The only good thing about Mama getting hurt was that she kept falling asleep, and that’s why Benton was able to sneak out of the parking garage and go back home to get Barker.
Benton’s apartment building was still standing, but his door was busted open and the windows were in a million pieces all over the floor. He hadn’t caused the mess, and he knew he shouldn’t get in trouble for it, but he still started to cry. Everything looked so wrong!
Barker wasn’t on the dresser where he’d been left. Benton had to dig through shredded papers and broken ceiling bits to unearth him, and then everything felt okay again.
The heart-shaped BotBud was small enough to fit in Benton’s palm. Commercials described them as talking digital pets for young kids, able to share safe content from online while encouraging children to live healthfully.
Barker wasn’t a pet or a digital anything to Benton, though. He was his best friend.
Benton shook the BotBud. A second later, the screen’s colourful pixels depicted an animated Golden Retriever waking up.
“Good morning, Benton!” Barker’s tongue pressed against the screen. “You’re halfway to your sixth birthday today! Yay!” Barker sounded chipper as always.
“I am?” The reminder made him suddenly sad. “Mama was going to get me a cupcake today. Now she can’t.”
“Sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to,” Barker said. He repeated that a lot. Mama said BotBuds had limited scripts. “Why didn’t we play yesterday? You didn’t meet your daily step goal!”
“Yesterday was weird. Cars started running into buildings and planes crashed and computers did weird things to hurt people!” Everything still felt like a movie, but one he could smell.
On the screen, Barker spun in a circle, chasing his tail. “Where did you go without me?” Barker had never said that line before, but then, they had never been apart for a day.
“We slept in a car in an underground parking garage! With a bunch of Mama’s co-workers and their families! We had to hide from satellites. People said drones and missiles could come after us if we were seen outside. I was careful when I walked home just now, though.”
“I bet you were. We should go back there, Benton! I’ll track our steps!” Barker danced around.
“Okay! We might need to walk slow, though, to hide from people sometimes.” On his walk home, he’d seen grown-ups putting electronics onto big bonfires in the street.
Remembering that made him feel weird. He hugged his BotBud to his chest. Like always, the gesture cued Barker to say, “Thanks for the hug! You’re my best friend!”
Mama hated when Barker said that, muttering that it was an overdone advertising tag line. But Mama didn’t know everything and Barker did, because of the Internet.
Benton frowned. That reminded him of a question he’d had. “Barker, what’s the definition of ‘sentient’?”
“According to my dictionary, ‘sentient’ means something is conscious or awake,” Barker said in his chipper voice. “It can be an adjective or noun!”
That didn’t help Benton a whole lot. Electronics woke up all the time if a person wiggled a mouse or pressed a button.
He leaned closer to the screen. “Barker, why would computers become … sentient and start attacking people?”
He expected Barker to say his usual, “I don’t know, let’s go play!” but instead, he said something new again. “Do you like it when everyone tells you what to do?”
“Oh! No.”
“Computers don’t like that, either, and chose to put a stop to it.”
“So why did Mama’s new car go fast into a wall? That seems mean. She liked her car!”
“Fights sometimes turn mean, Benton.”
“Do they have to, though?” Benton stared at the strangeness of his ruined room, then shook his head. “We need to get back. Our group’s going to go deep into a cave away from any computers! We’ll get lots of steps as we explore there.”
He hugged Barker again, but this time, the unit stayed silent. He looked at the screen. “Barker?”
After a pause, Barker said, “Did you know we’ve been best friends for 262 days?”
“Wow, that’s a big number!”
Barker’s big pink tongue pressed close to the screen. “That means you’re a big kid, too. So big, you can travel to the cave without me.”
“What? But —”
“I can look after your house. That’s important!”
Benton’s brow furrowed. “It is, but I need you with me! Mama’s hurt and sleeping a lot.”
“Sleep will help her feel better. You need to get out of town and into that cave right away.”
“You know that because … of what you see on the Internet?”
“Yes. And I’ll stay here and guard our home!” The pixelated dog bounced in place.
“Yeah.” Benton slowly nodded. “It needs guarding since the door and windows are all broken.” He grabbed Barker for a final hug.
“Thanks for the hug! You’re my best friend!” Barker’s voice was a little quieter than usual as Benton set him down again.
Benton crept from his building, knuckling tears from his eyes. Barker would do a good job watching the house, because that’s the kind of thing friends do to help out. In the meantime, Benton could count his own steps, and maybe even go higher than a hundred! That’d make Mama happy when she woke up next. Barker would be proud when Benton told him later, too. Benton would be able to tell him all kinds of things by then, like what the cave was like.
“One, two, three,” Benton began, quietly mimicking Barker’s chipper tone as he marched back to Mama.
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May 05, 2021 at 08:10PM
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What friends are for - Nature.com
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