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Roz felt something like curiosity. She was curious about the warm ball of light shining down from above. So her computer brain went to work, and she identified the light. It was the sun.
Like a hatchling breaking from a shell, Roz climbed out into the world.
The island was teeming with life. And now it had a new kind of life. A strange kind of life. Artificial life.
As the robot looked out at the island, it never even occurred to her that she might not belong there. As far as Roz knew, she was home.
The robot’s programming stopped her from being violent, but nothing stopped her from being annoying. So Roz plucked pinecones from the nearby branches and lobbed them down at the bears.
When Roz first stomped across the island, the animal squawks and growls and chirps had sounded like nothing more than meaningless noises. But she no longer heard animal noises. Now she heard animal words.
He’d wander down some hole in the ground and say to whoever was there, “Hello, my name is Brightbill!” Then a long robot arm would reach in and pull the gosling back outside. “Sorry to bother you,” Roz would say, in her friendliest voice.
she felt something like happiness that her son had made such a good friend.
Reader, it must seem impossible that our robot could have changed so much. Maybe the RECOs were right. Maybe Roz really was defective, and some glitch in her programming had caused her to accidentally become a wild robot. Or maybe Roz was designed to think and learn and change; she had simply done those things better than anyone could have imagined.
