October 1997, MIT
The dorm hallway looked like an electronics lab had thrown up orange and black. Someone had wired motion sensors into fake cobwebs, and every time a door opened, a chorus of tiny servo motors hissed and blinked. The engineers on this floor didn't carve pumpkins. They reverse engineered them.
Stephen stood there with a cup of coffee, watching a helium blimp shaped like a bat wobble past on a fishing line pulley, dropping mini Snickers from a plastic cup.
"Happy Halloween," the blimp squeaked, before drifting into a wall and deflating.
Paige appeared beside him, twisting a strand of red-dyed hair under the hallway light. "Normal people just buy decorations."
"Normal people don't go here."
Her grin came quick and a little dangerous. She wore a white-and-red coat with diamond-pattern cuffs and black boots, and the goggles hanging around her neck flashed tiny LEDs that spelled PUDDIN'.
"You're really committing to this."
"Occupational hazard." She handed him a small palette of face paint. "You've got the purple suit."
He held it up. "Borrowed it from the drama department. They think I'm in a play." The jacket was a size too big through the shoulders, but it would hold for one night.
"Technically you are."
Getting ready took longer than building half the lab equipment they'd used that semester. Paige handled the makeup with more precision than the task strictly required, working green color wax through his hair, painting a grin across his mouth, leaning back twice to check the angle.
"There," she said. "Equal parts menace and math major."
He looked in the mirror. "I look ridiculous."
"That's the assignment."
A knock interrupted before he could argue the point. Eugene burst in hauling a cart covered with a towel, wearing a cape made of aluminum foil and looking far too pleased with himself.
"Behold," he said, "Gourd-on Freeman."
He pulled the towel off. A pumpkin sat on treads underneath, glowing with orange LEDs along its seams.
"It moves," Paige said.
"It learns." Eugene crouched beside it, adjusting something on the underside. "Sound triggers, basically. Loud enough, it reacts."
"You've built the world's most easily provoked vegetable," Stephen said.
The robotics lab smelled like solder and spilled sugar. Candy wrappers had migrated between half the circuit boards on the long table. Eugene powered the pumpkin up. It gave a cheerful beep and rolled forward, LED eyes flickering through a startup sequence.
"Say something happy," Eugene said.
Paige leaned down toward it. "Hi, little guy. Trick or treat."
The pumpkin spun twice, then announced in a flat voice, "FALSE POSITIVE." A confetti cannon mounted somewhere on its back popped directly into her face.
She blinked through a layer of glitter. "It attacked me."
Eugene checked the code on his laptop. "It's reading laughter as a threat indicator instead of a reward signal. I must have inverted the weighting in the last build."
"It hates fun," Stephen said. "Relatable."
Paige flung a handful of glitter at him in response. "You're laughing."
"I'm flinching politely."
They reset the sensors twice, but the pumpkin kept misreading the room. When Stephen coughed, it rolled toward the sound like something hunting.
Eugene chased it with the remote, mostly uselessly. "It's learning too fast."
"It's bumping into the table leg, Eugene."
"That's the learning."
Paige doubled over laughing, the small jester earrings she'd added that morning swinging with the motion. "You two are unwell."
"Statistically likely," Stephen said, ducking as the pumpkin fired another burst of confetti in his general direction.
Eugene finally cornered it against a stack of spare breadboards and flipped the kill switch on the side panel. The thing went quiet mid-spin, LEDs dimming one row at a time like it was sulking about the interruption.
"There," Eugene said, slightly out of breath. "Tamed."
"It's off," Stephen said. "That's not the same as tamed."
"Semantics."
Paige crouched down to look at the sensor array on the front panel, brushing a few stray pieces of confetti off the lens. "You wired the microphone gain too high. It's not detecting laughter as a category. It's detecting volume and guessing."
Eugene leaned over her shoulder to look. "That's worse."
"That's much worse," she agreed. "It means it'll misfire on anything loud. Cheering, a dropped tray, somebody's bad cover band."
"It's Halloween," Eugene said. "Everything tonight is loud."
Stephen looked at the dimmed pumpkin sitting innocently on the table, treads still, cannon presumably reloaded by whatever mechanism Eugene had built into it. "You're bringing that back out tonight."
"Obviously."
"That seems unwise."
"Character growth requires field testing," Eugene said, already flipping the switch back on before either of them could talk him out of it.
By evening the whole floor had turned into an informal costume contest. Two data packets, one Einstein, two competing versions of the same video game character nobody could name correctly. Stephen and Paige made their entrance down the hallway with the pumpkin trailing behind them on its treads, surprisingly obedient for the first thirty feet.
The hallway loved it right up until somebody laughed too loud.
The pumpkin's sensors flared red. "JOY DETECTED. CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL."
It spun, fired one last burst of glitter into the air, and drove directly into the punch bowl on the folding table by the wall.
A chorus of noise followed as sticky green punch went everywhere. Eugene sprinted after it waving the remote like that would help.
"Abort," he shouted. "Abort."
Stephen grabbed a towel from the snack table, too late to matter. The pumpkin reversed itself out of the bowl, trailing punch across the floor like evidence from a crime scene nobody wanted to investigate.
Paige leaned against his shoulder, breathless. "You planned this."
"I'm not that clever."
"You are," she said, still grinning. "You just don't usually point it at parties."
Later, a cool wind moved through the courtyard where someone had set up old speakers running off an extension cord that definitely wasn't up to code. Students in half-ruined costumes drifted around under the orange floodlights somebody had rigged for the occasion.
They brought the pumpkin along again. Eugene swore he'd fixed the bug. It rolled peacefully at first, humming faintly through its tiny speaker. Then a burst of laughter from across the lawn set it off again.
"JOY EXCEEDS THRESHOLD," it announced.
"Not again," Stephen said.
It sped off this time, weaving between people like a runaway remote control car with opinions. Someone screamed. Someone else cheered. A campus security flashlight swung across the lawn toward the noise.
"What is that," the officer called out.
"Experimental art project," Eugene called back, in a tone that fooled absolutely no one.
The officer started talking into his radio while the pumpkin's confetti cannon visibly re-armed itself. Paige grabbed Stephen's arm.
"We should leave before your name ends up in a report."
They ducked behind the statue near the edge of the lawn and watched the pumpkin's last run from there. It clipped a tree at low speed, wheezed through its speaker, and died in a final cloud of silver glitter.
Silence followed. Then, from somewhere in the crowd, applause.
Paige grinned at him. "Chaos wins again."
"By glitter bomb. Hardly dignified."
"Dignified enough."
Back on the dorm rooftop, the city spread out below in patches of light. The air still carried traces of fog machine and burnt circuit board from somewhere two floors down. They sat on the ledge, still half in costume, his jacket spattered with punch, her coat freckled with glitter that wasn't coming out without a wash cycle.
Paige rested her chin on her knees. "I haven't laughed like that in months."
"Neither have I."
"You're allowed to. It doesn't make you less yourself."
"I was starting to forget that."
She looked over at him, eyes bright under the smudged makeup. "You're bad at fun. Improving, though."
"I'll note it. Recovered sense of humor, fall of ninety-seven."
She laughed and nudged his shoulder. "What did tonight teach you, professor."
"That you can't debug everything before it runs. Some things misfire first and you find out what they actually do after."
"That's a very generous read of getting glitter-bombed twice."
"I'm trying generosity. It's new."
Just after midnight, frantic knocking started on the door. Eugene's voice came through it, already talking before anyone answered.
"So. Funny story."
Paige groaned into the couch cushion. "If that thing's alive again, I'm finding a new dorm."
Eugene pushed the door open, out of breath. "Backup battery kicked in. It's rolling around the courtyard right now playing Monster Mash off a cassette deck somebody left in it."
Stephen rubbed his eyes. "That song should be illegal."
"Agreed, but that's a separate issue."
Paige grabbed her coat off the back of the chair. "You built it. You catch it."
"Technically we all contributed to..."
"Eugene." Stephen pointed at the door. "Go get your robot."
He saluted with more enthusiasm than the moment called for and ran back out, trailing glitter footprints down the hallway behind him.
Stephen and Paige looked at each other for a second, then started laughing again, neither one able to explain exactly why it was still funny the third time.
(Thanks for reading, feel free to write a comment, leave a review, and Power Stones are always appreciated. Let me know if you find any mistakes)