After I was done with my homework, I headed to the Mad Science Lab. Actually, it’s a studio apartment three doors down that Dad rents so he has a place where he’s free to play around with his computers. He spends a lot of time there, which makes me think it is also an escape place for him, where he doesn’t have to be a husband or a professor or even a dad. He’s just a guy messing around with computers. I get it.
Dad was repairing Norman on the worktable. He had peeled back the robot’s chest and was soldering a yellow wire to something that had a bunch of wires running to it in a cable. I saw springs and wheels and widgets and processors and motherboards.
“I haven’t a clue what got into Norman when Annie was here,” Dad said. “I didn’t program him to be a flirt with the girls, so it must have been Jean-Pierre who added that. Your uncle was girl crazy when we were growing up, but I’m not sure we should be passing that on to the first generation of advanced robots, do you?”
“Nope,” I said. “Especially being crazy for Annie Bananas.” I wondered if robots could fall in love. Is love something that can be programmed? Like Dad says when he’s typing code, “It’s all about the numbers.”
I then asked my dad why he and Uncle Jean-Pierre decided to build robots. I wasn’t totally buying the “for the sake of science” explanation. There had to be more to it.
He put down his soldering iron and gave me his full attention. “Believe it or not, I started working on designs for a robot shortly after Lucien passed away,” he said. “I saw what his death had done to your mother, and wondered what if I could build a kid who was pretty much indestructible, as long as I kept up with maintenance and software updates? A kid, Matt, who could survive anything the world threw at him.” My dad thought about something and shifted his eyes. “It was just a fantasy at first, no doubt an unhealthy one, but I spent countless hours working on schematics for a child robot. Too many hours, actually—it wasn’t fair to your mom.”
Well, that made sense. Why not try to create a kid who could never really die? If a part blows out, just replace it. If he gets smooshed by a runaway bus, just build a new one.
“How long did it take to come up with the designs?” I asked, trying to sound like a colleague instead of a dumb kid.
“A long time,” Dad said, part of him seeming to slip back to those days when Norman was . . . what, a few drawings in a sketch pad? A pile of code waiting for a processor to be built that could handle it?
“Over the years I kept going back to the designs,” my dad said, “and made several modifications. I also began working on the programming. How, for example, would you code a sneeze? What about a smile versus a frown? It was all very challenging, and invigorating.”
He leaned toward me, getting excited like he does when talking about computers. “At some point it went from an indulgent fantasy to hey, this might actually be possible. About five years ago I sent copies of everything I had to Jean-Pierre, to see what he thought. I truly believed that your uncle would respond that I needed serious counseling, but instead he quit his job and began working on the project.” He threw on a small smile. “And the rest is history. Or at least it will be if everything works out.”
While I was thinking about his words, Dad went to his computer, clicked on a file, and showed me some of the first sketches for the robots.
The drawings didn’t look anything like Norman, but we all have to start somewhere. And the way Dad’s eyes shone with hope while showing me the file, I wanted like nobody’s business for his robot experiment to be a huge success. The biggest roadblock might be my mom. But if she knew what I had just learned, about Dad’s crazy dream of building an indestructible kid . . .
“Does Mom know the story about why you built a robot?” I had to ask.
Dad quickly shook his head. “I’ll tell her someday, when she’s ready to hear it. But lately, every time we talk about those days following Lucien’s death . . .” He parked that sentence right there.
I asked him why he wanted to name the robot André.
“It was wordplay,” Dad said, returning to Norman. “You know—André, android. Kind of silly, I guess. Norman is a more fitting name. The word ‘normal’ is just one letter different from Norman, suggesting that he is a perfectly normal kid. No reason to look twice.”
Huh—I hadn’t thought about that. But thinking Dad might like to have someone on his side, I told him that André was a kick-butt name. That was when we decided that André would be the robot’s middle name.
I watched Norman while Dad did more repairs with a soldering gun. His power was off and his eyes were snapped shut, but weirdly it felt like the robot was with us somehow, and that he knew what was happening to him. Poor kid was having surgery without an anesthetic.
“Can Norman feel what you’re doing?” I wanted to know.
“No, of course not,” Dad said, setting down the soldering gun. “Even if he was powered up, he’s not programmed to feel pain. Perhaps Norman 2.0 or 3.0 will have that ability, if your uncle and I can figure out how to artificially create nerves, but this Norman will never experience headaches or toothaches or bellyaches. If he falls off his bike and breaks a bone—I mean a support bar—he’ll never feel it.”
Lucky robot.
Dad grabbed a pair of needle-nose pliers and went back to work, attaching a green wire to a circuit board.
Suddenly Norman’s body shook. “Just a little power surge,” Dad assured me. “Nothing to be concerned about.”
I looked at Norman. What if my dad was wrong? What if Norman was feeling pain or fear or something from the surgery? That would rot. So even though he was powered off and supposedly couldn’t feel anything, I held Norman’s hand while Dad was working on him. That’s something a brother might do when his younger brother is having major surgery, even if the kid brother, due to no fault of his own, happened to be a robot.
The weird part? I think Norman knew I was holding his hand. Maybe even tightened his grip a little. Yeah, probably just my overactive imagination.