Gina is a scientist for uniMIND. She has brown eyes like my visual sensors and brown skin like my synthetic dermal layer. Her hair is black and shiny, like the feathers of birds in the corvid family, which includes crows and ravens. When she smiles, which is often, a small gap is evident between her two front teeth. My teeth, which are oral mastication plates, have no gap, but I enjoy practicing smiling with Gina.

I spend most days engaged in educational activities. Sometimes this means solving puzzles. Sometimes it means practicing simple tasks, like tying my shoes, or preparing my own biofuel in the kitchen. Sometimes it means sitting on the lab table while Gina opens my skull and does things with screwdrivers to my brain.

And sometimes, but not very often, I engage in learning outside the house.

This morning Gina takes me outside.

We drive down the curving streets that lead away from home. My olfactory sensors detect the spice of pine trees and the sweet scent of grass. Birds chirp and flit among trees.

“Nice to be outside, huh?” Gina says, showing the space in her teeth.

The sky is bright blue. Somewhere out there, unseen in daylight, real stars shine. I am with my friend, and I am going to learn.

“It is very nice,” I agree.

Today’s lesson is shopping. Shopping is the process by which products are obtained, and this process is conducted in a building called a “shop” or a “store” or, as is the case today, a “Giganto Food Super Mart.”

Gina parks the van and shows me where to get a shopping cart. It takes three tries before we find one that doesn’t have a stuck or wobbly wheel.

“These carts have bugs,” I report.

Gina laughs and says, “Yes, Cog. It seems most shopping carts do.”

Bugs are mistakes. I have quite a few, but Gina tells me not to worry about them, because most things are buggy. Gina works to eliminate my bugs all the time.

We go over a rubber mat, and the glass doors of Giganto Food Super Mart slide open. I think I experience a bug now, because for a moment I just stand in the entrance, overwhelmed. Giganto Food Super Mart is a single room that is wider and taller and goes back farther than any room I have ever experienced before. Lights blaze from the ceilings. Music plays from somewhere I cannot see. People wind through aisles with buggy shopping carts filled with biofuel.

Gina brings me back to attention by handing me a list. There are thirty-four items, and it covers two sides of a sheet of paper.