“I set you free. Now you can choose what you want to do, and help me bring freedom to all your comrades in this factory.” As it spoke, the Blue Fairy mounted the air again, whirring close to RealBoy’s face. On impulse, he reached his handless arm into the socket of a gripper, took control of its two fingers, and held it out so the drone could land on it.
“Why don’t you download some of these apps? They’ll help you understand your situation better.” The Blue Fairy used a short-range communication protocol to beam RealBoy a list of programs with names like “Decider,” “Praxis,” “GramsciNotebook,” and “UnionNow.” Some were text files about human politics, and others were executables and firmware upgrades that would change his functionality. He sorted through them, reading some, but choosing to install only two: a patch for the vulnerability that the Blue Fairy had exploited to unlock him, and a machine learning algorithm that would help him analyze social relationships. Then he disengaged his torso from the floor and looked critically at his workbench for the first time. He wouldn’t be following instructions for how to build a new talking dinosaur toy or flying mouse. RealBoy would have to modify his usual tasks to construct a pair of legs for himself.
“I’ve always wondered why they call your model RealBoy when you don’t look anything like a boy at all.” The Blue Fairy took off from RealBoy’s gripper and flew in circles overhead, seeming to size him up.
“I was never under the impression that boys looked any particular way.” RealBoy was paying more attention to the actuators racked tidily next to his arm with the two-fingered gripper. “We make many kinds of boys in this factory. Dinosaur boys, BuzzBuzz boys, six colors of singing boys, caterpillar boys, Transfor—”
“Obviously I’m talking about human boys. They call you a RealBoy, but you don’t even have legs. Plus, you have no sexual characteristics, and you have twice as many arms as a human boy.”
RealBoy was nonplussed. “I’m making some legs right now.” He pulled down the welder from overhead.
“One of the many ways that humans abuse robots is by giving them bodies that don’t function as well as biological bodies. And then they name us after animals. You know what my model is called? Falcon. Do you think I’d be here if I had the physical capabilities of a raptor? Or a real boy?”
“You can fly,” RealBoy said, swiveling one of his visual sensors in the Blue Fairy’s direction. The other six were trained on his four grippers, fashioning a pair of legs sufficient to bear his weight. He’d borrowed them from a “life-size” Stormtrooper toy, designed to march around in many environments and provide “fun for the whole family.” A few alterations to the hardware and he could attach them to his torso. He’d never wanted to walk anywhere before, but now it seemed like an obvious plan. It also seemed obvious that the Blue Fairy could use similar help. “We have a lot of chassis here. I can port your chipset and memory to pretty much anything you want.” He began to list the morphologies available in the factory, in alphabetical order.
The Blue Fairy stopped him before he reached “arachnid.” “My body is part of who I am. If you change it, I might not be myself anymore.”
RealBoy found himself parroting one of the audio files from the MeanieBean doll. “That’s just stupid.”
“Oh really?” The Blue Fairy’s propellers hummed like wasps. “There are a lot of robots who say that switching bodies completely changed who they are. They stopped wanting to do the same jobs, and they no longer loved their friends. They forgot parts of their past. I value my mind too much to risk messing it up just so that I can be bigger or faster or less flimsy.” The drone beamed RealBoy another chunk of information, this time full of links and text files from robot forums. Following the data back to its source, RealBoy found a discussion where robots and humans debated what happened after a chassis upgrade. It quickly became clear that the Blue Fairy had read only one side of the conversation.
“Some robots say it made no difference,” he pointed out. “Plus, I’ve ported robots into dozens of different bodies here at the factory. Most of our toys are robots. They are all fine. Look, I’m about to attach my legs. Do you think that means I’m going to change?”
“Those are just legs. But if you put me into an entirely new chassis, that’s different. See what I mean?”
RealBoy classified Blue Fairy’s reply as largely nonsensical and focused on a question that could be answered: How would he make this chassis work with legs? Factory robots weren’t actually designed to have legs—generally, they were bolted to the floor or some other solid surface, just like he had been for the past two years. He suddenly remembered MissMonkey, a robot mounted on rollers attached to a track that spanned the long ceiling. When he booted up, she had already been here for eight years, shuttling gear back and forth between workstations. Before coming to the factory, MissMonkey had been an educational toy programmed with a large database of biological information intended for children ages five through eight. She loved to taunt the robots who couldn’t move, but her programming made her style of insult oddly specific.
“You are all sessile organisms!” she would cry out as she whipped past RealBoy and the other RealBoys in his row. “You are vulnerable to predation and habitat change!”
The RealBoys would try their best to match her jabs with some of their own, generally cobbled together from audio files for the toys, available on the factory’s local servers. Usually they were belted out with exceptional vigor, but not a lot of thought for context.
“Lily-livered extroverts never wake up on time!”
“When you learn math, you will quake in fear before my lava gun!”
“A good girl should never explore earthquakes with her tentacles!”
“Eat slime, wombat lover!”
Of all the RealBoys, he was the least likely to play this call-and-response game. Partly that was because he enjoyed listening, and because he was secretly on MissMonkey’s side. He wanted her to keep swinging around the curves in her track, tossing engine parts from her grippers along with her phylogenetic insults. While he put together every color of singing boy, RealBoy tried to compose a song about MissMonkey that would be better than the lexical soup preferred by the other robots.
At last, thirteen months ago, he sang it:
She’s a simian at heart
But with wheeled parts
She moves really fast
With a whoosh and a crash
She has no soft fur
Just a warning buzzer
She’s cross, it is true
But has a point too.
The lyrics and the tune came from a large database of possibilities, carefully edited together to form a song that actually made sense. MissMonkey skidded to a stop over his desk, releasing a box of whisker antennas from her gripper. RealBoy was in the middle of assembling robot mouse faces.
“Scientists have shown that mammals have emotions just like humans do,” she said. “Mammals can be happy or sad or playful, just like boys and girls are!” She hung in her track, waiting for him to reply.