Cecilia Lynn-Jacobs
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Everything was letters sent back and forth.
A river of words.
Baker sounded... authoritative.
Middle-aged.
Did he... I find this incredibly boring, Mal.
In the future, every middle-class family has their own personal robotic servant.
It cleans their house, types for them, does all the work they're too good for.
A lonely clerk has a crush on the daughter of his boss, but he's tongue-tied, too nervous to say anything.
He thinks about writing her a letter, telling her what he feels, leaving it on her desk, but every time he does, he tells his robot servant to crumple it up.
until he decides to just let the robot butler write it for him.
The robots have limited sort of sentience, and he just needs something this will have to do.
He leaves it on her desk, waits in fevered anticipation for a few days, and then, on his desk, a letter from the object of his affections.
She's asking him to send another letter, to tell her more about himself, but once again, he's too nervous to do it, so the robot writes another letter.
And it goes on like this, love letters, back and forth, until... Can you guess the end, Mal?
They meet up, and they have nothing to say to each other.
It turns out that she had her own robotic mate that was writing her responses.
It's been two robots expressing things their owners never could.