How High We Go in the Dark(40)

“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.

In the kitchen, Aki is introducing the girl to my late wife’s robo-dog, a husky puppy she named Hollywood. “Sit,” the girl says. “Shake hands, speak, let’s dance!” She tells Aki how she carries her dog everywhere in a bag and how Mochi likes to press her paws to the train window on the way to school. She tells him that her father died last year but still tells her stories every night through the recordings in Mochi’s memory bank. I’m inspecting Mochi’s head cavity with a penlight when I hear Aki whisper something to the little girl—and then after a few clicks of Hollywood’s paws, I hear my late wife’s voice singing.

I’m certain I won’t be able to return Mochi to her former self, but I bring her to my workshop anyway, sifting through the dozens of robo-dogs I’ve collected for spare parts—some donated by their owners in an effort to move on, others found online or in secondhand shops. Each has a name tag, and if I activated one, I might get a snapshot of their former life: a child’s prayers, a math game where numbers flash on the head screen, brief recordings of their family during happier times. I’ve promised their former owners that when I’m done salvaging their dogs for parts, I’ll hold a service so they can say goodbye. Somewhere among their ranks should be a replacement memory board. It won’t be Mochi, per se, but for a little girl who needs her best friend, who needs to believe her robo-dog will always be there for her, it’s something, at least.

I replace the motherboard and return to find the little girl sitting on the living room floor with my son, petting Hollywood. I set Mochi down in front of her. I’ve given the dog a pink collar and affixed a floral bow to her head.

“She’s just like new!” the little girl say, opening up her tote bag on the ground. It’s nearly as big as her, and she stuffs Mochi inside.

“Remember, Mochi is going to need some help getting back to her old self. Play with her, remind her of all the fun you’ve had together. Teach her the rules because she might have forgotten.” The little girl nods. I feel both heartened and guilty for how excited she is to have her best friend back. Maybe she’ll realize what I’ve done when she’s older and forgive me. I do know that one day, hopefully far enough in the future for her to outgrow the comforts of a plastic dog, Mochi will falter—a misstep leading to a fall down the stairs, an unbreakable audio loop, a failure to charge. I realize these are realities for Hollywood, too, that I’ve been pretending the occasional glitch or failure to respond to a command is simply a quirk in the technology. “Speak,” I say. Mochi lets out an excited series of barks and the girl’s bag shakes. “I’m glad I could help,” I tell her.