Mad Science Institute Read online

  Mad

  Science

  Institute

  A Novel of Calamities, Creatures, and College Matriculation

  Sechin Tower

  Chapter 1 ~ Soap

  My experiment exploded. Again.

  Now I’m thirty feet above a concrete sidewalk, dangling from the railing of a gigantic, burning doomsday machine designed to bring civilization as we know it to a sudden and very messy end. Oh, and BTW: my fingers are slipping.

  My name’s Sophia, but people call me “Soap.” They also call me a mad scientist, which I hate. Everyone knows mad scientists are old men in white coats who build monsters and death-rays and stuff and then laugh like maniacs while trying to conquer the world. I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, and whoever heard of a girl being a mad scientist? Besides, I don’t mean to keep blowing things up. For me, explosions are just a bad habit, like talking with your mouth full or chronic butt-dialing. The only difference is that my bad habit causes widespread property damage.

  So how did I end up here? It sort of started when one of my gizmos accidentally caused a couple dozen cell phones to explode while they were still in people’s pockets. On the up-side, that experiment got me a college scholarship. On the down-side, it set off a chain of events that included chasing a lizard monster through a radioactive basement and being kidnapped by a motorcycle gang. And now I’m stuck between burning alive and falling to my death.

  To be fair, half of the story belongs to my cousin, Dean. For him, it started 16 days ago, when the woman he loved showed up out of nowhere. This was the same woman who offered me admission to the college, so it’s probably fair to start the story with them.

  September 1st

  (Doomsday minus 16 days)

  Chapter 2 ~ Dean

  As the curtain of black smoke pulled back, Dean yanked the oxygen mask from his face and dropped his heat-warped helmet to the pavement. His fellow firefighters rushed in to offer assistance, but he didn’t need any. He was on his feet, and so were the rest of his crew. One man had a hurt shoulder—a broken clavicle, Dean guessed—but the fire was out and their job was done.

  He unclipped the air-tank from his back, and when he shucked his insulated jacket from his shoulders, a light rain of charcoal chunks and burned brick chips fell from him. The late summer Los Angeles wind was hot and tainted by the coppery scent of smog, but it still felt refreshing as it hit his broad chest and played through his short, black hair. He was not the tallest firefighter at his stationhouse, but he was far from the shortest, and his sturdy frame was wrapped in ample muscle and minimal fat, allowing his body to shed heat with the greatest possible efficiency.

  His colleagues gathered his discarded clothing as he dropped it and one of them shoved a canteen into his hand. Dean upended it over his head, then accepted a second canteen and gulped down the chilled water. By the time he finished, the station chief arrived and swapped Dean’s canteen for another full one.

  “Not exactly the best-case scenario,” the chief said, pointing with his chin back towards the remnants of the building from which Dean had just emerged.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Dean said with a shrug. He had once remained on his feet for three days to battle a jet-fuel fire at a hanger outside of Bagdad. By comparison, today was easy. Half the building may have fallen down, but he had read the impending collapse in the sagging interior walls in time to hurry his men to safety. The apartment building was lost, but the fire would not spread.

  “Take a rest,” the chief said, jerking his thumb towards an awaiting ambulance. “I don’t want to see you back on the line for thirty minutes, minimum. That’s an order.”

  Dean had a seat and allowed the paramedics to record his vitals before he found a shady spot to watch the clean-up operation. Exactly thirty minutes later, he got up and went to lend a hand.

  He took only three steps before he saw someone who stopped him short. There, across the street, stood a figure he instantly recognized but couldn’t believe: Professor Denise McKenzie. She was standing on the far corner, just past the ring of plastic cones that marked the civilian safety zone, with the other spectators. It was her hair that made her so easy to spot: orange-red, the color of a daffodil’s heart, and vivid even at a distance as it flowed over her shoulders. Her arms were folded across her chest, and she wore an earth-toned pants suit that allowed his eyes to follow the long journey of her legs all the way up from her black pumps.

  Dean felt a surge of happiness at seeing her, followed almost immediately by a cold splash of regret. He had known her since their first day as college freshman, and since then he might have measured his life by the cycle of intense love and bitter heartbreak they traded with one another. The last time he had seen her had been two years ago, when she rejected his marriage proposal for the second time. All that seemed like so long ago, and his mind raced to come up with an explanation for why she might be here, now, standing on this very street corner.

  She saw him and waved, then pushed past the other spectators to follow the safety line closer to him.

  “McKenzie,” he called out as he ran to her. He had always called her by her last name, ever since they had first met as freshman in college. Originally it had been a sort of joke, a jock’s nickname for someone who couldn’t have been less jock-like in attitude or upbringing, but the name had stuck with her. Even years later, her new acquaintances mistakenly believed that it was her given name because that’s what everyone else called her.

  He raced her to the edge of the safety line, but when he reached her he suddenly felt awkward and unsure of what to do. When they had last seen each other, they had been enemies after another ferocious break-up. By their usual pattern, they would now be lovers again, but Dean didn’t want to make any assumptions. McKenzie, however, had no reservations as she flung her arms around him. He laughed, scooped her off her feet with a bear-hug and inhaled deeply, finding that even the clinging stench of the smoke was powerless to cover her scent of jasmine and honeysuckle—scents he couldn’t name, but which he had learned to love. It meant they were about to re-discover all the ways they were so perfect for each other. Maybe, if they were lucky, this would be the time they would forget to explore all the reasons it could never work out.

  “Sorry,” he said, releasing the hug. “I’m all sweaty. But I’m so glad to see you. What are you doing here? And—how did you find me out on call?”

  “I just followed the smoke,” she said. “Wherever there’s disaster, there’s Dean.”

  When she looked up at him he saw deep, dark circles under her green eyes. She was smiling, but her mouth was strained. “What’s wrong,” he asked. “Is it your heart?” Her blouse covered the scar that had long since faded into a nearly invisible white line down her chest, but he knew it marked the implantation of the tiny electronic pacemaker that corrected her congenital heart defect.

  “My heart’s fine. Listen, I have a lot to tell you and not much time. First of all, I sent a letter of acceptance to your cousin, Sophia. She should be getting it any day now.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Dean rolled his eyes. “Look, I told you, I’m not that close to her or anything. You didn’t have to take her on my account.”

  “That’s not why I accepted her. Believe me, she’s more than qualified. She’s…extraordinary.”

  “Okay, you didn’t come all the way out here just to thank me for the recruiting tip. Spill it.”

  She seemed hesitant to speak, hesitant even to look at him. “I need a favor,” she finally said. “A really, really big favor. Dean, I need you to run my school for me. I need you to be the Dean of Students at the Mechanical Science Institute.”

  Dean just looked at her. He couldn’t imagine why on earth she wou
ld want him, of all people, to run a science college. He could disconnect a sparking car battery and predict the movements of flames within interior walls, but he wouldn’t have been able to pick out the difference between Avogadro’s number and Newton’s Laws if his life depended on it.

  “I’m sorry,” McKenzie said “I wouldn’t have come to you if I had any other choice.”

  “This is one of your games, isn’t it? Another one of your Mensa brain-puzzles? You’re always over my head with these things. You have to tell me plainly: what’s going on?”

  She didn’t answer. He held her at arm’s length so he could study her face, hoping to find some clue that would help him unravel the riddle or catch the joke. But the only clues he found were the dark circles under her eyes and the worried crease in her brow. Dean felt confused and worried, and the more he tried to figure it out the more he felt like there was a giant hand inside his stomach making fists with his guts.

  “Hey, Dean!” The booming voice of the fire chief called to him from the engine. “Were you planning to join us?”

  Dean glanced back to see that the rest of his crew had finished loading up and were ready to go. McKenzie took that moment to pull away from him.

  “Tomorrow morning, after your shift ends, meet me at that sushi place where you took me the first time I came out here.”

  “McKenzie, wait.” He reached out to her like a blind man trying to find a doorway. “Whatever it is, let me help. I’ll get you a doctor or a lawyer—or a hit-man, if that’s what it takes.”

  She gave him a slight smile, her green eyes suddenly sad. “The Institute,” she said. “I need your help with that.” And then she was gone.

  Chapter 3 ~ Soap

  “Well, Soap, I talked to your principal,” my Dad said as we spread the cloth to conceal my experiment. “She says there will be college professors here today. There’s even someone from the admissions office at MIT.”

  I have to admit, that made this year’s New York All-State Science Fair Invitational into a big deal for me. MIT is the most famous school of engineering in the world. Their graduates go on to build robots, space ships, fighter jets, and everything else that’s cool. It had pretty much been my dream school since the day my Dad first started pestering me about college planning. But before I could worry about getting into MIT, I needed to worry about winning some science-fair trophies. No awards would mean no scholarships, and no scholarships would mean the only higher education I’d be able to afford would be the Burger Emporium’s training video titled “Do You Want Fries With That?”

  As usual, most of the science fair was seriously boring. All the students set up their exhibits at little tables that lined the floor of the big gymnasium, and clusters of judges and spectators would move from one competitor to the next, asking for demonstrations and taking notes. Most of the time, there was absolutely nothing to do but sit back and wait for the next group to come by.

  I looked over at the kid next to me. He looked South Asian, maybe Indian. He was very good looking, sharply dressed with close-cropped hair and an athletic build you find at these kinds of gatherings more often than you might expect. That made him just about my opposite: I’m short-ish, I wear all black, I keep my dark hair long but tied back in pony-tail, and I’m not really interested in sports. I’m also not really interested in English or history or Spanish, either, which is why my GPA was pretty much garbage. I always thought it was unfair that colleges cared so much about grade averages. I mean, why do they want me to be good at everything when I only want to study one thing? Can’t I just be good at the thing I’m passionate about and forget the rest? You just have to add that to the list of life’s injustices, I guess.

  “I hear there’s a judge from MIT here today,” I said to the good-looking boy. I’m not too good with talking to people, so the minute I opened my mouth I knew I would regret it. To get my mind off the conversation I had just started, I fidgeted with the cloth covering my invention. That left a grimy feeling on my fingers, so I took three quick pumps of hand sanitizer because I’m kind of a germaphobe. I swear, sometimes I think I’m such a mess I should just be kept in a padded cell.

  “Of course there’s a judge from MIT,” he said. “There’s always a judge from MIT. This year, he’s the one wearing a green tie.” He watched me rub the sanitizer on my hands and gave me a smile like the one you give a homeless person you’re tired of arguing with. But his smile looked nice and his lips were thin and strong-looking. My lips are big and fat, which some people call “movie-star lips” but I don’t like them because I think it makes my mouth look too wide. For just a moment I imagined what it would be like to kiss him. Then I started to worry that it meant I was a creeper, but I couldn’t help it. Besides, I didn’t see how it was going to hurt, since it was all just in my imagination. Outside of my imagination, I hadn’t ever kissed anyone, which meant that at least I was only a mental creeper and not a real-life creeper.

  “What’s your project?” I asked. My brain was still screaming at me to shut up before I made a fool of myself.

  “I designed blueprints for an antimatter power plant,” the boy said.

  “Whoa, great idea,” and I could feel myself getting jealous. Antimatter fuel would be a thousand times more powerful than a nuclear reaction using uranium, and the only real waste product would be gamma-rays, which could be soaked up with thick shielding. If he had invented that, it would mean the end of the energy crisis on this planet.

  “So, how do you make the antimatter?” I asked him.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I only designed the plant to burn the stuff in.”

  I blinked a few times while I waited for him to finish, but apparently that’s all he had. Apparently, he hadn’t considered that producing antimatter would cost something like 20 billion dollars an ounce—no exaggeration—so it seemed to me like he might as well have been talking about squeezing milk out of dinosaurs.

  “Is that seriously all you’ve got?” I said. “That’s pretty lame.”

  Not for the first time I wished I had an “undo” button for what I said.

  The boy just looked at me for a moment. Then he went back to setting up his poster and ignoring me.

  “Why do you have to say things like that, Soap?” My Dad was sitting in a folding chair by my project. He put his Popular Mechanics magazine under his arm and gazed up at me with dark, tired eyes. He seemed like a shrunken version of his former self, like one of those ancient Egyptian mummies. It was my fault he looked that way. It costs a bundle for a single father to raise a child in New York, even out where we lived in Flatbush, and I’m way worse than a normal child because of all the expensive electronics I disassembled on the dining room table. And the fires I started in my bedroom whenever I overload a transformer. And the time I designed a robot that could make other robots out of whatever materials were at hand, which was great except that it mistook the neighbor’s Honda for scrap metal.

  Actually, I’ve been worried about my Dad a lot lately. Even after my mom divorced him and moved to Chicago five years ago, he still got really excited about two things: electronic gizmos and basketball. But last time there was a game on TV, he just sat on the couch without even shouting at the refs like he usually does. And when we were shopping for the servos and circuit boards I needed for this science fair project, he just didn’t seem into it, and his face got really pale when it came time to pay for the order.

  I sat down quietly and studied my hands for a while. I felt terrible because once again I had said something stupid and disappointed my Dad. There was nothing I could have done to make it better. The only option I had was to make it up to my Dad was to amaze the judges, get a scholarship, and move out after graduating high school in two years. To be honest, if the rest of the competition consisted of fantasies like antimatter reactors, I knew I had a decent chance of pulling it off.

  After a very awkward hour of sitting between my disappointed father and my pissed-off neighbor, the judge
s showed up for their demonstration. The MIT professor was in that group, and he was kind of pudgy with wispy blonde hair. There were about ten other judges in boring suits that looked really uncomfortable in the heat of the lingering summer. There were a few spectators as well, mostly the parents of other exhibiters who followed the judges like pilot fish following sharks, probably hoping to pick up tidbits that indicate the current rankings. There was also one cute little girl with blond pig-tails playing with a Raggedy Ann doll who was tagging along after her mother.

  The judges seemed really interested in the antimatter reactor blueprints. Even the guy from MIT asked a lot of questions, and they all took tons of notes, which meant that they were going to give it lots of points.

  Then it was my turn. My palms got really sweaty and I started to feel a bit dizzy. The things I hate the most in the world are germs, followed by bugs and rodents, which carry a lot of germs. But public speaking is a close third. I have a hard enough time talking to people one-on-one, but when there’s a crowd I end up doing really stupid things. I think my IQ is inversely proportional to the number of strangers who are listening to me. The bigger the group, the dumber I feel. And this was a big group.

  “So, what have you got for us?” said the judge from MIT, and now every eye in the crowd was on me.

  “A robot,” I answered. I could see that this statement didn’t make much of an impact. Half of everyone in the building had come equipped with some little gizmo that could walk or roll or change directions when it bumped into a wall.

  “What makes my robot special is two things,” I went on. “The first is that Rusty—that’s my robot’s name—can recognize its master and follow him or her around a room. The second thing is that Rusty can broadcast wireless electricity. That means when Rusty is around, you can run small appliances without having to plug them in.”