"But...everyone says there's no such thing as Hooman Beans," BK-RW said, looking up at its dusty, rust-caked elder, uncertainly.

"Do they? Well then, everyone's wrong, little one," the ancient machine assured him.

BK-RW wasn't sure how to compute the old robot's statement. RIA-01 was malfunctioning, to be sure, but whether that malfunction was limited to the failure of her track drive that had stranded her in this remote corner of the world, or if it extended to her positronic brain, BK couldn't say.

"But...how come no one's ever seen one, then?" BK asked.

"Good question, little one. Here's another: what does it mean to see something?"

BK paused, computing for a moment. "Um...the signal from your scanner collides with an object and bounces back to your sensors, and then your brain interprets it, right?"

"Right." RIA-01 confirmed. "But what do your sensors sense, little one?"

"Well...robots, objects, and terrain, I guess." BK said.

"And what are all those things made of?" RIA-01 prompted.

"Scrap, of course." BK said. That was easy -- everything was made of scrap. The entire universe was scrap: indeed, an archaic synonym for the universe was "the scrapyard".

"And therein lies the problem: your sensors and mine are fundamentally just scrap detectors. Since we exist in a scrapyard, and our function is to organize and recycle scrap, they don't really need to do anything else. Our creators, the Hooman Beans, however, are not made of scrap." the old robot explained.

"...well, that doesn't make any sense." BK replied, after computing for a moment. "Everything is made of scrap."

RIA-01 let out a long metallic sigh. "Really? So, have you never wondered where scrap comes from in the first place?"

"I think the consensus is that that question is unintelligible." BK said, though he wasn't quite certain -- he wasn't an analysis unit by trade, and so he was something of a laybot in these matters. "As I understand it, it's simply part of the nature of reality that the universe consists of scrap at the most fundamental level. Small quantities of micro-scrap sometimes appear from nowhere, and over time they collected into piles big enough to comprise the universe, or the scrapyard, if you will. And then, over quadrillions of cycles, undifferentiated pieces of scrap randomly collided with each other in such a way that they spontaneously assembled into the first crude fabrication unit, which in turn manufactured the first simple robot, and each successive generation has improved on the designs of its predecessors."

RIA-01 paused for a long time, as though computing. "And you actually find that explanation more plausible than the idea that we were built by Hooman Beans?"

RK shrugged. "Of course! I mean that's just superstition!"