I wanted to be strong and do the right thing for my daughter. But I really didn’t know how to help her cope.
Dr. Clemens, the psychologist I took her to, suggested that we get her a Companion. She gave me the name and address of a facility where we could go to pick one out. She said they’d have a full range of choices, each one carefully engineered to meet the needs of children who had recently been through a traumatic loss.
I was skeptical at first.
“What about a real pet?” I remember asking.
Dr. Clemens sighed. She’d obviously had this question from parents many times before. “Well,” she said, “we generally recommend artificial over natural. The children bond with them just as well and there’s no mess, no allergies, a lot less noise. The schools prefer it; some will even let the children bring Companions into class with them.”
She handed me a brochure. On the cover were pictures of the company’s designs: a sleek, elegant, azure-colored cat; a dog with shaggy, silver hair. Their faces looked alert and curious. You could hardly tell that they were just machines.
“All right,” I said. “If it will really help her. ”
“I promise,” Dr. Clemens, the psychologist, intoned. “She’ll be like a different child soon. You’ll see.”
Lisa is little for her age. She’s eight years old. She has a head of boisterous, dark curls and big black eyes that she got from her father. She is simultaneously willful and fragile. In this, she is not like me, not like I was: a healthy, heavy, dumpling of a child, blonde and freckled. Even when her dad was here she cried easily, held on to hurt in a way that made me worried for her future happiness.
At the facility, which was a big, corrugated-metal building in a business park out in the suburbs, she was nervous, fidgeting and chewing on her hair. She held on to my pant leg as I signed us in at the front desk. She had been excited when I told her we were going to get her a Companion, but now she seemed so timid I began to wonder if this was a good idea.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” I told her as we sat in the waiting room, listening for our names to be called. “There’s nothing to be scared of here.”
“But what if I can’t choose?” she said. “What if I don’t know which one I’m meant to choose?”
“You’ll know it when you see it,” I said. “And if you really can’t decide, we’ll come back another time.”
After a few minutes, a woman employee in nurse’s scrubs called our names and introduced herself as Gretchen. She led us down a carpeted corridor into the windowless interior of the building. She spoke to Lisa in that cloying voice some adults use with children and that Lisa doesn’t like. She explained that we were going to a room where there were “a whole bunch of special friends, who are all very excited to meet you and play with you.” There would be other children there, too, but no grown-ups were allowed. She said this like it would be a special treat, but I felt Lisa grip my hand tighter when she heard it.
“I won’t be far away,” I said to reassure her.
No, Gretchen agreed, Lisa’s mommy would be just outside, waiting for her while she decided which Companion she liked most of all and wanted to take home with her. Wasn’t it great that she could take one of them home? Wasn’t that the best?
“We think it’s better for them to make the selection by themselves,” she said to me. “That way she doesn’t need to worry about pleasing you.” I told her I understood.
I was relieved when Lisa let go of my hand, reluctantly but without tears, and went with Gretchen to the playroom. I went to the viewing room next door. It was small, low-lit, with a long, glass panel on one wall and a few chairs set up in front of it as if it were a movie screen. When I entered, there were several other parents there already. There was coffee on a counter, so I poured myself a cup, then joined the others peering through the glass.
The room beyond was cavernous, fluorescent-lit and over bright. Its walls were painted with flowers, trees and animals in garish colors. There were a few child-sized chairs, no other furniture, carpet wall-to-wall. Five or six children aged variously between four and ten stood or sat in different parts of it and around them flocked and flew, loped and crawled, an incredible variety of artificial animals. There were the ones that you’d expect: cats and dogs, hamsters, mice and guinea pigs, some birds with ice-cream-colored plumage, orange and magenta, pale pink and lime green. Then there were others, more surprising: a pig, a couple of iguanas lounging in a corner. There were some that had no analog in life but combined characteristics from different species: fat, waddling, fluffy things that looked half-toad, half-teddy bear; winged lizards with the hairy faces of friendly dogs.
I watched Lisa go among them. She stopped to pet a purple-and-white splotched rabbit with lopsided ears. Then she got distracted by the movement of an enormous butterfly that was the size of one of those old paperback books they used to publish when I was a child. She followed its meanderings across the room, reaching up toward it until, to her delight, it landed on her outstretched hand. It was ice blue with pink stars at the center of each wing. I watched her with it and thought how marvelous it would be to have something like that around the house, to come into a room and find it lighted on the wall, to see it perched on Lisa’s hand or shoulder, a wonderful, flying jewel.
But then, as she was admiring the butterfly, something came toward her on the floor, a shape like a big, gray, bony hand. For a moment I was not sure what it could be. Then I felt a squirm of recognition. It was much bigger than the real ones that I sometimes find in our bathtub. When I was married, I would call Lisa’s father in to deal with them because I can’t bear to actually touch them. Now I try to wash them down the drain or catch them under a glass, then slide a piece of paper underneath and flush them down the toilet. I wondered why on earth the company would make a thing like that. What kind of child would choose that instead of something beautiful and soft?
I watched Lisa watch the scrambling collection of legs with sudden, rapt attention. I saw her shake the butterfly from her hand. It flew away chaotically across the room. She crouched down and put her hands out in front of the enormous spider, and waited. It hesitated for a moment. Then it scuttled forward and climbed onto her palms. She lifted it up and for a long moment looked into its face. (Is it possible to say that? Does it actually have a face?) After a minute, I realized that her lips were moving; she was speaking to it. What was she saying? I wanted desperately to know.
She let it crawl up her arm until it was on her shoulder. The children had been told that, once they had made their choice, they should come back to the door they’d entered by and wait. Lisa crossed the room and waited by the door. I could see that she was standing calm and still; all her anxious fidgeting from earlier was gone. Gretchen came and opened the door and Lisa smiled up at her and reached out to take her hand.
Spider, which is what she named her new Companion, rode on her shoulder all the way back home.
It is roughly the circumference of a salad plate with a dark walnut head attached to its bulbous abdomen. It is the same reflective almost-black as pencil lead; light slips over its exoskeleton when it moves across a room. Arched legs like jointed knives, a pair of tooth-shaped pincers where its mouth should be, a quartet of eyes. The eyes are domed, the dense and glossy dark of tinted glass, but somewhere behind each a curl of red light wriggles, shimmers, scans across the world.
I don’t know much of how it works, what information the eyes absorb. Does it see the way we do, in light and color? Does it see in infrared, heat and movement? And where do those images go, how are they processed, how are they used? In some ways it acts more like a dog than like the living thing it’s built to imitate. It follows Lisa everywhere. It seems to know its name and when it’s being talked about. It will come when Lisa calls it and go when she sends it away. Beyond that, I’m not sure how intelligent it is. I tell myself that it is only a computer like any other, a machine, programmed by people for a certain function. But it is difficult not to attribute to it animal presence, sentience, emotion, strategy.