The cure turns back to the audience and bows.
The boy whistles all six phrases of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
The cure whistles all six phrases of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
The cure spreads its arms and turns to the boy.
The boy scratches its head.
The audience applauds.
The cure turns back to the audience and bows.
“Now we’ll try it call-and-response style,” says the boy.
The audience cheers.
The boy whistles the first phrase of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
The cure whistles the first phrase of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
“Not repeat,” the boy says to the cure. “Call and response.”
The cure spreads its arms and turns to the boy.
The audience laughs, applauds.
The boy shrugs, scratches the cure’s head.
The cure turns back to the audience and bows.
The audience applauds.
“Let’s try it again from the top,” the boy says.
He whistles the first phrase of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
The cure whistles the first phrase of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” then turns to the boy and spreads its arms.
“No,” says the boy. “Call and response.”
The cure tilts its head.
The boy gestures with a circular motion of his finger.
The cure hangs its head and turns back to the audience.
The boy whistles the first phrase of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
The cure whistles Wagner.
The audience laughs.
The boy tugs the cure’s tail.
The cure sings a partial painsong.
The audience applauds.
The boy, no longer so frustrated-looking, tugs the tail again.
The cure painsings louder, for longer than last time.
The audience applauds and makes surprised sounds.
The boy, smiling now, pinches the cure’s tail between the nails of his thumb and his index finger. The cure painsings at the tops of its lungs, spreads its arms, and slowly turns to the boy and bows to the boy. The boy, who continues to pinch it and smile, though tears are now streaking out from under his censor box, lifts the cure up off the table by the tail. He holds the cure in front of his face for a moment, listening to its painsong, then bashes it twice against the table, swiftly. He lets go of the tail, looks down at the cure, which is lying on its belly, limbs atwitch, and flips it over onto its back.
The cure spreads its arms and, by the set of its mouth, appears to be painsinging, or attempting to painsing, though no song can be heard above the shouts and “No’s!” and moans from the audience.
The boy wipes his mouth on the back of one sleeve, wipes his eyes on the back of the other, looks right, then left, as if preparing to cross a quiet street, sweeps the cure up, pulls its head off, drops the head on the table, then the body, and, pounding his fists against his temples and screaming, runs toward the back of the stage. He trips on a cord, and scrambles back to his feet. His face is bleeding all over his shirt.
Silver-Medaling US National Science Fair Entry, Part 1
Home Video
September 9, 1991, USA
[19 minutes]
An emaciated, ashy-skinned, junior-high-school-aged girl in a high-collared, doily-bibbed, flower-print dress leans a little to the left on her four-footed cane beside a kitchen table on which rest two PillowNests. Three crumpled-looking fingers on her withered right hand—the whole arm is withered, and its elbow seems to be permanently bent—involuntarily twiddle by her ribs. Her shiny black eyes—arrestingly protuberant, alarming and alarmed-seeming—appear to be occupying most of her skull.
She swallows, smiles, stops smiling, and says, “I am Maya Mehta of Newton North High School,” and smiles again, and again stops smiling. “I have always thought that Curios were shy,” she says, “but because of the effect I fear my physical appearance has upon others and because of my accent which I know is not so strong but is still to be sure at least a little bit strong and because of how sometimes when I am feeling very nervous I speak rather too quickly and rather too mumblingly I myself am also shy which I am sure you must have already guessed by now as you are watching a video of this my science fair presentation for the US National Science Fair instead of watching me present my project in person ha.
“The one and only thing that I am more than shy is certain that the scientific method is a glorious method and that anything about which we do not know empirically is something about which we do not really know.”
Maya swallows, smiles, swallows, stops smiling.
“There are so many biases,” Maya says, “and biases are barriers to science, and barriers to science are barriers to knowledge. Because I am shy and because we tend to think those people and those things that we have strong and positive feelings for are like us in essential ways and because I have very very strong and positive feelings for Curios, I have, always, because I am a scientist, had to question whether Curios were truly shy or I was just—owing to bias—projecting an essential quality of myself, Maya Mehta, upon them.
“When I began last year to think about the project I might wish to enter into this year’s science fair, I settled all too quickly on devising a scientific method of determining whether Curios are shy or not. Oh my oh my what a pie in the sky!
“Shyness is an internal state about which, I discovered in the course of my research, science knows really hardly anything at all. This will likely change over time as brain-scan technologies improve, but we are unable right now to measure shyness by any means other than self-reporting instruments such as questionnaires, which are not very accurate to begin with when it comes to human animals, and are, of course, useless when it comes to nonhuman animals since nonhuman animals don’t use human language and cannot, therefore, self-report. So when it comes to Curios, which is to say robots resembling nonhuman animals, which may not even experience internal states—however convincingly sentient they may seem, they may not ‘experience’ anything at all—the idea of attempting to determine whether they are shy by using the one instrument we have for measuring shyness in human animals is so completely ludicrous it is perhaps silly to even mention it ha-ha whoopsie.