Robot Mother Quotes

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

If you'd only let me come by myself, none of this would have happened. Having you around makes everything worse.' She buried her head under her pillow. 'Stop it! you're so cold! You're heartless, you little robot!' The pillow muffled her words, but they still stung. 'I feel things,' I said. 'I'm not a robot!' I stamped my foot and screamed. Then I burst into tears. I touched the wet little drops and held them toward her. 'See, I'm not a robot. This is proof.

But I do not know how to act like a mother.” “Oh, it’s nothing, you just have to provide the gosling with food and water and shelter, make him feel loved but don’t pamper him too much, keep him away from danger, and make sure he learns to walk and talk and swim and fly and get along with others and look after himself. And that’s really all there is to motherhood!” The

The students adore your father,' a perfumed woman said to me. 'Aren't you lucky to live with such a charming man!' 'He's even more charming at home,' Mom said. 'Isn't he, Bea? He rides a unicycle through the house -' '- even up and down the stairs,' I added. 'He juggles eggs as he makes breakfast every morning -' '- which he serves to us in bed of course,' I said. '- and pulls fragrant bouquets out of his ass,' Mom finished. 'He's just a joy.

Welcome to the real world, Mother Robot, a beautiful and dangerous place. Now you can truly begin to live.

One of the key algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence is Mother-Infant Inter-brain Synchrony algorithm, which mimics the brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions, touch and heart rhythms of mother and child.

Mother-infant inter-brain synchrony algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots are developed based on brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions and heart rhythms between mother and child.

You can’t sum it up, my mother says as we are driving and the electronic voice repeats, Turn Left onto Wildwood Canyon Road, so I turn left, happy for the mundane instructions. Let us robot at once. Tell me where to go. Tell me how to get there. She means a life, of course. You cannot sum it up.

My father picked me up from school one day, and we played hooky and went to the beach. It was too cold to go in the water, so we sat on a blanket and ate pizza. When I got home, my sneakers were full of sand, and I dumped it on my bedroom floor. I didn't know the difference. I was six. My mother screamed at me for the mess, but he wasn't mad. He said that billions of years ago, the world shifting and the oceans moving brought that sand to that spot on the beach, and then I took it away. "Every day," he said, "we change the world," which is a nice thought until I think about how many days and lifetimes I would need to bring a shoe full of sand home until there is no beach, until it made a difference to anyone. Every day, we change the world, but to change the world in a way that means anything, that takes more time than most people have. It never happens all at once. It's slow. It's methodical. It's exhausting. We don't all have the stomach for it.

My birthday is in March, and that year it fell during an especially bright spring week, vivid and clear in the narrow residential streets where we lived just a handful of blocks south of Sunset. The night-blooming jasmine that crawled up our neighborhood's front gate released its heady scent at dusk, and to the north, the hills rolled charmingly over the horizon, houses tucked into the brown. Soon, daylight savings time would arrive, and even at early nine, I associated my birthday with the first hint of summer, with the feeling in classrooms of open windows and lighter clothing and in a few months no more homework. My hair got lighter in spring, from light brown to nearly blond, almost like my mother's ponytail tassel. In the neighborhood gardens, the agapanthus plants started to push out their long green robot stems to open up to soft purples and blues.

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.

As infants, we see the world in parts. There is the good—the things that feed and nourish us. There is the bad—the things that frustrate or deny us. As children mature, they come to see the world in more complex ways, realizing, for example, that beyond black and white, there are shades of gray. The same mother who feeds us may sometimes have no milk. Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.4 With this integration, we learn to tolerate disappointment and ambiguity. And we learn that to sustain realistic relationships, one must accept others in their complexity. When we imagine a robot as a true companion, there is no need to do any of this work.

E is definitely the biggest ERROR my mother has ever made—worse than the time she designed a litter-box-cleaning robot that flung clumps of kitty poop all over the house.

Mother-infant inter-brain synchrony provides a template for designing compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots.

We are still at the stage where Mother Nature’s lowliest creatures can outsmart our most intelligent robots.

My mother looked at me, her long turquoise nail on the lift button. “Darling, I do hope, since you haven’t yet found a lover, that you’re masturbating regularly, as I suggested.

Everyone wanted to see the mother robot riding the mother bear.

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computer might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We are unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots who know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother, and use this uncanny ability to try and sell us something- be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds and cravings, and use these inner leverages against us.

Why did she do this to me?” I mumble. “Actually, Samuel, from my preliminary scans of your internal organs, it does not appear that our mother has done anything to you. Were you in need of repair as well? If so, I am certain she will—

Airports, on the other hand, are like airport bestsellers. They’re easy to read, you forget them quickly, you promise yourself to never again succumb to their temptation, and yet the brightness, those signs, those letters in metallic relief . . . And the passengers who consume those airport bestsellers are increasingly worthy of them. Beings with decreasing capacity for concentration, robots of flesh and bone who can’t go even a minute without connecting to their devices and extensions, as if they were waiting for the confirmation of the success of a sports star they idolize or the news that they’ve become fathers or mothers, even though their respective spouses are right there beside them in that very moment, looking after little kids hooked up to tablets where they surf without waves or a beach.

There are many kinds of mothers," said the robot. "Some mothers spend their whole lives caring for their young. Some lay eggs and immediately abandon them. Some care for the offspring of other mothers. I have tried to act like your mother, but no, I am not your birth mother.

LIAM HATED SILENCE. Once, when he was eleven, a case of laryngitis left him speechless for a week. Feeling like his soul had been ripped out, he’d asked his mother for one of those Stephen Hawking machines with a robot voice to replace his own. How cool that would’ve been. Even

We are unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability to try to sell us something—be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use these inner leverages against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their existing prejudices.

I don’t know if I can explain how fundamental this is. If someone comes to your table, you feed them, even if it means you’re a little hungrier. That’s how it works. Logically, I get that our circumstances are different, but everything in me just crawls when we do this. I feel like somewhere, my mother is pissed at me.

Both women were mothers of children caught up in mind control cover-up, one of which paralleled Kelly’s and my case. She, too, had volumes of documents and evidences whereby it was inexcusable that justice had not prevailed. The other mother conveyed a story that touched me so deeply it undoubtedly will continue to motivate me with reverberating passion forever. This mother was very weak from the final stages of cancer and chemotherapy, and tears slid down her pale gray cheeks as she told me her story. When she reported sexual abuse of her three daughters, the local court system took custody of them. The children appeared dissociative identity disordered from their ordeal, yet were reportedly denied therapy and placed in Foster care “since the mother was dying anyway.” When she finally was granted brief visitation with her precious daughters, they looked dazed and robotic with no memory of her or their sexual abuse. Mind control was apparent to this mother, and she struggled to give voice to their plight to no avail. She explained how love and concern for her children had kept her alive far longer than her doctors thought possible. She embraced me and said, “Now I can die in peace knowing that you are out there talking, raising awareness with the same passion for justice and love for children that I have. Thank you. Please keep talking. Please remember my daughters.

You do want him to survive, don’t you?” said the goose. “Yes, I do want him to survive,” said the robot. “But I do not know how to act like a mother.” “Oh, it’s nothing, you just have to provide the gosling with food and water and shelter, make him feel loved but don’t pamper him too much, keep him away from danger, and make sure he learns to walk and talk and swim and fly and get along with others and look after himself. And that’s really all there is to motherhood!

He stepped inside, saw his mother lying in the white bed, her skin as white as the walls and sheets surrounding her, and his heart stopped. He sat down, grabbed hold of her hand, and desperately tried to catch his breath. He had to tell her something. He wet his lips and swallowed. “I love you.” She looked at him and her eyes rose in a feeble attempt at a smile that her mouth didn’t have the strength to make. A single tear rolled down her cheek as a faint whisper of a breath passed through her colorless lips. The

Do you know”—she began to wheeze between the words—“that I begged your mother not to have you. I begged . . . and pleaded . . . to scramble you up and pull you out . . . before you ruined her life.” Her grandmother took a hit from the oxygen tank. “You were a disgrace to this family before you even popped out . . . and if I could change one thing in my life . . . I’d go back . . . and pull you out with my bare hands . . . before you were able to kill my baby girl.” She heaved into the mask. “You killed my baby . . . ruined what was left of my life . . . and I will never . . . forgive you.” She gripped the wheels of her chair and began to scoot away. “I should’ve left you . . . in a dumpster.” Even

The stagnancy of energy, lack of interest in life and creativity, unproductiveness and mediocrity which beset so many people is not the consequence of their genetic and biological programming but of parental and social conditioning. The great Otto Rank acknowledged this and correctly rectified Freud's Thanatos concept. He, like several humanist and existential philosophers and psychologists who came later, realized that our Death Instinct or drive manifests itself in the very repression addressed throughout this book. Repression is a form of violence against the Self. Rank and his followers also realized that man's blind conformity to social norms and lack of differentiation from crowd-consciousness also serves to deaden creativity and productivity. They understood that the robotic organization man, behind his cubicle or on his cell-phone, slaving for some faceless corporation, fully embodies the Death Instinct.

Make good decisions and remember who loves you." I looked at him. "I thought it was 'remember who you are.'" The Butler looked back at me. "It is the very same thing," he said. "What?" "Young Master Carter, when you walk Ned for your mother; when you attend Miss Anne's robotics competition without observing that such attendance is, if you'll pardon the expression, 'a pain in the glutes'; when you cheer at Miss Charlotte's football match even though she barely had a touch; when you accompany your sister to a Turner art exhibition; when you take your young sisters to buy Dreamsicles; when you appear as exhibit A for Miss Emily's Favorite Person of the Week event; when you attend two ballet exhibitions despite your unfortunate and undiscerning distaste for the art; you are telling them that it is the same thing." "Is that sort of what being a gentleman is supposed to be?" "We are what we love, young Master Carter.

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We are unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability to try to sell us something—be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use these inner leverages against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their existing prejudices.33 While science fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.

She thought she was getting out of the Water Rising clean, because she didn’t see her father anywhere around: there was only Ash and Lillian sitting at a table, and a few other patrons at as much of a distance from Ash and Lillian as they could get. She made for the door, at which point Lillian caught her arm. “Where are you going?” “Uh,” said Kami, eyeballing her wildly. “I’m going to buy some drugs.” Lillian stared. “I beg your pardon?” “This is a really stressful time for everyone,” said Kami. “So I thought maybe I could buy a little weed, take the edge off. I might be a while. This is a very clean-living town, apart from all the murders, so I don’t actually know any drug dealers. I realize Jared kind of looks like one, but he’s not, which is a shame because I think the drug dealer’s girlfriend gets her drugs free.” “I realize you are attempting to be humorous,” said Lillian, after a pause during which she stared some more. “I don’t understand it.” “Hey, you’re not the only family with a legacy. ‘Glass’ rhymes with ‘sass.’ Have you met my dad?” “I have had that dubious pleasure,” said Lillian. “He is, in fact, meant to be meeting me in order to, and I quote, ‘teach me to integrate better with society, display leadership skills, win over the populace, and stop acting like a robot princess from space.’ I admit that the humor in his humor escapes me as well.” She paused and suddenly looked determined. “I’m going to start without him.” She climbed off the stool and headed toward the group of people in the corner. Kami and Ash watched as they collectively shrank away. “Come on, quick,” said Kami, and as if summoned by some spirit warning him of his child’s intended reckless behavior, her dad appeared through the inn doors. He looked distracted. “Where’s Lillian?’ Kami checked over her shoulder. “Appears to be trying to wrest a screaming baby from the arms of her frightened mother in order to kiss it.” “Oh no no no,” murmured Jon, and raised his voice as he made his way over. “Libba, we’ve talked about this!” “The good news is the grown-ups are distracted by politics,” said Kami. You mean that your poor father is distracted by my awful mother, said Ash, who was far too polite to say such a thing out loud and looked vaguely embarrassed to be thinking it. Kami grinned. “Why quibble when we have the results we want!” I wish I could ask you what you’re planning, but I know what you’re planning, said Ash. Lucky me. I know this is important information, but going to Aurimere at all is a huge risk. “See, the thing is, if I ran a business it would probably be called Risky Business,

I am not a different species, an alien creature, a changeling, a robot, a freak of nature. I am a familiar word, pronounced with a different accent. I am your mother's favorite recipe, prepared by a stranger. I am your favorite song, recorded by a new artist. I am a human being; I am Autistic.

Hey, GreenHollyWood ruin my vision. I don't want to be gay... because what's shown in Mr.Robot it's geysish, mother fucker!

We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad , Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata: . . . He was crafting twenty tripods to stand along the walls of his well-built manse, affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see. These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord, automatai , to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey , Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever alert, never aging. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.

Uses of animal imagery and other nature elements in the worship of the Great Earth Mother is by design. Modern pagans, drawing on Eastern philosophies and the occult, believe that, unlike the “evil human race,” these elements are at one with Gaia. According to them, if it were not for male-dominated, Styrofoam

Is she in a persistent vegetative state?” quavered David’s mother. “Does she have brain damage?” My mother patted her shoulder robotically with a flat, board-like hand. “Unlikely,” she said. “From a statistical perspective.” A natural nurturer, my mother.

Like other living cre a t u res, plants' structural characteristics are encoded in the DNA in their cells. In other words, how a plant will re p roduce, how it will breathe, how it will come by its nutrients, its colour, smell, taste, the amount of sugar in it, and other such information, is without exception to be found in all of that plant's cells. The cells in the roots of the plant possess the knowledge of how the leaves will carry out photosynthesis, and the cells in the leaves possess the knowledge of how the roots will take water from the soil. In short, there exist a code and a blueprint for the formation of a complete new plant in every extension that leaves a plant. All the features of the mother plant, based on its inbuilt genetic information, are to be found, complete, down to the last detail in every cell of every little part that splits off from it. So, in that case, how and by whom was the information that can form a complete new plant installed in every part of the plant? The probability of all the information being totally complete and the same inside every cell of a plant cannot be attributed to chance. Nor can it be attributed to the plant itself, or the minerals in the soil that carry out this process. These are all parts of the system which make up the plant. Just as it takes a factory engineer to program production line robots, since the robots cannot come by the instructions themselves, so there must be some being which gives to plants the necessary formula for growth and re p roduction, since the plants, like the robots, cannot acquire these by themselves. It is, of course God who implanted the necessary information in the plants' cells, as in all other living things in the world. It is He who without any doubt created everything in complete form, and who is aware of all creation. God draws attention to this truth in several holy verses: He created the seven heavens one above the other. You will find no flaw in the creation of the All-Merciful. Look again-do you see any gaps? Then look again and again. Your eyes will become dazzled and exhausted. (Surat al-Mulk: 3-4) Do you not see that God sends down water from the sky and then in the morning the earth is covered in green? God is All-Subtle, AllAware. (Surat al-Hajj: 63)

Giants in Jeans Sonnet 30 Earth and Mars, what is the difference, Mars is barren, Earth isn't much behind! Mars is barren for there's no advanced species, Earth is made barren by its native intelligent kind. We haven't yet learnt to take care of Earth, Yet we are now headed for Mars as colonizer. With the money it'll take to get to Mars, We can literally end world hunger. Mark you, I am not against space exploration, But there's what I call existential priority. I guess robots who vacation at high altitude, Are least likely to fathom what’s humanity. Advancement that ignores human suffering, After a brief flight, eventually brings universal ruin.

And I admired her walk as she strolled away. Neither my mother nor Issac Asimov had warned me about girls like her.

Gorgeous and philanthropic. A devoted wife. An exemplary mother. The kind of woman who could be featured in one of those magazine articles about Women Who Did It All. She’d have been a Stepford Wife, if they weren’t fucking robots.

Christ, don’t give me your occupation-game labels! we are Beautiful People, ascendent from your robot junkyard :::::: and at this point they used to sit down and write home the Beautiful People letter. Usually the girls wrote these letters to their mothers. Mothers all over California, all over America, I guess, got to know the Beautiful People letter by heart. It went: “Dear Mother, “I meant to write to you before this and I hope you haven’t been worried. I am in [San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, a Hopi Indian Reservation!!!! New York, Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende, Mazatlán, Mexico!!!!] and it is really beautiful here. It is a beautiful scene. We’ve been here a week. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, how it happened, but I really tried, because I knew you wanted me to, but it just didn’t work out with [school, college, my job, me and Danny] and so I have come here and it a really beautiful scene. I don’t want you to worry about me. I have met some BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE and …” … and in the heart of even the most unhip mamma in all the U.S. of A. instinctively goes up the adrenal shriek: beatniks, bums, spades—dope.

All facts are not known to be composed but tight and young to a point. Death is nearing me, I feel that I see that, they want that. ME- watches the doors open to admit me in the rush upwards. The doors slide closed behind him. Then a muffled red laser-ROUND like an endless machine gun I hear a kid yells out. I walk and not look, as they tumble down in a lined-up row, all death no reason. Turns back to the screens. YOU- I gave you an order... you the order not to kill her I ran to the desk, of the hands that run the government, robotics departments. ‘Yes- we hear your cries out for help yet that rain the math that we can, or you don’t have.’ FREAK YOU! She has by the tie, I don’t see kill your life, that you don’t even understand, I think we can see more than enough looking over the wall screens, at the wastes. You killed my baby girl off- Kantilla! The Robot did not us, she was one point away from life, pushed back towards the door. The gun on my back- go or die. Killer robots, not of the laws, I never thought it possible. Shaking in its hand, I see as mothers cry. Happy for the clean-up as they say. Bodies burnt in a large firebox in the mid-city, see the black smoke for kilometers. Mass graves are wanted and have been in place now, it’s all the same no name to be remembered by, just a large hologram in the full finger, saying lines- as I love you, on your wrist is not life to me or having them here. I am desperate and unclear, and incompatible. She touches the WALL PANEL making her way back to her appearance in the high rise, without her young life. The doors slide open. The Robot, said I am sorry for your loss today, ‘Anything I can do,’ as she goes and weeps, ‘Yeah, FREAK OFF!

I was supposed to be a robot, but I’d become the opposite of that. Instead of metal and machinery inside my rib cage, it was music and motion and color. It was grief about my mother, and euphoria about Owen, and hope for the future and regret for the past—all swirling together in some relentless symphony.

There are literally hundreds of organizations that are replacing the family unit: nurseries, daycare centers, nursing homes, psychiatric wards, domestic abuse hot lines, homes for unwed mothers.... All of these services are a sign that the system has exchanged the family for institutionalism.... The human race seems to be on a crash course toward destruction. People living in major American cities are hardened, desensitized, and seem more like robots. Man is not just an intelligent animal endowed with a greater reasoning ability, as some philosophers contend. Rather, man is an entirely different species with a personality that has the capacity for compassion, love, humanity, and spirituality.

As the daughter of Perses and Asteria, Hecate (Hekate) was the only of the Titans to remain free under Zeus. She was the mother of the wizard Circe and of the witch Medea, and was considered to be the underworld sorceress of all that is demonic.

It's still home, Cager, and there's something about home, no matter how untidy we've left it.

Part of me hated technology, because to me technology was a mother fucker that was eating this world alive. It was all part of the machine, the deadening of the human spirit, and I wouldn’t allow it. I had to see the world for what it was, drain it of all its illusion, because what lingered beneath? The wild, untamed beast, and in the end it would eat us all. That was something nobody could stop, not with any amount of money, or material things. Nothing that was part of physical reality could prevent death. So, to me, people were absurd, robotic, already dead. Buying fancy cars, big homes, the latest electronics, and all for what? The excuse was convenience. I need this. It makes things easier. Yet, while comfort may have been at the surface, the real thirst for these things, for material possessions, was to feel in control, and to feel part of.

She says, enough, enough, just enough. It's too much already, I've never-- thank God-- had a problem with any of my children, but now all of a sudden it's like you are three different people and I don't ever know which one I'm going to get. It's exhausting, you hear me, you are exhausting me. Can we not just have some real, genuine peace in this house? Between you and your father everyone here is always walking around like someone has died or is about to die. Or people are shouting or sulking or whatever it is you men do. You see my hair. You people are making me old! For once can someone not fucking shout at me for something, I say, I can't wait until I'm out of this stupid fucking place and no one can yell at me. My mother's mouth falls open and her eyes lock on my face. She has heard me swear before. on the phone when joking with some friends but never have I said any such thing to either one of my parents. Never. I have always assumed that such an event would result in my being beaten within an inch of my unborn grandchild's life, but she just stands there like a malfunctioning robot. Is anyone keeping you here, she says finally. If you are unhappy, please go. Go and find the place where you feel happy. I'm sorry, I say, but it's too late. I've fucked up. The less I've said the better things have been, the less likely my father has seemed ready to pounce on me for the smallest mistake. If she tells him what has happened, this might be the end. I'm really sorry. My hands smell of cucumber as I wipe my nose. She tosses the vegetable peeler in her hand to the counter between us. Its protected blades glint in the sunlight streaming through the large bay windows. Do what you like, she says. Mommy, wait please, I say. Get out of here, I don't want to talk to you. Not like this, in my house, my mother says. Her voice is flat and hard, her eyes fixed directly to mine. Ypu should go and find whatever it is you want to find. Me, sef, I'm tired, I'm going upstairs, she says. I listen to her reach the top stair, enter her bedroom, and shut the door. It's just me now.

She says, enough, enough, just enough. It's too much already, I've never-- thank God-- had a problem with any of my children, but now all of a sudden it's like you are three different people and I don't ever know which one I'm going to get. It's exhausting, you hear me, you are exhausting me. Can we not just have some real, genuine peace in this house? Between you and your father everyone here is always walking around like someone has died or is about to die. Or people are shouting or sulking or whatever it is you men do. You see my hair. You people are making me old! For once can someone not fucking shout at me for something, I say, I can't wait until I'm out of this stupid fucking place and no one can yell at me. My mother's mouth falls open and her eyes lock on my face. She has heard me swear before, on the phone when joking with some friends but never have I said any such thing to either one of my parents. Never. I have always assumed that such an event would result in my being beaten within an inch of my unborn grandchild's life, but she just stands there like a malfunctioning robot. Is anyone keeping you here, she says finally. If you are unhappy, please go. Go and find the place where you feel happy. I'm sorry, I say, but it's too late. I've fucked up. The less I've said the better things have been, the less likely my father has seemed ready to pounce on me for the smallest mistake. If she tells him what has happened, this might be the end. I'm really sorry. My hands smell of cucumber as I wipe my nose. She tosses the vegetable peeler in her hand to the counter between us. Its protected blades glint in the sunlight streaming through the large bay windows. Do what you like, she says. Mommy, wait please, I say. Get out of here, I don't want to talk to you. Not like this, in my house, my mother says. Her voice is flat and hard, her eyes fixed directly to mine. Ypu should go and find whatever it is you want to find. Me, sef, I'm tired, I'm going upstairs, she says. I listen to her reach the top stair, enter her bedroom, and shut the door. It's just me now.

Mama! Mama!" peeped the gosling "I am not your mother," said the robot. "Mama! Mama!" "I am not your mother." "Food! Food!

I headed back to the North Atlantic for a second visit to Titanic aboard Woods Hole’s R/V Atlantis II, the mother ship for Alvin. Because we had discovered Titanic with only four days left in our 1985 expedition, we needed to go back and photograph the wreckage more thoroughly. Most important, I wanted to send a robot inside.

I was moving away from manned submersibles, which were dangerous and could stay underwater only a few hours at a time, to underwater vehicles that could be operated from on board a mother vessel and that could remain submerged for as long as needed. I even gave names to the robots I was envisioning. I planned to call them Jason and Argo, in honor of the mythical explorer and the vessel in which he had brought home the Golden Fleece. Compared to Alvin, they would be cheaper to operate and could survey much larger areas—a critical factor given the strict time limits on most ocean expeditions.

You’ll never be the perfect mother, so just do the best you can. All Brightbill really needs is to know you’re doing your best.

Do you know what happened to my birth mother?” Roz told Brightbill about that fateful day in spring. About how the rocks had fallen and only one egg had survived. About how she’d put the egg in a nest and carried it away. About how she’d watched over the egg until a tiny gosling hatched. Brightbill listened carefully until she finished. “Should I stop calling you Mama?” said the gosling. “I will still act like your mother, no matter what you call me,” said the robot. “I think I’ll keep calling you Mama.” “I think I will keep calling you son.” “We’re a strange family,” said Brightbill, with a little smile. “But I kind of like it that way.