Speak, Fetch, Say I Love You
I’m sifting through a nearly empty bin of spare parts, trying to repair my neighbor’s robo-dog, yelling to my son to ask if he’s seen any second-generation leg servos, when a customer walks through the door, a little girl carrying a PupPal 3.0 Pomeranian model in a bright pink tote bag.
“Aki,” I yell. “Aki, I need help.” I message him on his phone. I’m about to go search for him when he finally emerges from his room wearing headphones, giving me that same look he gave me when he said he wished the plague had taken me instead of his mother. He’s become a master of emotional manipulation, saying anything to hurt me, to avoid being punished for bad behavior: staying out late, getting caught with alcohol and cigarettes in his bedroom. I’m not worried necessarily. It isn’t like he’s going to run out and join the yakuza. Mostly he just spends hours in his room trying to cover pop songs with his mother’s shamisen, while her old robo-dog shimmies at his feet and plays recordings of her singing in the hospital, the only original record we have of what she sounded like.
“What is it?” he says.
“We have a customer,” I say. “I thought we had a deal. You help me and you get pocket money.” Of course, he used to help me for free, but these days I’m willing to bribe the kid for face time.
“No, you have a customer,” he says. He goes into the kitchen, pours himself an orange juice, grabs a rice ball wrapped in plastic wrap.
“Very mature,” I say.
His demeanor softens when he glances at the little girl. He sits at the service counter, and I see him studying the tiny pink supernovas on her face, a side effect of one of the most recent experimental preventative drugs used to manage the spread. It’s been over a year since his mother died （followed by two aunts, an uncle, a cousin）， and while Aki’s a good kid, he’s always holed up in his room or moving through the house like I don’t exist. The pigtailed girl takes out her unit and activates it on the counter, sending the dog two unsteady steps forward before it collapses on its front legs. The head twitches uncontrollably, shifting its focus between me and its owner. The girl reaches deep into her overall pockets and stacks some coins one by one on the counter, followed by a couple of wrinkled yen notes.
“What’s wrong with Mochi?” she asks. I could show her the spreadsheet of dissatisfied clients on my computer; my reputation as a miracle worker is spiraling out of control, people bringing in their robo-dogs with blind hope—dead on arrival, dead on arrival, dead on arrival. I could do that, but this girl is too young. I lie constantly to my customers, even to the adults, about the chances for their plastic best friends. It’s hard to tell the truth when, for so many, these robo-pets are the most tangible memories they have of the loved ones they’ve lost.
Mochi begins playing “Happy Birthday” and then unexpectedly changes over to one of the preprogrammed techno club beats, LED eyes flashing flower patterns in rainbow colors. The dog sways from one side to the other, pointing its paw in the air like it’s Saturday Night Fever. Left paw. Right paw. Right paw. Right paw—and then it collapses, nearly rolling off the counter as the music turns to static. The little girl looks like she is going to cry.
“Why don’t you introduce our customer to Hollywood,” I tell Aki. “Get her a snack. I have some work to do here. It’ll take some time.”
“Can he fix her?” the little girl asks and pushes the money across the counter. I wave away her pocket change, slide it back toward her.
“She’ll be here when you get back,” I say. “Good as new.” Aki shoots me a look as if to say Are you just going to keep lying to people like you lied to me about Mom getting better?
I’ve seen cases like this before—corrupted firmware, third-party programs that can barely run on their five-year-old operating systems. I can’t do much, but I always try to find a short-term solution when there are kids involved. If the girl had come to me six years ago, before the pandemic, I could have helped her easily, but the 2RealRobotics Inc. canine plant where I’d worked has since laid me off, converted to exclusively producing robo-friend and robo-lover lines. Spare parts are hard to come by these days. There are scuff marks all over Mochi’s body from where the dog has fallen. A piece of paper covered with tape instructs anyone who finds the pet to return it to an address in Meguro ward. I open the head panel—the serial number indicates a 2025 model. The little girl likely has no memory of a time before Mochi.