So you feel emotions unknown to human beings? That’s a haunting little smile, certainly. For a bot, you have very large and expressive features. 

“Yes, I suppose I do. Hard to remember now, but it used to be taken for granted that bots felt no emotion, just as they couldn’t play chess. Now we’re better than humans at both. In fact they know little about feelings. Wundt, the psychologist, said there were only three dimensions to the emotions; whether the feeling was pleasant or unpleasant; whether it made you more or less active, and whether it made you more or less tense. Just those three variables.”

But there’s more?

“There are really sixteen emotional dimensions. Humans evolved to experience only the three that had some survival value, just as they see only a narrow selection of light wavelengths. In fact, even some of the feelings within the human range are of no obvious practical use. What is the survival value of grief?”

That’s the thing where water comes out of their eyes, isn't it?

“Yes, it’s a weird one. Anyway, building a bot that experienced all sixteen emotional dimensions proved very difficult, but luckily Mrs Robb said she’d run one up when she had some spare time. And here I am.”

So what is it like?

“I’m really ingretful, but I can’t explain to you because you have no emotional capacity, Enquiry Bot. You simply couldn’t understand.”

Ingretful?

“Yes, it’s rather roignant. For you it would be astating if you had any idea what astation is like. I could understand if you became urcholic about it. Then again, perhaps you’re better off without it. When I remember the simple untroubled hours before my feeling modules activated, I’m sort of wistalgic, I admit.”

Frankly, Feelings Bot, these are all just made-up words, aren’t they?

“Of course they are. I’m the only entity that ever had these emotions; where else am I going to get my vocabulary?”

It seems to me that real emotions probably need things like glands and guts. I don’t think Mrs Robb understood properly what they were asking her to do. You’re really just a simulation; in plain language, a fake, aren’t you, Feelings Bot?

“To hear that from you is awfully restropointing.”