Where is my Persocom?

Chobits was something that I watched in the very early days of my fascination with anime, and it was to be a series that would have a lasting impact on me. Although Chi is the main persocom character, by far it was Sumomo that sticks in my memory.

A quick bit of description: a persocom is an android, basically, able to move around and about the size and shape of a person. They're computers that can talk and interact, but can't feel emotion. Sumomo was an example of the mobile-phone version, a tiny version of the persocom model that could do most of the things a normal-sized persocom could.

But where is Sumomo? Why don't we have little people that we talk to with all the natural speech we use when conversing with each other? Mobile phones with personality, that can move and act? Instead, we have Asimo, the Honda robot that walks a little bit like it's had a nasty accident in its trousers.

Whenever I've talked about this with others, one problem comes up quite quickly: the idea that it's hard to fit all of the important things that you get in a mobile phone into something the size of a BJD. So recently I've been thinking, what if most of the processing power was in the jacket you wear, or a box it sits on on your desk, and the inside of the little robot was just for the mechanical components?

And that's where this week's Pocket Fiction comes from. What if your tiny persocom was stolen? How would it react? In the case of Toshiko (which literally means 'clever girl'), she just can't give in...