Niccolo is an eleven-year-old boy living in a highly structured, computer-dependent future society. He lacks the academic prowess of his peer group and expects to eventually become a control-board guard. Though he tries to hide it to appear tough, he harbors a sentimental attachment to his family's outdated storyteller robot and feels anxiety about his family's lack of wealth.

Paul is an assertive, intellectually curious eleven-year-old boy who excels in elementary circuits and programming. He plans to become a Computing Engineer and views older technology as useless junk. He actively leads his dynamic with Niccolo, organizing a secret club to learn the ancient "squiggles" (letters and numbers) that humans used before computers automated society.

The Bard is an outdated, squeaky-wheeled storyteller robot constructed from scarred and discolored plastic. It relies on a singular memory cylinder to generate predictable, heavily censored fairy tales where the "good guy" always wins. It serves as a passive background presence in the boys' lives until Paul decides to disassemble its casing and force it to absorb an audio tape about automation.

Mr. Daugherty is a teacher who takes a special interest in cultivating Paul's talent for computer programming. He maintains a collection of antiquated devices, including slide-rules and keyboards with letters. He firmly believes that human life before computers was messy and miserable, passing this historical view down to his students.

Niccolo's father is an unseen presence who limits his son's access to new technology due to financial constraints. His explicit refusal to purchase a new Bard model prompts Niccolo's defensive behavior when his peers criticize the household's older machinery.

Paul's father is an unseen figure who significantly shapes his son's worldview, particularly regarding societal control. He justifies the predictable, censored nature of robot stories as a necessary mechanism for keeping the younger generation compliant and orderly.