An Android Dog's Tale

by D.L. Morrese

  ~*~

  He turned to leave and caught sight of a woman of uncertain age sitting alone in the sand and staring into a clay bowl. The behavior struck him as odd, so he wandered closer to investigate.

  Her long straight hair hung down, hiding her features, but after a moment she straightened to reveal a perplexed expression on her young face. MO-126 guessed her age somewhere between sixteen and twenty.

  “It’s the same each time. I wonder why it’s doing that,” she said softly.

  She turned her head to the dog standing quietly a short distance away. “What are you looking at?” she said to him. Her blonde brows arched over pale-blue eyes.

  He never could get the hang of observing people without appearing that he was, unless he concentrated on it, which he had not been. The way she posed her question did not sound like she objected to his presence. In fact, it sounded simply conversational, as if she expected him to understand and would not be especially surprised if he answered.

  He adjusted his sensors to confirm that she was human. She was, or at least she exhibited the right kind of heartbeat and other life signs.

  “I’ve got no food, if that’s what you’re looking for,” she said. “But if you don’t mind being seen with the village crazy woman, I don’t mind the company.” She patted the sand next to her.

  That explained it. She was crazy. But she couldn’t be too crazy because if she was, she wouldn’t know it. MO-126 witnessed all kinds of crazy over his twelve thousand years of, for lack of a better word, life. He never took time to categorize them, but the range ran from screaming, homicidal maniacs who saw little qualitative difference between rocks and people and hated them all, to abnormally introspective recluses who saw little qualitative difference between rocks and people and found them all fascinating. Those at both frayed ends of the rope of reality did not appreciate that their grip on it might be a bit loose. The quietly-sitting-alone-and-talking-to-yourself type of crazy person did not normally present cause for concern, especially if he, or in this case, she realized they were a bit odd, which this one obviously did.

  He moved closer and sat beside her. She petted his head.

  “I’ve got a bit of a mystery here, doggy,” she said, returning her attention to the bowl. “It’s probably not to you, of course.”

  She put her hand in the bowl and gave the thing inside a twist. A sliver of stone threaded on a bit of tree bark floated and spun on a shallow pool of water.

  “You’re lucky you’re a dog. Eat, sleep, make puppies. Anything not connected to one of those probably doesn’t interest you much, does it? If it did, the dogs around you would probably think you were fairly clever rather than thinking you were strange, too, I bet. It’s different with people, but I’m sure you know that.”

  The spinning assembly came to a stop in the bowl with the sliver of rock pointing out toward the sea at about a ninety degree angle to the coastline.

  “See,” she said. “It always does that, every time, no matter where I do it. It always points the same way. Most rocks don’t do that, or much of anything else, as far as I’ve ever seen.”

  She spun it again. When it came to rest, it aligned itself as before.

  “Don’t you think that’s strange?” she said. She patted him on the head again. “Well, of course you don’t, but I certainly do. What do you suppose causes that?”

  The young woman could not possibly know much about lodestones or anything about magnetic fields, but she could see that something odd was happening, and she wanted to find out why.

  She stood, brushed sand from her stained tunic, and collected her bowl.

  “Come on. Let’s try it closer to the water.”

  She seemed to expect him to follow, so he did. He found her strange in an interesting way. He liked that in a person.

  Three barefoot village girls splashing in the surf giggled as they approached. One of them pointed at MO-126.

  “Is that who you’re going to marry, Payshia?” she said. All three of them laughed as if they somehow found this funny. “Bella said you’d never get a boyfriend, but I told her there must be some dog-ugly man desperate enough. Looks like I was right.”

  The girl with the bowl, Payshia, apparently, stopped and turned around. “I think it might be best to try this someplace else,” she said either to herself or to the dog next to her but clearly not to the three girls. She did not even look in their direction.

  Her tormenter, unwilling to be ignored, blocked Payshia’s attempted tactical retreat. She was outnumbered by inferior forces. The android dog suspected that something like this condition might apply to humanity in general.

  “I asked you a question,” the girl said. She held her shapely arms crossed over her shapelier bosom.

  Payshia, a bit taller but far less busty, attempted to walk around her antagonist, but the other two girls blocked her way.

  “Why don’t you tell us?” one of them said. “We promise not to steal him away from you.”

  This prompted another round of laughter.

  Payshia eyed the three girls. Judging by her heart rate, she felt nervous, but only sad resignation showed in her eyes.

  “MO-126, it’s time to go.” The call from Tam should not have come as the surprise that it, in fact, did. The trader must have concluded his business here a while ago.

  “I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” the android dog signaled.

  “Tell us. Tell us.” The three girls chanted.

  “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s just a friend,” Payshia said. She did not say ‘just a dog,’ MO-126 noticed, which is probably what most people would have said. He appreciated that she did not.

  “So why don’t you marry him?” the third girl said.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” Payshia said. She should have stopped there, but a contemplative look came over her and she continued. “I expect you don’t because you are all fairly stupid and insecure, and you are trying to make yourselves feel better by picking on people who are not.”

  “What?” The ringleader of the band said. It was more of a challenge than a question, but Payshia replied.

  “I’m sorry. I tried not to use any big words.”

  “Words! I’ll give you words.” The girl paused, found she had none to offer, and instead pushed Payshia’s comparatively planar chest with both hands. Hard.

  Payshia fell, dropping her bowl. The girls confronting her drew back shapely legs to add their input to the debate.

  A low, rumbling growl in the ancient dialect of gray wolves, which, until now, MO-126 did not realize lay buried deep in his firmware, caught their attention. The girls stopped in mid kick. One wobbled for a moment, lost her balance, and fell in the sand.

  He took a slow step toward the first girl. Fur bristled. White fangs gleamed. Anyone paying attention would have sworn that his eyes glowed with a demonic red flame for a brief second. This was just a side effect of his infrared scanner being activated, but it provided the desired result.

  The girls beat a speedy escape in three-part screaming harmony. He watched until he felt confident they would not turn around and then went to fetch Payshia’s dropped bowl.

  When he returned, he dropped it in her lap. She gave him a hug from where she sat, seemingly unperturbed by her recent experience.

  “Thanks, doggy. I can’t seem to get them to stop teasing me. They never kick very hard, but I’d rather they didn’t do it at all. I think I upset them because, well, it’s like, I’m different, you know. They have this idea of the way things should be, what’s important, and I don’t fit in because I kind of see things a different way. That makes them nervous. To be honest, it kind of makes me nervous, too, because I don’t really know where I’m going. They do. They can see their whole lives ahead of them, and they say they’re happy about it, you know, getting a husband, having children, and all that, but I’m not sure they really are. Personally, I think it’s kind of depressing. Nothing ever really changes. We’re just doing what eve
ryone else has done, thinking the same thoughts, dreaming the same dreams, and if we have children, they’ll do the same. Same story, different faces until the end of time. Know what I mean? What’s the point in that? I mean, okay, maybe I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know I can’t get there standing still, and that’s what we’re all doing. We’re just running in place.”

  MO-126 listened attentively, cocking his head from side to side as she spoke.

  She smiled at him and gave him an affectionate scratch behind an ear. “I know none of that makes sense to you, but thanks for listening.”

  She might not be the most articulate speaker he ever heard. She did not have a trade android’s way with words, but for a verbalized idea, which, after all, she believed she was really only telling to herself, it was pretty good. He thought he knew what she meant.

  She retrieved her bowl and looked inside. The water had spilled out, but the sliver of lodestone on its tiny bark float was there. MO-126 made sure of that. He got a fair amount of sand in his mouth trying to pick it up.

  “Thanks for saving my experiment. I haven’t figured out how it works, yet.”

  She probably never would. Despite her obvious intelligence and inquisitive nature, developing a theory of electromagnetism was probably far beyond her. It would not stop her from trying, and perhaps one of her descendants might someday understand it.

  “MO-126, what’s keeping you?”

  “I’ll be there in a minute, Tam,” he said.

  “Hurry up.”

  Payshia stood. “Sometimes I almost wish I could be a dog,” she said. “It must be nice. Uncomplicated.” She turned the bowl in her hands contemplatively. “Except for the lack of thumbs, maybe. I think I’d miss thumbs.”

  You got that right, kid, MO-126 thought.

  “I think it might be a good idea to go home now. What about you, doggy? Do you have a home?”

  “Woof,” he said. He had a place, anyway, like a cog in a machine, but it was the place he was made to fill. He could not honestly call it a home.

  She marched away from the sandy shore and MO-126 walked beside her while he determined the location of his partner. His signal put him about half a kilometer outside of town.

  “Woof,” he said again. This was Dog for ‘Good luck.’ She’d need it. He briefly considered going with her, but that would create problems for both of them. He ran to find Tam.