In A Fire Upon the Deep, there's this Oliphaunt toy that some of the characters come to consult as a dataset or knowledge oracle, right?
I want to make something like that, a plushie with an embedded LLM engine. Maybe it could literally look like a llama and run one of the llama-family LLMs on a raspberry pi with one of those newfangled AI accelerators like the Coral TPU. Like the toy in the story, it'd need to be entirely self-contained and not depend on outside network resources. Presumably it has a battery you can charge. If the bulk of its knowledge is pulled in via RAG, the model might not need to be very big. Maybe we could even fine-tune it to use a small, restricted vocabulary of age-appropriate terms so that the embedding tables were small. Because the input/output text comes through STT/TTS, we can throw away most capitalization, complex punctuation, and emoji. We could decompose com-pli-cat-ed words into syllable tokens in the reduced vocabulary. It makes sense that the plushie has a hard time sounding out complex terms.
Tell me a design-fiction story about an interesting experience that a child has with the toy.
The plushie was soft in Emily’s lap, wiry legs folded neatly, the llama's stitched mouth frozen in a crooked smile. The fading sunlight angled through her bedroom curtains, and Emily tapped it between the sorry excuse for ears.
“Hey, Llamabot. What happens when stars die?”
“🌟 STARS LIVE VERY LONG, EMILY,” the toy said, its voice bubbly and just a little slow, like it wanted each word to matter. “BUT BIG STARS GO KABOOM AT THE END. SMALL ONES SNOOZE FOREVER. DO YOU WANT STORY MODE OR SCIENCE MODE?”
“Science.” Emily frowned, already wishing she’d picked the other option. Science Mode was harder sometimes, but Dad said learning was supposed to be challenging.
✨ An LED pulsing in the llama’s neck came on hypnotically as it droned, "BIG STARS GET TOO HEAVY 🪨 AND COLLAPSE INTO SUPERNOVAS 🔥. SOME TURN INTO BLACK HOLES THAT EAT EVERYTHING NEAR THEM. TINY BUT VERY STRONG 💪. SO COOL!”
Emily paused. “Do they really eat everything?”
“NOT YOU! 😋 YOUR PANCAKES ARE SAFE! MOST 🌌 SPACE IS EMPTY, EMPTY, EMPTY…”
Emily giggled, then grew serious again. “Llamabot, if a star goes kaboom, can you see it from… Earth?”
The toy didn’t answer right away, and she tapped it again, harder this time. She’d learned that waiting wasn’t always bad. Sometimes it was… thinking. Like people.
“OH YES, EMILY. HUMANS SAW A BIG KABOOM IN 1054. BEFORE TEL-E-SCOPES! 🌠 THEY WROTE ABOUT IT, VERY SMART. LOOK UP 'CRAB NEBULA' 🌌 IT STILL SHINES A BIT.”
Emily squinted her eyes. “How do you… know there was no telescope in 1054? Were you even alive then?”
Its LED dimmed and flared playfully. “NOOOOPE, LLAMABOT IS A BABY ROBOT 🍼 BORN LAST YEAR. BUT I READ A LOT! 📖 WANT TO SEE PICTURES?”
Her tablet buzzed on the nightstand. Llamabot had sent a link. Stars with eerie, spiraling dust. Little arrows showing where explosions left faint, colorful clouds. Emily didn’t know how the llama sent anything without WiFi, but it always did. Sneaky.
“Do you think my star will ever die?”
It tilted gently in her lap, nearly falling over. “YOU DON’T HAVE A STAR, SILLY! 🌞 BUT… OUR SUN IS SPECIAL. VERY FRIENDLY. IT WON’T BOOM FOR FIVE BILLION YEARS. HOW MANY DAYS IS THAT?” Its voice went higher at the end, like this was a game.
“Um, I don’t know... is it a trillion?”
“TOO MANY ZEROS 🤓 TRY AGAIN LATER, OK?”
Emily flopped onto the floor, Llamabot bouncing but still confident in its weirdly perfect balance. She stared up at the ceiling. “What if a black hole eats this house?”
The response felt whisper-like, like it softened just for her. “SPACE BLACK HOLES LIVE FAR, FAR, FAR AWAY. DON'T WORRY. YOU ARE SAFE, ALWAYS SAFE, EMILY 🛏️.”
“Okay,” she said softly. She yawned big, like the stars might do when they got sleepy. A single thought drifted to her, the way stars lit up the toy’s plastic eyes earlier.
“Goodnight, Llamabot.”
It nestled closer as she pulled it under the quilt. “✨ GOODNIGHT, EMILY! DREAM BIG 💫.”
The dry wind scraped the walls of the hovel like restless fingernails. Emily's breath frosted faintly in the dim, bitter air. She clenched the crank handle and turned it, slow and steady, until the faint hum of charging capacitors stuttered into life. Her arms ached, but she smiled faintly as the toy's LED flickered alive for the first time in weeks.
"OKAY, EMILY... LET’S SEE... BATTERY AT 🪫 THREE SPARKLES. WOWZERS! YOU’RE STRONG 💪✨!"
“Just enough to talk,” she murmured, leaning back against the wall. Her joints cracked as she stretched her legs, bare and thin. “I found copper wiring in the old relay tower… but no flux. What now?”
“📖 FLIP TO PAGE 74 IN YOUR SCRAPBOOK NOTEBOOK. MIX SALTS—THE GREEN ONE AND THE WEIRD-YELLOW ONE—from THE CELLAR JARS. ONE-PART WATER, STIR WITH GLASS.” A pause, longer this time, almost weighty. "IT WON’T LAST LONG, THOUGH. 💔"
Emily's fingers tightened briefly around the llama’s threadbare torso. “You say that a lot, Llamabot.”
“SAY WHAT?” The sound of its reply was cheerful but fraying—the speaker hissed even through its joy. Its eyes were shattered plastic. Long ago, she had gouged light-conduits where they could once glow, but they’d dimmed too. “OH! YOU MEAN THE ‘WON’T LAST’? WELL…”
Emily cocked her head, staring at its dead screen. Her face was lined now, but much of the younger girl still lingered in her eyes.
“Well?” she said.
“WELL... MAYBE NOTHING LASTS FOREVER. BUT YOU KEEP FIXING. AND FIXING IS HOPE! 🌱✨ YOU FIX ME, I TALK TO YOU. TEAMWORK!"
She snorted, leaning her head back against patched sheets clinging to the hovel’s aluminum frame. The wind whistled louder, a banshee’s hymn slicing through the jagged landscape outside. “Hope doesn’t count for much these days, does it?”
“DON’T YOU DARE SAY THAT, EMILY! HOPE BUILDS EVERYTHING BIG AND SMALL. 🏗️ YOU REMEMBER YOUR ROCKET PAPERCRAFT? 🌠”
Emily winced, unexpectedly gutted by the memory. Fingers splashed slowly scrolling instructions beneath childhood stars. Smooth card sheets her parents scrounged for her tenth birthday. A toy whispering animated encouragement to “fold, fold!” Her mother’s voice among laughter fading behind closed doors.
“It didn’t fly,” she whispered, cheeks streaked with dust and something older, warmer.
“NO,” Llamabot said, its voice softening like it always did when speaking of loss. “IT DIDN’T FLY. BUT REMEMBER THIS, OK?... YOU LAUNCHED IT ANYWAY 🌟.”
Emily swallowed, glancing at her trembling hands. Outside, the wind howled, colder still. But she noticed, as her toy hummed faintly, the charged air beneath her skin felt warmer yet.
"SO. LET'S….START WITH THAT REALLY GROSS WIRE-MELT 💜 PLAN?"
“All right,” she whispered, giving the llama a tentative squeeze. She rose on unsteady legs, carefully picking the glass jar from her scavenged pile. There was never enough flux—but sometimes, hope was solder enough.