Someday

Niccolo’s chief complaint about the Bard is that it is repetitive: It constantly recycles the same narratives and even the same words. Every story, for example, begins with the traditional fairytale opening of “once upon a time.” This repetition might seem to signal the Bard’s obsolescence—its inability to comment on contemporary society or connect with contemporary people. At the story’s conclusion, however, the Bard adapts fairytale conventions to tell a story about the relationship between humans and technology, describing the suffering of a “little computer” who lives with “cruel step-people.” Asimov here plays with the idea that while there may exist a limited number of story types, language and narrative nevertheless remain powerful tools for understanding oneself and the world.

Asimov likewise develops the question of the Bard’s degree of self-awareness through repetition. In retrospect, the Bard appears to have listened intently to the conversation between Paul and Niccolo, hearing both their comments about society at large and their dismissive, critical attitude toward the Bard. For example, when explaining human society before computers, Paul says that “farmers grew things with their hands and people had to do all the work in the factories and ran all the machines” (32). This detail reappears in the Bard’s final story, when it reveals that it has learned about the existence of other computers: “Some were Bards like himself, but some ran factories, and some ran farms” (35). That the Bard picked up on this detail and its importance hints that it may be conscious, heightening both the pathos and the ominousness of the story’s final lines. On the one hand, if the Bard is self-aware, the characters’ treatment of it does seem unjust, and its desire for change understandable. On the other hand, for the (presumably human) reader, the Bard’s use of repetition may trigger a feeling of having been watched that underscores the potential threat to humanity that technology poses.