I wanted to like this, I really did. I always love Christiana's readings, and what's not to like about a story with a childhood fictitious robot in it?
Well, apparently a lot.
To cut it short, I am upset and angry at the author for being lazy.
At first I was like "Oh cool! The robot thinks in seconds! Wonderful!" then I had to stop and do the conversion in my head (3 mega-seconds is about 50 minutes, 600 kilo-seconds is about a week). So that broke the flow of the story.
Then the robot arbitrarily started using days ("4 days ago") and diurnal periods and seconds. Why? What's going on here? All I can assume is that the author got lazy and just kept writing to keep the flow. But it broke my brain a little bit. Not to mention the interchanging of "nest" and "compartment". Pick a term and stick with it. Pick a method for telling time and stick with it. This just screws things up in my head. When the robot measures things in seconds I can believe that it is a robot. When it calls things strange names I can believe that it is a robot. But when it stops doing that, or when it switches its strange term for a different, even stranger term, that's just dumb. It breaks the flow and throws me out of the world.
Then there is the whole issue of the robot's programming that Cutter McKay started on, but I have much more beef than that.
You don't program
anything like that. Robots don't need manuals, they don't need to consult them. They have programming, and the programming dictates behavior and responses. The manual should not exist, and the robot should not need to consult it.
But let's suspend our disbelief for a minute and assume that this robot is an actual artificial intelligence, and actually does learn things by reading them, and even forgets things and then has to consult what it read.
Who the hell wrote that stupid manual? Other robots? What sort of society would provide robots, video conferencing and private houses but neglect to actually explain to the robots how a household works.
"You! Robot! You're going to work for this family! I don't give a hoot who they are, what their names are or what their gender is (BTW, author, "sex" and "gender" do not mean the same thing, please stop mixing them up.) but you go and find out! Here's a manual written by a different robot who actually observed actual human beings for 12 seconds! Good luck!"
Seriously? I think not.
So, to summarize, aside from the interesting point of view of a dysfunctional family, I disliked everything about this story.
Replace the robot with an alien and fix a few let's-call-them-typos and this would be a much better story. In fact, when I saw the title I thought that's what it was going to be.
You know what? I reject your reality and substitute my own. In my head that's how the story went and it was much better than
your reality.