Free Fuzzy by Tom Angleberger Page A

‘don’t care’ about Colonel Ryder?”
    Jones groaned, remembering the hundred and one times he’d been yelled at by the colonel . . . and realizing that Ryder would probably be calling to do more yelling as soon as he heard about Fuzzy leaving the building.
    â€œOf course I care about Ryder!” said Jones. “But this could be the breakthrough we came here for! There was no logical reason for that robot to leave the school! In fact, there were a hundred reasons why it shouldn’t leave the school!”
    â€œYes,” said Nina, “I remember specifically instructing Fuzzy
not
to leave the school. He’s packing a lot of awfully valuable technology in his innards while he’s out there running around on his own.”
    â€œHe’s breaking rules!” gushed Jones. “He’s making his own decisions, thinking for himself! We’re in unchartedterritory here! We may have finally succeeded in creating true artificial intelligence!”
    â€œI don’t know if we’ve created artificial intelligence,” said Nina, “but I think we’ve created artificial teenager.”

7.2
THE PARK
    Meanwhile, Fuzzy had downloaded a map of the area and was walking toward a park. He had read that parks are places of peace and quiet, and he wanted to give it a try. He had no experience with private property, sidewalks, or even looking both ways before he crossed the street, so he cut across people’s lawns, slogged through drainage ditches, and walked out into traffic. Luckily there wasn’t much traffic in this sector, so the few automated cars that were on the road easily glided around him. He was aware that Nina’s security team was following him, but since they were keeping their distance, he ignored them.
    He got to the park and found that it was a little less peaceful than he’d expected, but he stepped intoa grassy area and found that it was pleasant to turn off his HallwayNavigation(), ObjectAvoidance(), and PoliteBehavior() programs for a while.
    He saw the park’s robotic gardener at work. It buzzed around, stiffly vacuuming up litter. It glided right past him without pausing. Fuzzy was too big to be litter, and this robot had zero interest in anything that wasn’t litter.
    Once it had passed, Fuzzy shut down everything but his core functions and focused all remaining processing power on HelpMax().

7.3
THE PARK
    A cargo truck pulled up to the sidewalk as close to Fuzzy as possible.
    â€œWhat a break!” said Karl, the barrel-shaped man, as he toyed with the trigger on his electromagnetic disruptor. “Let’s grab and go!”
    â€œWould you hold on a second,” snapped Valentina. Those predatorial eyes of hers narrowed again. She stared at the robot, no more than ten feet away.
    Decision time.
    She considered the offer she had gotten from her “client.”
    Ten million dollars for the robot with its programming code and memory intact.
    Six million for just the code.
    She had hired Zeff to see if she could pick up an easy $6 million by having him hack into the robot or Jones’s computers and simply download the code.
    So far, Zeff had gotten nowhere. He still hadn’t been able to track the frequency the robot was using to communicate with Jones. It must be a secure, heavily encrypted military frequency, he’d said. He would need more time and more expensive gear,
and
he’d need to get up close to the robot.
    This wasn’t an easy $6 million after all.
    She had hired Karl for the other option: the grab-and-go.
    That was worth an extra $4 million . . . at least! Once she actually had the robot, she might be able to bargain for even more. When SunTzuCo, the company that had hired her, reverse-engineered the thing, they’d have the most advanced robotics technology on the planet. That would be worth a lot more than $10 million.
    But was it worth the risk?
    Downloading some files over