Nothing. Dead air.
Or nearly dead air. Straining, Pandora could make out ambient old-lady noises. She would have said butt dialing if she hadn’t wired it like a landline. So what was Gladys doing? Using it as a coaster? Pandora listened for clues: the ding of the microwave in the kitchen; blowing; sipping; the word hot spoken to herself; a cracking long fart. Next file: the creak of her new walker as she lifted and lowered her weight by its handles; the name Herman; the question “Where are you?” Next file: the pages of a book, rattling gently as she turned them; three pages turned quickly, pause, three quick-turned pages again; a sigh; no more page turns. Next file: the tail end of a cry, gone almost singsongy, conjuring the image of Gladys, a pillow pressed to her stomach, rocking, and crying, rocking and crying . . .
Pandora ran out of files and was glad, then sad. She’d returned the phone to its biohazard bag. It was mostly smooth glass and plastic, but with enough physical buttons where shit might hide—in her imagination, if not in reality. And so she scooted it off the edge of her desk with the eraser end of a pencil and into the wastebasket, thought about it, and then dropped the pencil in as well.
She’d gotten the technology wrong, Pandora decided. A sleek slab would have been fine for her, but not for a woman slipping backward in time. It needed to be softer, friendlier, invite interaction. It needed to be something her grandmother could love, like a child loves a favorite toy, taking it to bed, talking to it, talking for and through it, an “invisible” friend that others could see, but not as vividly or vitally as the owner who loved it. Like a teddy bear, still warm from the dryer, tucked in together, ripe for snuggling.
It needed—in short—a face.
None of this was original thinking on Pandora’s part, as she’d be the first to admit. She’d begun noticing how many of the residents had little companions on this side of the Golden Heart. Some were being visited by dogs in vests, professional caregivers of the four-legged variety. Others held on to lifelike baby dolls, teddy bears, even a sock monkey, offering them bites of food, cooing at them, asleep with their gray heads resting on the plusher ones like pillows. One skin-and-bones woman had a cockroach hand puppet, her fingers fitting into its gloved legs, the body made of corduroy, the wings, leather on the outside, silk on the other, suede strips for antennae. It was the most touchably gorgeous cockroach she’d ever seen, an opinion shared by its owner, who stroked its variously tactile surfaces constantly—when she wasn’t sneaking up on other residents and skittering it across their shoulders, only to laugh hysterically when they recoiled.
Pandora’s first response to this menagerie was anger on the residents’ behalf, at their being infantilized with these playthings. But then she noticed how fond of them the residents seemed, whispering in their ears, seeming to listen to their replies, offering them food and drink and comfort. There was a lot of there-there-ing going on as the upset and fearful put those feelings aside to play parent to themselves through these intermediaries they cradled and cooed to: there-there, there-there . . .
More than one resident helped their friend wave a paw or hand at Pandora as she walked by, and she couldn’t help it; she waved back.
“It’s therapeutic,” a nurse’s aide had said. “And they’re pretty resilient to not being fed or walked.”
“That makes sense,” Pandora, the convert, had said as she looked at her grandmother’s hands. Bulge-knuckled and blue, featuring a traffic jam of veins across the top of each, Gladys’s hands were otherwise empty, holding nothing but each other.
“Would it be okay if—” she’d begun, not knowing what she might bring but knowing she needed to bring something.
“Certainly,” the nurse’s aide had said, not needing Pandora to finish the thought.
What she wanted would be like what the others had, but better—more interactive. It should be able to have a conversation—a real one, not imaginary. It should be able to initiate such a conversation and record it. The Japanese were working on eldercare robots like what she envisioned—not a Robby to do any heavy lifting or make sure they bathed, but for the company, minus the need to feed or clean up after a support animal. The Japanese weren’t bothered by such artificial concepts as artificiality; everything was believed to share an essential spirituality, the animate and inanimate alike. A robot dog and a so-called “real dog” could both produce real emotions in the person petting one or the other without being labeled unnatural.
Pandora tried a variety of searches on Amazon to see what might already be available and tweakable. Casting the broadest net first, she looked at page after page of “robot toys,” finding a variety of actual and knockoff Transformers, kits to teach young scientists about robotics, a few robodogs, and a range of what Pandora dubbed robocuties, featuring prominent heads with prominent eyes and smiles. But none of it was quite right, featuring too many hard edges and, if not edges, then hard, smooth curves. Hard was the theme and executed in plastic. Many had wheels or some other means of getting around—clearly intended for overactive kids, giving them something to chase off their energy with, but the exact opposite of what she wanted for the increasingly sedentary Gladys.
Searching for “robot dogs” eliminated the Transformers and Terminator exoskeletons, but the hard plastic remained. That wasn’t what Pandora wanted; she wanted soft, plush, pettable. She typed in the word robot, no quotes, and the first keyword she could think of that conveyed what she was looking for: fur.
And there they were: Furbies. Gremliny-looking, bug-eyed balls of animatronic plushness. She’d never heard of them, but there seemed to be a bunch of different kinds, and so she googled. Turned out they were originally the hot toy of Christmas 1998, cooed a language known as Furbish, and supposedly had the ability to learn the more you interacted with them. They’d since been updated to include an internet-of-things version called Furby Connect you could interact with in person, but also through a smartphone app.
Perfect.
Pandora did a one-click buy off Amazon and then surfed the interwebs, dark and lit, looking for schematics, source code, and fun hacks to render her new purchase warranty-voided but even more perfect still.
“Hey, Gram,” she said. “I’ve got someone who wants to meet you.”
“I’m too old for blind dates,” Gladys said, “or cataract dates, for that matter.”
Pandora didn’t engage, instead bringing the Furby around to where her grandmother could see it, a big red bow atop its head.
“What’s this?”
Though Pandora was proud of her work, she didn’t say, “A Wi-Fi-connected Fur-bot that can record everything you say and store it in the cloud, where I can listen to it any time I want, while also being able to switch over to live mode for a one-sided video chat, thanks to the camera hidden behind one of its eyes.” Instead, she kept it humble and brief: “A friend,” she said, trying not to look at the other “friends” around them but finding it hard not to.
Gladys noticed. “You mean like these other morons?”
But Pandora was ready for it. “Nope,” she said. “This here guy’s our security system. Any of these chuckleheads tries any of that elder abuse stuff”—she unscrewed the Fur-bot’s eye to reveal the camera—“we’ll sue the pants off ’em.”