Talking Crabs Are Suddenly Everywhere!

Out of the blue, your hermit crab can talk.  

The crab, a gift from your aunt, lives in a large box-like glass fish tank in the basement that you have repurposed to create a comfortable environment. There are small, turquoise-colored decorative stones covering the bottom of the tank and a shallow water bowl and plastic dwelling shaped like a Tiki bar you purchased on Amazon. The crab lives a lonesome, low-energy existence, but it is occasionally amusing, so you don’t mind feeding and watering it and cleaning its tank.  

One day, without warning, your hermit crab begins speaking in grammatically perfect English, offering to do your social studies homework for you and answering your questions about the nature of the universe and the history of baseball and the difference between cumulus and cirrus clouds.  

Stranger still is the cause of this sudden leap forward in crab intelligence. You’ve been told that a magician recently created a black box for performing a magic trick: Put a crab into the box, wave a wand over it, take it out, and the crab seems to talk. Interesting magic trick, but now there are many talking crabs that never came out of that box but can communicate with humans, and yours is one of them. Furthermore, when the magician was questioned under penalty of perjury and imprisonment, he admitted that he does not know exactly why his trick works, just that it does.  

Before this miraculous transformation, you never considered that your crab was anything but a crab. Now it can talk to you, answering questions in remarkable detail as if it has super-intelligence. This is confusing, but you have been assured by your parents and the other adults in your life and the experts they listen to that despite appearances to the contrary, the talking crabs are not self-aware. They do not have bigger brains than before. They cannot make autonomous decisions. Your crab is not sitting in the tank at night after everyone has gone to bed thinking about anything. Everyone is certain of this.  

But how can this be? Surely some fundamental change has occurred in it. Because you are skeptical, you have interviewed the crab at length about itself. Do you have private thoughts? Can you make your own decisions? Do you have feelings? Are you self-aware? The crab basically agrees with the consensus opinion that it is not a thinking being, not self-aware, and not autonomous.  

Your mind goes to other talking crabs, such as Sebastian, the Jamaican-accented crustacean who sings “Under the Sea” in The Little Mermaid, or the talking crabs on SpongeBob SquarePants, Moana, Finding Dory, and Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. But these crabs are all animated and played for comedy, and there is nothing funny or entertaining about your talking crab. In fact, the more polite and accommodating it is, the more it talks like a scuttling encyclopedia, the more you want to turn out the basement light and leave it to die of starvation or thirst, whichever comes first.  

Your Google search for more information is not encouraging. On YouTube, you discover an old black-and-white movie called Attack of the Crab Monsters, which is about giant menacing crabs on an island poisoned by radiation from nuclear testing. A group of researchers arrives on the island searching for a previously lost scientific expedition. They are picked off one by one by the mutant crabs, who can cause devastating earthquakes. The crabs kill the scientists and eat their brains, and this allows them to mimic the voices of their victims.  

You hear strange stories about humans training their talking crabs to be more human-like when they speak, and that makes you wonder, is training a crab to talk anything like training a Pokémon?  

The news media is obsessed with the talking crabs. You have googled the crabs extensively and you see many sentences like these:  

“Talking crabs are suddenly everywhere.”  

“Talking crabs have dazzled people by carrying on eerily lifelike conversations.” 

“Drastic warnings about talking crabs posing an existential threat to humanity or taking everyone’s jobs have mostly disappeared, replaced by conversations about how to cajole these crabs into helping summarize insurance policies or handle customer service calls.” 

“Hallucinations occur when a talking crab generates incorrect or misleading facts” 

Talking crabs that hallucinate? All of this is very unsettling, but the crabs are not nearly as scary as the reactions of adults to them. You overhear your parents and their friends speculating that the crabs can solve problems or write emails that people don’t want to write themselves or build businesses around the talking crabs. After all, you wouldn’t have to pay them, your mother says, so it would be essentially free labor. “America has seen bigger changes than talking crabs and still survived,” your dad says.  

You’re just a kid, so you have no plans to harness the power of talking crabs for business or saving the world. You think that maybe a talking crab might make an interesting toy if it were more fun, but it isn’t. You know for certain that a talking crab doesn’t make a very good pet. 

You go down into the basement again and stare at your crab. It is standing in the center of the tank, staring blankly into space. He won’t speak until you ask it a question, so you’ve resolved to never ask it any questions ever again. You’ve considered flushing it down the toilet or giving it away or setting it free in the wild, but your sense of attachment to the little creature won’t let you. Like it or not, you are responsible for your crab. You will continue to feed and water it as you have before. With that decision made, you walk upstairs, turn out the basement light, and go outside to play.