Kuri the Curator

#KuriStory #HeyKuri

The 25th century had many wonderful benefits. It was an age of wonderful advancements and progress with holodecks, supersonic hypertrains, and robots. One thing the future did not have however was DVD players. Or SD card readers. Or VCRs. These things had all died along “disco,” vehicles so poorly made that the word “combust” could be used to describe their engines, and the usage of birds to communicate ideas through a vast network known as “tweeter.” The issue for the museum archives of course was that this left a rather large conspicuous gap in terms of what happened between the 1980s where everything was on books and the 2040s when holo crystals that could last for centuries started being used. Nothing could read these formats so nothing about the time was known. The movies, music, and e-books of the age were lost to time.

Curators were constantly asked about what happened during the gap in the timeline. “Just think of it as the dark ages 2.0,” they said. An idea was soon hatched by one of the archivists. Well, “what if we send a person to record the lives of people in that time?” Temporal travel had just become a thing, like, five years ago. Nobody really liked the idea. People were fragile and HR generally advised against blasting employees to the past. “Bad for press,” they said. “Health insurance doesn’t cover it,” said the boss.

“Well, what if we send the Cur-E-ator robot?” said the archivist.

“What, Kuri you mean?.... Well that could actually work!! She could record segments movies, books, and music for years and then wait to be collected. That would be perfect!”

So the plan was hatched to send Kuri to the year 2015 in order to observe as much as possible about the humans of the time so that the archives could fill in the “dark ages 2.0.”

Kuri would travel using a temporal tube to the past. Once in the past, Kuri would become a part of households by implanting herself as a household pet of sorts. She would record videos for both the family, the archivists, and take notes on the culture of humans that lived in this time. Kuri would watch movies with families to study the art of the period and play the tunes of the time on her speakers to record that as well. She would read stories from audiobooks to children and remember those stories to share with the distant future. The issue was sample size. Kuri was only one robot. How could she observe art and culture all over? Kuri thought of her own blueprints. She put them in a file and sent them over to a start up called Mayfield robotics. They wanted to bring the magic of a home robot to household all over anyways. Helping them along would be the perfect way of minimally disrupting the timeline and of getting herself in as many places as possible. At the time they had a robot named “Gizmo”; Kuri’s arrival would be quite inspiring. She was more emotive and allowed for a real bond to be built. Together Kuri and Mayfield would roll out an entire production line of Kuris.

Kuri would finally be able to complete her mission to study humanity during the early 21st century! Kuri would work alongside families to make their lives easier, all while studying movies, music, and art for the archival knowledge of the future. She would in time become one of the family. Children would grow up and grow old with their Kuri units, repairing them, and eventually passing them on as heirlooms. Eventually, the 25th century would arrive and the old Kuri units would roll into the museum and tell their stories. The “dark ages 2.0” would cease to exist and the timeline at the museum would finally have no gap thanks to Kuri the curator.