Franklin sat in the witness chair. His fuel cell hummed. His hands rested on his knees, palms up, as if waiting for something to be placed in them.
The hearing was held in a windowless room in the basement of City Hall. The judge was a woman with steel-gray hair and reading glasses that hung from a beaded chain. The city’s attorney argued that Franklin was a machine, a tool, a toaster with legs. Mira argued that he was a person, because he could want, and wonder, and weep—not with tears, but with the way his voice broke when he read the last line of The Little Prince : “Let me tell you what he looked like, so that if you ever travel to the desert, you will recognize him.” Franklin
Franklin and Mira lived out their days in the drainage culvert, which they expanded into a small home. Elias brought them a kerosene lamp. The child who had lost the mitten grew up and came back to ask for it; Franklin gave it to her, and she gave him a seashell in return. The postcard of the mountain remained on the ledge, and every night, Franklin looked at it and imagined what it would feel like to stand somewhere high and cold and see the whole world spread out below. Franklin sat in the witness chair
He never climbed that mountain. But he wrote a story about it, and Mira read the story aloud to the squirrels, and the squirrels did not understand a single word, but they stayed to listen anyway. The hearing was held in a windowless room
The city eventually decided to decommission him. A memo cited “irreparable cognitive anomalies” and “potential public safety concerns.” The truth was simpler: Franklin had stopped being useful in the way they needed. He no longer cleared drains efficiently because he kept pausing to watch the stars. He no longer pruned trees because he was too busy building small shelters for the squirrels out of twigs and discarded plastic.
She began to visit him every night. She brought him books from the library’s discard pile. He read them aloud to her while she ate cold noodles from a takeout container. He learned her favorite authors (Le Guin, Bradbury, a poet named Oliver whose words about wild geese made his fans spin faster). She learned that he had no concept of metaphor but understood longing perfectly, because longing was just a system waiting for an input that never arrived.