We finally had what could be considered a lazy day. Wynn insisted on repaying me for saving him and his boy, even though the compel was still there and they weren’t saved at all, but he would hear none of that. He spent the day showing me various tricks he’d picked up, from foraging to knot-tying. I drank it all in, while Tate headed off by himself to pick mushrooms and AEGIS played with the mass-fab.

She’d been running it a lot lately, and I hadn’t seen anything she’d been making, but also didn’t want to pry. As far as I was concerned, it was as much hers as mine, but I did take a peek at the last print job as it finished, and it just looked like machine parts. For what, I had no idea.

It was evening before the two left, leaving me and AEGIS alone again. I was lazing around, basking in the afterglow of having friends again, and AEGIS started up another print on the mass-fab. I was going to continue ignoring it when a thought hit me.

“Hey, AEGIS?”

“Yep?”

“How do you get things out of the mass-fab when you’re done printing them?”

She shifted uneasily. Uh oh.

“I um, have my ways.”

“You made more drones?”

“Yeah. Well, at first.”

“Look, I don’t want to drag it out of you, I just was asking out of curiosity, but now you’ve got me worried.”

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you because if you don’t know, you can’t go telling Karu or having Saga read your mind about it. You’re not exactly a successfully secretive guy.”

“Hey, I can keep a secret!”

“Like what? Is there one secret you haven’t told me, or Karu? I’m even being nice here and leaving Saga out of it.”

“Sure!”

“Which is?”

“…uhh. Can’t tell you, it’s a secret.”

“You’re useless. I guess I can’t tell you about how I’m getting things out of the mass-fab either, because that’s also a secret.”

“No really, what is it?”

She gave a long, defeated sigh with an apocalyptic amount of exaggerated eye-rolling.

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “Bears. Did you know that a grizzly bear can run 40 miles an hour, and climbs just as fast.”

“No. Great fact. Very interesting. Now tell me.”

“Bear claws grow up to 6 inches long. Six inches! Imagine a 6-inch cavity in your chest, and that’s what you’d look like in the brief window between a bear mauling you, and a bear eating you.”

“Still no. Now tell me.”

“What’s more, bears are freakishly strong for their size, like they even needed that. An adult grizzly bear can take down a full bison, which weighs over a thousand pounds more than it does. Polar bears are even crazier, and can take down elephant seals, which is up to a seventhousand pound size differential.”

“AEGIS. Dude.”

“On top of their immense might and intelligence, bear senses are also orders of magnitude stronger than ours. Bears can track prey by scent from over 20 miles away and hear well into the ultrasonic range. They can also taste fear, and it is said to be one of their favorite flavors.”

“…really?”

“I made the last fact up. The rest are all legit. Bears are srs business, man.”

“Great, thanks for sharing. Now mind telling me what’s going on with the mass-fab?”

“Okay fine. But seriously don’t tell everyone.”

“I won’t tell Karu, Jesus.”

“And don’t tell Saga. She doesn’t read your mind unless she has a reason to, usually, and even then, I think she usually just finds what she’s looking for. Don’t give a reason to look for it.”

“Whatever. Just tell me already.”

“Okay.” She typed away at the console. “So at first I was just using drones. I made some a little bigger as workhorses to recover materials to dissimilate, but it’s hard because the weight ratios get really hard without being able to make plastics or polymers.” She tapped a few more keystrokes and then from the ceiling beam above the mass-fab, three drones, each about the size of my fist, and supported by six spinning helicopter rotors flew out, nearly silent. Each had a wide, flat profile, a camera mounted on the front, and some kind of claw device on the bottom for moving builds or scrap.

“Uh. Impressive that I haven’t found these. I should probably clean at some point.”

“Yeah. Well, they’re decent for moving small things around, especially in tandem, but for anything larger, no-go. So I’ve been putting together parts and made us our first DOG.”

“We have a dog.”

“A DOG. I invented them. Distributed Operations: Ground-unit.”

“That is a horribly tortured acronym. What does that even mean?”

“Well, it’s ground-based as opposed to all my previous drones, and it is my first creation to have its own rudimentary AI instead of being directly controlled from here, hence distributed operations.”

“As in…the opposite of centralizing all operations is to distribute them…to an AI.”

“Yep.”

“Okay. That is still a horribly tortured acronym.”

“I’m aware. But I really wanted a DOG, so here we go. I’ll call for it.” She tapped some commands and pressed a final key with a flourish. “I can, of course, control it directly if I want to. So it’s not a dedicated distributed operations unit. And I can see what it sees, if it’s within range, but it can go out of range autonomously if it wants to. And…here…it…comes.”

I heard whining and clanking from the doorway and a moment later, a thing scuttled into view. It was bigger than I expected, a four-legged thing with a small central platform hanging down from…knees, I guess…which reached about three feet high. It was almost spider-like in its form, but robotic instead of hairy and creepy, as I imagine a three-foot spider would be.

The central platform had a little camera on it facing forward, I guess, and the legs were just empty struts with some cables and pneumatic pistons, but it moved with a swiftness that disguised the unstable, ungainly gait.

“Hello, DOG,” I said, crouching down to look at it from it’s eye level. The thing did a little wiggle where the central platform rocked back and forth without the legs moving.

“They’re programmed to like you,” AEGIS said. “But don’t make me mad or I’ll flip the murder switch on.”

“Uh. You’re joking.”

“Yeah.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Though I guess it’d be easy enough to negate their affection for you and make it really, really hate you. If that’s lower than the KOS threshold I put in for bears, I guess it’d be a murder switch.”

“That’s…educational. Can we make a new house rule that nothing here is allowed to murder me?” She laughed, but seemed to miss that I was only half joking. The robot was small and not armed or armored, but I still didn’t enjoy the idea of robot death spiders.

“You like him?” AEGIS asked. I had to think about it. On one hand, it looked like a pile of parts jammed together more than anything I would attribute as a ‘him.’ On the other hand, as it sat there, moving a little idly, taking tiny half-steps and adjustments and pivoting its little body to point the camera at different things, I thought its motions were sort of cute. Something about it reflected a simple animal’s curiosity.

“He’s all right, I guess.” DOG bounced up and down a little at me speaking. “Yes, you. You are all right.”

“And here’s him with me driving,” AEGIS said, typing away at her console. DOG froze mid-bounce, landing a little awkwardly and not adjusting, and just rocked in place like an uneven table for a moment. Then the takeover was complete and a little red light turned on next to the camera, and it stood rigid and upright, animal curiosity replaced with stoic efficiency.

“He’s got some design issues,” she explained while putting DOG through his paces. He was much faster and agile with AEGIS driving, and she made him do some flips and even parkour off a wall to jump higher than my head. I glanced over and saw her grinning at her computer as she showed off, her hands flying across the keyboard. “He’s designed basically only for lifting and rapid transport in any terrain, but without a downward-facing camera it’s actually pretty hard to position and pick things up. Sometimes takes him a couple minutes to pick up cargo. I’m much better, of course…”

DOG did a straight vertical leap and landed on one of the rusty metal workbenches with a loud clang. It took some small shuffling steps and looked at the table’s contents by pointing downward as much as possible, front legs extended straight forward and back legs as high as possible, a profile like a runner touching their toes.

Finding a target, DOG walked over a hammer and lowered its body to touch it, whereupon there was a small explosion of tiny grasping tendrils, like a thousand wires a few inches long, which wrapped around the hammer in every possible way, binding it tightly for transport.

“First try, GG, EZ,” AEGIS said, quite pleased with herself.

“Doesn’t look that hard,” I said.

“Of course not. I make it look easy. And I offloaded a lot of work to keep him gyroscopically stable to the onboard AI. But it’s still plenty hard.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I have another model being worked on now,” she said, which explained why she was still printing parts despite DOG being done for who-knows how long now. “This one has an external head for mounting the camera which can pivot independently of the body. Excited to see how he turns out.”

“DOG mk. 2? Or do you have something else cringe-inducing in store for this one’s name? A CAT maybe?”

“Distributed Operations: Ground-unit — Enhanced,” she said with a diabolical grin.

“DOG-E,” I groaned. You are the worst.” She laughed. She was such a ridiculous juxtaposition of spending dozens of hours making a fully-functioning AI worker/pet, being incredibly proud of it and its operation, and then naming it something so whimsical and stupid. But I guess, given that AEGIS was both a smart and a happy person, it was fitting enough.

“Hey, why don’t you take him outside and get acquainted. It’ll be fun. You probably need a little more of that in your life.”

It sounded stupid to me, but she was excited and I saw no need to burst her bubble. I went out and DOG bounded after me, with a spirited, playful bound. I noticed the light was off, meaning he was back on AI, and guessed that if she were driving, there would have been no such inefficiency in his movement.

I picked up a big stick and threw it as far as I could. DOG rose up and pivoted to track it, and then took off running before it hit the ground. It ran with a bouncing scamper, and I noticed that AEGIS was right, it could only look in one direction at a time. It had to keep turning back to look at the stick in flight and forward to avoid obstacles, which gave it the impression of being a very clumsy, dumb animal.

The stick dropped, and DOG stopped, only a couple feet from it. Carefully, gingerly, almost, it took little steps until it was over the stick, lowered itself, and then exploded its graspers downwards.

They raked at the dirt and grass, missing the stick by a few inches. Securing nothing, they withdrew. DOG took a few steps away and angled downward to look at the stick again. It reminded me of a holo of a turtle trying to eat a strawberry I’d once seen on the ‘net. With eyes on the sides of its head, it just kind of lunged forward blindly bumping into the morsel before it was able to get a bite.

DOG secured the stick on his second try and came loping back at a much more leisurely pace, body swaying side to side more than necessary. Was that some swagger?. It was funny, seeing an AI so pleased with itself. Maybe it was because it was such a basic intelligence, but it almost made me laugh.

AI were almost everywhere, but also almost inconspicuous growing up. There were AIs who drove all personal cars, ones in our kitchens which organized and automated a lot of parts of cooking, stocking, and shopping, and of course every mobile had a personal AI assistant, or PAIA in it. But most of those were designed to be deceptively human, no matter how simple their tasks…even if the driver AI was actually pretty dumb at anything other than getting a car from place to place, it was given a voice and would politely inform you that you’d reached your destination. Nobody wanted to think a dumb animal was driving their car.

Which is what made DOG so refreshingly simple. It dropped the stick, gave it a gentle nudge to make sure I saw it, and then bounded off a few paces before turning around and crouching at the ready at me.

“Careful with that,” I heard AEGIS say from indoors. I peeked inside at the little yellowish hologram. “He might enjoy play, but he also doesn’t get tired. He’ll have you out there throwing sticks until the end of time if you let him.”

“I can give him another couple more,” I said, like I was doing the robot a favor. In truth, it was just funny to watch DOG go and interact with the world. And impressive, too, though I’d never say it to AEGIS. If her head got any bigger, her glasses wouldn’t fit.

Soon it was so dark I couldn’t see anymore, and though this was apparently no impediment for DOG, my amusement with the situation rapidly diminished. I dropped the stick and would have given DOG some skritches or praise but was unsure how to give that to a robot in a meaningful way. Not like it really cared too much about something touching its metal frame. I settled for giving it a gentle pat on top of the main body, which it responded to with the same wiggling motion it had given me earlier. Success?

“Well, at least he doesn’t bite,” I said. DOG looked at me sideways, clearly missing the joke.

“Yeah. He’s a good boy. Now go make some runs, mama needs a new pair of ethyl groups.”

I watched with a smile as it loped away into the dark. I wasn’t sure how much time I’d have to play with it with AEGIS running the mass-fab nonstop, but the simple joy of playing fetch with a robot and hanging out with good friends reminded me that she had been right. Fun was something I’d been sorely lacking recently.