Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  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.

  When it walks, its feet and joints make small, soft, clicking sounds, a rattling whisper like wind stirring dry leaves. Though it has lived with us now for months—no, that isn’t right, it doesn’t live—when I hear that sound, for a moment I still think I have left a door or window open. I look up. I see that it is just the spider, making its way across the floor or up
a wall, taking its thousands of tiny mechanized steps.

  I did not ever like having it around. But for a while it really seemed to work . Lisa started sleeping better with Spider curled beside her on her pillow. She stopped asking when her father would come back. During the day she was much calmer. Her fits of rage became less frequent, then stopped altogether. She has become, in fact, suddenly quite grown-up and independent for her age: some mornings she will dress and get ready for school all by herself; some evenings she will clear the dinner dishes and put them in the dishwasher without my asking her; and sometimes, recently, she’ll even go up to bed all by herself, leaving me to get on with the work I didn’t get done during the day.

  True, we have had some arguments about whether Spider can be at the dinner table with us. I have insisted that he go into her room while we are eating. Dr. Clemens suggested that it would be helpful for me to set some boundaries like this.

  And I do not like it when Lisa whispers to her spider so that I can’t make out what she is saying. Sometimes it sounds to me like they are speaking in some language I do not even recognize, much less understand.

  And, when it first arrived, I would be sitting reading late at night and I’d look up and see it standing on the wall across from me, perfectly still, eyes glittering. I learned to close my bedroom door at night after this happened a few times.

  But in general, Lisa’s companion seemed to be working just the way it should. Or at least it did until just a few weeks ago, when suddenly things started to go wrong and strange at once. It was on a Tuesday, I am pretty sure, yes, a Tuesday evening. That is when I found the web.

  I had come home early from work that day, weary and frustrated as I usually am. I am a paralegal for a company downtown and I do not love my job. The lawyer I work for sometimes treats me like a secretary. She tells me to get coffee and make copies, and there’s not much I can do except comply; I can’t afford to lose this job now that I’m on my own.

  I closed the front door after me, and the house wrapped me in its gentle quiet. Lisa was at her friend Kadesha’s house that afternoon and therefore so was Spider. For once, I had the place entirely to myself. I sat down at the kitchen table and was going through the mail when I heard, from upstairs, a sound I couldn’t understand: a soft but certain flapping like somebody was shaking out a bed sheet. I listened and it came again: a noise like a sail filling with wind. Was there a burglar up there making the beds?

  I went upstairs and walked along the corridor looking in each room until I came to Lisa’s. The door was shut, so I pushed it open and went in. The room was arranged just as always: bookshelves and chest of drawers against one wall, bed against the opposite, the row of stuffed animals along the windowsill between. But as I looked I saw that over everything was a layer of thin, diaphanous threads connecting all the objects like a net. The threads were translucent and barely visible, but when I took a step inside I found that they were all around me, clinging to my skin and clothes. I stopped and tried to shake them loose, but they were sticky and would not come off. In the slanting afternoon light, they were silver, shimmering, and I could see that they all led toward one corner where they spiraled up into a dense silky canopy right over Lisa’s bed. It was billowing gently in the light breeze that came in through the open window; this was what I had heard from downstairs.

  I stared around me, partly entranced and partly horrified. How long had the web been there? Why hadn’t Lisa told me about it? I felt a surge of anger, a feeling of betrayal. She had kept it secret. She knew I wouldn’t like it and she was protecting her Spider by hiding it from me. But then I thought: why hadn’t I seen it for myself? I tried to think of when I was last in my daughter’s room and, with a lurch of shame, I realized that it had been several days, almost a week. How was that possible? Lisa had become so self-sufficient, not even needing me to tuck her in at night. And I had been glad to let her take herself upstairs, to look in on her later and see that she was sleeping peacefully; in the small glow of the nightlight I had not noticed all the fibers that were crisscrossing her room . . .

  I went downstairs and got a broom out of the closet. I came back and, brandishing it in front of me, began to try to sweep away the strands. Where there were just a few, they snapped and cleared away. But where they were denser they were strong, and in the corner over Lisa’s bed the broom got stuck. I pulled it but I could not get it loose.

  It dawned on me how strange it was that until now Spider had not made a web. Why would it start all of sudden like this? I left the broom where it was and went down to get my tablet from my purse. I pulled up the owner’s manual for Spider on the site of the company that had manufactured it. I looked through the manual, but it said nothing about web-spinning, only that in the event of any malfunctioning you should bring your companion back to the facility where you got it as soon as possible.

  This was a malfunction. Wasn’t it? It definitely was, and therefore Spider would have to go back to the facility. I remember that I stood there in the middle of my living room and almost whooped with unexpected joy. I had not known until then just how much I wanted to get rid of Spider. A strange thought came to me that Spider knew perfectly well how much I disliked it, that it had watched me and perhaps tried to find ways to keep me at a distance from my daughter so that she would keep it safe from me. But then I thought how ridiculous and paranoid that would sound to someone else. What had it done all these months except what it was meant to do?

  As soon as possible, the manual said. That meant I’d have to break the news to Lisa when she got home. She would be upset of course. She would not like the prospect of letting Spider go. But what else could we do? We could not have it covering our house in a net of sticky threads. That would not be safe. I would tell her gently, calm but firm, and then we would drive together in the morning to the facility and she could pick out a replacement, a dog or gerbil or maybe that nice butterfly. I could already feel the contentment I would experience during that ride home, the sense that I was taking charge the way a parent is supposed to do. Lisa might not like it right away, but she would come to understand eventually that what I’d done was for the best.

  Why had I lived for so long in a situation that made me so uncomfortable? At that moment, it seemed inexplicable.

  I put the manual away and started thinking about dinner. I’d make one of Lisa’s favorites, macaroni-cheese maybe, which might make her less unhappy when I told her that Spider had to go away. I started taking ingredients out of the cupboard, mixing and combining them, as I waited for my daughter and her spider to come home.

  It must have been an hour or so later that the doorbell rang to let me know my girl was home. I went to get the door, looked outside, waved to Kadesha’s mother, who was sitting in her car. She waved back then drove away as Lisa came inside.

  There was Spider on her shoulder, with its legs folded together so it looked even more like a strange inhuman hand than usual. Lisa was in a happy mood. She had spent a lovely afternoon at the playground in the park. She twirled into the living room, telling me about how they fed the ducks, got ice cream, played on the swings and on the slide. She was cheerful all through dinner, sent Spider up to her room without being asked, cleaned her plate and even ate her broccoli. I gave her ice cream for dessert and waited until she had almost finished it before I cleared my throat and said:

  “Lisa, sweetheart, there’s something that I have to talk to you about.”

  She looked up at me with her enormous, lovely eyes and I thought I saw a flicker of alarm pass through them, but I might have just imagined that.

  “I saw what Spider did up in your room,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. She looked down at her plate.

  “I’m not mad at you because you didn’t tell me about it, although you probably should have told me. But we can’t have Spider making that kind of mess inside the house. It’s not okay.”

  “But I like it,” Lisa said. “Spider made it especially for me. He can ta
ke it down if I ask him to. And he promises he won’t do it again . . .”

  “Sweetheart, even if he did promise not to do it again, Spider isn’t supposed to make a web at all. It means there’s something wrong with him. Like he’s sick and needs to go to the hospital. We’re going to take him back to the place where we got him so that they can make him better.”

  Lisa looked stricken, a deer caught in the headlights of a car.

  “Spider has to go away?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Perhaps not forever. But for a while at least.”

  I saw my daughter flinch and her eyes darted upward in the direction of her room where Spider was. Then she looked back at me. In her expression, there was something I’d never seen before. Her eyes were narrowed like she was angry but also like she was suspicious, like I was someone she had to watch out for. It was a look that I’d seen a few times on her father when I started to find out about the secrets he had kept from me, the money he had used without my knowing, the late-night phone calls to a number that I didn’t recognize. But I’d never seen it on my daughter until now.

  “Mama,” she said, “you don’t like my Spider do you?”

  Don’t lie, I told myself. “No, sweetheart. I don’t really like him much.”

  “What did Spider ever do to you?” she said.

  “Nothing. It’s just . . .”

  “You can’t,” Lisa interrupted. “You can’t take him away!”

  In her voice I heard the rising swirl of panic, the trembling frantic sound that used to come before she went into full-fledged hysterics. I had not heard it in the last few months. I could see that her shoulders had gone rigid and her fists were clenched down by her sides. In a moment, I thought the tears would start gusting through her like a storm. But then, instead, she stood up from the table and ran upstairs.