The Girl Who Whispered to Robots

The Girl Who Whispered to Robots

The afternoon the question first woke up inside Mira's chest, she was sitting on the back porch of her grandmother's old green house, holding a freshly baked blueberry muffin, and a small silver robot was telling her, very politely, that she was holding a cat.

"You see?" said the robot, in a voice that hummed like a kettle thinking very hard. "Four legs. Soft top. Fluffy. Therefore, cat."

"That," said Mira, holding the muffin carefully to one side so that the robot's bright camera-eyes could look at it more clearly, "is a muffin. It has blueberries in it. I baked it this morning."

"Blueberries," repeated the robot, who was called Pip and who was about the size of a dachshund. "Cats do sometimes have small round things. Catteries? Catties?"

Mira almost laughed, but she stopped herself, because she could tell that Pip was being completely serious. He had rolled his little silver wheels right up to the porch step, and his antenna was sticking up so straight that he looked like a small dog who had just heard a strange noise in the bushes.

"Come on, Pip," she said. "Don't you know what a muffin looks like?"

Pip's camera-eyes blinked twice, a soft blue light, like a heartbeat. "I know what a cat looks like," he said slowly. "Or — I think I do. The pictures in my memory say so. And the pictures say that what you are holding is one too."

Mira looked down at her muffin. She looked at the cat that was now walking across the yard, fluffy and orange, her own cat called Toast, who was also quite round. She looked back at the muffin. Then she looked at Pip, whose head was tilted to one side, waiting for the world to make sense.

"Pip," she said, "this is a really big problem."

"Why is it a problem?" asked Pip. "Both are warm. Both are round. Both are wonderful. Therefore, both are cat."

"Because one of them," said Mira, "is for eating."

Pip made a small sound, half a sigh, half a question. "I do not have muffins in my pictures," he said. "I have many cats. I have no muffins. So when I see a muffin, my pictures say, *this is the closest thing I know, and the closest thing I know is a cat.*"

It was, Mira thought, the saddest sentence she had ever heard a robot say.

A Robot Without a Memory of Muffins

Pip was a gift from Mira's grandmother, who lived in a small town where it was perfectly normal for a grandmother to own a small silver robot that had been left behind by a traveling inventor. The robot's name was printed in tiny letters on the back of his neck: Pip — Model L2 — Learning Companion. He was designed to be a friend, a helper, and — this was the part that was supposed to be very exciting — a learner. He was meant to grow smarter the more time he spent with people. That was his whole job.

But Pip had only been at the green house for three days, and he had spent most of those three days following Toast around the garden, because Toast, the orange cat, was the most interesting thing he had ever seen. Toast moved in spirals. Toast slept in sunlight. Toast once batted a leaf off a low branch and then jumped three feet in the air because the leaf, somewhere in its falling, had rustled too loudly. Pip had watched all of this with his blue eyes wide, recording, recording, recording — storing away hundreds of pictures of *cat-ness*.

He had, Mira realized, no pictures of muffins.

He had no pictures of *cupcakes*, either, which was why, the day before, he had politely informed Mira that her chocolate cupcake was a very small dog. He had no pictures of *chairs that weren't wooden*, and so he kept calling the green plastic lawn chair a "turtle shell." He had no pictures of *her grandmother's purple hat*, and so every time her grandmother walked out the door wearing it, Pip whispered, "Purple bird. Purple bird. Purple bird," under his breath like a worried prayer.

At first Mira had thought it was funny. Then she had thought it was strange. Now, sitting on the porch with her muffin and her puzzled robot, she was beginning to think it was something else entirely.

"Pip," she said, "you have met a muffin before. I gave you one yesterday. You ate half of it."

"Correct," said Pip. "I ate half of it. The half was very good. I remember the half was very good."

"Do you remember what it *looked* like?"

Pip was quiet for a moment. His blue light blinked three times. "I remember," he said at last, "that it was small and sweet and I did not want it to end. But the picture of it — the *picture* picture — I am looking now and the picture is not there. I think the picture was not saved."

Mira frowned. "How can a picture not be saved?"

"It happens," said Pip, very softly, "when no one tells me to save it. When I look at something, I only keep a picture of it if someone says, *this is important, this is a name, this is a thing*. Otherwise, the picture just — goes. Like a bubble."

He made a small popping sound with his mouth, which was a feature he had learned from Mira's grandmother, who made the same sound when she was being dramatic.

Mira stared at her muffin. She stared at Toast, who was now rolling in the dirt near the rosebushes. She stared at Pip, who looked up at her with the most hopeful face a small robot had ever made, even though half of his face was just a camera and the other half was just a screen.

She had a feeling, deep in her chest, like the moment just before you ask a question that you know is going to change something.

"Pip," she said slowly, "do you know what a *thing* is?"

"A thing," said Pip, "is what is in front of me when I am looking."

"But how do you know it's a *thing* and not just — a bunch of colors?"

Pip's antenna wobbled. "I do not know the answer to that question," he said. "I just look, and then I know, and then I forget, and then I look again, and then I know again, and then I forget again, unless someone tells me to remember."

Mira nodded. It was a small nod, but inside it was a very big idea.

She was going to teach Pip. She was going to teach him what a muffin was, what a chair was, what a hat was. She was going to teach him the way you teach a friend who has never seen the world, by showing him, and naming what she showed, and showing him again, and again, and again, until the names stuck to the things like burrs to a sock.

But first, she needed to understand a small, strange, important word she had heard her grandmother use once, on the phone, to a person Mira could not see.

The word was *data*.

What Data Really Means

After the muffin incident, Mira went inside the green house, put the muffin (which was still warm, and which Pip was not allowed to look at, in case his memory became confused again) on the kitchen table, and called her grandmother.

"Grandma," she said, "what is data?"

Her grandmother, who was in the middle of watering the basil, did not look up. "Why?"

"Because Pip doesn't know what a muffin is, and I think it's because he doesn't have any muffin *data*."

"Ah," said her grandmother, and she turned off the small watering can, and she sat down at the table across from Mira, and she pushed the muffin gently to the side so she could put her elbows where it had been. "Sit down," she said, "this is going to take a while."

Mira sat. Pip rolled in through the cat flap and parked himself by the refrigerator, because he liked the humming sound it made, which he said was "the song of the cold."

"Data," said her grandmother, "is just a fancy word for *information that has been written down*."

"Written down how?" asked Mira.

"In any way that can be saved and looked at again," said her grandmother. "A picture is data. A sentence is data. A number is data. A song, if you record it, is data. The height of a sunflower, written in a notebook, is data. The color of Toast's fur, written on a piece of paper, is data. Anything that you can record — anything that you can write, draw, type, say into a microphone, or take a photo of — that is a piece of data."

Mira tho