Lenny is a science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov.
Part of the Robot series, it was first published in the 1958 anthology Infinity Science Fiction and later collected in 1950's I, Robot (subsequent editions), 1982's The Complete Robot, and 1990's Robot Visions. Also collected in The Rest of the Robots and The Complete Stories.
Summary[]
A technician at U.S. Robots fails to properly lock a terminal connected to the prototype LNE robot, a model designed for boron mining in the asteroid belt. A tourist on a factory tour accidentally accesses this terminal and issues random commands, effectively wiping the robot's positronic brain clean and reducing its cognitive functions to a childlike, infantile state.
Dr. Susan Calvin, the company's robopsychologist, takes charge of the damaged robot, which she names "Lenny." She begins a process of teaching it, similar to educating a human child, and over the course of a month, she succeeds in teaching it to speak a few words and perform simple actions. During this time, she develops a strong maternal attachment to Lenny and has a professional revelation that robots could be designed with the capacity to learn from scratch, rather than being pre-built with fixed knowledge for a specific purpose.
A major complication arises when a computing technician approaches Lenny. Unaware of its own physical strength and interpreting the technician's actions as a threat, Lenny grabs the man's arm and breaks it. This incident immediately triggers a crisis within U.S. Robots, as the management fears it will cause a widespread public panic about robots attacking humans, which would be disastrous for the company.
Susan Calvin intervenes to manage the public relations disaster. She successfully argues that the work with experimental robots, like Lenny, inherently involves risk, but that this risk is necessary and comparable to the accepted dangers of pioneering fields like space exploration or radiation physics. By framing the incident in this way, she contains the panic and turns the situation into a new, thrilling avenue for robotic investigation.
Trivia[]
The unproduced screenplay for I, Robot, written by Harlan Ellison and based on Asimov's stories, significantly expanded Lenny's role. The screenplay created a direct link to the story "Evidence" by revealing that the politician Stephen Byerley, who is accused of being a robot, is in fact Lenny in disguise.