A childhood belief about technology

When I was about four, a friend and I thought we were quite the scientists. We planned to build space ships to fly into space, and always wanted to build robots. I used to spend all my library time at school reading up on how to build spaceships, and decided that we would have to be able to go faster than the speed of light to get where we wanted to in time.

One day I was visiting my friends house, and we were supposed to be building as robot, but my friend had lost the "chip" before i came over (the "chip" is the part that makes the robot work). I was really upset, until we decided we could just get a new chip from inside a battery. We started attacking a AA battery, but only black goo was coming out (battery acid). I told my friend, and he said, it's ok, the black goo is just in there to protect the "chip". I never found it, but for years I believed all i needed to make a robot work was the illusive "chip".