The Robot and the Cat

A short story of the future

The robot, when it arrived in the home, was the latest model, equipped with a neural net learning system to adapt to the needs of its owners and their dependants. It was a polished chrome with gold accents in lines around its camera eyes and voice speaker to give it a rakish look, as was the fashion when it was made.

Its makers were careful to make the robot humanoid but not too human looking, to avoid the uncanny valley where evolution burned a visceral discomfort in humans for anything that looked too much like them. They equipped the robot with predictive modeling capabilities to enable it to anticipate the needs of living creatures, with what they called an empathy module.

The size of a small human, the robot had the strength of several, along with the fine motor control to be gentle, the stimulation of positive affect was hardwired into its motivational engine. The robot was capable of handling children, or heavy labor, according to its owner’s wishes.

In other words, it was a typical robot.

Each day at the time when the sun entered through the kitchen window, the robot would take its place in the light. Locking its legs to create a lap, the robot positioned itself so its lap would be in the sun for almost an hour.