Another second draft from my Writing for Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy class.
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The first thing I noticed when I came to, even before I opened my eyes was the buzzing. I was stuck with the family DAWG.
I opened my eyes, and it came as no surprise to see its one, dumb eye staring at me
Nothing hurt, but my ears were ringing and my forehead was sticky. I sat up and looked at my reflection in the DAWG's lens: A pretty serious gash above my eye. An organic pet would have tried to do something about the cut, but the DAWG could only stare at it. Item #22 on the long list I would be presenting to my parents on why the DAWG should be replaced by a real animal as soon as possible.
Just as soon as I found my parents.
I quickly looked in all directions. I must have drifted downriver because I could not even see the Elevator on the horizon. I tried to remember how I wound up unconscious on the beach.
* * *
The shuttle docked at Counterweight Station, and Mom, Dad, the DAWG and I boarded a car down to Earth.
The first couple hours of the trip were nothing spectacular. I could see Earth from this view anytime I wanted just by looking out a window. Dad tried to get me interested in the view, but until we broke atmo, caring about Earth was not on my agenda.
“You ever going to give the DAWG a proper name?” Dad asked after I flipped its off switch to stop it from distracting my attempts at reading.
“Soon as you name the toaster.” I returned to my digital book. “Real pets get names,” I added under my breath. “Fake ones don't care.” The cabin started to glow orange and vibrate as we hit the friction of the Earth's atmosphere.
Clouds! That was the first view of Earth that tore me away from my tablet. Water in the sky! Now that was unique. After we passed through the clouds, it was impossible to get my face away from the windows. Pictures and videos could never do it justice. Liquid water as far as the eye could see, plants growing wild and free, no controlled gardens or hydroponic labs. Wherever there weren't turquoise oceans, it was just brilliant green! Even the buildings of the city below were overgrown, square pillars of green reaching towards our descending car.
While Mom and Dad talked business, I explored the city and DAWG followed me. By my count, this city had room for millions of people; I think I saw maybe 20 while I was exploring. I could not make sense of it. You stayed in first grade a long time if you did not know the rhyme: “In twenty-one twenty-two, we colonized the Moon; by twenty-one sixty-eight, we mostly lived in Space,” but seeing the planet like this, I could not figure out why any sane person would want to leave this planet. Must have been more of a cesspool a hundred years ago.
I explored the city for hours. Up close, the skyscrapers were even more impressive. Giant walls of concrete with hundreds of rooms, but the only thing living there was the ivy and moss that climbed towards the sun. I had DAWG take pictures to show the kids back on the station; as far as my crash course in conversational Portuguese got me, there were never enough recreational visitors to make a real souvenir business viable on the planet. DAWG's pictures would have to be enough to impress everyone.
I was exploring an alley when Dad's call came telling me to meet him and Mom at the ports. We were going on a boat ride to get the merchandise we were here to pick up.
The ports were a long way from where I was. “Sure thing, Dad. Gimme...” I consulted a nearby bus map; I had to wipe a layer of moss off before I could read it, “about 20 minutes to get there.”
“I'll try,” he warned, “But these boats get a lot of passengers.” He paused, and I knew he was looking around the boat's empty deck with a narrow smile on his face. “20 minutes or we'll just have to pick you up when we head for the station on Sunday.”
Sure, abandon me in a sparsely populated city on Earth. That was real likely. “Yeah, see you then.” I ended the call and headed towards the docks. In old movies from before humanity moved, this part of town would have been full of kidnappers and gangsters. Now, my biggest problem in the ground-level parts of the city would be wild animals, and they would be too scared by the DAWG's noise to cause me any problems. Of course, it would have been pretty useless against any animals not scared by his buzzing. Item #32 on the list of flaws with a DAWG.
A couple blocks walk brought me to the bridge, two lanes of asphalt road with rusted wire fences on either side. Like everything else, plants covered the whole bridge. Ivy grew up the fences and poked out of cracks in the road. Thick moss covered a few patches. The river roared underneath it.
Rivers, another thing that videos and pictures simply could not capture. “You're recording this, right, DAWG?” I asked. I stepped out onto the bridge. “I know it won't be like the real thing, but I think a river in a vid will make some of the kids jealous.” If I had not been distracted by the massive wall of flowing water, I probably would have noticed the hole I stepped into that dropped me into the icy water. The dumb, but loyal, robot must have just kept following me, right into the river.
* * *
Knowing how I had wound up in jungle was a start, but I had no idea what to do next...
My phone! Once it was dry enough to restart, the blinking red light told me that I had a message. Good, someone was coming to get me back to the city. The message was recorded about an hour after I talked to my dad.
“20 minutes, eh?” asked the recording of Dad's voice. “Look, I don't have time for your little protests; I need to get my merchandise picked up tonight so we can get loaded tomorrow and get offworld at a reasonable hour on Sunday. I'll notify the hotel to let you in tonight and set you up an extension of my credit so you can buy yourself some dinner.”
There was a pause in the message while Mom whispered something to Dad, “Your mother says to eat healthy on your own. We'll see you when we get back to the city. And this is no way to convince me you're responsible enough to own an organic, you know.”
So they had left without me. I checked the display, no signal. No surprise either. Any amplifiers on Earth were over a hundred years old and covered in plants and bird nests. That meant no 'Net access to try and figure out where I was either.
I sat down and tried to figure out how to get out of this. DAWG must have also been working out the problem, as it came up behind me and nudged me. “Stop it, DAWG, I'm thinking.” DAWG kept nudging me. “Stop it, you stupid substitute for a real pet...” I trailed off as I realized what DAWG was trying to bring to my attention.
I had been carried downriver after I fell. It never occurred to me, due to a distinct lack of rivers on the station, but I could follow the river in the direction opposite of where the water had carried me, and that would take me back to the city.
I got up, brushed the dirt off my ass and started climbing along the river bank. DAWG followed me. The dumb robot was starting to become a bit more impressive. It probably just had a GPS installed rather than any sophisticated tracking program that got us pointing in the right direction, but I watched it clamber over the rough terrain surprisingly well. The box had claimed DAWG would have no problem on rocks like you might find on the Martian or Lunar colonies, but I had only ever seen it on the smooth, rounded surfaces of the station. DAWG handled the soft, irregular dirt more easily than I did, and I was a living, breathing, thinking person.
Impressive ability to walk, but, as I discovered over hours of walking through the hot, humid jungle, DAWG was still not a companion like a real pet. It just marched along making that annoying buzzing sound the whole time. A real dog would have stopped and barked encouragements at me if I fell behind. A DAWG will just keep marching. All it could do was walk.
When it started to get dark, I checked my watch. We had been walking for several hours. I checked my phone again; still not enough signal to figure out how far away I was. “Stop,” I shouted at DAWG, and it diligently returned to my side.
I briefly wondered whether tearing open the machine to find its GPS device and trying to get it to output to something with a screen would be considered resourcefulness worthy of replacing DAWG with an organic or just reckless destruction of a pet Dad had paid good money for, worthy of grounding me when we got back to the station. Knowing Dad, and knowing that I probably did not know enough about the machinery in either DAWG or any of my devices, I figured not destroying the DAWG was a safer bet.
It was still early in the evening, but marching, and knowing I had a whole lot more hiking ahead of me tomorrow and no food on me, left me exhausted. I collapsed in the soft dirt along the river with barely enough energy to curl up into a ball to limit the skin exposed to the bugs.
The night was far from silent. The jungle was full of noises from bugs and animals and the river, but one noise was absent. I opened my eyes and noticed DAWG lying quietly next to me. Its motors were still and there was no annoying buzzing that night. It looked at me, head cocked, almost like a real dog. Maybe it was the exhaustion and the hunger, but in that gesture, I could almost detect DAWG apologizing for the fact that his motors' noise annoyed me and a desire for acceptance.
I woke up early the next morning when the sunlight started to heat up DAWG's synthetic 'skin' that was pressing against my body. The instant I stood up, his motors clicked on and started buzzing. DAWG was on his feet in an instant. “Let's go,” I had to force myself not to add “boy” to the end of that sentence. The robot was starting to grow on me.
As we walked, I thought about how hard I had been on the DAWG. Sure, it was all programming. A real pet could have formed a genuine opinion on whether it liked me or not; DAWG had no such option. Did that change the fact that the robot still had my best interests in mind? Fear was never an option, but it still fearlessly followed me into the river in case I needed it when I came to. I shudder to think how long I might have been moping on the bank if there had not been a DAWG with a functioning GPS to point me in the right direction. It was even considerate enough to silence its motors so I could sleep.
Throughout the day I edited my mental list of DAWG's flaws, amusingly, following DAWG's lead as we walked. With a little delirious re-imagining, many of the flaws on the list became positives. A few had simply been issues of not initially understanding DAWG's heuristics, like when he figured out that I would sleep better without his buzzing motors. I also caught myself compiling his positives. I had a few friends with organics, and I realized I would never have to deal with DAWG's waste on the space station, never need to exercise him or feed him when it was inconvenient for me. Now that I knew he would shut up his motors while I was sleeping, I would never have to worry about any late-night noise from my pet.
The final coup-de-grace to my anti-DAWG bigotry came when the hunger got to me. DAWG had been trundling along brilliantly ahead of me, but I was stumbling. As far as I knew, nothing in the jungle was safe to eat. Plenty of it probably was, but without the 'Net, I had no knowledge of what I could eat that would not be toxic.
DAWG's heuristics surprised me again, when he stopped to see why I had fallen behind. I leaned against a tree, and DAWG backtracked until he was in front of me. He looked at me curiously. And then, I fell forward, right onto DAWG's back. Right before I blacked out from hunger DAWG started to walk forward again, carrying me on his back.
* * *
The next thing I remember is feeling air conditioning on my skin. I was in a bed, looked like a hospital of some sort. Mom and Dad were waiting in the room with me.
“Thank God you're awake,” Mom said as she dove in for a hug, dodging the tube in my arm.
“Glad to see you too. Was I really that bad?”
“Nah,” Dad responded, “Doc said you'd be fine once we got some food and water in you.” He looked at my arm, “Creative choice of souvenir. I never thought to bring back sunburn to prove to my friends I'd been on Earth.” He chuckled.
“Where's DAWG?”
“Powered down in the hotel.” Dad looked down for a second. “Sorry I jumped to the conclusion that you were rebelling. Before we head back to the station, we can see about getting you an organic pet.”
“Thanks, but, how about just an upgrade for DAWG? Next time I get stranded in a jungle on Earth, it might be helpful for him to have a visual interface so I can use that GPS of his. Maybe a 'Net connection too. I'd also feel safer if he could make a noise a little more scary than just his motors buzzing...”
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