Some weeks ago, I visited a good friend and saw that he had a bit of plastic, which he wasn’t using. So I asked him for it, he gave it to me and I took it home and made it into a robot.
I treated the robot just like a child, or a pet. I petted it, I taught it to bring in the newspaper, and I hugged it often. I oiled it and cleaned it and recharged it and refined it – I even sold my iPod, to be able to pay for some of the parts I used in it. (Hey, plastic alone does not a robot make.)
It was almost human, so I named it Pinocchio. Now I should call him ‘him’. I named him Pinocchio. I sent him to robot school (I parted with my laptop, so he could take it with him and learn.) My son wanted to become a real boy, not just a robot, and for a while he worked very hard. He worked so hard, that he was cast in the main role during the annual day of the robot school. There, the others made a song about him, and sang it to the tune of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’. Here’s how the tune went:
Old Geppetto had a robot
P-I-N-O
And that robot went to school
C-C-H-I-O
With a click-click here and a click-click there
Here a mouse, there a mouse
Old Geppetto had a robot
P-I-N-O-C-C-H-I-O!
I was so proud when I heard them sing it to him on stage, I had tears in my eyes.
But then, all the praise got in to his head.
He decided he didn’t need to go to school. He went to Robot-La instead. There were lots of games and rides there, on donkeys. What my son didn’t know is that the donkeys were all robots, who had now been re-programmed to kick their hind legs and bray, and give the new robots rides.
So – my son got re-programmed and became a donkey. How he got out of it, I haven’t figured out. I know one of his friends was scrapped. But my son managed to re-re-program himself, and he came out of Robot-La.
But he hadn’t learnt his lesson yet, unfortunately.
So, when he met the Blue Fairy (she worked for Asimov Inc., and if there was one person who could turn him into a real boy, it was her) he LIED.
My son told a lie to the Blue Fairy! Oh the shame!
She just clicked her remote control a few times and – oof – his circuits went all haywire. His nose-circuit grew and grew and got in the way of the other circuits.
As soon as he told the truth, his circuits went back to normal.
But then my son fell in with some bad characters, and lying became a habit with him. The Blue Fairy relentlessly clicked away at her remote control, and his circuits threatened to go completely bonkers.
In desperation, I started going to the watering hole more often. I had to confide in someone, about my son, and the man behind the counter was a good friend of mine. He sympathized with me wholeheartedly. He raised my spirits.
But I didn’t remember that watering holes contain – WHALES.
I’m too embarrassed to go into details, but somehow, I managed to get myself swallowed by a whale at the watering hole.
It was dark and scary in the whale’s tummy, I can tell you. Not even the new mobile phone with flashlight could do much to help me see anything.
And so I sat, in darkness, regretting what I’d done, regretting what my son had become, regretting that I would never get to scold him again. I started hearing voices in my head, thinking people were speaking to me, thinking my son was speaking to me.
“Hey, Dad, Dad, what’s the matter, I’ve been calling you for five minutes – whale enzymes mess up your hearing?”
It was him! It was Pinocchio! I pinched myself – I wasn’t dreaming. There he was, my son, in the whale’s tummy, come to rescue me!
“Sammy at the watering hole told me I’d find you here. Now c’mon, Pa, we got to get out when this old whale sneezes. I’m going to count down to that, okay?”
He flipped the remote control he had borrowed from the Blue Fairy, and counted down – five-four-three-two-one..
We were out of the nasty whale’s tummy, back in Sammy’s watering hole!
And there were all the news channels, waiting to interview us. I could hardly speak, I was so happy. Best of all, there was the Blue Fairy, all dressed up for her first appearance on television, waiting to turn my son into a real boy. “Give me back that remote control,” she whispered to him. He handed it over, she wiped it down with her hand sanitizer and – click!
It became the most-watched show anywhere – on TV and on every computer in the world.
PINOCCHIO THE ROBOT BECOMES A REAL BOY.
This re-telling of “Pinocchio” by Sonali Bhatia was ranked 5th in the Twist-A-Tale contest on Tell-A-Tale. Find other winning entries here.
(Image credit: jepoirrier from Flickr used under a CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license)
