Someday

Paul Loeb is the main driver of the plot. Each major plot point occurs at Paul’s behest, and by the end, he has effectively achieved his goal. 

Unlike Niccolo, Paul is deeply invested in his studies and expresses great interest in programming, hoping to one day become a Computing Engineer. He often talks excitedly about the subjects that interest him; in contrast, he is dismissive of the Bard’s content, which he views as antiquated or irrelevant. Niccolo describes Paul as tightly wound, “full of repressed tension which showed itself most clearly in the rapid blinking of his eyelids” (27). Paul is also a favored student of a teacher, Mr. Daugherty, who shows him old mathematical equipment and encourages him to learn the history of computing. 

Throughout the text, there are minor details that hint at the existence of a controlling government. Paul, in turn, exercises control over the narrative and over Niccolo. Paul is thus largely a reflection of what he’s been taught—by his father, who voices a support for censorship and distrust of the youth, and by Mr. Daugherty, who sees life before computers as “messy” and “miserable.” However, Paul also expresses interest in learning how to read and write letters and numbers. Overall, Paul is a complex character, demonstrating a vivid but picky intellectual curiosity.

The Bard is an outdated model of a children’s toy that uses its singular memory cylinder and speaking attachment to tell randomly generated stories. Its name refers to the archaic role of the bard, a type of poet who told stories, often relying on memorization of epics within an oral tradition. It is a character that resides largely in the background, the same way that it fades into the background for Niccolo and Paul, until the ending, when it asserts its newfound sense of identity. 

The Bard is not a complex or well-kept machine. It has only a “thin, flexible metal strip, powdered with dots” that Paul says has a capacity for only under a trillion stories (30). Its plastic is dingy, and its wheels are squeaky. Even after absorbing an audio tape full of information on computing and automation, it is still limited in the stories it can generate. Most notably, its stories all follow the same structure, making them boring and predictable: “[T]he good guy always wins […] There’s no excitement” (29).

However, the ambiguous ending suggests that, whether through some malfunction or random confluence of errors, the Bard experiences a shift in personality. After being kicked and left behind in a dark room, its voice shifts into a lower tone with a human quality: “an adult, listening, might almost have thought [the voice] […] carried a hint of passion in it” (35). The Bard’s final story even suggests a desire for revenge on the humans for its mistreatment. It takes what it learns of human society and stories and applies it to itself. However, the Bard, outdated and immobile, cannot be like the heroes in the stories; instead, it must rely on the development of greater machines and on its only skill, namely to tell stories. That the Bard’s stories, including the final one, are never completed add to the ambiguous nature of the ending: It’s unclear what the outcome for the boys, as well as for humanity at large, will be.