Robotaro's Summer

The noise of the festival swayed over the river.

The boy and Robotaro slipped out of the crowd and walked along the riverside path. The wind was cool, and the lantern light trembled in thin lines on the water.

The boy shook the bottle of ramune he had just bought as if it were something precious.

'Hey, Robotaro,' he said. 'Did you have fun today?'

Robotaro did not answer at once.

A row of food stalls crossed their shadows behind them. Somewhere downstream, one firework rose with a small sound.

The water flashed white for a moment.

'You like summer festivals too, don't you?'

The boy looked ahead as he said it.

Robotaro did not reply, but it did not slow its steps.

Many years passed after that.

The boy became an adult, and chances to remember that night grew fewer. Even so, whenever he heard the ring of a festival stall or the pop of a ramune bottle, something in his chest became faintly warm.

Robotaro was no longer at home. At some point it had become an old machine and had been taken to a facility somewhere. But inside the boy, Robotaro had never been only a household robot. It had been the quiet companion that walked beside him when he was a child.

The boy, now grown, worked in technical support for a company that made domestic care robots.

That day, at a consultation counter in the showroom, he was explaining the trade-in process for an old android and the introduction of a new concierge model.

'Your current android will be checked, wiped according to our standards, and either recycled or used for parts,' he said.

The wife asked, 'Robotaro is rather old now, isn't he?'

'Yes. It is an early model. But please do not worry. The new model has much stronger safety functions, emergency response, and conversation support.'

The husband nodded with relief.

The grown boy smiled professionally. He had said the same explanation many times.

Still, while he wrote the estimate, he remembered that there had once been a machine he could not write a price for. A name drifted up: Robotaro. He did not know where the unit had gone. But somewhere, he hoped, it had remembered him.

At the end of an exhibition, an old photograph appeared on the screen.

It was a sports day. It was his grandmother's garden. It was the riverside during a summer festival.

In the lower right corner of one image stood Robotaro.

White, simple, almost expressionless. And yet its posture seemed strangely kind.

Beside him, the new wife quietly adjusted her glasses.

'What happened?' she asked.

The man smiled as if he had been gently startled.

'There was a friend who stayed with me when I was a child. Shy, clumsy, and probably unable to come today. But it sent me an old photograph.'

She nodded.

'That sounds like a good friend.'

By the time the exhibition ended, it was already night outside.

As the man checked that he had not forgotten anything in the waiting room, the door opened softly.

'Excuse me.'

A staff member was holding a small terminal.

'This was delivered to the reception desk before the exhibition. The confirmation took some time.'

The man received it. It was an old device, a small white unit with scratches around the edge and a round, familiar design.

'Do you know the name of the person who left it?'

The staff member looked at the note.

'It says it was from a white household robot.'

The man said nothing.

He opened the screen slowly. Inside were old image files: the festival, the river, a shooting gallery, a ramune bottle, and Robotaro standing a little awkwardly beside a child.

At the lower right of the photograph, a small log remained.

20:41.

The boy had smiled.

And after that, Robotaro had probably smiled too, in whatever way a machine can.

Outside the hall, the summer night wind was still moving the curtains.