Yeah, I’m never going to finish this. Feel free to take a crack at the next part and send it to me…
Deet was a robot. He was made four feet tall, so that his owners didn’t feel intimidated by his metal alloy frame. There was actually a lot of thought put into his design in that respect. The engineers sat through many day-long meetings, and each morning they started with the same premise: Let’s make something very special, but let’s make it in such a way that no one will really know how special it really is. Especially the thing itself.
Everyone likes to feel superior, it’s just human nature. And if you’re going to buy a $300,000 robot, you better not have to feel silly standing next to it. No, happy customers like to feel they can push their android products around, even if the android has an IQ of 950 and can squat thrust an ambulance.
So Deet was designed with the very best wiring and mechanical guts science could assemble, crammed into a delicate four-foot body, then given a pale yellow coat of hardened acrylic paint. Artists had sculpted his face to have a weak, sloping chin and added a stooped back. His eyes could see a pine needle at ten miles, but were covered by a shiny epoxy layer that added a glassy, silly look which one magazine called “the gaze of a dull child, quite possibly the effect of prenatal drinking on the part of the robotic mother.”
The height of twenty thousand professional’s talents and three billion dollars in research, Deet felt akin to an iron.
Sitting at night in a cupboard, plugged into the outlet, he hummed a song he had heard in the assembly plant. He didn’t know the words but there was something about the melody that was sweet and sad. “Da dee da dum, de dum, Lay la dum.” It made him feel something. It was vague and warm and unexpected, and he couldn’t quite say what it was he felt, but he found the song lovely. He would hum for an hour or so, and then click off into hibernate mode.
And so it was, crouched under the counter and humming lay la dum, that the cat found Deet.
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