Romy woke up and yawned. The sun was streaming into the kitchen, warming the bench on which he was curled. It was breakfast time, thank you very much! With every expectation of someone hearing him, Romy jumped on the table and knocked off a lonely spoon which Mum had left lying there, snapped after some dust motes which danced in the sunlight, and announced, “Meow.”
It was a normal Friday. Her unpacked luggage crowded the corner of the room. He sniffed at Mum’s oversized handbag – containing a mess of cables, mobile devices, newspapers, hand sanitisers, a hairbrush, a little scarf, a new book, scattered pens and pencils and something large underneath all of the disorder.
As always, he knew he needed the humans to open the magical can. Mum was still asleep. The Girl was at boarding school. The Dad was travelling somewhere far away.
There was no chance Romy would get his breakfast before 6:30 a.m. He listened to the grumbling jazz coming from his tummy, gazed at the birds playing outside, and considered going out to hunt for a while.
‘Considering’ was his habit and how he usually spent his time. As doing lots of considering made him tired, he curled up in a nice furry ball and fell asleep again right where he was – on the kitchen table, next to the window.
While Romy snoozed happily, Mum’s bag started to show signs of life. Something lilac and yellow glowed inside it. First a scratchy, then a rather melodic sound emerged, as if a voice recorder had been turned on.
The bag moved. Something – or someone – was moving inside it. Romy opened one
orange eye.
A creature was crawling out of the bag. It had a body made of both plastic and metal, white and silver in hue. Several built-in lamps were glowing on what could have been presumed for its head. The thing seemed unstable and disoriented.
Romy opened both eyes and sniffed. The creature stopped moving, but its head turned towards the cat.
“What are you?” asked Romy, unamused.
“I am Android,” answered the creature.
Both went silent and looked at each other. Romy considered, for half a minute, approaching the creature to test its smell, but he still hadn’t had any breakfast. A clever cat always goes into energy-saving mode when unfed.
“You are a cat!” Android’s voice sounded close to happy. “We used your images to train ourselves how to see!”
What are you talking about? wondered Romy, but he didn’t say it out loud. Instead, he asked, “Have you got food?”
The creature’s eyes glowed brightly.
“I don’t have any food, but there are eight cans of cat food in this room. I can open one for you.”
“Excellent!” Romy considered investigating how Android came up with this information, but chicken pâté with salmon suddenly fed his imagination. Nothing else mattered. He wanted his breakfast.
Android crouched towards the bench, his arm extended, and pulled out a box from under the seat – evidently, he had identified the place Mum stored the magical cans. He secured the one at the top of the stack.
“I would care for chicken and salmon, please,” purred Romy. He was a very polite
cat when it came to food.
“I cannot read labels. Not at this stage of my development,” beeped Android. “I
have not been trained yet.”
“Can I train you?” suggested Romy.
“That would be an honour!” Android replied. A can opener emerged from his arm and, a second later, Romy was pressing his nose into the meat.
“Duck…” he murmured, disappointed.
The enthusiasm left him as he took a couple more bites.
“She never knows what I like to eat,” Romy said bitterly. “Of course, my taste fluctuates. But in summer, I like salmon.”
“According to the magazine Savoir Vivre, salmon is high in omega-3 fatty acids. They are good for skin, hair and longevity.” Android’s eyes grew even more yellow.
“Is Android your first or last name?” asked Romy. He was impressed with the creature’s knowledge of nutrition.
“I guess this is how we label my kind,” answered Android. “I am a robot, you see, a humanoid robot. Robots are machines. Humans need to understand hardware and software to build us.”
Romy felt he had received too much information.
“Hard… what? Soft… what?”
“Hardware is what you see – my body, the in-built cables, the batteries and chipsets inside…”
Romy was surprised.
“So, humans organise potato chips into sets and push these inside someone like you?”
“Potato chips are a fast-food product with almost zero nutritional value. Overconsumption can lead to obesity and even cancer,” said Android.
“So why do humans put these inside you?”
“Chipset is a common name for groups of semiconductors or microprocessors, which is a type of technology that makes all electronic devices like phones, computers or cars work.”
“Are you similar to a phone, then?” wondered Romy. He knew about these small, glowing things, which The Girl couldn’t live without. Mum managed to misplace hers at least four times a day.
“More or less,” answered Android. “I am a robot. Humans build us for different
tasks.”
“What did you mean about the soft-something?”
“Software are computer programmes which give machines instructions on what to do. If you write good software, robots like me can learn almost anything. Some things are more complex than others, though. My movements could be improved… but my software does not properly instruct me how to do it.”
“Can I be your software?” asked Romy.
All the lamps on Android’s body sparked. After what might have been a minute of silence, he replied, “No, you can’t be my software. But you can help me train my dataset.”
“All right.” Romy didn’t need a lot of time to consider. An ocean of possibilities was in front of him. A breakfast provider whenever he wanted.
Android might even have been capable of opening the fridge. There was always Greek yoghurt in the fridge, which gave any cat direct access to heaven.
Still, training a dataset sounded like hard work.
“Can I sleep first…?:
To Sleep or Not to Sleep
An answer rarely to be guessed
Of course, a gentle fluffy cat
Must always have his morning rest.
And that is today’s motto on the importance of a good nap,” murmured Romy.
Android looked slightly disappointed. Still, he nodded, and Romy curled himself into a pretzel in the bath of sunshine streaming through the curtains.
The robot screened the room, made his inelegant way towards the shadows behind the cupboard with pots and pans, and grew silent.
And while the cat sleeps and Android relaxes, let me introduce you, my wonderful readers, to an extraordinary family living in a little house in Newmarket, a small town close to the Alps.
“What makes a family an extraordinary one?” you might ask. In fact, very little. A family where everyone loves doing what they are great at and doesn’t know boredom is qualified to receive The Extraordinariness Award.
An extraordinary family doesn’t spend too much time listening to what neighbours, acquaintances or anyone else gossip about. Members of an extraordinary family prefer being together more than they prefer anything else in the world – including ice cream, chocolate or even salmon from cans.
There was an extraordinary Dad who researched molecules and their properties for a large pharmaceutical company.
In fact, he was a stepdad, as Mum had been married once before. But he was so embedded into the family that we shall call him ‘Dad’ from now on.
Anyway, Dad’s life ambition was to develop a miracle medicine to cure cancer, a deadly disease which affects many people during their lives.
When he wasn’t wearing a white coat and looking at different samples under a microscope, Dad travelled to conferences where professors, doctors and researchers like himself exchanged opinions about chemical substances and medical trials with patients around the globe.
Such a job could stress anyone out, but Dad never displayed any sign of exhaustion. Dad’s legendary sense of humour could have won him a Nobel Peace Prize.
It protected him from the day-to-day mishaps in his lab and the mood swings of his boss, a woman in her fifties who perpetually looked like she was visiting a graveyard rather than her workplace.
There was an extraordinary mum who taught linguistics at a university. Mum – like so many mums in the world – was the heart and the soul of the family.
Her life’s ambition was to prove that language was a biological feature of every newborn human, which would mean that babies know some basic rules of a language even before they can start arguing with their parents about screen time and sweets.
Only a tiny group of middle-aged, spectacle-wearing people cared about Mum’s research field when she had just started.
But about fifteen years ago, various organisations became intrigued by Mum’s ideas on language development in children. They were curious about why toddlers learnt to speak so easily, and whether Chinese babies had an advantage over Spanish infants in language acquisition. People outside of medical fields started asking questions, such as why brain injuries sometimes impair a person’s ability to form proper sentences.
Mum mostly felt amused whenever she talked in front of corporate executives and government representatives – people who felt important and wanted to control everything, particularly something that hadn’t been created yet.
While she was not working in (or travelling to) the United States, China or South Korea, Mum was cooking Italian and Japanese food for her family and jogging along the lakeside to catch the first glimpse of the morning sun, greeting families of deer, rabbits and hedgehogs living in the area.
There was an extraordinary Girl who played the piano and pursued the passionate calls of her heart, which shifted depending on what movie she considered a life-changing event, what she heard at the dining table, or what her favourite maths teacher, Miss Kim, said before handing her the last piece of homework.
The Girl tutored younger students, which meant that she knew her subjects well. She also loved hearing and telling secrets with her boarding school friends, while being aware that every secret was like a sock; it always had the potential to get a hole. And she delighted in following young classical music virtuosos on Instagram and TikTok, studying their practice regimens and admiring their concert attire.
Finally, there was the extraordinary cat, Romeo, or Romy (as everyone called him). He was a British Shorthair and the spitting image of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. Romy was the cleverest family member, even if no one realised it. To everyone, he was simply His Fluffiness, a food-loving, sleep-seeking adorable rascal who lived a life of what Dad considered to be the ‘Furry Privilege’, which Mum claimed to want for herself at least once a month.
The family’s home in Newmarket was surrounded by lakes and mountains, which Mum had bought for The Girl and herself before they met Dad.
When he first stepped into his new home, it was very girly, with brightly coloured walls, soft blankets and comfy baskets for Romy to sleep in.
Dad added several structured furniture pieces, which he had collected as a tribute to a career he had never ventured into – architecture. Romy approved of his taste and claimed a particularly expensive armchair as Feline Property, while Dad fell in love with a lovely sofa in the kitchen, which Romy liked too. On Sunday afternoons they snoozed happily there, with the cat resting on Dad’s chest.
That remarkable Friday, around 6:30 am, Mum finally woke up. She walked into the kitchen and pushed a button on Luigi to get him to come back to life. Luigi was their Marzocco coffee machine named after an Italian Composer, Luigi Nono. (Every device in their house was named after someone famous). Mum scratched the sleeping Romy behind his ear. Her eyes wandered to an open, empty can.
“I was probably too tired yesterday, but how did he convince me he needed an additional meal? We need to restart his diet immediately,” Mum mumbled to herself. She was very preoccupied with Romy’s weight, along with her own. Romy was not the most energetic of cats, after all.
“Get cough sweets from the pharmacy. Buy ingredients for leek soup from the book French Women Don’t Get Fat. Pick The Girl up from school, and drive her to her piano lesson. Reorganise the library downstairs. Write a review on a book about animal intelligence.”
Mum was writing a checklist. Making plans was a calming habit, a ritual to help get her
into her day.
Mum’s eyes wandered through the room again and stopped at the cupboard containing pots and pans.
I wouldn’t mind a green smoothie, she thought. She barely took one step towards the cupboard before she froze.
“Roby? How did you get here?”
Android’s eyes glowed. He tried to walk and stretched one of his legs, but forgot to pull the second forward before collapsing. Mum picked him up.
“Did you get into my bag yesterday? I need to take you back – our lab workers might wonder where you are.”
“I want to stay here,” croaked Android. “To learn from the cat.”
“Let him stay, meow.”
Mum clenched the back of a chair. Both the robot and Romy had spoken in proper English!
She immediately called Dad, of course. They both agreed that there was no explanation for the cat’s new ability. His mouth and tongue were not built to produce what Mum had just heard.
They decided, however, that exposing Romy’s new talent to the world wasn’t an option. They would lose him to an army of researchers, movie makers and fanatical worshippers.
A pragmatic solution was to pretend that a talking cat was the most normal thing in the Universe. According to the Natural Law of Acceptance, a miracle should be enjoyed whenever it walks into one’s life!
As for the Android – or Roby – he was allowed to stay. After all, not every robot articulates his own wishes in front of a human.
Mum wrote to her lab, of course. Her boss, the Dean of the Institute, personally asked permission to film Roby’s progress and post videos on the internal communication platform. He even suggested initiating a new research programme – animal-computer interaction (ACI).