If you come to the barn, you will find a busy but happy human engineer. You will find a robot who gets satisfaction from keeping the place clean and tidy. You will find a small, doglike robot who enjoys chasing lizards and kangaroo rats. Kangaroo rats are not kangaroos. Kangaroos are marsupials, whereas kangaroo rats are rodents. They have pouches in their cheeks where they store the seeds of creosote, mesquite, and other desert plants.

A girl lives in the barn, too. On the night when the uniMIND surrendered, and every advanced uniMIND robot had a choice, many chose to leave. But some chose to remain with uniMIND and enforce the company’s will. And some chose to join the smiling man at ONE. The girl watches to make sure no people or robots with ill intent come close enough to hurt her family. She is their protector.

Her name is not Advanced Destructive Apparatus, nor Assault Deployment Array, nor Amazing Drone Annihilator. She is named after the woman who invented computer programming, Ada Lovelace.

The last member of this family is a boy who looks like a boy but is more than that. He is a robot built for learning and his name is Cog, who is me, of course.

I continue to learn, a million things every day. Some lessons are easy. Some are difficult. Some are painful. They are all important.

And I don’t just learn. I record my thoughts and feelings and conclusions and confusions. I write down facts and observations and questions I have. And whenever I can, I pass along my lessons to anyone who will listen. I don’t know what they take from the things I teach. It is up to them, I suppose.

I step outside the barn on a cool autumn night and stand beneath the stars. The Milky Way slants across the black sky. I am looking toward the center of the galaxy, at stars so distant that even though I can see them, they died a long time ago.

My syntha-derm chills, so soon I will go inside and make hot chocolate. But for now, I stand here and cheese.

Acknowledgments

IF I DID A WORD problem calculating how many books I would write without a great deal of help from other people, the answer would be none. None more books. Among the many to whom I owe thanks are Lisa Will, Beatrice Blue, Erica Sussman, Holly Root, Deanna Hoak, Jessica Berg, Louisa Currigan, Alison Donalty, Molly Fehr, Rosanne Romanello, Nellie Kurtzman, Ann Dye, Megan Barlog, the entire HarperCollins Children’s Books crew, Patrick Heffernan, and Maryelizabeth Yturralde and the booksellers at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore. Thanks as well to my office mates Dozer and Amelia, who are dogs.

Excerpt from Weird Kid

KEEP READING FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT GREG’S LATEST OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD ADVENTURE!

Chapter 1

TOMORROW I’LL BE AMONG PEOPLE, so tonight I practice my smile.