I leapt out of the vehicle and shut the door behind me. Alex was pointing at the car’s front.
What I saw nearly made me collapse. The mountain road we had been taking had simply halted and broken into a massive 3000 ft drop- the car’s front wheels hanging off the edge
ominously.

I simply stood staring at the cliff’s edge and the sheer drop…
Alex was the first to break the
silence.

“Nye, how long to ComicCon if we turn around and use the LA route instead…”
I was expecting Nye’s familiar ,cocky, robotic reply but heard a dead silence instead.

“Nye?

Nye!”

There was still no reply. Alex threw open the car’s right hand side door- only to find a
broken Nye lying on the car’s booster seat at the back, rusty and crumpled up. I did not
know what to say. Nye had always been there to help and now he was gone. Alex’s face was
cold and without emotion. He tried with all his strength to start the car and turn around but
it was to no use. Nye would have known how.

It pained me to recall the early moments of
my life. When me, Alex and my friend Milo had only been 7 years old we spotted an empty
coke can and tried adding disused robot parts from Milo’s old RC car and tried building a
robot out of them- using the can as a torso and fitting it with 3 AA batteries only to discover
it moved on its own.

We named him Nye , after our TV hero Bill Nye the Science Guy.

I couldn’t believe he was gone now.

My moment of commemorative silence was broken by the roar of an engine.

“Alex! You got the car working! All we have to do is drive to Milo’s house to get Nye back in
order. He lives in Pasadena… It shouldn’t take too long! Come on!”

The car’s engine coughed and spluttered into life.
It took barely moments to get to Milo’s apartment.

I knocked three times, listening to the
sound reverbrate through the door. Milo answered the door swiftly and carried Nye to the
the kitchen, attatching a stethoscope to his chest.