Ríta's dark brown eyes, ones that normally held a tiny glimmer, stayed fixed on her fidgeting hands beneath the table. She listened to the four boys around her, the rest of a five-person team chosen for a summer internship, tasked with building an autonomous robotic platform for assembling electrode cells in chemistry research. She was the only girl, the only Hispanic student. These characteristics never bothered her, not until her dark curly hair bounced up as the robotic arm beside them stalled mid test, and she was the only one who spoke up. "I think it's the training data," Ríta said, confident in the research she'd spent hours preparing. "We teleoperated the arm to record its movements, but once we run that footage through the software, it converts into code the arm can actually read to move on its own. If the conversion's off, the movement will be too." The boys glanced at each other, then back at her, silent, before nodding and drifting into their own conversation, laughing about something unrelated. Behind them, the lab hummed with graduate students working on their own research, students who had stopped by twice that week to see how the team's robot was coming along, genuinely invested in watching a robot take over a task their own labs did constantly by hand. Ríta sighed. She knew what this meant. Their team had spent weeks shadowing researchers before choosing their own task, settling on electrode cell assembly almost immediately, drawn to the idea that a robot could handle a process possible by hand, but slow and exhausting to repeat with precision. If it worked, chemists could hand off the most repetitive part of their experiments and return to consistent results. It was a small machine carrying a large promise: that robotics could make room for more human thinking, not less. Her family, immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala, had taught her what it meant to work for something bigger than convenience. As a first-generation Latina in STEM, she carried a quiet responsibility: to prove, to her community and herself, that girls like her belonged in rooms like this one, not as an exception, but as a fixture of robotics' future. She reached down and clutched the small yellow keychain clipped to her jeans by a metallic pink chain. She'd built him the winter before, the same year she became captain of her school's all girls robotics team, a title she'd earned by showing up first and staying latest. Watto wasn't built for anything serious. He held a Tetris style game for boring car rides, jotted quick reminders, counted down timers when she forgot to eat during long build nights. She'd added a simple AI chat feature almost as an afterthought, closer to a talking pet than a real tool, a small yellow face with round orange buttons and a star shaped keychain hook, built purely because she loved robotics enough to build something just for fun. "They don't hear me, Watto," she whispered under the table. His screen lit up, cheerful. "That's silly! You already knew the answer. You said it first!" "They didn't listen, though." "Then say it again. Louder! I believe in you, and I'm always right," he chirped, a tiny, animated star spinning across his face. Ríta huffed a laugh despite herself. It was hard to stay discouraged next to something so relentlessly happy. The next morning, the arm drifted off calibration mid run, the exact flaw she'd flagged the day before and watched get brushed aside. Their mentor was due back within the hour, and the boys hesitated, unsure how to fix it in time. Ríta didn't wait. She walked to the console, pulled up the training data log herself, and said it loud enough that no one could talk over her. "It's a lag in the conversion. I flagged this yesterday. Here's the fix." She began typing, her hands moving the way they had for years in her makerspace, certain and sure of herself. This time, the boys leaned in. One adjusted the sensor angle at her suggestion. The arm steadied. The calibration held. The simulation ran clean for the first time all week, the robotic hand closing around a test cell with a precision none of them had seen before. No one clapped. No one apologized for the days before. By the final week, when their mentor asked who would present the work, four boys looked at Ríta, and she stepped forward without hesitation, her voice steadier than it had been on day one. That night, back in her dorm, she held Watto in her palm, the keychain that had ridden in her pocket all summer and would ride home with her the same way. "Thank you," she said quietly, "for being loud when I couldn't be." His screen blinked, bright and certain. "That's what I'm for!" Isaac Asimov gave robots laws built to protect humanity from harm, obedience, and self-destruction, nothing about protecting a person's belief in themselves. The robots of the near future may hold a quieter purpose, one Asimov never wrote into his laws: not just protecting people from harm, but reflecting back the confidence the world sometimes withholds. The lab's autonomous arm represented one kind of future, machines built to carry the technical weight of discovery, freeing human hands for bigger questions. Watto represented another kind entirely, small and unserious on the surface, yet quietly powerful in reminding one girl her voice had always been worth raising. Neither robot was built to replace a person. Both, in their own way, were built to make more room for one. Somewhere in a lab not so different from this one, there is another Ríta, quiet for now, carrying an idea nobody has heard yet, and maybe a small yellow keychain of her own. That may be robotics' real opportunity ahead: not only smarter machines, but tools, massive or pocket sized, that help the next generation of Hispanic girls in STEM trust the knowledge they already carry.