C. J. Richards has loved tinkering with gadgets since he was a little boy. He remembers fondly the time he accidentally blew up his father's radio after some experimental rewiring. Mr. Richards lives with his wife, his cat, and his eight televisions.

Worker robots keep the high-tech town of Terabyte Heights humming, but ten-year-old George Gearing is the only one who has a robot for a best friend. When his scrappy but beloved pal Jackbot is hit by a car, the whiz kid re-engineers him with fancy parts from state-of-the-art TinkerTech Laboratories. Jackbot's astounding new skills far exceed anything George?or even TinkerTech's head of robotics?could ever have imagined. Will the villainous Dr. Micron destroy the whole town to see his tech-driven dream realized? Not if George can help it . . .