I remember the first time I saw Rover.
There were about a dozen dogs in the virtual pound when I telnetted over to check it out. Most of them were purebred; the source code which went into making them had been taken from parents who could trace their lineage back many generations, and had electronic documents to prove it. Rover was something of a mutt, with the source code of half a dozen different breeds in his artificial blood. But when he looked up at me with his big, perfectly round eyes, my heart melted and I knew he was the one for me.
To get Rover home, I bought an electronic cage from the vet at the pound, a very solicitous expert system, and downloaded the virtual dog to my computer. Installation on my desktop was easy. To ensure that he didn’t get fleas, Rover came with a sophisticated debugging program.
Rover didn’t need to eat much, just a few computer cycles every four or five hours. I learned the hard way that he did have to be paper trained, though: I left a document for a few minutes to answer a phone call, and when I came back I found that Rover had peed all over it. Yellow splashed all over my color monitor. At first, I was indignant — isn’t the whole point of having a virtual pet that you don’t have to deal with the messiness of real animals?
I soon got over it. I learned always to keep a few windows with old documents in them open, just in case. Rover had this way of wiggling his tail before he went to the bathroom, giving me ample time to minimize the file I was working on before he did his business.
I got Rover lots of representations of plush squeeze toys, but his favorite pasttime was chasing a two dimensional stick all over the screen. When I first got him, we would play like this for hours. As the novelty wore off, I must admit that I spent less and less time with him and more and more time on my work, which he resented. He would often bark in that loud, gruff, synthesized voice of his. Eventually, I would have to turn down the volume on my SoundBlaster card just to get any work done! Rover would sulk for a while, then jealously start chewing at the edge of the document I was working on. I, of course, would feel terribly guilty for ignoring him and stop whatever I was doing so we could play.
Even with electronic pets, some things never change.
A few months after I got Rover, the virtual vet advised me it was time to get him fixed. I got the cage out of storage on my hard drive and tried to coax Rover into it. Nothing I did could make him enter the cage voluntarily (stubborn mutt!), so eventually I chased him around the screen until I literally cornered him, leaving him nowhere to go but in. (How do animals know?) I attached the dog and cage to an email message to the vet with instructions on what needed to be done and sent it.
When I got Rover back a couple of days later, he seemed listless and didn’t eat as much as he used to. Also, I thought the bark on my speakers wasn’t as deep as it had been, although this may have been my imagination. He rebounded after a while, but he was never his old frisky self again. Who would have thought that getting such a small piece of code snipped could have such a serious effect on him?
I bought a program which helped me train Rover to fetch my newsgroups every morning. There was no reason not to let him off my desktop, now. At first, he brought me a whole bunch of file I didn’t need. But over time, as my choices showed him what interested me and what didn’t, he learned what I wanted.
Virtual pets are good that way.
Time passed. Rover lost interest in chasing the stick It took him longer and longer to search the Net for information for me; eventually, I stopped sending him out. He stayed in his corner of the screen and ate fewer and fewer cycles. At first, I tried to convince myself that nothing was wrong that a memory upgrade couldn’t cure, but the truth couldn’t be avoided for long: after several years of wonderful companionship, Rover was getting old.
I had to have Rover put…well, let’s just say that he’s no longer with us. But I have a scrapbook full of screen captures of him when he was a puppy. Those are memories nobody will be able to take away from me.