Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

“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.