The Shark
Your girlfriend brings the shark home one day after work. It is dark out when she arrives and so you cannot see what is in the bag she is carrying; can’t hear it splash and churn in its plastic bucket. Welcome home, you say, and she says she has something to show you. What is it, you ask.
It is a robot shark, she says. I got it for the aquarium.
You ask her what she means. Robot shark. Like a toy? You wonder aloud if it might be for your daughter, whose birthday is coming up this weekend.
No, she says, I got it for us. We are supposed to put it in the aquarium.
What will the shark do? You ask. The aquarium in your home is full of fragile gentle tropical fish; a real shark would kill them and bloody the water.
Don’t worry, your girlfriend tells you, it is not a real shark. It only looks like one. Actually it will just clean the aquarium. They had a lot of models. I picked the shark one because it looked nice. It makes a little shark noise.
Won’t that scare the fish? You ask, before realizing you don’t really know what a shark noise would sound like. It’s just a little electronic roar. You tell her that it’s okay, then, if the goal of the shark is to clean the tank she can put it into the tank. A toothy smile spreads across her face. Thank you.
The fish in the tank do not like the little robot shark. When it moves, they swim to the corners or under rocks. When it emits its electronic roar, their eyes narrow and they seem frightened, if a fish can experience fear. You ask your girlfriend if this is normal, and she says yes. That’s what the people at the fish store told her, anyway. After a while the fish get used to the shark, and the shark will start replacing the work of the cleaner fish, and the tank will be better off for it.
As the weeks pass you notice that the fish don’t seem to get any less scared, and the aquarium doesn’t seem to get any cleaner. True, you observe, the cleaner fish have stopped cleaning the rocks and the sides of the tank, and the shark has taken over for them. But the shark does not seem to be better at this. When its body cavity splits apart to reveal its spidery assortment of mechanical brushes you see a different way to clean the tank, but you wonder if it is better. You wonder what the cleaner fish think.
You ask your girlfriend about the shark not delivering the promised results, and about the fish, who are scared of it. She seems frustrated with you. This is expected, your girlfriend says, the shark must get used to the tank, and the other fish to it. That’s what they told me at the shop. It is a long game.
These days your girlfriend spends less time with your daughter, and it has been a month since you watched a movie together after dinner. Now she prefers to press her face to the tank and watch the shark move, and roar, and clean the tank with its mechanical tendrils while the other fish watch.
. . .
One day you wake up and the aquarium is red. Later you will tell your girlfriend you don’t know when it happened, just that you came downstairs in the morning and the aquarium was like that. Your two favorite fish are floating, bellies up and eyes white in the froth. You remember when you bought them, and how they grew, and which side of the tank each of them preferred to swim in.
You want to cry.
When your girlfriend gets home from work you show her the scene. She asks what happened. Isn’t it obvious, you say: the shark killed them. It is a shark, and it is doing shark things. This is exactly what I was worried about.
At first she denies it, says the shark couldn’t have possibly done something like that, it wasn’t built for it, the fish shop people said it was just a cleaner.
But she can’t ignore the bits of flesh still stuck between its teeth, the desperate crimson streaks on its metal brushes, the holes it carved into your favorite fish. Still, your girlfriend seems somehow more upset at you than she is at the shark. It is a new model, she says. Maybe it has glitches.
You offer the explanation that a robot shark, like a normal shark, might kill fish; has killed fish. You tell your girlfriend you’d like to throw it away.
Then your girlfriend spits at you. It comes out of nowhere; not once have you seen this kind of rage. But she is mad, fuming, and she tells you that you cannot throw the shark away, that there is a big difference between this and a real shark. This shark, she says, does not know what it is doing. It is just a program. A real shark knows when it kills fish. It wants to. This is just a robot cleaner. It doesn’t want anything.
You tell her that even if you accept her premise, well, something must have happened. Maybe the shark was infected by a malicious program.
She smiles at you. Exactly, she says. The shark could have been infected by a malicious program. And so it is not the shark that we should have a problem with, she says, just the people telling the shark to be this way. Be angry at the hand, she tells you—yelling now—not the tool.
But you put the shark in the tank, you say. You were the hand.
Maybe it behaves in shark-like ways, she admits. Maybe it was told to act like a shark by some sadistic hacker or by the robotics company itself. Maybe it was trained on real shark data, somewhere in the pipeline. And then she repeats the thing she told you on the day she brought it home, the thing she continues repeating to this day:
It is not a real shark.
Finally you ask her, before going up to bed.
Does it really matter?
* * *
Enjoy these essays?
Or, if you have any feedback, contact us.