When I first met her, she only knew one word: “help”, uttered in a dozen different voices, with a dozen different meanings. It was the only common word she could parse among all those she had encountered in that dark dreary ruin. She had cycled through each audio file steadily, approaching me with the deliberate gentleness of someone trying not to startle an injured bird. “Help… Help!!… help…”
The tenth word she learned was “tomorrow”. Every day I told her, “tomorrow I will return.” I don’t think she had ever seen the sun, but every time I scaled the steep cliffs, she was waiting for me at the bottom.
The fiftieth word she learned was my name. I jumped when I heard it uttered in my own voice, snipped from my own introduction days before. But she laid a cold metal claw on my shoulder and repeated it, lights flashing in the way I would eventually learn indicated her joy.
The hundredth word she learned was “home”. My tiny apartment was no place for technology like her. I withdrew all my savings and bought out a garage on the edge of the city. As I scaled thick ropes out of her ruin, carrying her on my shoulders like an oversized backpack, I told her again and again, “I’m taking you home. Home.” And she coiled her limbs around my waist and buzzed gently.
It was in this garage that her vocabulary exploded. TV personalities, actors and actresses, even random strangers - she picked and chose from the voices of the whole world, sifting through hours of footage and tapping into radio calls to find her favorite ways to speak. It was also here that she taught me a word for the first time; as I was getting my thin mattress ready for bed, she craned her long neck down and intoned, “I… love… You.”
