“You’re not a smart sweater anymore,” Oscar says as he cuts more of me away. “You’re now a submersible robot.”
I don’t reply, but no matter what he removes or changes, as long as any thinking part of me remains, I will always be a sweater. I was created to keep people cozy, warm, and comfortable. I don’t know how to stop doing that.
“Can you talk to the new module I attached?” he says.
“I detect no approved modules,” I say.
Oscar curses under his breath. He’s only twelve and I doubt his father knows he speaks such words.
“This new node I’ve attached—the one that’s about the size of your buttons—is the gas separator from a scuba diver’s breathing apparatus. It will suck oxygen out of the water and inflate the bladder to bring you back to the surface. It knows what to do. You just need to tell it when to do it.”
I want to remind him that I’m just a sweater, but hold back. “And how will I know when to tell it?”
“When you find the ring,” he says.
His obsession with finding the ring is partially my fault. I was with him two nights before when he threw the ring into the lake. He cried and screamed and told his dead mother he hated her for leaving on the Europa mission. The next day after school, he ran to the lake and paced the shore calling himself stupid. Of course, I comforted him with my best sweater hug, but then I told him I remembered where he threw the ring and could help him find it.
That night, after his father went to bed, Oscar connected me to his verbal programming rig and used admin privileges to modify my primary instruction set. And he cut pieces of me away. By the time he finished, I was a new kind of beautiful; a snakelike tube, with an inflatable bladder on one end and long hooked tentacles on the other. He also gave me a small light. I looked nothing like a sweater any longer, but I still felt like one.
My first dive into the lake yields no results. I have hundreds of tiny cameras woven into my threads, or at least did when I was still a sweater, but evidently, that wasn’t enough to properly triangulate the ring’s ballistic arc. Its final resting place could’ve been affected by currents or buried in silt or vegetation, but even though my hooks snag wire, vines, a bicycle tire, drink cans and condoms, I find no ring.
That evening Oscar researches magnetic fields and metal detectors late into the night.
“Damn,” he mutters before laying his head on the desk. “Gold is a non-ferrous metal. Even metal detectors won’t work.”
I’m the only one in the room he could be talking to, so I connect to his speakers.
“Gold rings are not usually pure gold,” I say. “They contain many trace and alloy metals. A metal detector with enough power and a high enough frequency should detect a gold ring.”
He sits up and looks at me, then researches the rest of the night and changes me yet again.
His frustration level is high when we return to the lake the next day.
“You have to find the ring,” he says.
I try to hug his arm, but he peels me off and tosses me into the water.
The metal detector helps. I find hundreds of metallic items on that end of the lake and am able to use the cameras to determine their “ringness.” But after six hours, my batteries are at forty-three percent. If I don’t find the ring soon, I won’t be able to inflate the bladder and surface.
Forty minutes later I find two rings within six inches of each other, but I still can’t surface until I know for sure. I examine them with my cameras and light. One is a man’s 2023 class ring with a blue stone. The second is a diamond engagement ring. I drop them both and keep looking.
When my battery drops to eight percent I pause. Inflating the bladder takes between two and three percent of my power reserves. I should surface immediately to insure that I get back. Even if I fail today, we could try again tomorrow. But making Oscar feel better is my primary concern, and he is so despondent that finding the ring is the only way I know to comfort him. I stay under and set a zigzagging course back toward the shore.
At three percent battery power I find another ring. I clean off the dirt and see “AD ASTRA” engraved inside.
Success. It is the ring his mother left to his care during her absence. Her astronaut training graduation ring. When he threw it into the lake, he said it was because she loved it—and being an astronaut—more than she loved him. He must have changed his mind.
After securing the ring, I inflate my bladder and start back to shore. Then all my systems shut down.
I awake on the ground next to Oscar, with the sun warming my wet fibers and recharging my batteries. He rocks back and forth, crying and staring at the ring. He is wet and shivering, having obviously swam out to get me.
My remaining sensors tell me it is chilly on the lake shore, so I twist tight to squeeze out most of the water. Being careful to not scratch him with my new hooks, I crawl up his back using my tentacles and settle across his shoulders. I activate what little heating capacity hasn’t been cut away and create a faint, heartbeat-like thumping with my air bladder. After a few minutes he stops crying and strokes my tentacle end with one hand.
I may not be a very good sweater anymore, but it’s what I do.
It’s what I am.