Norman wasn’t fried. What a relief.
Amid all the stuff that came out of the box when I pulled Norman out was what looked like a laptop charger, only bigger. A light flicked on in my head. Norman probably just had a dead battery! (Later I learned that Norman is powered by four sixteen-cell lithium ion battery packs. But it’s still not later yet.) So I inspected him, searching for a place to plug in the charger, and found a port in his left armpit.
Feeling kinda oogled out by what I was about to do, I carefully plugged one end of the charger into Norman, and the other end into a wall socket. Norman didn’t move, and his eyes were closed, but underneath his eyelids I could see a small green light slowly blinking, which must have meant that his batteries were taking in juice.
Norman lives!
Dad came home while Norman was charging.
“I see that the NRM 2000-B has arrived,” he said, dropping a stack of student papers onto a table. My dad teaches computer science classes at New York University, and sometimes fixes their busted computers just for fun. “He’s a few days ahead of schedule, but that’s okay. Adaptability is a hallmark of the evolutionary process, right, sport?”
Okay, so it was Dad who ordered the robot from France. That made perfect sense. Probably every computer nerd dreams of owning a PC that can walk and talk and play a decent game of chess. Me, I’m more of a checkers kind of kid.
“Have you and André had a chance to get to know each other?” Dad asked, stretching his arms and cracking his knuckles.
André? I told him that since the robot didn’t come with a name tag, I had named him Norman. Dad shrugged and said he was planning to name him André, but since I “beat him to the punch,” Norman would do just fine.
While my dad circled Norman’s box, I told him that I had put Norman together and taught him how to walk, and now I was charging him because his battery went dead.
“We’ll have to fix that,” Dad said. “André, I mean Norman, should not lose power without advance warning, and not until after using up the reserve battery. Probably just a loose wire somewhere. But nice work on the assembly, junior.”
“Thanks,” I said, almost blushing. I love it when I do stuff right.
Dad roughed up my hair, then kneeled near Norman’s crate. “Amazing,” he said, running two fingers along Norman’s face, which would have given me the giggles, but the robot stayed in recharge mode. “I’ve seen photos, videos, and 3-D models, but in person André—Norman!—looks so much more lifelike. So much more . . . human.”
“Almost too human,” I said, wondering how long it would take for the robot to charge. “I’ve never seen a kid with hair and skin that perfect.”
“Good point,” Dad said. “Norman may indeed appear too perfect to pass for human. I hadn’t considered that! Though an intentional downgrade would raise ethical issues, including but not limited to whether Norman should have a say in the matter, or is it okay for us to act on what we perceive to be his behalf without his prior consent?”
I got confused halfway through that sentence.
While a bunch of questions were bouncing around inside my head, like did Mom know about his latest gadget, Dad told me how Norman came to exist. The robot was created by my dad and his brother, Jean-Pierre, who is also my uncle Jean-Pierre, who is also a scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Institute in Paris, France. My uncle designed the hardware, and my dad wrote the software, and then Jean-Pierre’s girlfriend, Véronique, and two assistants built Norman and one other prototype.
“What’s a prototype?” I asked, feeling like I was spending too much time on the dumb side of the street.
“A prototype is the first of its kind, a test model,” Dad said. “There are inevitably going to be some bugs to work out before you release it to the general public.”
“Norman’s smile is weird,” I told him, trying to screw up my smile as a demonstration.
“I can fix that,” Dad said, winking, which is always strange because my dad doesn’t wink right. He holds the wink too long, and just when you think his eye is stuck shut, it pops open. My dad might be the only adult in the whole world who doesn’t know how to wink.
As I was about to ask Dad why he and my uncle decided to build robots, and how come kid robots instead of adult ones, we heard a whirring sound. Norman opened his eyes, saw Dad, and cried out, “Papa!” Papa? Huh? And then the robot launched himself at Dad in a way no real kid could, like a rocket booster kicked in. Dad fell back onto the rug as Norman kissed his cheek like a zillion times.
I think they do a lot of that in France, people kissing each other even if they aren’t in love. It’s probably a cool thing in France, but over here it looked kind of dumb, probably because Norman is a robot, and robots, at least the ones in movies, aren’t normally big kissers. Might go on killing rampages, but you never see them kissing people.
And it looked like Norman was going to kiss Dad to death, for cripes’ sake! Dad was putting up with it, which I also didn’t like. I mean, this was my dad, not Norman’s. Get your own dad, crazy robot!
Eventually, Dad pushed Norman away, saying, “I like you, too, but that should do it for now.” He sat up and placed Norman on the rug, but the thing scootched closer to Dad like he’d be miserable if he had to be more than three inches from my father.
“Uh—Dad? Why did Norman call you ‘papa’ and me ‘brother’?” I asked.
Dad drew an arm across his face, even though it looked like it was free of robot spit. “Norman is programmed to recognize you as his brother, me as his father, and your mother as his mother. Several image and video files of us are stored in his CPU.”
“Oui, c’est vrai,” Norman said, smiling. “Accessing relevant JPEG and MPEG files immediately.” He blinked, and his left hand twitched. Dad would fix the twitching hand thing later. But it’s still not later.
While I was wondering why the robot was programmed to recognize us as his family—since, being people, we are not his family—I heard someone coming up the hallway outside our apartment, and the familiar sound of Mom jiggling her keys into the lock.
Dad’s face nearly dropped to the floor. “Here’s the thing,” he said to me. “Your mother does not know about Norman—I thought I had another day or two to break the news to her. So . . .” He had a wild look on his face, then said something utterly absurd: “Let’s hide the robot and deny everything!”
Let’s hide the robot and deny everything—that’s something I’d say! But since we had only a few seconds, and were panicking, I helped him hide the robot, though we did a lousy job. Dad dropped Norman in his box and we smoothed packing peanuts and straw over him, then Dad and I stood in front of the box like two murderers trying to hide a body from the police.
We are so busted, I thought, as the door opened with a ghostly creak. Eeeeeeeeeee . . .