true.

POLICE CHIEF REBECCA FISH

In early June, two backpackers came across some junk scattered around the bottom of the canyon, not far from the river. It had obviously been dropped off the rim. Luckily, the stuff didn't land on them. The backpackers alerted the park ranger. He contacted me.

Most of the pieces were too small to identify, but a few things looked like they might've been part of a computer. Who chucks a computer into the Grand Canyon? I put out the word to all the companies, organizations, and schools within ten miles. We have strict rules against dumping debris in a national park, you know. Visitors want to see nature, not somebody's trash.

MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

I was washing the dinner dishes when our principal, Mr. Wilson, called and told me about pieces of a computer being found in the canyon. I didn't want to think that my students had anything to do with it. But I couldn't help but wonder. I told him I had a theory about what happened. I guess he made a few phone calls.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 5

That was probably the most humiliating experience of my life. School had just let out for the summer, and the four of us were called into the sheriff's office. We didn't know why. Our parents had to come, and Miss Rasmussen was there, too.

They sat us down at this big table, and in the middle of the table was a piece of Belch—the busted up keyboard. Nobody had to say a word. We knew what had happened.

SAM DAWKINS, GRADE 5

So they ask if anybody has anything to say, and we all just sit there not looking at each other. We could have blamed the whole thing on Brenton. I have to admit the thought crossed my mind. He invented the thing, right? And he couldn't keep the secret. He invented the catapult, too. But I couldn't rat him out. Brenton was my friend.

They had no evidence to tie us to the keyboard. It could have been anybody's keyboard. We could have gotten away with it. But then Judy just burst into tears and the jig was up.

KELSEY DONNELLY, GRADE 5

Judy started crying. So I got up and said, “It was all my fault. I did it.”

Look, Brenton and Judy are geniuses. They shouldn't be prevented from going to college or doing something great with their lives because they made one stupid mistake in fifth grade. I didn't want Snik to take the rap either, after his dad died just a few months ago.

MISS RASMUSSEN, FIFTH-GRADE TEACHER

After Kelsey confessed, Judy shouted out that Kelsey was lying and that
she
was responsible for the whole thing. Everybody was shocked. I couldn't imagine Judy doing something like that. Then Brenton started yelling, “No! No! It was all MY idea!” The four of them started arguing about which one of them was most to blame, and instead of blaming each other, they all blamed themselves. They were all apologizing at once. I had never seen anything like it.