An Android Dog's Tale Read online

  Companies were allowed far more leeway when it came to species living on planets that did not spawn their evolution, however, even when they were introduced by the company involved. The major restriction was that the transplanted species must be provided with a level of technology and culture considered at least equal to those it already achieved on its own at the time of its discovery. Once established on a different planet, members of that species fell into a legal gray area somewhere between employees and domestic livestock. Individuals in either category could not be abused, endangered, or cheated. The legal definitions for all of these were so vague that companies were usually considered compliant as long as the primitives seemed content and healthy. In questionable cases, interstellar corporate lawyers sometimes argued that establishing the colony outweighed any minor concerns because it spread the primitive’s species, which is, of course, the goal of all life.

  Despite this, the various star-faring civilizations that comprised the Federation did not see the relatively free hand extended to large businesses as a license to exploit their primitive workers. Quite the contrary. Companies paid their advertisers well to ensure the public knew that the businesses were benefiting the poor savages in ways they could not possibly comprehend. After all, any sentient species they discovered would probably become extinct on its own. This was most often the case. Based on statistical analysis of millennia of data, for every one hundred sentient races that emerge, ninety-nine would die out without ever achieving a written language, if left on their own. Forty would succumb to natural disasters or climate fluctuations, thirty to disease, twenty to predators, and the rest to incredible stupidity.

  Of the one percent that did eventually achieve the ability to pass on information in written form to subsequent generations, most died out before attaining anything resembling the wisdom or technology necessary to venture to the stars. It seemed such a shame after overcoming such hurdles, but most self-destructed, sometimes intentionally, or at least mutually assuredly. The odds were not good.

  One race, the botraques, died out when a religious leader came up with the concept of heaven. His followers found the idea so enticing they could not wait to get there and began dying through self-flagellation for imagined sins, prolonged fasting, and other efforts to obtain spiritual purity. It was a great time for the planet’s lowly scavengers but rather unfortunate for the botraques, which otherwise exhibited a great deal of potential.

  Because of this, Federation laws looked upon the removal of genetic material from primitive sentient species as a legitimate conservation effort, the costs of which companies could recoup by humanely utilizing the collected genetic material to raise workers for their businesses. The plan benefited everyone concerned.

  In the history of the Galactic Federation, there has only been one recorded mishap related to this policy. It involved the krutons. The Xcuse Mining Corporation first discovered them on a planet around a star in the Scutum-Crux spiral arm. From all outward appearances, the krutons were a clearly sentient and docile vegetarian species with no outward signs of sophisticated technology. When the automated survey probes went down to the planet, they were immediately met by a delegation of natives wearing plant fiber togas and beatific expressions. Using what was assumed to be some kind of radio transmission, they telepathically announced that they were on vacation and did not wish to be disturbed.

  This was enough to send the confused survey probes back to their ship, which sent out a call to its home base for further instructions. Given the immense distances involved, they received a reply forty-two years later. By this time, Federation commercial scout ships had discovered four other planets populated by krutons. An ancient artificial satellite orbited one of these. It lay dormant until the survey ship approached, but as it neared, the seemingly dead orbiter powered up and broadcast a short and simple radio message in various languages.

  “Please be advised that we are no longer open to unsolicited requests for contact with sentient species. We’ve tried that, studied it, and found it has only limited survival value. If you persist in your efforts, we will, of course, be happy to demonstrate this point.”

  A scan of the satellite indicated a vast array of weaponry, much of which remained largely incomprehensible to Federation physicists but which appeared to be able to warp the fabric of spacetime into tiny and incredibly dense knots or, more disturbingly, undo existing knots that gave a semblance of separate existence to matter. The Galactic Federation designated the krutons the first, and hopefully only, post-sentient species ever discovered and declared them off limits.

  The Xcuse corporate headquarters instructed their survey ship to deploy warning buoys.

  ~*~

  Some of the village dogs approached MO-126 and began to sniff. He expected this. Smell is one way dogs recognize each other. He allowed their olfactory examination and reciprocated in kind for the sake of appearance. Some returned for a second sniff as if confused, but none seemed to take exception to his presence.

  Encouraged at having passed their examination, he ambled in the general direction of the river, scattering a few chickens, ignoring a couple goats, and attempting to observe people while trying not to appear that he was observing them. The trader was right. It was more difficult than it sounded.

  People sat alone or in small groups sewing leather, weaving baskets, or stringing beads of shell, bone, or rock. Humans seemed to have adapted well to this planet, and they appeared content, confirming what his Corporation indoctrination files led him to expect. He clandestinely recorded a few images of them happily constructing useful and decorative items, hoping some of the pictures might eventually be used in corporate advertising. This would not benefit him personally other than to provide a sense of satisfaction for being even more useful to his makers. The corporation did not reward their android operatives for recording normal behavior, but it did give generous bonuses for discovering and reporting serious scientific-discovery or technology-development faults.

  Beyond the clustered buildings, children played a game that involved kicking a goat’s bladder stuffed with dried grass. Some of the village dogs joined in. MO-126 watched them for a minute but could not discern the rules, assuming there were any. Most of the children seemed to enjoy it, laughing even when they fell in the dirt, which they often did. A few, mostly boys, seemed to be taking the game far more seriously. They pushed; they shoved. He saw one bite another one who wailed and limped away. He noted it as an example of the type of competitive dominance behavior the species sometimes exhibited. His data files included examples of this and other behavioral traits. Fortunately for the primitives, the project manager could prevent such tendencies from causing them too much harm, but it saddened him to think what would happen to the descendants of these people when the corporation eventually abandoned the project. It would most likely be several thousand years until that happened, but after that, the humans here would be left unsupervised. MO-126 found himself saddened by the possible results. The thought made him even more determined to see to it that the project ran as long as possible.

  A small girl, with tangled brown hair and knees stained with dirt to a similar shade, ran to him. “Hi, doggy. Why are you sitting here all alone?”

  MO-126 responded with an involuntary wag of his tail. His mouth opened in what passed for a doggy smile. She wrapped her arms around him in a weak hug and then rushed off to join the other children in joyful mayhem. The artificial canine remained and watched them for a few minutes before moving on, wondering why he enjoyed that.

  Some adults sat on the ground nearby, occupied with their own games. He noticed two distinct types, but he did not pause long enough to understand either fully. One used a wooden board with cuplike indentations and dried seeds, which two players captured from one another. The second used small discs of two different shades of wood on a square board marked with a grid. Games and toys often provided the first signs of new discoveries, but neither of these suggested any unwanted advances or d
iscoveries.

  Nearer the river, a woman worked clay. Some crude bowls sat on a board by her side, but her current project was a small animal figurine with four legs. Others sat drying nearby, including stylized representations of goats, dogs, sheep, and some that looked like small models of extremely large women.

  He recorded what he observed. Clay working could lead to problems. The first would be the slow wheel, essentially a platform potters could turn as they worked clay. That could lead to more advanced types of potter’s wheels, which could lead to spinning wheels. Those were not problems in themselves, but they could eventually lead to axles, wagon wheels, water wheels, and cogwheels, which certainly would be. Developments such as these could destroy the simple lifestyle these people currently enjoyed and, of course, eventually lead to termination of the Corporation project here. The Galactic Organic Development Corporation guaranteed to its customers that all products carrying its brand were produced naturally by hand—or by pseudopod, or tentacle, or paw, or trunk, or whatever, depending on the species. Any complex mechanized devices used in the creation of an item would make it unsuitable for the corporation’s exclusive market.

  A black cat crossed his path, paused, and said, “Meow?” In Cat, this meant something like, ‘Are you of any use?’ which is a cat’s normal first reaction to most things. The inclusion of cats in the bio matrix transfer amounted to a last minute decision. When the first Corporation survey ship examined the humans’ home planet, cats were small, feral predators. Neolithic humans did not have a symbiotic relationship with them. Unlike dogs, they were not domesticated, but the sentient survey ship determined they would be ideal to keep down the population of small rodents that apparently had been. Later, after carefully reviewing its data, it concluded that mice and rats were not actually invited guests to the caves and hovels of primitive man, as it initially assumed, although they were sometimes a minor source of protein.

  A small boy gathered clay by the river, using his hands and a wooden trowel to dig into a section of steeply inclined bank, more like a dirt cliff than a beach. A woven basket of reeds hung by its handle from the gnarled branch of a bush clinging to life on the embankment, and he heaped handfuls of moist, gray clay into it. He might be the son or younger brother of the potter MO-126 noticed earlier. The android dog was not yet adept at judging the age of humans, so he could not determine which of these was more likely.

  A rope dangled in the swift flowing river farther along the bank. He wandered that way to take a closer look. From the angle, it appeared to be tethered to something submerged being tugged by the current. It must be flax. This posed no problem in itself, but it could lead to weaving and then to mechanical looms and, after five or ten thousand years or so, to computers, if the humans were sufficiently clever and imaginative. He already suspected they might be.

  Humanity could be one of those creative species with the ability to develop things independently, unlike the comfortable conservative complacency enjoyed by the majority of those in the Galactic Federation. Whatever capacity for innovation these once must have possessed, they lost long ago. The few innovations they eventually adopted now were normally originated by others. Innovation brings risks, which content societies lack the motivation to take. A desire for change normally presupposes a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the status quo, or an unhealthy level of innate curiosity. Especially creative trail-blazing races tend to self-destruct when their curiosity and creativity outpaces their intelligence. Those who follow them can simply stop at the crater where the metaphorical footprints end and consider themselves wise for doing so.

  A scream quickly followed by a loud splash came from behind him. MO-126 turned and saw the boy previously gathering clay now flailing in the river. A long skid of loose dirt and broken plants in the embankment showed how he got there.

  Humans could swim, couldn’t they? MO-126 did a quick search of his data files and confirmed that they did have some limited ability to swim. The boy fell only a couple meters from shore, so the android dog watched bemused while the young primitive slapped his arms against the current in his effort to reach the bank. He did not seem to be making much progress. The water must be deeper than it looked and the current was obviously stronger than the small human could handle. When his head went under for the third time, something basic, something deep in the android dog’s firmware that served as instinct, pressed a metaphorical panic button, and MO-126 jumped in after him.

  It was not a conscious decision. He could not explain why he decided to do so. He could not recall considering the question at all. It was as if his rational cognitive abilities and all of the information contained in his Corporation files were somehow temporarily bypassed or overridden by the deep-seated canine behavior patterns in his basic programming. Whatever the cause, he leapt into the water, almost immediately reaching the point where the boy went down. It did not occur to him that this was probably several times the distance a biological dog could hope to jump.

  He plunged his head in the flowing water and saw the boy weakly attempting to reach the surface, but for every advance he made, the water carried him farther downstream and pushed him back under.

  MO-126 possessed a design optimized to do many things well. Swimming was not one of them, but his robustly engineered legs beat rapidly, creating a foamy wake as he moved with the current. The boy continued trying to fight it. This, and the ineffable uncertainties of chance, which humans call luck, allowed the android dog to reach the child just as he seemed to have exhausted his meager strength. MO-126 caught the tough linen of the boy’s tunic in his teeth and angled toward the sloping bank.

  He soon felt mud and stones beneath his paws, and he dragged the boy to shore. The child tried to get to his knees, coughed out some water, and then collapsed, managing to turn so that his back was to the ground. The simulated dog reasserted his hold on the boy’s clothing, dragged him farther from the water, and then started barking. It felt like the right thing to do. The child looked so…, not helpless, really, but as badly needing help, which the android dog inexplicably felt he should provide.

  Someone must have noticed the boy’s predicament because people already raced toward them from the village. When they reached the riverbank, some tended to the child while a few seemed more interested in MO-126.

  “Master Trader Tork’s dog saved Margot’s boy,” one of them said. “I never saw anything like it.”

  More villagers approached him; some patted his wet fur and others just stood by seeming to admire him. This was not a good thing. His job as a clandestine, unobtrusive observer specifically required that he not draw attention to himself. Field Ops might say he was defective. They could even disassemble him for parts. At the very least, they would subject him to extensive diagnosis to find out what caused his rash reaction and then reprogram him to correct the problem. The effect would be little different from his perspective.

  “That wasn’t very doglike,” the trade android said.

  MO-126 received the message clearly, but it took a moment for him to locate his partner visually in the crowd. All humans still appeared much alike to him.

  He felt another human pat his head, finding it surprisingly pleasant, but he could not let that distract him. He needed to think of some way to justify his behavior. He just began forming an identity and did not want to have to start over.

  “Um, dogs save people all the time. That was included in my basic knowledge packet,” he said. It was, and the information was correct. There were several well-documented observations of such behavior.

  “True, but most dogs cannot leap over ten meters into a deep, cold, fast moving river, drag someone out, and survive.”

  “I could play dead if it would help,” MO-126 said half jokingly.

  Another villager petted him and told him what a good dog he was. It was the sixth one since he emerged from the water, and he found the experience strangely satisfying. Others congratulated the trader for having such an exceptional dog.r />
  “It’s too late, now,” the trade android said without humor. “If something like this happens again, just bark from shore.”

  MO-126 tried another tactic. “The boy would have died if I didn’t go after him. No one else could get to him in time.”

  “Probably. But people die every day, and it is not your job to save them. Their lives are short. Few make it to a single century. Most die before they reach much over half that. You’ll see thousands die during the course of the project, and it’s something you’re going to have to come to terms with. Don’t get too attached to the primitives.”

  The android dog did not reply, but something about what the trader said seemed wrong, or maybe just unfortunate. The people here seemed so, well, alive. That all of them would shortly be dead seemed incredibly unjust. They did not deserve to die. They did nothing wrong. They just happened to have been born human. Was the trader saying that saving the boy was pointless because he would die soon anyway? MO-126 found it difficult to agree. If anything, it made saving him even more important. His life would be far too short already.

  MO-126 shared none of these thoughts. He did not wish to appear to be malfunctioning. “I apologize if I’ve created a complication,” he said.

  “I don’t think any harm was done, but I have been offered good trades for any puppies you might sire.”

  “I’d love to oblige, but I can’t provide any the traditional way, and I can’t build any. No thumbs. Did you conclude your trade with Oslan?” He hoped to deflect the conversation onto a topic other than himself.

  “Yes. Some of the other primitives are loading our gond now. We can leave soon. Did you have time for any observations, or were you too busy being a canine hero?”