The End Has Come

Maddie smiled to herself. For Mist, asking Maddie a question and waiting for her slow cycles to catch up and answer was probably like sending snail mail. It would be far faster for her to investigate the new contraption herself.

The motors in Maddie’s creation spun to life, and the three wheels in the base turned the four-foot-tall torso around. The wheels provided 360° of motion, much like those roving automatic vacuum cleaners.

At the top of the cylindrical torso was a spherical “head” to which were attached the best sensors that Maddie could scrounge up or buy: a pair of high-def cameras to give stereoscopic vision; a matched pair of microphones to act as ears, tuned for the range of human hearing; a sophisticated bundle of probes mounted at the ends of flexible antennae to act as noses and tongues that approximated the sensitivity of human counterparts; and numerous other tactile sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and so on to give the robot the experience of touch, gravity, presence in space.

Away from the head, near the top of the cylindrical body, however, were the most expensive components of them all: a pair of multi-jointed arms with parallel-elastic actuators to recreate the freedom of motion of human arms that ended in a pair of the most advanced prosthetic hands covered in medical-grade plastiskin. The skin, embedded with sensors for temperature and force, were said to approach or even exceed the sensitivity of real skin, and the fingers modeled human hands so well that they could tighten a nut on a screw as well as pick up a strand of hair. Maddie watched as Mist tried them out, flexing and clenching the fingers, and without realizing it, she mirrored the movements with her own fingers.

“What do you think?” she said.

The screen mounted atop the head of the robot came to life, showing a cartoonish pair of eyes, a cute button nose, and a pair of abstract, wavy lines that mimicked the motion of lips. Maddie was proud of the design and programming of the face. She had modeled it on her own.

A voice came out of the speaker below the screen. “This is very well made.” It was a young girl’s voice, chirpy and mellifluous.

“Thank you,” said Maddie. She watched as Mist moved around the room, twisting her head this way and that, sweeping her camera-gaze over everything. “Do you like your new body?”

“It’s interesting,” said Mist. The tone was the same as before. Maddie couldn’t tell if that was because Mist was really pleased with the robotic body or that she hadn’t figured out how to modulate the voice to suit her emotional state.

“I can show you all the things you haven’t experienced before,” said Maddie hurriedly. “You’ll know what it’s like to move in the real world, not just as a ghost in a machine. You’ll be able to understand my stories, and I can take you on trips with me, introduce you to Mom and other people.”

Mist continued to move around the room, her eyes surveying the trophies on Maddie’s shelves, the titles of her books, the posters on her walls, the models of the planets and rocketships hanging from the ceiling — a record of Maddie’s shifting tastes over the years. She moved toward one corner where a basket of stuffed animals was kept, but stopped when the data cable stretched taut, just a few centimeters too short.

“The cable is necessary for now because the amount of data from the sensors is so large. But I’m working on a compression algorithm so we can get you wireless.”

Mist moved the swiveling screen with her cartoonish face forward and backward to simulate a nod. Maddie was grateful that she had thought of such a thing — a lot of the robotics papers on robot-human interactions emphasized that rather than simulating a human face too closely and falling into the uncanny valley, it was better sticking to cartoonish representations that exaggerated the emotional tenor. Sometimes an obviously virtual representation was better than a strict effort at fidelity.

Mist paused in front of a mess of wires and electronic components on Maddie’s shelf. “What’s this?”

“The first computer that Dad and I built together,” said Maddie. Instantly, she seemed to have been transported to that summer almost a decade ago, when Dad showed her how to apply Ohm’s Law to pick out the right resistors and how to read a circuit diagram and translate it into real components and real wires. The smell of hot solder filled her nostrils again, and she smiled even as her eyes moistened.

Mist picked up the contraption with her hands.

“Be careful!” Maddie yelled.

But it was too late. The breadboard crumbled in Mist’s hands, and the pieces fell to the carpet.

“Sorry,” said Mist. “I thought I was applying the right amount of pressure based on the materials used in it.”