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“Hello, I am ROZZUM unit 7134, but you may call me Roz.
As you might know, robots don’t really feel emotions. Not the way animals do. And yet, as she sat in her crumpled crate, 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.
Then she lifted her hands and pulled apart the crate. 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.
I should remind you, reader, that Roz had no idea how she had come to be on that island. She didn’t know that she’d been built in a factory and then stored in a warehouse before crossing the ocean on a cargo ship. She didn’t know that a hurricane had sunk the ship and left her crate floating on the waves for days until it finally washed ashore. She didn’t know that she’d been accidentally activated by those curious sea otters.
The robot stared at them with her softly glowing eyes, and something clicked deep inside her computer brain. Roz realized she had caused the deaths of an entire family of geese.
I’d like you all to meet Bumpkin, Lumpkin, and Rumpkin. But I call them the Fuzzy Bandits.”
There was a brief silence as RECO 1 computed his next move. And then he began to speak. “One year ago, a cargo ship carrying five hundred ROZZUM units was sunk by a hurricane. Four hundred ninety-five units have been retrieved from the ocean floor. We have come here in search of the last five, and we have located them. ROZZUM unit 7134, you are the property of TechLab Industries.
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.
Brightbill had been Roz’s son from the moment she picked up his egg. She had saved him from certain death, and then he had saved her. He was the reason Roz had lived so well for so long. And if she wanted to continue living, if she wanted to be wild again, she needed to be with her family and her friends on her island.
