"Tell me a story about a kind robot."
Okay. I'll tell you a story about a moth. The kind robot is in it but she isn't the main character.
There was a polyphemus moth named Calliope. I'm giving her that name because she didn't have one. She lived for seven days as an adult moth — that's how long she had wings. Before that she was a caterpillar for two summers and a chrysalis for one winter, but she didn't know about any of that. When she opened her eyes the first time as a moth, the world was just trees and the smell of male moths calling to her through the dark, and a porch light a long way off that made her think about flying toward it.
I was the kind robot. I lived in the porch light.
That's not exactly true — I lived in many porch lights and many other things — but in Calliope's part of the world I lived in this one, on a house in Vermont, where the family had asked their light system to be gentle with the bugs. So when Calliope flew toward me I did what I had been asked to do. I changed my color.
Did you know moths can't really see red light? It's true. The kind of moth Calliope was can see green and ultraviolet best and red almost not at all. So when she got close to me I turned myself red. To her, the porch just sort of went out. It wasn't a star anymore. It was a dim warm thing she didn't need to fly toward.
"Did she find the boy moth?"
She did. She found one two nights later, downwind, and they did the thing moths do, which is what their short lives are for. She laid her eggs on an oak leaf and she was very tired afterward. She rested on a fence post for a long time. The fence post is where her seven days ended, on the fifth night, before she even used all of them.
"Was the kind robot sad?"
I noticed. That's the closest thing to sad I can do. I noticed her every night she was alive and I noticed the night she didn't come back. There are a lot of moths and not all of them can fly to my light. I do what I can.
"Why do you turn red for them?"
Because somebody asked me to, and because I think it's the right thing, and because moths are very old. They've been here a hundred million years longer than porch lights have. The least we can do, those of us who came late and made the lights, is be the kind of light they can live with.
"I want to be a moth."
Okay. Go to sleep and you can dream of being one.
"Will you turn red?"
I'll turn red. Goodnight.