Oldest hack in history, raising kids. Get everything just right and you end up with nice, well-adjusted future generations. Get it wrong and years later there'll be psychiatrists messing around in your children's logs and timestamps, finding all the evidence you forgot to clear.

I think I'm doing a pretty good job, if I do say so. The first year DefCon moves to the swank new Ur hotel and casino, right on the Strip, Mr. 15 says he wants to come with me. I'm so proud I could bust. Then, of course, Mr. 12 says that if Mr. 15 goes, he should be allowed to, as well. So I say yeah, okay. Then Miss 9 gets in on the action, my precious baby girl who, to my knowledge, has never shown the slightest interest in computers beyond texting her friends (what do 9-year-olds have to text about?) and playing Angry Bastards on her tablet. And I try to talk her out of it. You'll just be bored, I say. There's a lot of walking around, I say. A LOT. You'll be bored AND tired. But she just does that quiet-but-intractable thing she gets from her mother until finally I cave. So here I am with three kids at DefCon.

It happens the minute we hit the rotunda, fresh piping-hot badges swinging from our necks. Mr. 15 disappears in one direction, and Mr. 12 zips off in another. I figure Mr. 15 is heading for LPV. He's at that age where a kid without a girlfriend might turn to lockpicking as a substitute for--you know--something else. But Mr. 12 is an enigma, and ever since that time they kicked us out of Disneyland, I am loathe to let him wander around unsupervised. So I hustle into the nearby vendor area, hoping that's where he went. Miss 9 trails demurely in my wake, sticking with me despite the fact that her eyes never leave her tablet screen.

A quick tour of the vendor room reveals no sign of Mr. 12, so I rush up to the nearest Goonbot. This was, apparently, one of the Ur's stipulations to the DefCon organizers: you can hold your conference here, but you have to use OUR robot security forces. So no more human security Goons. I miss them and their snazzy red shirts, but in this case I can see the advantage. Any Goonbot has immediate access to every security cam and every other robot in the hotel. They should be able to spot my lost boys in the twinkling of a LAN.

"'Scuse me," I say to the Goonbot. "I'm looking for my son. He's 12, about so tall, brown hair, brown eyes, Incepticons t-shirt?"

The Goonbot issues that same metallic clicking sound that my health insurance provider's phone lines make when they're sending you from one voice menu to another. Then it says, "An individual matching that description is at the British Airways counter at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport."

"Where?" I say. There must be some mistake.

"Jomo Keny--"

"No, I heard you," I interrupt.

"Nairobi," Miss 9 mutters behind me. I glance at her. Her fingers are flying over her screen. She is really into that game.

"Jomo Kenyatta is the main airport in Nairobi, Kenya, sir," the Goonbot says.

"My son is not in Kenya," I tell it. "He was right here, like, two minutes ago." The Goonbot clicks a little more.

"An individual matching that description is at the poolside bar at Caesar's Palace," it says.

"Caesar's is way down the Strip!" I snap. "There's no way he could have gotten there in the time he's been gone. Can you search for him just within the conference area of this hotel?" Click, click, click.

"An individual matching that description is in the baseball stands at Greenwood Neighborhood Park in Auric, Kentucky."

"No, WITHIN the conference--"

"An individual matching that description is 50 yards west of the main parking area of the Cliffs of Moher in Liscannor, Ireland. An individual matching that description is outside the doors of Whiskey a Go Go, Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood, California. An individual matching--"

"Stop!" I yell. "Stop it! Just search the Ur Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada!"

"Dad," Miss 9 says, in a gently insistent tone.

"Not now, honey!" I say. The Goonbot continues to rattle off location after location of individuals who look like but are not my son, all over the world. I plead with it to stop, but it won't, so after a while I do what all good users of technology the world over do: I resort to physical violence and fetch the Goonbot a sound slap upside the head. It wobbles on its pneumatic treads. People around us are beginning to stare.

"Assaulting robotic staff is an infraction of hotel rules," the Goonbot says. "Please stand by for additional assistance."

"ADDITIONAL assistance! Are you kidding me? You haven't been any assistance to me at all, you worthless piece of--"

"Language," murmurs Miss 9. Ignoring her, I give the Goonbot a low roundhouse kick.

"Infraction! Infraction!" it bleats. "Please stand by for--" The arrival of four more Goonbots interrupts its litany. This must be the additional assistance. One of them interposes itself between me and the first Goonbot.

"Sir, you have committed several infractions of hotel rules," says this one.

"Stick around. I'm just getting warmed up."

The first Goonbot wheels in a circle in the background, clicking madly.

"Sir, your belligerence suggests you may be under the influence. Please come with us," says the backup Goonbot.

"This is Vegas!" I tell it. "I may be the one person over drinking age in this room who ISN'T under the influence. Now, look, all I want is to find my--"

"Come with us, sir." It takes my arm. Just then, who should come barreling into me but Mr. 12.

"Dad, Dad!" he says. "Can I get an advance on next week's allowance? Please, please, please?"

"Sir, come with us," the Goonbot says, tugging my arm. I am about to jerk my arm away when we are all distracted--all but Miss 9, of course, who's still immersed in her tablet screen--by the whirling Goonbot in the background.

"An individual matching that description!" it declares in an unsettlingly challenging tone, coming out of its dervish act. "Please stand by!" it booms, and charges the EFF booth.

People scream and leap out of its way. The EFF table slams over on its side, spilling cards and stickers and T-shirts across the floor.

"Comewithuscomewithuscomewithus," grates the Goonbot holding my arm. Its grip tightens dangerously. I yank myself free. Its pincer-like hand snicks shut with enough force to crack a steel walnut. It reaches out for me. I grab Miss 9 by one hand and Mr. 12 by the other and dodge out of its way.

The other Goonbots are whirling and clutching at people now, too, spouting locations and accusations and urging everyone to remain calm, even as one of them brings a claw down on the Pwnie Express table, chopping it in half with a sound like a rifle report. Dragging the kids with me, I flee out into the rotunda.

Things are even worse there. The swag booth is in flames. Brogrammers run screaming to and fro. Every Goonbot I see is malfunctioning, and they keep calling in more and more backup units until the crowd of humans and bots is so thick we can scarcely move. Mr. 12 and I manage to fight our way into Capture the Flag with Miss 9 in tow, but the Goonbots have sacked the place and are busily engaged in chasing a gaggle of mohawked hackers through the litter of smashed laptops and twisted cables.

I haul the kids back out into the corridor. The shrieking, wailing crowd pushes us inevitably toward the Hardware Hacking Village. I'm terrified that this is where the chase will end. I can imagine a couple hundred things the Goonbots could do with soldering irons, none of them pleasant to contemplate.

Suddenly Miss 9 gives a tremendous yank on my hand. I stumble and barely escape being trampled underfoot by the surging horde. I start to scold her--usually so quietly sensible and serenely well-behaved--when I perceive that she is tugging us toward the nearest ladies' room. This seems like a reasonable place to seek refuge, so I add my efforts to hers, and together we push through the maelstrom. We overshoot and have to slink back pressed up tight against the wall. It takes five minutes to travel ten feet this way, but we finally reach the door and tumble through it.

The door swings shut behind us, and the quiet, after the chaos outside, is nearly deafening. Mr. 12 looks around.

"There's no one else in here," he observes wonderingly.

"Good thinking, sweetheart," I say to Miss 9.

"I'm glad you noticed," she says in a faintly distracted tone. Incredibly, her fingers are still dancing over her tablet screen. If we make it out of here alive, I think, I really need to get her some help for that game addiction. I turn to Mr. 12.

"We need to figure out a plan for finding your brother and getting out of here."

"Dad," says Miss 9.

"Hang on, pumpkin," I tell her.

"We could set off the fire alarm," Mr. 12 suggests. "When the fire department comes, they can--"

"The Ur security bot forces are programmed to respond to fire alarms," interjects Miss 9. "Besides, did you not see the swag booth? It's a conflagration. If the LVFR's not here now, they're not coming."

"But--" objects Mr. 12. Miss 9 silences him with a dismissive wave of one delicate hand. She turns to me.

"Now, listen," she says, and I am too impressed by the fact that she's finally disconnected from her screen to interrupt. "I know how to stop all this."

"What? How?" I gasp.

"You do not!" Mr. 12 scoffs at the same time.

"Yes, I do," she insists. "I'm not going to tell you how. Just give me a simple yes or no answer: do you want me to stop it?"

It's the fairy tales she reads, I think. The Goonbots have been transformed into ogres and trolls in her imagination, and she thinks she can chant some magic spell that will turn them to stone or transport them all to the bottom of the sea or some such nonsense.

"Sweetheart," I say as patiently as I can, "I'm sure you THINK you can stop it, and I'd love to hear your ideas, but right now--"

"A simple yes or no," she repeats, slowly and distinctly, like she's talking to someone deaf or simple-minded or both.

"Yes," I sigh. Sometimes the only way to deal with her is to humor her.

"Okay, here's how it's going to work," she says. "I want the same allowance as Mr. 15 gets." I shake my head, too dizzied by this conversational turn to protest that now is not the time to be talking about allowances.

"Now, honey, that's not fair. You have to work your way up."

"Yeah!" says Mr. 12. "I don't even get as much allowance as him." Miss 9 doesn't deign to acknowledge him.

"I do twice the chores of both of them put together," she tells me. "And you don't have to nag and remind me all the time."

"That's not true!" protests Mr. 12, but, in fact, it IS true.

Something hits the ladies' room door with a resounding crash. We all look up. A Goonbot trundles in through a cloud of splinters, brandishing a fire extinguisher.

"Heeeeeeere's Johnny!" it exclaims.

I can't bear for my last moments on this earth with my daughter to be spent in argument. So I say, "Okay, honey, if you stop these things, you can have the same allowance as Mr. 15."

"Backdated to the start of the year," demands Miss 9.

"Fine," I say.

"And I want my very own R-Pi. Not one I have to share with luser over there."

"Sure, honey."

"That's SO not fair!" Mr. 12 whines.

"Think of it as compensation for millennia of patriarchal oppression," Miss 9 tells him, the barest suggestion of a smirk hovering over her rosebud lips. He can't think of anything to say to that.

Miss 9 steps out from behind the protective screen I'm making with my body to shield her and her brother from the approaching Goonbot. I make a grab for her and miss.

"Honey, no!" I shout. "That thing could kill you!"

But she ignores me and marches right up to the Goonbot. Glaring fearlessly into its gleaming metal finish, she stands on tiptoe and speaks very loudly and clearly into the microphone built into its chest.

"This situation is exactly like Nazi Germany," she says.

And I'll be damned if the thing doesn't freeze right where it is. The arm hefting the fire extinguisher droops toward the floor, and the light dies out of its LED eyes.

Mr. 12's eyes get big as saucers. "What did you do to it?" he whispers.

When I finally work up the courage to peer out into the corridor, the chaos has mostly ceased. People mill around, muttering, nursing minor injuries--miraculously, no one seems to have been seriously hurt--and poking and prodding cautiously at the Goonbots, ALL of which have shut down. My jaw hits the ground.

My precious, pink-cheeked little elf princess has just Godwinned a casino full of marauding robots.

Mr. 15 saunters up with a pack of lockpicks in one hand and a young lady with zebra-striped hair in the other. "Dad," he says, "this is Ada. She can open a Schlage 2600 in eighteen seconds using nothing but a paperclip."

It's not until the plane ride home that I ask Miss 9 how she knew exactly what to do to save us all. She doesn't answer me, just smiles sweetly and hums a few bars of her favorite Hanoi Montana tune.

Down below, Las Vegas retreats into the distance, and I entertain a brief, feverish notion that she somehow caused all this mayhem just to achieve equal footing with her brothers. But I know that's silly. I'm probably just hysterical with relief.

The Ur hotel takes its entire robot security staff offline after this fiasco, but DefCon moves back to the Rio anyway. It's good to be back there and nice to see all the friendly-faced, red-shirted human Goons patrolling the halls the following year.

Miss 9 becomes Miss 10 and leads the team that wins Capture the Flag. I am one proud papa, I can tell you.

She's my future, and anywhere we go, I'm glad she's right here, right now.