Emily's Secret

5. My science project

After I accused Rob of following me, he says, "I'm not following you, I'm just going to my next class." Then he takes out a paper printout of his class schedule and points. "See, American History."

Sure enough, he's assigned the same American History class as me, as well as the same every other class.

"How do you have the exact same schedule as me?"

"I don't know," Rob replied, grinning. "I guess it's just random luck."

"No, it's not! There's not a single person in this entire school with all of the same classes as me. Not until you showed up. What's going on?"

"I don't know," Rob said with a mock innocent voice. "I guess you'll have to ask the registrar why that is. I'm just going to the classes I've been assigned to."

And then after another class where I'm the only girl in the class paying attention to the teacher and every other girl spends half the class staring at Rob, I go to my last period class and the one class which Rob couldn't be assigned to, because it was an independent study for my science project.

Let me tell you about my science project. I'm pretty proud of it. I'm building a robot detector.

Of course, today one would have to be blind not to be able to tell the difference between a robot and a person, but in the future it's possible that they could build robots that look so much like real people that it would be impossible to tell the difference. And that's where my robot detector comes in. You just point it at someone, and then it blinks green for human and red for robot. At least that's how I hope it will work. I have a lot of fine tuning to do on it.

Maybe you're wondering how a 16-year-old high school student managed to build such an advanced technology by herself. But it wasn't really that difficult. The robot detector just utilizes existing parts. More specifically, the heart of the instrument is a sensor that I obtained from a self-driving car. Some people think that self-driving cars just use video cameras, but actually they're a lot more sophisticated than that. The sensors measure a lot of other things besides visible light, and they also emit low-power radar waves which are then detected by an array of radio wave receivers which are built into the sensor.

Last semester, it occurred to me that robots would be physically different than humans. The human body is made up of organic materials and a lot of water, while a robot body would contain plastics, metal, other materials not found in humans, plus an electric power source. The sensor from a self-driving car would be able to pick these things up. All I had to do was hook the sensor up to a tablet computer, and then write a computer program that could analyze the stream of data.

The hardest part of the project was obtaining the sensor from a self-driving car. They're not something you can buy online, and even if they were I doubt I could afford one. But one day I was fortunate to observe a car accident. Well, it was fortunate for my science project, but unfortunate for the people involved in the car accident. Car accidents are extremely rare, because self-driving cars have a near-perfect safety record. It's not like the old days when people used to drive cars themselves and every year tens of thousands of people died in car accidents.

However, on this day, some geezer was illegally driving an old human-controlled car, even though they have been outlawed for over a decade. And then he got himself into a car accident that totaled the self-driving car which he hit. I don't really want to think about what happened to the poor people who were in the car.

But I hung around the scene of the accident, and later after everyone else had gone away, there was just me and a guy from a wrecking company about to tow away the car. I asked him if I could have one of the sensors from the car. "Sure," he said, "it's just junk. But I don't know what you're going to do with it."

I was still worried about taking it. "Are you sure we won't get in trouble?"

"Nah," he assured me, "I'm just taking the car to a junkyard where it'll be demolished. No one will care if it's missing a part."

"Thanks so much!" I said.

"No problem," he said, "glad to help a nice girl like you."

I thought it was really nice of him to say that. In school, I'm the fat girl who's a social outcast and no one is ever nice to me.

Anyway, that's how I got the sensor for my science project. Mr. Brown, my science teacher, thought the project was a great idea, and he was hopeful that it could win a regional or even a national prize. I thought that sounded too good to be true, because if that happened it would mean I'd get a scholarship to a good college and then I'd have a career after I graduated and I wouldn't be another poor person collecting welfare like most of the people in my town. I wasn't lying to Squi earlier today when I told him he should be more worried about his grades. Every year, more and more jobs are replaced by robots, and only people who have connections or the best educational credentials have any hope of having a career. And certainly, neither Squi nor myself had any connections.

I was so engrossed in writing new code for my robot detector that two hours passed, and everyone else at school had gone home (except maybe for people on sports teams, but the athletic facilities were all the way on the other side of the school). I decided that I would take my robot detector home with me so I could work on it later tonight. As a fat girl with no social life, I had plenty of time to devote to schoolwork.

The robot detector was a large device which weighed almost fifteen pounds. Unfortunately, the sensor that was at the heart of the robot detector was designed to be mounted on a car and wasn't meant to be portable. I put the robot detector into my backpack, in which it barely fit, I locked the door to the science and engineering lab using the keys that Mr. Brown had entrusted me with (like at my house, the school hadn't updated to more modern locks), and then I walked down the now-deserted hallways towards the school exit.

Except, the hallways were not as deserted as I thought. I suddenly found myself surrounded by four guys from the football team. Most ominously, Chuck, the guy who I had tripped earlier today, was there. He was backed up by Jack, the guy from the bus stop this morning who got into the scuffle with Rob, and two other football players, Biff and Duke.

"Out of my way. Leave me alone!" I shouted at them.

"I don't think so, fat bitch," said Chuck. "You think you can just trip me in the hallway, and get away with it?"

"Didn't anyone tell you never to hit a girl?" I said, hoping that I could talk some sense into him. But Chuck and his companions didn't seem moved by this.

"I don't see any girls here," Chuck said, "I see a FAT WHALE." His companions guffawed at his insult.

Then Jack added, "Yeah, we've had enough of you scaring all the real girls, and doing stuff to us guys thinking you can get away with it because you're a girl. Well you're not a girl by my book, you're just a FAT WHALE like Chuck said, and we're going to beat the crap out of you."

Shit, I think I was in serious trouble.