“It comes easy to me. There is already stuff like this made, though. I just added my own thing to it.” Even though comments like his come my way often, I still didn’t know what to do with them. To me, making robots was fun. I liked coming up with ideas and figuring out how to make it work. My power of metal manipulation made it easier. I didn’t need a lot of tools or equipment to make my ideas into reality.
“You made a freaking fish cam. Gwendolyn, that’s amazing.”
I just gave him a simple smile as my thanks. I watched on the remote screen as my little robot fish swam up the river, looking for anything suspicious.
So far, we’d found most of the life in the water was dead. Only a few live fish were swimming around instead of the normal schools. Something was killing the life in the water, and the plants on the banks were showing brown in their foliage.
“Poor fish.” I felt bad for them. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t their fault.
“I think I see something ahead. Like a building.”
I looked up to where he was pointing and could just barely make out what he was seeing. Maybe it was a building. We’d been walking for an hour and a half—about time we ran into something. But it was odd to have a random building in the woods.
The closer we got, the more I could make out. It wasn’t just a building. It was a large, warehouse-sized building directly over the river and allowing the water to flow through. Somehow, I doubted that was approved by the EPA.
“Let’s check it out,” Arthur said, a little quieter this time. In case there were people around, maybe?
“I don’t think so. I mean, we have no clue what’s in there.”
“That’s why we need to check it out, see if we can figure out what the deal is.” He made a valid point, but there were a lot of unknown variables here.
But I followed him on, still pushing my robot fish forward to get a look inside the building. We stopped walking and stayed behind a tree close to a six-foot fence that surrounded the open property.
There were two men at the security gate about twenty yards away from us.
What was going on here?
Looking back down at my fish, I knew I needed it to be a little stealthier for this mission inside the building. On the screen I saw an opening where a small section of the river flowed through the building. The color of the water changed to a dark brown as I neared the opening. It was hard to see with the camera, almost as if someone had dumped coffee in the water.
“What the hell?” Arthur was now looking at the screen with me. It was odd for sure.
My little fish made it through the opening, and I shifted it to look up to what was above the water. Bright lights, very bright lights.
“You didn’t happen to give your fish legs, did you?”
I shook my head. That would have been nice, but I didn’t. We’d have to see what we could in fish form. I didn’t see anyone right by my robot, so I brought it to the concrete edge they’d created and pulled up on the knob slowly.
The fish cam became clearer as it slowly rose out of the water to look around.
“It looks like a garden.” An obvious observation, but I was confused as to why that was there, and the need for it to be guarded like it was. So many new questions were rolling through my head.
Two men were walking over to a tree that seemed to be dead.
“Did you put a microphone in this thing, by chance?”
I shook my head. If I would have known that I would have been spying on people instead of just being in the river, I would have made it more into a ninja spy fish instead of a normal robot trout.
“We’ll just have to watch them, see what they do.”
They were examining the tree and shaking their head. Maybe they were unhappy that it died. The two men walked away, and another man covered in a protective suit came over with something that looked like a flame thrower.
As soon as he got up to the plant, he lit it on fire.
“Interesting.” Arthur was watching the screen intensely.
As soon as the plant was nothing but ash, a woman came over with a hose, and they washed away the dirt and ashes into the river. Quickly I moved my robot back into the water so it wouldn’t be seen.
The water turned dark and I couldn’t see anything.
