Whatever Happened... to Robot Jones? Continued

Chapter 22: Tenant of Apartment #3

By the time Robot pushed himself upwards on the couch-bed on Halloween morning, he could hear the clanks and bangs and various mechanical noises that meant that parents were already awake downstairs. His tank was empty again, and burning in protest for Robot's lack of consumption of fuel. He sat there, feet danging from the end, knowing what a long night he had ahead of himself, and almost wishing it were Monday.

Of course, he wouldn't have been able to sleep in as late if this were Monday instead of Sunday. When he actually got around to flipping his digital clock on in front of his eyes, it was eleven thirty am. He was used to waking up around 8 or 9 on a Sunday, usually because his father had some sort of household chores for him, or wanted him to come to the factory with him. Today though, both parents were home, and by some tiny miracle, Robot had been allowed to sleep in.

He certainly wasn't feeling the sleep. The more and more time he spent with the humans, the less effective his nightly charge felt. Then again, it might have something to do with the irregular hours. Or was it at all possible that teenage drowsiness was contagious?

When he couldn't stand the odd loneliness of his room anymore, Robot's feet finally found the floor, and he took the lazy non-hopping ride down on the escalator to the kitchen. There, he tiredly greeted his busy-as-usual mother and fixed himself an emergency energy-packed canister of gasoline and two shots of espresso blended together. If this didn't wake him up, nothing would.

As his drink heated to a satisfying temperature, he went into the living room to reconnect the phone to the cord in the wall. His mother had explained that she and Mr. Jones had left the phone unplugged through the night and morning to let Robot sleep, but that Mr. Jones wasn't happy about it-having been waiting for a mildly important call from the factory that morning.

Robot promised to check all their messages and let his mother know if Dad unit had gotten his call. But when the teenage robot checked the furiously blinking but silenced answering machine, the cassette tape inside had been completely used up. Several minutes of boredly fast-forwarding through the many messages, Robot learned that the tape had maxed out at a gut-kicking fifty seven messages, the first ones having been recorded earlier yesterday after Robot's first appearance on the live morning news. A more advanced device hooked up into the answering machine told Robot that at least forty more calls had been made after the answering machine had stopped recording. Robot's tank burned. He knew nobody at Polyneux who cared about Nob's would have called-they would have shown up to the event, if they did. And to Robot's credit, there had been a handful of familiar faces towards the end of the day yesterday. But still, a handful and the entire rest of the student body were fairly disproportionate. Which meant only one thing: Like the prior fifty seven messages, aside from Robot's friends, everybody was calling to make fun of him.

So much for popularity. Oh, he was famous alright, but not for the right reasons.

How had so many people gotten his house telephone number, anyway?

He had one theory. One of the particularly least subtle messages was a baby-talk voice of a suspiciously familiar hissing voice calling him 'baby bot', with a similarly hissing-cackle in the background. These two callers did an awful job at trying to cover up their distingusihable voices, and they also called the most frequently-a total of five times, at least before the cassette was full.

Robot wondered where the Yogman Twins of all people had acquired his phone number from in the first place. Then he remembered how easy it was to get into students files when he had distracted Ms. Wilson. And suddenly Robot was annoyed that he obviously wasn't the only one to think of doing that.