The little robot who wanted a friend

Ferro had been built by an old inventor who lived alone at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by gears and blueprints never finished. Ferro was the only robot the inventor had ever completed, so he had no one who looked like him.

One morning, the inventor told him: "Go see the world, maybe you'll find another robot like you." Ferro set off, his metal footsteps echoing on the road, determined to find someone made of the same gears, the same sheet metal, the same round blue eyes as his own.

He crossed villages, questioned cats, children, old clocks, without ever finding a single robot. Discouraged, he sat by a stream, his joints creaking with fatigue. A little girl named Sunny, fishing for tadpoles nearby, came and sat beside him.

"Why are you looking for someone who looks like you?" she asked. "None of my friends look like me, and they're still my friends." Ferro had never thought of it that way. Sunny showed him how to catch tadpoles, and he, in turn, taught her to count stars in base two, just as the inventor had taught him.

That evening Ferro went home to tell the inventor he'd found a friend — not a robot, but a little girl who loved tadpoles and stories about stars. The inventor smiled, for the first time in a long while, and tucked his unfinished robot blueprints deep into a drawer.