As we hit the grass, Darryl’s waiting for us, clutching the jacket and hat that will turn him into our Mr. Aidact look-alike.

  I grab him by the arm. “Come with us!” We begin to wade into the boiling mob that surrounds the celebrating state champs. Everybody’s bouncing up and down, which isn’t so easy when you’re carrying a heavy briefcase.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spy Perkins and the engineers charging toward the crowd. With my free hand, I rip the MR. AIDACT IS UNREAL flyer out of Stinky’s hand and throw it straight up. That’s the signal for everybody to do the same. In seconds, the air is white with a blizzard of Avalon’s flyers.

  Nathan and Darryl get behind me, and—using the briefcase as a plow—I blast my way to the center of the celebration. I don’t know if dancing was ever part of Mr. Aidact’s original programming, but he’s doing it now, right along with the girls, leading them in a rousing chorus of “We Are the Champions.” You get the sense that he could be a rock star if he put his AI to it.

  “Pupils!” he greets us. “We won! How dope is this?”

  “You remember you’re leaving, right?” I shout over the noise.

  “Indubitably.”

  “Already?” Rosalie is crushed. “Can’t we keep him just a little longer?”

  I toss my head in the direction of Perkins and the engineers, who are approaching the edge of the mob. “The bus leaves in five minutes!” I hiss. “It’s now or never!”

  Mr. Aidact rips off his teal hat and jacket, and I stuff the heavy briefcase into his arms.

  “Signs!” I bellow.

  All at once, a double row of huge posters is unrolling in front of us, creating a clear pathway out of the crush of people. Mr. Aidact dashes down his escape route, Nathan and I hot on his heels. A backward glance shows me that Darryl, now dressed in teal, is at the center of the partying Bobcats. A split second later, Perkins and the engineers break through to him. It takes them a long moment to realize who he is—and, more important, who he isn’t.

  Perkins catches a fleeting glimpse of his AIDACT unit sprinting for freedom. But before he can react, the sign holders collapse the escape route, trapping the engineers in the middle of the crowd.

  By this time Mr. Aidact is at full gallop. He hurdles the fence surrounding the field and barrels down the sidewalk, dodging pedestrians. Nathan and I are running our fastest, but we’re falling behind.

  “It’s platform six!” I holler, hoping my voice will reach him. “Platform six!”

  Without turning around, he raises the briefcase like it weighs nothing and waves it in our direction.

  I catch sight of the clock in front of the bank: 11:42. The bus leaves in three minutes!

  “Oh no!” Nathan wheels and points. The Department of Education cube van is pulling out of the Memorial Field parking lot. “Mr. Aidact is fast, but he can’t outrun a truck!”

  The fleeing robot is way ahead of us, but he’s still got a block and a half to go before he reaches the depot.

  Just as the van is about to pull into traffic, a navy blue sedan squeals around the corner and screeches to a halt, blocking the driveway. The van lurches to a stop, inches from a collision.

  Nathan and I instantly recognize the driver of the car. “Mrs. Candiotti!” we chorus.

  The engineers lean on the horn, but the principal won’t budge.

  As Mr. Aidact approaches the depot, a bus turns out and heads for the highway.

  “No!” I wail, all the energy suddenly draining out of me. “He missed it!”

  That’s when I see the sign over the windshield: MIAMI. There’s still hope. The Denver bus hasn’t left yet.

  When Mr. Aidact disappears into the building, the station clock reads 11:44. The Denver bus is set to depart in one minute. He has to be on it.

  Please let him be on it!

  Nathan and I pull out all the stops and race into the building. Platform six is directly in front of us. And—hooray—the Denver bus is still there! But—

  “Where’s Mr. Aidact?” Nathan pants.

  We look around desperately. There he is at platform five, where the bus to New York is loading up luggage. As we watch, Mr. Aidact reaches into his pocket, pulls out the GPS chip, and tosses it into the baggage compartment.

  Brilliant. When they search for the tracker, it will be on its way to New York. I couldn’t have planned it better myself.

  There’s an abrupt hiss and the door of the Denver bus starts to close.

  Pure panic seizes me. What could be worse than missing it when he’s right here?

  Nathan and I lunge into the opening to keep the door from closing. It hurts, but I’ve never been so happy to get crushed by something.

  “Mister—wait!” Nathan rasps in a strained voice. “Our—uh—uncle is coming!”

  The driver is impatient. “Tell him to hurry up. I’ve got a schedule to keep.”

  “Uncle Aidact!” I call. “Come quick! Your bus is leaving!”

  In an instant, he’s directly in front of us, one foot on the bus’s bottom step.

  Relief floods over me. He made it. But just as quickly, it dawns on me that this is goodbye. We’re never going to lay eyes on our new teacher again. I feel a lump in my throat the size of a bowling ball. All at once, it doesn’t seem so long ago that I was mad at him because he caught that spitball on the very first day of school.

  But there’s no time to say any of that. The driver is looking at his watch and glaring at us.

  So I just blurt, “We’ll never forget you.”

  “And I’ll never forget you,” he replies. “Unless I stand too close to a strong magnet. Goodbye, pupils. Aidact out.”

  We stand there, practically at attention, as the door closes and the bus pulls away. I’m afraid to say anything for fear that my voice might crack.

  Nathan swallows hard. “I wonder who our new homeroom teacher is going to be.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “Whoever it is won’t be as good.”

  Walking out of the depot into the cold sunshine is like entering a strange new world—one where Brightling is a state champion and Mr. Aidact doesn’t teach there anymore.

  “Oliver—” Nathan squeezes my shoulder.

  I stare. The Department of Education cube van is idling right in front of the station. One of the engineers is at the wheel. Beside him, in the passenger seat, Perkins pounds the keyboard of a laptop computer.

  “They’re tracking him,” I whisper.

  At that moment, two buses drive up to the depot exit and pause at the street. The Denver bus waits to make a left turn, while the New York bus continues straight down the avenue.

  Barely daring to breath, Nathan and I watch as the cube van makes an awkward U-turn, cutting off the Denver bus, and speeds away after the vehicle headed to New York. I picture the GPS chip in the baggage compartment, sending its signal to Perkins’s computer.

  The Denver bus finally makes its left turn. As it passes, we can see Mr. Aidact in a window seat near the front. His head is thrown back and he’s laughing.

  It’s like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. “He’s going to be okay!”

  Nathan is nervous. “How do you figure that?”

  “He’s laughing!” I crow. “Don’t you get it? He sent those engineers on a wild-goose chase, and his AI taught him how funny that is. He finally has a sense of humor!”

  “It is pretty funny,” he concedes. “Especially if they follow that bus all the way to New York.”

  “Way to go, Mr. Aidact!” I applaud. “With artificial intelligence and a sense of humor, he’s unstoppable!”

  36

  CONFIDENTIAL REPORT

  * * *

  To: Department of Education, Washington, DC

  From: Paul Perkins, PE

  Project: AIDACT

  While it’s never good news when a $250 million project has to be scrapped, and a valuable piece of equipment goes missing, I don’t think the AIDACT experiment should be considered a total failure. Never before in the history of artificial intelligence has a robot conspired with middle school students to act against all its programming and thwart the plans its designers had for it. The fact that this AIDACT unit actually succeeded in its escape proves that its AI capabilities are far more sophisticated than anything we could have imagined. It will add a great deal to our knowledge to examine the AI system if and when we ever find the unit, which seems unlikely. By the time the engineering team caught up to the bus on the New Jersey Turnpike and realized AIDACT wasn’t on it, the unit could have been almost anywhere in the continental US and Canada.

  PROJECT STATUS: On Hold

  SPECIAL EXPENSES

  1 engineering toolkit

  Gas reimbursement (14.5 gallons)

  1 package extra-strength carsickness remedy

  37

  Rosalie Arnette

  The new field hockey trophy goes right on the empty pedestal where the old field hockey trophy used to stand.

  I know I only tried out for the team because it would look good on my student record. But I’m really proud of it. Any way you slice it, a state championship is a humongous achievement. And however proud the players are, multiply that by fifty thousand and you’ve got Principal Candiotti.

  Seriously, ever since the game, she’s been smiling so wide that it looks like her face is about to crack. Even when the grease trap caught fire in the kitchen and smoked out the whole cafeteria, she couldn’t work up much of a frown for the fire department when they arrived. It’s that kind of happy.

  The first time we see our trophy is the morning Mrs. Candiotti invites all the Bobcats into her office before homeroom. We drink sparkling apple cider out of plastic champagne glasses and toast our glorious victory.

  The principal holds her glass high. “From one Bobcat to you others, across the generations!”

  We all drink, and Cassidy adds, “And to Coach Aidact. We’d give it all back if you could still be here with us.”

  That gets a big cheer, and we clink glasses, even though plastic doesn’t clink. We all start chattering about how awesome the escape was and how Mr. Aidact made the entire Department of Education look like a bunch of clowns. We talk about what a fantastic coach he was—how nice, how smart—and how he inspired us and turned us into a true team. He didn’t abandon us when we abandoned him, not even when he was putting himself at risk by sticking around. I hear words like great guy, super-coach, mentor, genius, and friend. The one word I don’t hear is robot. Mr. Aidact has always been as real to us as our own families.

  “Now, girls,” Mrs. Candiotti chides. “What took place after the game should never have happened, and it cost our government an awful lot of money. I hope none of you were involved.”

  She has to say that. She’s a principal, so the Department of Education is sort of her boss. But I can see a traffic violation sitting open on her desk. It’s dated the day of the game, and the charge is for blocking the parking lot exit at Memorial Field. We all saw her. She may complain about the escape, but she helped it along as much as anybody—maybe even as much as Oliver and Nathan.

  In the awkward silence, I look out the window at her panoramic view of the Brightling Ravine. I guess it makes sense that the best view in the whole school should go to the principal. Maybe I’ll be a principal one day, with an office just like this one—big windows, amazing view. It’s possible, you know. With a state championship on my record, I could get into any college and achieve anything.

  It’s a great celebration, but pretty soon the bell rings, calling us all to homeroom. As I file out behind the other girls, I stub my toe on a small cardboard box at the doorway. Looking down, I’m surprised to see the old field hockey trophy, broken into pieces.

  “You found it!” I exclaim.

  “Someone returned it—what’s left of it,” Mrs. Candiotti confirms. “It was in a plastic bag, hanging on the doorknob of the gym entrance. No note. Just the pieces.”

  “Are you going to have it fixed?” I ask. “This is your state championship, just like we have ours.”

  The principal shakes her head. “I don’t live in the past. You girls are the stars now. Enjoy this moment.”

  On the way to homeroom, I’m surprised to run into Mr. Perkins coming out of the faculty lounge. No one’s seen him since the championship game.

  I always thought he was kind of a jerk, but I’m a little bit sorry for him now. He’s carrying a carton with an assortment of books and papers, and he looks a lot like a guy in a TV show who got fired and had to clean out his desk.

  He fixes me with an expression I can’t quite identify. Regret? Disappointment? Anger?

  I swallow hard. “I’m sorry about—what happened. I hope you didn’t get in too much trouble.” I indicate the box in his arms.

  “I didn’t lose my job, if that’s what you mean,” he replies stiffly. “My role here was always attached to the AIDACT unit. Now that the unit is no longer in the picture . . .”

  I can’t help smiling. The thought of Mr. Aidact’s clean getaway fills me with a glow that no state championship ever could.

  I have to ask. “Do you think he can make it? You know—on his own?”

  Mr. Perkins nods slowly. “Every time I felt the unit had reached the limits of its capabilities, the AI always proved me wrong. It’s a very impressive technology.”

  “Mr. Aidact isn’t technology,” I tell him. “He’s a person—one of the best people. And as long as you think of him as wires and circuits, you’re never going to understand him.”

  I start to move on, but he stops me. “Wait. One question—did he get the toolkit?”

  “He did,” I confirm.

  “Good,” Mr. Perkins says slowly. “There are always minor repairs and adjustments.”

  I stare at him. Maybe our “student teacher” has a heart after all.

  Our new homeroom teacher is Ms. Van Dyke, and we know she’s not a robot because she has a cold. She’s been sneezing and blowing for the past week. Also, she doesn’t have some guy pretending to be a student teacher, toting a giant briefcase and following her around.

  Oliver is determined to get her to call us “pupils.” He’s constantly asking questions like, “Can a pupil use the bathroom anytime we want, or do we pupils have to get a hall pass?” Or “What were the pupils like in your old school? Were the pupils there any different than the pupils here?”

  So far, she’s still calling us “students” and “class.” But knowing Oliver, he’ll break her down.

  “How was the Bobcats thing in Candiotti’s office?” Nathan whispers.

  “Pretty good,” I reply. “But you’ll never guess what I saw. Remember the old trophy—the one that got stolen? Well, somebody brought it back, busted into pieces!”

  Nathan goes bright red. “The high school kids!” he blurts.

  “What high school kids?”

  Oliver elbows him in the ribs to keep him quiet.

  Okay, that explains a lot. Of course they were involved in what happened to that old trophy. Most of the unexplained disasters at this school involve those two.

  But lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to stay mad at Nathan and Oliver. I think it’s because they did so much to help Mr. Aidact escape. I’ll always be grateful to them for that.

  I wonder where he is and how he’s doing. I hope he’s happy, even though Mr. Perkins doesn’t think a machine can know what happy is.

  What if the Department of Education tracks him down? What if he blows a circuit or runs into a software glitch he can’t fix? There are a million things that can go wrong. And the hardest part is that we’ll never know.

  Epilogue

  NATIONAL FIELD HOCKEY CHAMPIONSHIP GOES TO SMALL SCHOOL

  * * *

  ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS: It’s the ultimate Cinderella story. Tiny McLaren Academy, an all-girls school with fewer than a hundred students, has won the National Girls’ Middle School Field Hockey Championship, defeating teams from schools fifteen and even twenty times its size. How did a small-town institution that didn’t even have an athletic program a year ago rise to the very pinnacle of middle school sports?

  “My pupils deserve all the credit,” said McLaren’s new coach, a young teacher named Nathan Oliver. . . .

  About the Author

  GORDON KORMAN published his first book at age fourteen and since then has written more than one hundred middle grade and teen novels. Favorites include the New York Times bestselling Ungifted, Supergifted, The Unteachables, Pop, Notorious, Unplugged, Operation Do-Over, and the Masterminds series. Gordon lives with his family on Long Island, NY. You can visit him online at www.gordonkorman.com.

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  Copyright

  Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  THE SUPERTEACHER PROJECT. Copyright © 2023 by Gordon Korman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  Cover art © 2023 by David Miles

  Cover design by David DeWitt

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Korman, Gordon, author.

  Title: The superteacher project / Gordon Korman.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Balzer + Bray, [2023] | Audience: Ages 8-12. | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary: Oliver and Nathan, determined to get to the bottom of their new homeroom teacher’s fishy behavior, discover Mr. Aidact is actually an AI robot from a secret experimental program.