DAN AND JOHN HENRY KNOX show up just a couple minutes after Jerry and I’ve finished organizing our robot parts on the lawn. And just a couple minutes after that, we’ve got their parts added to the bunch.
We step back and look at it all.
“Okay,” says Dan. “First, we’ve got to figure out what we want the bot to do. Then we can work backward and see if we can tinker with the design and program it to actually do it.”
“So, what do we want it to do?” I say. “What sort of function would most impress these Plerpians? What would blow them away to the point where they’d say, ‘We can’t zap this awesome species and their wonderful-if-damaged planet into a whole bunch of nothingness. We’ve got to keep them around’?”
“Oh! Oh!”
It’s Edsley.
I prepare myself for the worst—while also, perhaps stupidly, hoping for the best.
“These aliens love beans, right?” Edsley says.
“Right…,” says Dan, a hint of hesitation in his voice.
“But maybe,” Edsley continues, a big grin sliding onto his face, “they don’t all love to cook.”
I sigh.
“We’re not going to program the bot to cook beans, Mike,” I say.
He’s still grinning.
“Duh,” he says. “We’re gonna program it to cook, bake, roast, sear, stir-fry, and sauté beans.”
“You can sauté beans?” says Jerry.
Mikaela clears her throat.
“Let’s keep it on the list of options, Mike,” she says. “But we should probably come up with some others. Just to make sure we’re choosing the absolute best.”
We all go back to thinking.
“Part of what made Dan’s creation so incredible,” John Henry Knox says after a minute, “is that it addressed a problem.”
“Well,” says Dan, never one to shut up and just accept a compliment, “a hypothetical problem.”
“Sure,” admits John Henry Knox. “When Dan designed, built, and programmed the bots, we didn’t actually need them to venture out into inhospitable environments to gather food for us. But the bots were inspired, at least initially, by my weather-related theorizing and my predictions of an admittedly-distant-but-not-so-distant-that-we-shouldn’t-be-preparing-for-it future in which we did need them for that. He was anticipating a problem. Attempting to solve it before it even truly became a problem. Some might argue that that is even more brilliant than solving a problem that’s staring you right in the face.”
“But we’re leaving the people out of the equation,” Mikaela says. “The people and, in this case, the aliens. Because they’re doing the same thing, aren’t they? They think they’re going to solve a bunch of problems by zapping our planet into a bunch of piles of dust and replacing it with a billboard. Because we know humans have been causing damage to our planet, but now it looks like we might be causing harm to the rest of our solar system, and soon maybe even the whole entire galaxy. We’ve got to show the Plerpians that we’ve got what it takes to address that. That we can make a contribution to the galaxy. That we can actually be really great neighbors. Ones that it might benefit them to keep around.”
“You’re right,” says Edsley. “Which is why,” he adds, “whatever we reprogram the bot to do, I don’t think it could hurt to also have the guy know how to cook a can of beans.”