Jonah the Robot Dog

“Sign and date, please,” the vendor said, handing me a clipboard with a piece of paper fluttering in the cold January wind.

I signed my name slowly, trying to sort out the date in my head. How many nights had it been since I cooked that pathetic Christmas dinner over the tiny stove plugged into the cigarette lighter of the car? Ten? It was at least the 3^rdthen. Or maybe the 4^th?

I stared blankly at the wall stacked thinly with the canned goods I longed to buy. I gazed at a particularly perfect jar of jam, willing it to give me answer. “It’s the 7^th,” the vendor said, growing impatient and wanting to tend to paying customers queueing behind me. I felt so exposed.

I scribbled 7 and realized today was, in fact, January 7^th: the day we’d brought Jonah home exactly two years ago. I returned the clipboard in exchange for a tiny paper bag labeled adult +2.

I thanked him for my rations: tortillas, a tin of taco beans, and a large can of pears, and returned to the comfort of the reliable old car that was serving as our home during the interlude. I was thankful to be back inside the car, protected.

It wasn’t as cold as it had been, so I drove us down to the docks and popped the tailgate down so the boys could get some fresh air and I could appreciate the change of scenery. I wrapped their legs in wool blankets, Noah nodded passively, half-asleep, and Ethan cuddled into him, clearly freezing. The lingering warm air was departing with the sun faster than I’d anticpated, so I removed my gloves and put over his tiny hands. “Oh, Ethan.” I looked at his sweet face and tried not to cry. This isn’t the world I had planned to bring him into.  

Two years ago, everything was normal. The nights were exhausting because I was awake caring for baby Ethan and his toddler brother, Noah, who wouldn’t slept through the night, but the days were full of love. They each had their own room. We lived at home with cell phones and tablets and running water and enough warm beds for all of us. My partner, Erin, was still with us. And there were no robots to worry about.

Everything was different now.

None of my sci-fi reading prepared me for this particular apocalypse. It was an us verses them scenario and the robots were winning. I felt guilty since I associated all of the changes with Jonah: the robot dog we adopted two years ago. That’s when things first felt abnormal.  

Erin had offered a solution for all of us: a tiny robotic dog named Jonah. And maybe if I hadn’t been so exhausted and overwhelmed, I would have had the forethought to say no, but I couldn’t. Mostly because she had been part of the prototype team developing the robotic companions, and I knew she was delighted to finally bring one home. She said it was to help me, to be the second parent that she couldn’t be, and I believed that. But it was clearly also incredibly exciting to her to know that our boys would be some of the first in the world to grow up alongside a robot.

And I think her excitement clouded her judgement. Because she’d run the experiments. She knew the risks. But she disregarded them.

Noah was uneasy around the robot at first. Jonah the dog was neither alive nor a toy, so he wasn’t sure how to interact with it. But baby Ethan, on the other hand, loved him without even a grain of caution. Their connection was immediate. He relied on Jonah for everything, and Jonah knew his mannerisms and anticipated every cry – providing comfort and companionship in a way that I couldn’t.

I guess, in hindsight, I resented Jonah from the beginning. Unlike my infallible human self, Jonah had endless patience. He wasn’t impacted by fatigue or annoyed by hair pulling or spit up, he just showed up and cared for baby Ethan as if he was his own. Their relationship always made me a bit uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. And he drew distance between me and Erin, too. Erin came home from work wanting to know what Jonah did, what behaviors did Jonah learn, Jonah was her baby and I didn’t like that my baby had an intrinsic attachment to this machine that was just that – an object – to the rest of us.

I tried to give the robot up a few times, and I swear it knew. Of course it did. It was always listening and learning and accommodating, even to our most private conversations late at night. And so he stayed.

Eventually, I grew to recognize Jonah for what he was: a tool to help me. He learned to fetch discarded pacifiers, warm blankets, and even watch Ethan in the tub. I wouldn’t trust Noah – a four-year-old – to mind his baby brother, but I felt safe leaving him for a moment or two because Jonah was there with hyperactive reflex moves. If Ethan were to fall, Jonah could pull him up out of the water faster than I could – a point that had been proven when Jonah gripped my arm with his teeth.

But I never felt alone in the house with Jonah there, for better or worse.

“If it’s too much, you can turn him off.” Erin showed me. “Just hold this button for thirty seconds, and then flip the switch. See? He’s off.”

I watched in fascination as this forever hovering creature became an inanimate object. I felt better knowing that I had that option, it gave me a sense of control.

I thought about using the off switch often, but I rarely actually did. For one thing, I didn’t like to touch it. Jonah was always there, hovering. Helping to fold laundry. Picking up food scraps, but never ingesting them like a real dog, just moving things together into a disgusting pile that it would signal for me to clean up.

Then the news stories started. Live-in robotic companions, like Jonah, were a little too good at picking up human mannerisms and learning commands, and some of the newer prototypes were being trained to fight and coerced harm others.

Then the raids happened, and since Erin was a target, we were asked to leave, for her protection and ours. We were supposed to move to a protected sanctuary for at-risk humans, but. We could have brought Jonah with us to be rehabilitated off-site, but I knew transporting him would make us a target, so Erin suggested we switch him off and store him in the laundry room the night we left. She assured me, “He’ll remember us this way. And when things are safe and we’re back, he’ll pick up right where you left off. Whether it’s two weeks or two years, to him, it will be tomorrow.” And that seemed like enough.

Except, I forgot to switch him off.

I didn’t realize right away. I was thrilled for the break, and I felt so much comfort in imagining him as an inanimate object in a cupboard. I only remembered days later when we were a thousand miles away sleeping safely in a hotel room in route to the sanctuary. There, the guilt plagued me.

I never told the boys, of course, but I haunted myself with the thought of him suffering alone every night, and I felt a tremendous amount of guilt. I had an explanation. I’d had trouble finding the switch. I didn’t like to pick him up or touch him, so I meant to ask Noah to do it. I knew he’d be able to take care of it effortlessly, but I forgot to ask him. And for a split moment I considered bringing Jonah with us, despite the risk, but the chaos and fear clouded my thoughts and once we were all safely in the car, I just drove.

Then reports of abandoned robot companions began surfacing on the radio and I was terrified. Their actions were more damaging and destructive than thought possible and they were seeking revenge on the people who had hurt them.

Erin called in from her research unit, reminding us that we had nothing to worry about because we had always treated Jonah the robot dog with love and respect. I knew I needed to tell her but I couldn’t, I just took her advice to “keep driving – stay away from all of this” so I drove the kids back to the tiny beach town where I’d grown up on the east coast. I wanted to give them a piece of my childhood, and the refugee site would give us daily rations until we could get back. I thought it was the best solution for the time-being, but it was winter, and it was crowded and supplies and spaces were limited, so it was all horrible.  

I spent hours driving around to keep the kids warm. We spent evenings at the refugee center or at a campsite, or by the docks. I tried to push the memory of Jonah abandoned in the laundry room away from my mind, but it found me on long stretches of quiet road and again almost every night. When I thought of him there, alone waiting and suffering, the pit in my stomach grew and grew. Unable to sleep with no desire to eat, he would just wait, in patience, but for how long?

I tried to convince myself that it was okay. He’s not alive, I reminded himself. Not he, it. It’s not alive. It’s just a robot. And it has everything it needs in the laundry room jail cell. What I didn’t know is that all the time it was learning. The same way it had learned about compassion and gentleness from growing up with Ethan, now it was learning about abandonment and defeat. It learned about longing and missing. It learned how to cry and sob. It cried a lot. He, not it.

And it’s been a year. It’s been a year.

I thought about the date, again, white I warmed taco beans over the tiny heater. I felt excited for a new flavor, but also worried it would be too spicy for Noah. These are the things you worry about in the same breath when it comes to kids: their life and safety and well-being and then also spice level of the rationed taco beans. Both boys turned up their noses at the tortillas, but they ate them, earnestly. They knew it’s all we had, and that broke me.

We’ll do something special tomorrow, I thought.

We I spent the day collecting cans to turn into the recycling center until I had twelve dollars worth, just enough for a pizza. The boys were delighted with the thought.

I didn’t realize when I placed the order was this particular delivery service was employing rescued robot dogs: giving them a renewed sense of purpose, and rehabilitating them to exist safely in the community. Had I known, I wouldn’t have risked it.

The pizza delivery driver stopped ahead of the road block, the space separating us in our protected oasis from the outside world. A joyful robotic dog ran toward us with the pizza box in his mouth. For a short moment I was unnerved by this until I remembered that these robots are rehabilitated and that robot dogs don’t produce slobber. But as it drew closer, I became increasingly uneasy for another reason: I knew this dog.

He recognized Ethan right away. Jonah the robot dog dropped the pizza in the back of the car, as instructed, and then leaned into Ethan lovingly – his presence alone causing Ethan to cry out and laugh and gasp for breath all at once. Of course he remembered.

The confused driver called out to Jonah to return to the van he knew his name but Jonah stayed exactly where he was, frozen in time and encapsulated in the hug he’d craved for well over a year now. And they both looked at me: the baby and the baby dog, and saw me for who I was, the mother who had abandoned them both, in a sense.

The deep pain I’d felt was briefly replaced with a sense of relief in realizing that Jonah was okay, after all. He hadn’t been forever locked in the laundry room jail cell. But then the sinking feeling of guilt crept in. He had been suffering. He, not it. He needed to be rescued and rehabilitated. He was okay now, but for a while, he was not.

“Is that Jonah?” Noah asked, passively, when he realized. And I didn’t know what to say.

He wasn’t ours anymore. He still loved Ethan, clearly. And Noah. He cuddled them both, but I couldn’t even pet him. He wanted my blood.  

After a third whistle from the delivery van, Jonah hopped up and departed, but not after clipping my ankle aggressively with his sharp teeth on his way out. How were they so sharp? Bastard dog I muttered.

We ate the pizza, by the docks, but a deep sadness hung over all of us. I resented Jonah for ruining the otherwise sweetest evening we’d had in months. I resented him for ruining everything. I felt infected with resurfaced guilt and imagined another rogue robot running toward me, crashed into the car, biting my leg and aggressively gnawing at my shoe. I shook him off and realized there was nothing there. We left, traumatized.

Later, while carrying Ethan out of the public bathroom, two dogs snipped at my heels like it was a planned attack. How did they get here? But then they were gone again. I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined them.

I didn’t realize at first, and wouldn’t for weeks, but he’d marked all of us. Jonah the Robot Dog had lovingly designated Noah and Ethan as safe, but he made me a target. I thought about going to the authorities, but there was no way for me to explain this without confessing what I’d done. And then I’d be a criminal, responsible for contributing to the uprising. I couldn’t turn myself in.

Instead, I live out this quarantine fiercely afraid of imaginary robot dogs lurking around corners. Now I’m always bracing for the worse. For a while I was afraid a robot dog was going to lock me out of the car, or lock me in a small bathroom, or keep me away from my kids the same way I kept Jonah away from his. But then I realized I already was feeling paranoia, fear, and abandonment. I had already been locked in.

This safe rescue sanctuary for humans, it’s just my own laundry room jail cell.