Chapter 2
The controller board was out of stock.
Zora refreshed the page once, though she knew perfectly well what that would accomplish, then checked the branch inventory. The Manhattan store had one left. It was the display unit, available for collection, and someone had marked its condition as acceptable without supplying a photograph of anything that mattered.
She could call in the morning. She wanted to know whether the pins had been bent and whether the power connector still fitted tightly. A scratch on the housing was not the problem.
She saved the listing and returned to her simulation.
The small arm on her screen reached for a blue cylinder, hesitated, and closed its gripper on empty space.
“You saw it,” she said.
The event log disagreed. It had seen the cylinder, accepted its position, and then acted on an observation old enough to be useless.
She scrubbed back through the last half second. In the kitchen, Simone’s invitation lettering had taken less than fifteen minutes to fix. Zora had enlarged the type, moved the date, and discovered that the export setting was softening everything. People had thanked her. She had eaten dessert. Then she had come upstairs to spend nearly two hours convincing a simulated machine that an object might move while it was deciding what to do about it.
There was a knock on her open door.
“Am I interrupting?” her father asked.
“A little.”
“I can come back.”
“No, it’s okay.” She paused the model. “What is it?”
He held up a plate with two slices of mango. “You left this.”
“I thought Shavonne ate it.”
“She tried.”
He stepped around the canvas tote on the floor and looked for somewhere to put the plate. Zora moved a notebook off the corner of the desk. Beneath it lay a small motor, two lengths of wire, and the plastic cover she had been meaning to reattach to her desk fan.
“Does anything in here still work?” he asked.
“The fan works. The cover vibrates.”
“So you took it off.”
“Until I print a new mount.”
He considered the exposed fan, which was unplugged, then set down the mango.
“You ordered your thing?”
“They’re out. I’m going to call about the display one tomorrow.”
“Get a new one somewhere else.”
“It might be fine.”
“Might be.”
She smiled despite herself. “I’ll ask the right questions.”
“I’m sure you will.”
He stayed near the desk, looking at the screen. Zora waited for him to ask about the model, but his attention moved past her to the wall above the narrow bookcase.
“You still have that.”
She followed his gaze. The ROSIE poster had bowed slightly inside its cheap black frame. One corner had slipped free of the backing, leaving a narrow wedge of white visible behind the dark print.
“Yes.”
“I remember putting it up in the old frame. You said this one was temporary.”
“It holds it.”
“Barely.” He moved closer. “What was it again? A school thing?”
“A technology summit. The one you took me to.”
He looked over his shoulder. “I took you to a lot of things.”
“I know.”
She left the desk and stood beside him. Against the poster’s dark background, the rose looked almost metallic where the light caught the pale edges of the inner petals. Farther out they deepened into lavender, then a violet so dark it was nearly black. Below it, ROSIE appeared in widely spaced letters, with the Navarro Dynamics mark near the bottom.
“Was this the one with the terrible parking?” he asked.
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
“We had to walk under something.”
“A building?”
He gave her a look. “You know what I mean.”
She laughed. “I remember you saying the coffee cost more than the parking should have.”
“That sounds right.”
He leaned forward to read the small lettering. Zora had once known every line of it. The program dates still looked familiar, but the names of the smaller sponsors had become background shapes.
“And this was a robot?”
“The project was. The rose was on all the material.”
“Why didn’t they put the robot on it?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t asking me about their marketing.”
“They should have. I would have liked to know what I was looking at.”
She touched the lower edge of the frame to straighten it. “You knew when she came out.”
Her father turned toward her, and she realized she was smiling.
“She?”
“ROSIE. She walked onto the stage with him. No track, no person standing behind her, no one off to the side waving a controller. And people were asking things. Things they hadn’t prepared her for. At least, they said they hadn’t, but one man dropped his badge, and she stopped answering to tell him. Then she picked it up.”
“Picking something up doesn’t sound very difficult.”
Zora glanced at the frozen arm on her monitor.
“It can be.”
“For a machine, you mean.”
“For a machine that isn’t only built to pick up one particular thing in one particular place. Think about your warehouse. If every roll was a different size, and somebody kept changing the lighting, and the label was folded under—”
“Somebody usually does.”
“Exactly. You know what matters even when the thing you expect isn’t where you expect it. Getting a system to do that without making terrible assumptions is hard. She was doing it while she talked to people.”
Darnell pulled the desk chair around and sat. “Who was the young man?”
“Jelani Navarro. The CEO’s son.”
“I remember the name Navarro.”
“He was seventeen.”
“Young.”
“Dad, he was seventeen. He was standing there explaining how he’d built her, and somebody asked this question about response latency as if they were going to catch him out. He didn’t get embarrassed. He asked which part they meant. Then he changed the display and showed them.”
Zora sat on the edge of the bed. She could remember the sudden quiet around her when he began answering. Until then, people had been shifting in their chairs, checking phones, doing the adult version of waiting to see whether a school presentation would be any good.
“I thought he’d be much older when I read the program. And then he came out, and he was just a few years older than me.”
“You were thirteen?”
“Thirteen or fourteen. Around then.”
“You had that little bag you wouldn’t let me carry.”
“It had my notebook in it.”
“I wasn’t going to steal your notebook.”
“You kept leaving things under your chair.”
“Pamphlets. Deliberately.”
She laughed again. He had bought her lunch afterward and listened while she tried to explain the demonstration with salt packets and the spoon from his coffee. She remembered moving the spoon across the table. She didn’t remember what he had said about it.
“I thought I’d have built something like that by seventeen,” she admitted.
“You built plenty of things.”
“Not like that.”
“You won those competitions.”
“School competitions.”
“They didn’t hand you the prizes for showing up.”
“I know.”
He waited. It was more uncomfortable than an argument would have been. Zora looked at the screen, where the gripper hovered just behind its target.
“I’m twenty-three now.”
“I was there for the cake.”
“And I’ve graduated, and I’ve done projects, and I can explain what’s wrong with things, but I haven’t done anything that—” She stopped. “I haven’t done what I thought I’d do.”
Her father leaned forward, forearms on his knees.
“When I was twenty-three, I was trying to convince a man to sell me cloth without making me pay for all of it before it left his loading dock.”
“That’s different.”
“It is. I didn’t have a boy on a stage to compare myself to.”
“He’s not on the poster.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
She did, and she didn’t want to be unkind. He had spent enough afternoons in rooms full of machines for her. But he was looking for a way to make her feel better, and she wanted to know how to stop being so far from the work she wanted to do.
“I’m not saying I’ve done nothing.”
“Good.”
“I just thought there would be more by now.”
From downstairs, Shavonne called for him. Darnell raised his voice to answer, then looked back at Zora.
“When’s the Kuroda thing?”
“Middle of July.”
“And they’ve already looked at your application.”
“The first screen. There are more people than places. A lot more.”
“But they want you to take the test.”
“Yes.”
“Then take the test.” He stood when Shavonne called again. “And eat your mango before it gets warm.”
At the door he paused. “Do you want a better frame?”
Zora looked up at the poster. “Maybe one that doesn’t reflect so much.”
“Send me the size.”
He went downstairs. She heard Shavonne begin telling him something before he reached the bottom, then his answer, too low to distinguish.
Zora ate a slice of mango standing beside her desk. She had meant to explain the assessment properly. It wasn’t simply a test, and passing it wasn’t something that happened because a person’s father believed it ought to. But he had asked about it. She could tell him more when she had something better than complaints.
She sat down and brought up the event log again.
The delay wasn’t where she had thought it was. The vision process had delivered an update. Her controller had discarded it because the previous motion command hadn’t finished.
“Oh, that’s stupid.”
Her own code. She couldn’t even blame a library.
She reached for the notebook, moved the mango plate out of the way, and started tracing the handoff.