How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch. Sarah Archer

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      Of the three people standing onstage, only two of them were people. But that was totally normal to Kelly—one of the people people. Along with Priya, her best friend and fellow robotics engineer (the other person person), she looked out over the audience filling the brightly lit demonstration room: a field trip of fifty or so kids, squirming and grouchy under the cloud of that early January gloom. The children were freshly reinstitutionalized after two halcyon weeks of holiday break, the feral spirit of pajama days and pumpkin pie breakfasts still smoldering in their eyes. And now it was up to Kelly to win their wandering attention.

      “I’d like you to meet Zed,” she began tentatively, gesturing to the robot standing beside her. He was one of the first projects she had worked on five years ago when she landed her coveted job at Automated Human Industries, AHI, the boutique cutting-edge robotics company. Zed made a modest impression at first glance, his body a four-foot-tall construction of steel ligaments and exposed wires, his face a flat panel. “I know he looks pretty basic,” she continued, trying and failing to eclipse the gleeful Pillsbury Doughboy noises issuing from four girls in the back as they took turns poking each other’s stomachs. Kelly was not the most confident performer. This was a young woman who, when playing a tree in her third-grade play, had gotten stage fright—despite not having any lines—and dramatically fled the theater. Which had not been easy, seeing as her legs had been bound together in a trunk.

      But now her voice grew as she got excited, talking about her work. “But at the point of his creation, Zed had a greater scope of motion capabilities than anything else on the market. He was our first build with our patented predictive stereo vision—”

      A tinny ring from the front row announced that a sandy-haired boy had just won a game on his contraband phone—and threw Kelly off her flow. Robbie, one of her coworkers here at AHI, bustled over and extended a hand. “Phone,” he commanded. The boy dutifully dropped his thousand-dollar smartphone into a red plastic bucket of other thousand-dollar smartphones, glass hitting metal with a thump. Robbie had jumped at the chance to play phone wrangler today, ensuring that—even though none of the company’s newest technology was on display—no junior spies filmed the program for their parents, two thirds of whom probably worked at competing tech companies here in Silicon Valley. He clutched the bucket with a sort of protective satisfaction and retreated to his position on the sidelines, from which he watched the rows of children like a prison guard. Sometimes Kelly couldn’t believe that she had dated him.

      She refocused. She was determined to get through to these students. Or at least to half of them. Maybe one? Just a small one? But so many were talking to each other that they could barely hear her. The whole detailed presentation she had perfected and rehearsed was falling apart in practice. “So we started with something called stochastic mapping, which is, um—” She faltered. Her eyes darted irresistibly toward the exit. She felt another “fleeing tree” moment coming on.

      “It’s kind of easier if you see it first,” Priya gently interrupted. “Who wants to see this guy in action?”

      “Yeah!” a couple of the kids responded, sitting up. Kelly relaxed as she looked across at her friend, grateful for the intervention. Priya was better at this type of thing anyway. She could get a smile out of a statue.

      “Shall you do the honors, madam?” she asked now.

      “I shall, mademoiselle.” Kelly clicked the remote in her hand and Zed beeped into life, his blue eyes blinking on. More of the children looked up, their attention caught. “So he can walk, of course.” She pushed the mini joystick on the remote forward and Zed took a few steps, his movements more fluid than his rough form seemed to indicate.

      “But big deal, right?” Priya asked the crowd. “You guys have been walking for years.” Some of the kids giggled.

      “But he can also walk sideways, which is pretty cool.” Kelly toggled to the right on the remote, sending Zed into a side-to-side grapevine movement. “And if you add in the arms—”

      Priya pressed a sequence of buttons on her own remote and the robot added a rhythmic arm movement to his routine. “Zed’s got some major moves.” The kids in the audience started clapping.

      “Observe.” Kelly swept the joystick around, and Zed whirled in a perfect, whip-fast pirouette, stopping on a dime. The sandy-haired boy let out an involuntary “Whoa!”

      “Way better than my moves, I have to admit,” Kelly said.

      As the crowd laughed and cheered, Kelly sneaked a grin at Priya. They had officially won these kids over with the sweet smell of science. They were superheroes. Now she spoke confidently as she started to explain her process. This was her favorite part: the magic of engineering, the ability to imagine an impossible-to-solve problem, then slowly break it down, unpiecing it until it became possible.

      “So how do you teach a robot to walk?” she asked the crowd. They were silent now, utterly rapt. “Imagine you were trying to give someone else the ability to walk for the first time. What would you need to give him?”

      “Feet!” one child cried.

      “Good, that’s the first thing.” She was actually starting to enjoy this. “What would those feet need to be able to do?”

      But the buzz of another phone, conspicuous in the quiet, cut her off. Her eyes shot instinctively to Robbie, waiting for him to nab the culprit. But Robbie’s glare was fixed squarely on her. “I’m so sorry,” she muttered, fumbling her own phone out of her pocket and striking the Ignore button. She could almost physically feel everyone watching.

      It had been her mom calling, but she could have guessed that even without looking at the screen. It was always her mom calling. She cleared her throat and tried to resume the presentation, but she had lost her train of thought. “So … the feet. The feet would need to be able to balance flat on the ground, right? What else?”

      She felt a smaller rumble in her pocket as a voicemail registered, where it would sit alongside the five or six other voicemails from her mother that could be found on Kelly’s phone at all times. She could already hear what this one would say: “Are you coming to family dinner this weekend?” (Yes, Kelly came to every family dinner, every two weeks like clockwork.) And “Are you bringing a date?” (No, it’s a family dinner, that would be weird.) Of course, Kelly was rarely dating anyone anyway. But that wasn’t the point.

      Diane’s energetic voice filled Kelly’s mind so loudly that she failed to hear the kids shouting answers at her in the audience. “Sorry, what? One at a time,” she said. Just moments ago she had been doing so well. She had asked her mom time and time again to not call while she was at work, but Diane just never seemed to think that Kelly’s work was too important to interrupt. “How about balance?” she tried again. “Wait, I just said that. Um—”

      Priya gave her a sympathetic glance before stepping forward again. “What did you just say? You, the boy in the awesome SpiderMan shirt? That the feet have to talk to the brain? That’s right. You have to figure out how those feet are going to know what to do.”

      This time Kelly stepped back, allowing Priya to take over for her. She had lost the nerve to try again.

      The drive from AHI to her parents’ house that Sunday wasn’t far. But passing from the sweeping, glass-bound corporate giants of North San Jose to the leafy suburban streets of Willow Glen always gave her the feeling of entering another world. Maybe she became more of the girl she was growing up there, less of the woman she was now.

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