Bucket- Gel Walls

"It can't possibly," said Keerthi. "Is this place managed entirely by robots?"

"Robots? What? No," said Mr. Bucket. "You don't understand. Watch!"

Mr. Bucket walked over to Roy's pedestal, picked up his cane, and swung it at the sugar glass. It broke, and Roy's body fell to the floor in a pile. The pedestal snapped in half. The children screamed.

Mr. Bucket ignored them and pointed.

"Do not look at Roy! Look at the floor, children! The floor!"

The floor began to liquify, in the spot where Roy, the pedestal he had been on, and the broken sugar glass had landed. It all sank like quicksand into the floor and disappeared. The floor stopped wiggling and became hard again.

"Where did he go?" asked JUROR.

"I vape," said Mahuika.

"Contain your excitement," said Mr. Bucket. "There! There it is!"

At the same spot as before, the ground turned to liquid sand again, and a new pedestal began to lift out of the ground, along with Roy and a repaired glass case. Soon they were back where they had been originally in restored condition.

"All the floors and walls and ceilings in my factory can do this," said Mr. Bucket. "When they need to operate or fix something, they turn into a special gel, drag it into themselves and work on it and bring it back out. Everything is designed so that it can be operated through this method."

"Is it automatic?" asked Lim.

"Not fully," said Mr. Bucket. "I have a chip in my brain that issues commands. Most of them are scheduled but some are from when I need them to do something special, like fixing up Roy here. When I tell it what to do, the chip sends that command to the Control Center, and the Center Controller decides how to go about using the walls to do what I need it to do."

- Chapter 10: The Failure Room