The Terminator this ain’t. What we get are four vignettes about life issues, with some robots thrown in as reflections of the characters’ inner conflicts. My Robot Baby has a yuppie couple struggling to care for an adopted mechanical infant. As soon as you see its cute, egg-like shell, you know it will be more of a handful than it appears. The bots of The Robot Fixer are the broken action figures of a young man in a coma. His estranged mother displaces her worry by repairing and completing his valuable collection. Machine Love stages an office romance between two data-entry automatons. They absorb, process and transform the abuse they receive from their human coworkers into a surprising display of humanity. Clay deals with issues of identity and free will in the face of death.

These collected shorts bring to mind a low-tech, simplified A.I. Each story is brief and spare, focusing on basic character motivations and development. It’s not the most exciting bunch of shorts, but it’s interesting to see emotional themes explored with a dash of sci-fi.

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