Killer Robot Apocalypse progress report (#1)

The Boy came home from school yesterday and announced that he was determined to “build an army of Ultrons.” Before I could say anything, he asserted that he was not talking about pretend Ultrons, or playing a make-believe game—he and a preschool pal are deadly serious about building and unleashing an army of actual bloodthirsty killer robots.

I liked his initiative. It was good to see him willing to tackle a big project.

So I said, Okay. What’s our first step? “Metal,” he said. “We need to find some metal.”

After we had scavenged one of the dog’s bowls and a handful of paperclips, I asked him, What do we need to do next?

He said he didn’t know, and I told him that robots require circuitry. He asked me what that was, so we were off to The Google for a few minutes to look at pictures of circuit boards. I explained we’d have to solder all those tiny pieces of wire to the board, gluing them in place with dots of melted metal.

Then we spent a few minutes looking at pictures of soldering guns, with him encouraging me to “Scroll faster, Daddy, scroll faster…”

When I warned him about the logistical difficulty we were likely to encounter getting our hands on some death rays for Ultron’s eyes, he finally began to get impatient with me. “Let’s just start!”

I said, Okay. The first thing we need is a plan. We can’t build a robot from scratch (“Ultron,” he reminded me) without a plan, because we needed to know in advance how all the pieces were going to fit together. That made sense to him, so I sat him down with a pen and paper and said, “You’d better get busy on the blueprints.” He’d gotten as far as the head and shoulders when we dragged him off to bed last night.

Hopefully he will come home from school today with a new project in mind, one that won’t necessarily require humankind’s extermination at the hands of killer robots.

Or maybe not. Boys will be boys.