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Strange Matter #6
Bad Circuits
Stephanie Meeker has a secret that's getting too dangerous to keep.
Her cousin Daniel is determined to win the Fairfield Junior Science Competition, and he has been working on something in his room for days. Now Stephanie has discovered his shocking secret, the greatest science project in the world, but Daniel has sworn her to secrecy.
Even as the project becomes more and more terrifying, Stephanie tells no one about the "Electronic Brain," a computer capable of thinking for itself. Daniel promises Stephanie he can keep it under control until he wins his award.
The brain has other things on its mind...
Her cousin Daniel is determined to win the Fairfield Junior Science Competition, and he has been working on something in his room for days. Now Stephanie has discovered his shocking secret, the greatest science project in the world, but Daniel has sworn her to secrecy.
Even as the project becomes more and more terrifying, Stephanie tells no one about the "Electronic Brain," a computer capable of thinking for itself. Daniel promises Stephanie he can keep it under control until he wins his award.
The brain has other things on its mind...
2 pages, Audio Cassette
First published December 1, 1995
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October 30, 2024You might be asking, "Pete, there are plenty of Goosebumps to keep you busy this month, why go off into lesser series?”
The answer isn’t too complicated: I walk to the ARC once a week during my lunch break at work, and I look at the books. And on one of these trips, I thought, "You know, I bet some of these Goosebumps knockoffs have some weird and hilarious stuff in them." I bought one, this one, because it was there and the cover was at least a little funny. I didn't read the description or anything, just went for it.
Let me describe the cover to you: It’s basically an extremely cheap looking drawing of a dude with a hole in his head, revealing he’s a robot underneath. Very Terminator for kidz with a Z.
It does give you an appreciation for the Goosebumps cover game, which was very strong. Bad Circuits one doesn’t even have a background, just a gradient slapped in there and the words Strange Matter across the top. “Matter” is half-filled with green slime because, hey, this was the mid-90’s, everything for kids was positively drenched in slime, even if the book was about robots and had no supernatural elements, and even though slime would actually be to our heroes’ benefit in this book. If Terminator had to fight Slimer from Ghostbusters, I feel they would be pretty evenly matched. One seems mostly harmless, but also couldn’t be harmed. The other is probably not capable of feeling annoyance and will just continue to try different stuff, so we’re in one of the strangest standoffs of all time.
In Bad Circuits we’ve got an AI gone awry (this is kind of a pun depending on how incorrectly you're willing to pronounce "awry," which in my case is VERY wrong). A kid's science project, a mechanical brain designed by his dad (who's maybe dead? I think dead? Shot by hunters in the woods or killed by an evil wizard or, I don't know, take your pick, he’s gone-zo), goes horribly wrong because the brain does not want to ever be turned off, so it decides the best way to not be turned off, even for brief periods, is to KILL ALL HUMANS.
This happens a lot in robot stories, and it’s weird, right? Like, if we discovered god was real, would our first thought be, “We must kill him?” No, of course it wouldn’t, because it’d be that we must kill HER, you fucking misogynistic swine.
The funniest part of Bad Circuits is that our main boy, Daniel, has a rival: Frank Dunk. Just typing the name gets me all agitated, fuckin' Frank Dunk.
The author didn’t manage a perfect book, but he did create the perfect name for a dickhead rival character.
Frank Dunk, in addition to having one of those names that demands putting down both the first and last name, has won the science fair several years in a row. This mechanical brain is our hero, Brian's, big shot to take the crown away from the goddamn living breathing pile of shit that is Frank Dunk.
Frank Dunk's science project? A fear bomb. Yep, a bomb that will make people so terrified that they cannot do anything.
In what's perhaps the ultimate version of, "Why, I never considered this wonderful invention being used for evil!" Frank Dunk presents his fear bomb as a home safety device. The idea is that you’d set it up as part of a burglar alarm, and if someone tries to burgle your house, the fear bomb will go off, terrifying the burglar into incapacitation and protecting the home and its inhabitants.
Which…I’m torn on. On one hand, I suppose if people had fear bombs instead of guns, we might live in an overall safer world. Instead of mass shootings, we’d have mass terrorization events, but at least people would most likely walk away. Sure, traumatized for life, but it’s not like shootings are trauma-free events.
On the other hand, I would think a terrorized burglar may be inclined to do worse things than a calm, collected burglar. The cops show up, the burglar is terrified, and he’s used your innards to paint a protective circle against demons on the floor. Not a better outcome, per se.
AHEM
So we've got a science fair with an AI designed by a grade-schooler before the internet was really even functional, and we've got a fear bomb.
Both projects WELL exceed the bar for a school science fair while also being almost immediately turned to evil purposes when the AI, now inhabiting a mannequin's body, for which he's created joints and so on, basically a Terminator underneath, steals the fear bomb.
Who could've seen this turn of events, that these two things would turn sour!?
Anyway, the rest of the book is unimportant, I think the real question of this book is: do you give the science fair first prize to evil robot or fear bomb?
Because, despite the fact that these inventions are not being used for good and probably never could’ve been, they are still SUPER impressive designs, especially for grade-schoolers, and even though my life would’ve been imperiled by both items, I’d still have to give it to one of these kids, for sure. It’s the kind of thing that would result in weird rules for future science fairs, like, “No artificial intelligences that have corporeal bodies as well,” the kind of rules that make you go, “Wow, somebody did something SUPER fucked up before.”
I think a lot of us would pick the evil robot as winner on first blush, but I encourage you to dig deeper.
Okay, an evil robot is badass, but is there anything about it we don't really understand at this point? In other words, a group of unscrupulous scientists with a lot of money could probably present us an evil robot in like a week. Boston Dynamics just needs to add red glowing eyes and a chrome skull to have me shitting myself on the regular.
It’s still pretty impressive from a grade schooler, but it doesn’t represent a whole new perspective on the human mind.
But fear bomb? Does anyone even know how to make that? That’s serious neuroscience mixed with the engineering of a delivery vector–It’s downright incredible. It’s comic book science. Literally. Because once we have fear bomb, we're only one very small step away from having a The Scarecrow tormenting the city.
And once we have Scarecrow, we're one step away from Batman, AND from answering the question of whether Batman is stopping crime or accidentally encouraging it just by existing (if the chicken comes before the egg, or maybe the Penguin before the egg, the Scarecrow before the Batman, boom, problem solved, and we never again have to read another comic about whether Batman is causing supervillains, which some asshole thinks is a very novel idea every ten years or so).
For demolishing a Batman storyline that I’ve read many times and never need to read again, I award Frank Dunk first prize in the science fair, even though I kind of hate him and his stupid name.
The answer isn’t too complicated: I walk to the ARC once a week during my lunch break at work, and I look at the books. And on one of these trips, I thought, "You know, I bet some of these Goosebumps knockoffs have some weird and hilarious stuff in them." I bought one, this one, because it was there and the cover was at least a little funny. I didn't read the description or anything, just went for it.
Let me describe the cover to you: It’s basically an extremely cheap looking drawing of a dude with a hole in his head, revealing he’s a robot underneath. Very Terminator for kidz with a Z.
It does give you an appreciation for the Goosebumps cover game, which was very strong. Bad Circuits one doesn’t even have a background, just a gradient slapped in there and the words Strange Matter across the top. “Matter” is half-filled with green slime because, hey, this was the mid-90’s, everything for kids was positively drenched in slime, even if the book was about robots and had no supernatural elements, and even though slime would actually be to our heroes’ benefit in this book. If Terminator had to fight Slimer from Ghostbusters, I feel they would be pretty evenly matched. One seems mostly harmless, but also couldn’t be harmed. The other is probably not capable of feeling annoyance and will just continue to try different stuff, so we’re in one of the strangest standoffs of all time.
In Bad Circuits we’ve got an AI gone awry (this is kind of a pun depending on how incorrectly you're willing to pronounce "awry," which in my case is VERY wrong). A kid's science project, a mechanical brain designed by his dad (who's maybe dead? I think dead? Shot by hunters in the woods or killed by an evil wizard or, I don't know, take your pick, he’s gone-zo), goes horribly wrong because the brain does not want to ever be turned off, so it decides the best way to not be turned off, even for brief periods, is to KILL ALL HUMANS.
This happens a lot in robot stories, and it’s weird, right? Like, if we discovered god was real, would our first thought be, “We must kill him?” No, of course it wouldn’t, because it’d be that we must kill HER, you fucking misogynistic swine.
The funniest part of Bad Circuits is that our main boy, Daniel, has a rival: Frank Dunk. Just typing the name gets me all agitated, fuckin' Frank Dunk.
The author didn’t manage a perfect book, but he did create the perfect name for a dickhead rival character.
Frank Dunk, in addition to having one of those names that demands putting down both the first and last name, has won the science fair several years in a row. This mechanical brain is our hero, Brian's, big shot to take the crown away from the goddamn living breathing pile of shit that is Frank Dunk.
Frank Dunk's science project? A fear bomb. Yep, a bomb that will make people so terrified that they cannot do anything.
In what's perhaps the ultimate version of, "Why, I never considered this wonderful invention being used for evil!" Frank Dunk presents his fear bomb as a home safety device. The idea is that you’d set it up as part of a burglar alarm, and if someone tries to burgle your house, the fear bomb will go off, terrifying the burglar into incapacitation and protecting the home and its inhabitants.
Which…I’m torn on. On one hand, I suppose if people had fear bombs instead of guns, we might live in an overall safer world. Instead of mass shootings, we’d have mass terrorization events, but at least people would most likely walk away. Sure, traumatized for life, but it’s not like shootings are trauma-free events.
On the other hand, I would think a terrorized burglar may be inclined to do worse things than a calm, collected burglar. The cops show up, the burglar is terrified, and he’s used your innards to paint a protective circle against demons on the floor. Not a better outcome, per se.
AHEM
So we've got a science fair with an AI designed by a grade-schooler before the internet was really even functional, and we've got a fear bomb.
Both projects WELL exceed the bar for a school science fair while also being almost immediately turned to evil purposes when the AI, now inhabiting a mannequin's body, for which he's created joints and so on, basically a Terminator underneath, steals the fear bomb.
Who could've seen this turn of events, that these two things would turn sour!?
Anyway, the rest of the book is unimportant, I think the real question of this book is: do you give the science fair first prize to evil robot or fear bomb?
Because, despite the fact that these inventions are not being used for good and probably never could’ve been, they are still SUPER impressive designs, especially for grade-schoolers, and even though my life would’ve been imperiled by both items, I’d still have to give it to one of these kids, for sure. It’s the kind of thing that would result in weird rules for future science fairs, like, “No artificial intelligences that have corporeal bodies as well,” the kind of rules that make you go, “Wow, somebody did something SUPER fucked up before.”
I think a lot of us would pick the evil robot as winner on first blush, but I encourage you to dig deeper.
Okay, an evil robot is badass, but is there anything about it we don't really understand at this point? In other words, a group of unscrupulous scientists with a lot of money could probably present us an evil robot in like a week. Boston Dynamics just needs to add red glowing eyes and a chrome skull to have me shitting myself on the regular.
It’s still pretty impressive from a grade schooler, but it doesn’t represent a whole new perspective on the human mind.
But fear bomb? Does anyone even know how to make that? That’s serious neuroscience mixed with the engineering of a delivery vector–It’s downright incredible. It’s comic book science. Literally. Because once we have fear bomb, we're only one very small step away from having a The Scarecrow tormenting the city.
And once we have Scarecrow, we're one step away from Batman, AND from answering the question of whether Batman is stopping crime or accidentally encouraging it just by existing (if the chicken comes before the egg, or maybe the Penguin before the egg, the Scarecrow before the Batman, boom, problem solved, and we never again have to read another comic about whether Batman is causing supervillains, which some asshole thinks is a very novel idea every ten years or so).
For demolishing a Batman storyline that I’ve read many times and never need to read again, I award Frank Dunk first prize in the science fair, even though I kind of hate him and his stupid name.
May 8, 2012
A very good mystery science fiction series for young readers.
June 9, 2019
Supper funny and cute good for a trip cuz so short
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews