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hurts, like when my mother brushes the tangles. So, I think [the Furby’s hair pulls] hurt too.” Then, she ponders her stomach. “There’s a screw in my belly button,” she says. “[The screw] comes out, and then blood comes out.” Jessica thinks that people, like Furbies, have batteries. “There are hearts, lungs, and a big battery inside.” People differ from robots in that our batteries “work forever like the sun.” When children talk about the Furby as kin, they experiment with the idea that they themselves might be almost machine. Ideas about the human as machine or as joined to a machine are played out in classroom games. 2 In their own way, toy robots prepare a bionic sensibility. There are people who do, after all, have screws and pins and chips and plates in their flesh. A recent recipient of a cochlear implant describes his experience of his body as “rebuilt.” 3
    We have met Wilson, seven, comfortable with his Furby as both machine and creature. Just as he always “hears the machine” in the Furby, he finds the machine in himself. As the boy sings improvised love songs about the robot as a best friend, he pretends to use a screwdriver on his own body, saying, “I’m a Furby.” Involved in a second-grade class project of repairing a broken Furby by dismantling it, screw by screw, Wilson plays with the idea of the Furby’s biological nature: “I’m going to get [its] baby out.” And then he plays with the idea of his own machine nature: he applies the screwdriver to his own ankle, saying, “I’m unscrewing my ankle.”
    Wilson enjoys cataloguing what he and the Furby have in common. Most important for Wilson is that they “both like to burp.” In this, he says, the Furby “is just like me—I love burping.” Wilson holds his Furby out in front of him, his hands lightly touching the Furby’s stomach, staring intently into its eyes. He burps just after or just before his Furby burps, much as in the classic bonding scene in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial between the boy Elliott and the visitor from afar. When Wilson describes his burping game, he begins by saying that he makes his Furby burp, but he ends up saying that his Furby makes him burp. Wilson likes the sense that he and his Furby are in sync, that he can happily lose track of where he leaves off and the Furby begins. 4

WHAT DOES A FURBY WANT?
     
    When Wilson catalogues what he shares with his Furby, there are things of the body (the burping) and there are things of the mind. Like many children, he thinks that because Furbies have language, they are more “peoplelike” than a “regular” pet. They arrive speaking Furbish, a language with its own dictionary, which many children try to commit to memory because they would like to meet their Furbies more than half way. The Furby manual instructs children, “I can learn to speak English by listening to you talk. The more you play with me, the more I will use your language.” Actually, Furby English emerges over time, whether or not a child talks to the robot. (Furbies have no hearing or language-learning ability. 5 ) But until age eight, children are convinced by the illusion and believe they are teaching their Furbies to speak. The Furbies are alive enough to need them.
    Children enjoy the teaching task. From the first encounter, it gives them something in common with their Furbies and it implies that the Furbies can grow to better understand them. “I once didn’t know English,” says one six-year-old. “And now I do. So I know what my Furby is going through.” In the classroom with Furbies, children shout to each other in competitive delight: “My Furby speaks more English than yours! My Furby speaks English.”
    I have done several studies in which I send Furbies home with schoolchildren, often with the request that they (and their parents) keep a “Furby diary.” In my first study of kindergarten to third graders, I loan the Furbies out for two weeks at a time. It is