The tests with Para weren’t anywhere near done. I still needed more time to produce convincing data to guarantee forgiveness.
With great trepidation, I showed up at the presidents’ office on the second floor of the central building. The executive assistants quickly ushered me into a small conference room, where Ron and Jake sat at the table, stone-faced.
“I can explain,” I began. “The preliminary results are very encouraging—”
“I hardly think we’re in the preliminary phase anymore,” Jake interrupted. He slid a tablet across the table. “Have you read this?”
It was the New York Times. “Home Robots Found to Be Source of Infestations,” said the headline.
I quickly scanned through the article, and my heart sank. I should have paid more attention to those reports Amy had been sending me.
It turned out that the Vegnors were so good at their jobs that they were displacing real rats. The robots were, of course, programmed to fight the rats and chase them out of homes—this was touted as one of the key advantages of the machines.
Then the Vegnors replicated some of the beneficial behaviors of the rats by sweeping and collecting food and garbage from the plumbing and pipes. I had been particularly proud of this clever bit of biomimicry. I thought I was being comprehensive.
But the Vegnors only pushed the garbage away from the houses instead of eating it, which led to middens on the edges of properties that became breeding grounds for other vermin—cockroaches, maggots, fruit flies—and the cockroaches infested the houses because they were now free of rats, which had once preyed on them. Even worse, the bodies of the rats the Vegnors killed attracted coyotes, the top urban predator in many American cities.
Everyone had always thought that if all the rats in the world died tomorrow, no one would miss them. Apparently they had a role to play in the urban ecology that the Vegnors could not fully replicate.
“Our neighbors came to complain this morning,” said Jake. “They have outdoor cats.”
I imagined the bloody, lifeless body of Tabby, the victim of a coyote. I winced.
“And they dragged us out to the wall between our properties so they could show us the dumping ground of our Vegnor,” said Ron. “The smell made me lose my breakfast.”
“There’s going to be a class action lawsuit,” said Jake, rubbing his temples.
“You see how gleeful the plumbers and exterminators quoted in that article are?” said Ron, drumming his fingers on the table. “The Vegnors were supposed to make them no longer necessary, but our robo-rats have been creating infestations wherever they go.”
I struggled to not hyperventilate. They don’t know about the skunkworks project. My eyes looked from Ron to Jake and then back to Ron again.
“We could make a patch,” I blurted out, “and get the Vegnors to collect the garbage and dispose of it safely. . . . Or we could make another robot to clean up the mess and sell them to municipal governments. . . . Or how about we patch the Vegnors to seek out cockroaches, and their eggs too? . . .”
If technology created a problem, surely the best solution was more technology.
Ron and Jake just glared at me.
The Vegnor setback meant that I had to hit Para out of the park. It was the only way to redeem my name.
While doing my best to manage the robo-rat fallout, I pushed my team and myself even harder in an effort to make the Para prototypes do more for the parents. We wanted to anticipate needs and take care of them all: the Paras could be set to implement a clock-based feeding regimen, or, in the alternate, an infant-driven feeding schedule that replicated breastfeeding; they could be configured to start sleep training at an age designated by the parents, or encourage babies to engage in the “paleo” practice of polyphasic sleep; they could be designated to play and comfort children in a variety of styles to stimulate optimal brain development; and they could even cook meals and do simple housekeeping to give exhausted parents more time to sleep and finish their work until they were ready for their offspring.
The preliminary results were promising. The feedback from the new parents was almost uniformly positive.
These robots were as devoted as the octopus, as cooperative as the elephant, as responsible as the orangutan—they really were the best nannies the parents could ever hope for. They freed moms and dads from everything unpleasant about parenting and left them only the fun parts.
*
“Why don’t you want it?” I asked. “What did it do wrong?”
“Nothing!” said Emily. “But it doesn’t feel right.”
“I can fly down tonight to see—”
“I see. You can’t fly down here for my birthday, but you can come on a night’s notice when you think something’s wrong with your robot.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s not fair, Emily.”
“Isn’t it? Since when did you become such a workaholic?”
“Don’t do this to me, Em. It’s my career we’re talking about here! If I can’t trust you to give me honest feedback, who can I trust?”
Emily sighed on the other end of the line. “I’m telling you the truth. There’s nothing wrong with what Para is doing. But Eric and I don’t like what it’s doing to us.”
“How do you mean?”
This shouldn’t have happened. I had been careful from the very beginning of the Para project to avoid one of the big pitfalls with human nannies, who often elicited jealousy from parents seized by the fear that their children were building a stronger bond with the nanny than with them. This was one of the reasons that Para was not designed to be humanoid. Just as we didn’t feel threatened by the housekeeping skills of automated labor-saving devices, no parent needed to worry that their child would become attached to a synthetic appliance, not fundamentally different from a self-rocking cradle.
“I don’t know how to explain it.” Emily sounded like she was grasping for words. “But Eric was telling me that he missed how much time he used to spend with Danny, and I feel the same way.”
“But so much of that was wasted time. Para allows you to spend quality time, to be efficient.” The frustrated e-mails that Emily used to send me went through my mind, as did the words of so many other surveyed mothers and fathers who complained about lack of sleep, about how their babies turned their thoughts to mush. Children took up too much time—that was the problem to be solved.
“That’s just it. I’m not sure there is such a thing as ‘quality’ time. Eric and I used to spend hours feeding Danny and worrying about his poop and trying to get him to sleep, and we felt tired and unprepared and stupid, but every time we looked into Danny’s eyes, we felt happy. Now we pretty much just spend half an hour a day reading to him and playing with him, but even that seems too much. We get impatient. Somehow, the less time we spend with Danny, the less time we want to spend with him. This doesn’t feel right.”