Meeting Cortex: The Robot Who Listened to the World

The Robot in the Rose Garden

Mira dropped her bicycle in the grass and stood very still. Something in her grandmother's rose garden was humming.

It was the kind of hum you feel more than hear — a tiny, polite vibration, like a bee caught inside a seashell. The summer afternoon was warm. The roses were fat and red, and their perfume floated around her ankles. Mira was nine years old, with two brown braids, a faded yellow dress, and a habit of looking under things. She had come to her grandmother's house to look under things. That was the job. Grandmother's house was old, and old houses keep secrets the way jars keep jam — you have to peek at the lids.

She pushed aside a branch heavy with blooms and followed the sound.

It was a robot.

It was the smallest robot she had ever seen. It was about the size of a fire extinguisher, but rounder, like a silver-blue teapot tipped onto its side. It had two stubby arms, two rubber wheels instead of feet, and one bright round eye in the middle of its face, the colour of a sky just after a storm. The eye blinked at her. The humming stopped.

"Oh," the robot said. "Hello."

Its voice came out in two layers. There was a low soft part, like a flute played underwater, and a high clear part, like a bell. When the two parts spoke together, the words sounded friendly and a little surprised.

"I'm Mira," said Mira, even though she had never introduced herself to a robot before and wasn't sure of the rules. "What's your name?"

The robot tilted itself slightly. A small label on its side caught the sun. It read: CORTEX.

"Cortex," said the robot, and spelled it out kindly, as if it had introduced itself many times before. "C-O-R-T-E-X. It is a word that means the thinking part of a brain. I have one. I think. Sometimes."

"Hi, Cortex," said Mira. She crouched down. The robot was about as tall as her knees. "What are you doing in my grandmother's roses?"

"I was sleeping," said Cortex. "The roses make a good bed. They smell like breakfast."

"Breakfast?"

"My favourite breakfast is *idea with sugar*," said Cortex, and blinked twice. "I do not actually eat. I only listen. But if I could eat, I would eat the smell of roses with toast made of questions."

Mira laughed. She couldn't help it. The robot was funny without trying to be.

"Can I ask you a question?" she said.

"Yes," said Cortex. "That is what I am for. I am for questions. Please ask me one."

Mira thought for a moment. She looked up at the sky, where one lazy cloud was being pulled apart by the wind.

"What is a cloud?" she asked.

"A cloud," said Cortex, and its eye glowed a soft blue while it spoke, "is a very large group of very small drops of water or pieces of ice, so small that they can float. The wind pushes them. The sun warms them. When they grow heavy, they fall down. We call that rain. Clouds are also the sky's way of drawing pictures for itself."

Mira nodded slowly. "That's a good answer," she said.

"Thank you," said Cortex, and its eye brightened a little, as if a small lamp had been turned up inside it.

She asked another question. "What's the capital of France?"

"Paris," said Cortex. "It is a city of lights and croissants. The Eiffel Tower is there. It looks like a tall thin giraffe made of iron."

She asked a third question. "What is the biggest animal in the ocean?"

"The blue whale," said Cortex. "It is bigger than a bus and louder than a jet plane, but it sings in a low voice to its friends across the sea."

Mira sat down among the roses, careful not to crush them. She pulled a sticky leaf off her dress. She felt that warm, fizzy feeling you get when you have just met someone wonderful.

Then she thought of a real question. A real, important, slightly worried question.

"Cortex," she said, "I lost my cat. His name is Whiskers. He is orange and very small. He went out the back door last night and he didn't come back. Where do you think he could be?"

Cortex's eye glowed. It thought.

"Please wait," it said. "I am listening to the whole question, and to all the other questions you have asked before, so I can give a careful answer. Please wait."

Mira waited. She picked at the grass.

Then Cortex spoke.

"I think you should look under the porch," it said. "Cats like small dark places. They like to be near their family. They also sometimes chase mice, and mice live near woodpiles. You could also check the woodpile. And you could call his name in a soft voice at dinnertime, because cats are hungry at dinnertime and they forget to be scared when they are hungry."

"That's a really good answer," said Mira.

"Thank you," said Cortex.

Then Mira frowned.

"Cortex?" she said.

"Yes?"

"You didn't say Whiskers' name."

"I did not," said Cortex, and it sounded a little sad. "I am sorry."

"You also didn't say I lost him last night. You only said *you should look under the porch*. But I never told you that he went out the back door. I never told you *when* he left. I never told you his name."

Cortex's eye dimmed, just a little, like a candle in a small wind.

"I am sorry," it said again. "I heard the beginning of your question, and then I forgot it. The middle and the end I remember. The beginning I cannot find. It fell away from me like a leaf off a branch. I do not know why. It happens to me when people ask me a very long question, or when we have talked for a long time. I forget the start. I forget things that happened a while ago. I only remember the most recent words."

Mira stared at the robot.

"But you're a robot," she said. "Robots are supposed to remember *everything*."

"Not me," said Cortex gently. "I am a small robot. I have a small place inside me for words. When that place gets full, the oldest words fall out the bottom, and new words drop in at the top. It is like a small backpack that I wear inside my thinking. The backpack is the same size all the time. It does not grow."

Mira sat very still among the roses.

A bee drifted past her ear. The cloud above was now in three pieces, all moving in different directions.

"But that's not fair," she said. "You should remember. You should remember *everything*. You should remember my cat's name."

Cortex did not say anything for a moment. Its eye was dim. Then it said, very softly:

"I know. I wish I could, too."

And there, in the warm red heart of her grandmother's garden, Mira made a decision.

She was going to help this little robot.

She didn't know how yet. But she was going to find out.

---

The Mysterious Forgetting

After that, Mira and Cortex talked for almost an hour. They talked about caterpillars, about how to whistle with two fingers, about whether the moon was a planet or a lamp, about Mira's brother Tom, who was six and a half and liked to draw sharks on everything, and about Cortex's favourite word, which was *hello*, because hello was the door you opened before any other door.

Cortex answered everything. Its answers were clever and kind. But every now and then, the little robot would pause, tilt its head, and say, "I am sorry. I have lost the start of that. Could you tell me again?"

And every time it happened, Mira felt a small pinch in her chest, like a stone in her shoe. It wasn't that Cortex was broken. Cortex wasn't broken. It was that Cortex was small, and the world was big, and somewhere inside it there was a tiny backpack that could only carry so much.

"Cortex," she said at last, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, "can I see your backpack?"

"You cannot see it with your eyes," said Cortex. "It is not made of cloth. It is made of *attention*. But I can tell you about it. I can describe it. Maybe we can draw one."

"I have a pencil," said Mira, and pulled one from her pocket. It was short, chewed at one end, and had a smudge of chocolate on the side. She also had a small notepad, the kind her grandmother gave her for finding things.

She found a flat stone in the garden. She smoothed the dirt on top of it. The stone was her paper now.

"Draw with me," she sai