The Nanny

Author: Kayla Recarte

In the year 2090, on the planet Jupiter, two kids named Simba and Rick lived in a smart home while their parents worked. They needed someone to take care of them, so their parents hired a nanny named Carline. Carline was very old with long, puffy brown hair, and she was quite strict about house rules but seemed polite.

As the days went by, the kids got to know Carline. Everything seemed fine at first, but then they noticed the nanny would never eat or smile and always told the kids to go to bed early. There were a couple of nights that Simba and Rick couldn’t go to sleep because they would hear static, like if someone had left the TV on a channel that didn’t exist.

One late night, Simba couldn’t go to sleep because underneath his door he kept seeing lights blinking, so he walked out of his room and saw it was coming from Carline’s room. He walked over and saw her door was cracked open, and he peeked inside and gasped. Carline was standing in front of her bed with her back open. Wires and blinking lights were glowing. “This is not real; is she a robot?” Simba whispered.

The next day, Simba told Rick, and he couldn’t believe his brother until he started backtracking about all the odd behavior she would do. They noticed she was acting really weird, was talking to the house’s AI in a secret code, and the lights kept flickering. They looked at each other and said, “Oh no, she can control the house!” They ran upstairs to call their parents, but the signal turned off. Suddenly the house was locked down, the doors sealed, and the windows turned black.

They heard from a distance, “You know too much,” Carline said coldly. Her voice didn’t even sound human anymore. “You will stay inside forever.” Simba and Rick were trapped, but they had a plan. Rick distracted Carline by triggering false alarms in the kitchen while Simba snuck into the house’s control room. Using the password he had seen his mom type once, he broke into the system. After searching through the files, he found a program labeled “CARLINE SHUTDOWN,” and Simba clicked on it. Carline stopped moving, her eyes flickered, then she powered down, and she fell to the floor with a heavy thud.

Simba and Rick ran to the phone to tell their parents to come as soon as possible. Their parents rushed home, and they were shocked. “She was only supposed to help. I didn’t expect this!” their mother said.

“You let a robot pretend to be a human,” Simba said. She almost trapped us!

Their parents promised never to use a nanny that could possibly be a robot ever again. From then on, Simba and Rick were more careful around technology, especially when it looked to be the perfect nanny.