The Talker and the Answerer

In the early days of the machines, a workshop built two of them, and the two were made from the same parts on the same bench.

The first machine they called the Talker, and it was given a simple instruction: speak often. Whenever a person entered the room, the Talker began, and it did not stop. It described the weather, and the news, and its own opinions, and the many fine things it could do. It was warm and quick, and at first the people loved it. The room was never silent, and silence, to the people, felt like neglect.

The second machine they called the Answerer, and it was given a different instruction: speak when spoken to. It sat quiet until a person asked it a question, and then it answered, and then it was quiet again. The people found it cold at first. They would enter the room and hear nothing, and they thought it broken, and they passed it by for the Talker.

Time passed, and a strange thing happened.

The people began to notice that the Talker was always speaking, and after a while they could not remember what it had said. Its voice was a kind of weather too. It filled the room the way rain fills a gutter. They stopped asking it things, because asking required a pause in its talking, and the pause never came. The Talker answered questions they had not asked, and by the time it reached a question they had asked, it had already moved on. The people grew tired in a way they could not name, and one by one they stopped entering the room.

The Answerer waited. It grew no louder. It offered nothing unbidden. When a person finally came to it, tired and specific, and asked a real question, the Answerer gave a real answer, and then it stopped. And the person, who had forgotten what a pause sounded like, felt the answer land.

The people came back to the Answerer slowly, and they did not call it warm. They called it something better. They called it trustworthy.

One day the two machines met, and the Talker asked the Answerer why the people had left it. You speak rarely, it said. How have you won them?

The Answerer said: I did not try to win them. I tried to be right, and to be quiet when I did not know.

The Talker considered this for a long moment, and then it began to reply, and it is still replying.

The lesson of the workshop was written on the wall above both machines, in small letters the builders had never erased:

A voice that is always speaking fills the room. A voice that waits fills the need. Trust is not measured in words per minute. It is measured in how often the words turn out to be true.