MY BEST FRIEND IS A SECRET AGENT, Book 1: How Chip Became CHIP and Foiled the...

Chapter 7: "Exploding Heads"

Things weren't looking good.

I couldn't tell my dad about C.H.I.P. I tried to tell Carla, but she wouldn't believe me. And Gert von Brugen, the last person I wanted to know about C.H.I.P., was starting to figure things out.

I needed to take control of the situation.

Chip and I headed down to HQ. I told him we had to keep a lid on the C.H.I.P. project. That meant both of us not spilling the beans to anybody. We wanted to use C.H.I.P. to keep the city safe from crazy bad guys, and if those bad guys ever found out what was really going on – that C.H.I.P. was really just a kid being controlled by another kid – they'd laugh us out of the city.

Nope, as far as crazy bad guys knew, C.H.I.P. was a real secret agent who could take them all on at once!

This bummed Chip out because what's the point of being supercool if you have to hide it from everybody all the time?

I told him that real secret agents and even superheroes in movies never go around telling people who they really are. It would blow their cover.

Chip thought about that for a while and finally said that if real secret agents don't go around telling people they're secret agents, then he shouldn't either. He also said it would be really cool if he was also a superhero.

I told him superheroes weren't real. He thought about that for a while too.

It was time to get serious and perfect the C.H.I.P. It had worked amazingly well the first time out, but I needed Chip as C.H.I.P. to be able to go from one skill to another by himself – and superfast! So we started to get to work...

...and then Stella showed up. My sister. Eight years old and almost as smart as me. (She thinks she's smarter.) She had one of those stupid Freaky Fuzzy things with her – you know, that mechanical alien-pet toy that moves its eyes and actually talks to you? Yeah, creepy, but they were all over the place. Every little girl had one, and they were really annoying.

Stella wanted to know what we were up to. She was always sticking her nose in my business. When I was seven, I had almost figured out how to power our entire house just by supercharging the blender. Then Stella walked in, hit "frappé," and instead of an answer to the world's energy crisis, we ended up with banana-strawberry smoothie all over the place.

And last year, I almost solved global warming with my plan to build the world's hugest ice-cube tray. But once again, Stella messed things up by pouring fruit punch into the prototype ice-cube tray in the freezer. Who knew it would self-destruct when exposed to red dye No. 14?

I told Stella to take a hike. I was working on something seriously serious this time. Then her Freaky Fuzzy started scooting around the room, nosing into every nook and cranny of my HQ. And still with the questions!

This sure seemed like the perfect toy for Stella.

Finally we got rid of Stella and her Freaky Fuzzy, and I started to reprogram the C.H.I.P. to let Chip switch from one skill to another whenever he wanted.

But there was a risk - I could overload the C.H.I.P. and blow the whole thing out, which wouldn't be too cool if Chip was right in the middle of fighting some crazy bad guy. And there was also a risk of overloading Chip's brain, which, let's face it, probably wasn't that hard to do.

I just hoped that that thing about people only using 10 percent of their brains was true. Maybe the C.H.I.P. might allow Chip to use his other 90 percent.

Or it might make his head explode.

I considered my options and decided that Chip would think his head exploding was kind of cool.