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Fiction

Panic On Petrov

by Gordon Linzner

Lieutenant Janet Santiago’s initial landing on Petrov could have gone better.

Her single-person shuttle gouged a sixty-meter-long ditch through the open field before smashing into the low rock outcropping. The officer cursed but remained seated, safety straps digging into her shoulders, calming herself with deep breaths.

The shuttle’s internal computer, better secured than its human occupant, remained intact and operational, even if the ship itself wasn’t. A quick medical scan revealed no bones broken, no internal injuries beyond a few sore muscles. Her flight suit was undamaged. Santiago refused the computer’s offer of a mild analgesic, undid the safety harness, pulled herself erect, and cautiously slid open the airlock.

Moss-like vegetation gave way under her weight as Janet Santiago became the first human to set foot on the planet arbitrarily named Petrov.

A half-dozen of Petrov’s inhabitants gathered around the crash site. They were a mixed bag, indeed, seemingly placid, standing close together, softly clacking among themselves. They seemed to eye her more out of interest than fear. Those among them in possession of organs resembling eyes did, anyway.

Santiago’s earpiece crackled. “Mama Bear to Baby. Come in, Baby.”

“Baby Bear here,” she replied, rolling her eyes. She would never get used to these silly codenames. Who would eavesdrop on, let alone comprehend, an English language transmission hundreds of light years from Earth? How would fairy tale names give away less information than simply referring to each other as Martin Wu and Janet Santiago?

“State condition.” Captain Wu’s clipped manner was more annoying over a communicator than in person.

“A few bruises. Nothing more. My suit’s padding did its job, thank you. That’s more than I can say for the failed decelerator.”

“Shuttle condition?”

“Looks repairable, but not by me.”

“I’ll send a tech crew.”

“Hold off a bit. I’ve drawn a crowd.”

“Hostile?”

“More curious, I’d say. I might be able to start work immediately.”

“Which species is dominant?”

“I just got here, remember? How many distinct types did we monitor from orbit again?”

Wu paused. Santiago pictured him fumbling to pull up the report.

“Forty-one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-eight. No two the same.”

“That fits what I’m looking at, with much smaller representation. These Petrovians don’t seem as if they belong on the same planet, let alone in the same species. I see an orange eight-legger, a two-meter tall blue slug, a half-meter something-or-other that’s mostly eyestalks…”

“Save the details for your report. We’re already reading and recording audio and visual.”

“I’ll wager you can’t see how intelligent these guys look to me, though.”

“Maintain objectivity, Lieutenant.”

Lieutenant? What happened to Baby Bear?

She couldn’t blame her commander for his testy attitude. Captain Wu was tasked with finding an Earth-like world free of any life of Class Seven intelligence or higher, and therefore suitable for colonization. Santiago’s job was to confirm no life on Petrov above Class Six.

A soft beep drew Santiago’s attention to the electronic readout above her faceplate, confirming the data taken from orbit. Temperature twenty degrees Celsius, ultraviolet radiation minimal, atmosphere thin but breathable by Earth standards.

“I’m removing my helmet. I need to communicate with more than verbal cues. The translator needs to sample more of their language.”

“Assuming they have a language.”

“Objectivity, Captain?” Santiago whispered.

The six Petrovians inched closer. Santiago undid her helmet seals, paused to let the pressure equalize, then removed the bulky headgear The balmy breeze felt refreshing after that dry, metallic-smelling canned mix.

“There,” she announced to her non-human audience. “Now we can…”

With a series of high-pitched, unmistakably panicky squeals, the Petrovians scattered.

Santiago sulked, leaning an elbow against the shuttle’s battered hull. “You guys sure know how to boost a visitor’s self-esteem.”

She was still in that position twenty minutes later, helmet dangling from her left hand, when a lone yellow octopoid drew near. She did not recognize the newcomer as part of the original group.

The creature halted two meters from the shuttle, just out of reach, and clacked at her.

Santiago remained silent and, she hoped, unthreatening, for the brief time it would take her suit’s translator to absorb enough of the alien speech to reply. When her earpiece pinged in sync with a green light in the upper left corner of her face plate, she slowly smiled, then extended her right hand.

“A hand, er, appendage-shake?” Santiago offered through the thin, almost invisible, microphone attached to her chin. “It’s a type of greeting where I come from. You don’t have any taboos about touching, do you?”

She’d already guessed the answer, after observing how close together the first group had been, but the more communication she exchanged, the more material the translator had to work with. Judging by their vocabulary level, the Petrovians, this one anyway, appeared close to Class Six. They need only establish a working dialogue with the Earthers to get beyond that.

That was not the result Captain Wu hoped for, of course.

The translator crackled in her left ear. “Un-understand ‘taboos.’ Touching good.”

“Great.” Her smile widened. She pictured the more germophobic crew members turning pale as she peeled off her glove, even though the ship had scanned the environment for potentially dangerous microorganisms before she even boarded her shuttle. Something might still have been missed, but part of her job involved taking reasonable risks.

The octopoid’s reaction was more extreme than that of her own fellow hypothetical crew members. It leapt back a good four meters. Over the translator, Santiago heard “No change! No change!”

The creature skittered out of sight.

Nertz, Santiago thought sourly. Now I’m some kind of interstellar panhandler.

She glared at her exposed right hand, with its short square cuticles, faint blue veins, and a barely visible scar on the middle knuckle where she’d caught it in a doorjamb as a child. Nothing you’d want to stare at for hours, but neither was it something to run screaming from, considering the variety of lifeforms on Petrov. Had Santiago instead put down the helmet and offered her still-gloved left hand, she might have better understood the creature’s reaction. The two extremities looked as if they belonged to different beings.

Especially if you didn’t know what a glove was.

Or a helmet.

Of course!

Santiago’s fingers started racing along the seals of her flight suit, then stopped to look back at the damaged shuttlecraft. She decided to remove her outfit inside, out of sight of prying eye parts. Enough Petrovians had been traumatized for one day.

#

An hour passed, and more. Santiago didn’t know how long, exactly. Aside from the translator, now draped around her neck, she’d left her technology, and most of her clothing, in the damaged shuttle, then moved outside of its line of sight.

The brighter of Petrov’s two suns sank below the horizon. Santiago perched on a nearby rock, ignoring the feel of rough stone against her bare legs. The ambient temperature dropped a degree, maybe two, remaining in her comfort zone.

Had she reached her epiphany too late? Had word spread among the Petrovians to completely shun their visitor?

A deep, loud snuffle sounded behind her. Santiago slowly turned.

Three meters away a pink circular shape, not much larger than her shuttle seat, crinkled as it approached her across the loose soil.

She leaned forward, one hand reaching for her translator.

The newcomer suddenly seemed to grow wider, taller. Santiago caught her breath, amazed that any living thing could increase in size so much, so quickly. Then she realized what she saw was not physical growth, but a being emerging from its den, or lair, or whatever, somewhere beneath the surface.

The thick tube of pinkish flesh towered over her in minutes, throbbing, undulating, bending forward. A dark hole widened at one end, like opening a mouth, to reveal multiple rows of sharp, black teeth. There was no face, no eyes, no expression that could be read, only a threatening maw lunging forward, too quickly for her to evade it.

Apparently the Petrovians had settled on the best way to deal with the invading anomaly that was Janet Santiago.

Her eyes closed tight. Warm breath enveloped bare skin. The Lieutenant had no clothes, no weapons, not even a communicator.

After a long moment, still alive, Santiago looked again.

The pink tube shifted aside with what looked like a shrug.

#

“Now that I’ve been accepted,” Santiago radioed Wu, “I can see all sorts of aspects of their lives. We’re talking Class Nine here, maybe Ten. The Petrovians were very interested in my analyses of DNA samples, which indicate, by the way, that all forty-one thousand of them are indeed likely the same species. I’d love to hear the Evolutionary Geneticists explain that!” She affectionately scratched a blue juvenile mothlike creature under what seemed to be a chin.

“Yet they run around naked,” Wu responded, disgruntled.

She sympathized with his mood. Who wouldn’t feel that way after surveying fifteen, now sixteen, planets, only to determine that every one of them, so far, as per the Council’s standards, were to be considered off-limits for Earth colonization?

“Basically, yes. I didn’t realize they were all one at first because the Petrovians vary outwardly so much from each other. Using outer garments to tell them apart would be redundant, and standard patterns pointless. The climate here is temperate, year-round from what I could gather from them. They don’t need protection from the elements.”

“You’ve gone native?”

Santiago glanced down the length of her slim body, wriggled her bare toes. “Not completely. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t feel comfortable without at least my skivvies.”

“I can’t in good conscience instruct the team to run about in their underwear.”

“They’d be fine, Captain. The atmosphere’s quite comfortable, given the environment. The key is to never dress or undress in front of a Petrovian. At least, not until they get used to the concept of garb.”

The moth-cat clacked goodbye, then jumped off Santiago’s lap to playfully chase its sibling, a ten-legged ball of fur.

“I still don’t understand.”

“It’s obvious in hindsight. Young Petrovians look like small mature versions of themselves. There’s none of that big head, big eyes effect we find in most Earth species. They hatch from eggs in a communal nursery. No one knows whose progeny is whose, so everyone raises them.”

“You’re getting off subject, Lieutenant.”

“They don’t wear clothes. They don’t change appearance, except in size, as they mature. They considered my shuttle a clunky, oversized egg. When I removed my helmet and gloves, they thought I was peeling off parts of myself, physically changing shape. A concept alien to them.”

“And?”

“How would you feel if the puppy you were petting suddenly sprouted werewolf fangs?”

The empty crackle of static was confirmation enough that she could soon move on to the next world on their list.

~

Bio:

Gordon Linzner is founder / former editor Space and Time Magazine, author of five published novels and scores of short stories in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently Darrell’s Schweitzer’s anthology Dark Dreamlands. He is a full member of the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.

Philosophy Notes:

The non-human concepts held by alien species always take a bit of digging. And sometimes they can’t be exactly followed by mere humans. Some of us, however, are a bit more keen than others.

Fiction

On Birthdays, Turnagún

by Arturo Sierra

Those who take an interest in the strange and fascinating matter of birthdays find few such peculiar cases as Turnagún. This out-of-the-way world, generally insignificant in the affairs of the wider galaxy, nevertheless makes two claims to fame. First, that the inhabitants are notorious for the violence they visit upon outsiders, though admittedly they haven’t had much contact with the outside. Only three visitations on record, in fact. Still, no one had a good time of it.

Secondly, Turnagún is famous for having the most convoluted calendar known to the sages. Some scholars, who can be trusted not to make stuff up, maintain both these peculiarities of Turnagúnian culture are connected. It’s no wonder, since the world is a moon-moon, or what’s known as a submoon, a moon of a moon, a subsatellite in orbit around a super-earth which, in turn, orbits a Jovian with nineteen masses-of-Jupiter. The super-earth is called Kalgán, and it dominates the skies of its attendant, crawling slowly across the heavenly dome. Meanwhile, the Jovian is named Úb, and most local religions call it the abode of the gods, unsurprisingly. In the sky, it looms and lurks behind Kalgán, scattering fortunes in its path.

The inhabitants are solemn and taciturn, but their bodies move with gentle grace, almost floating in the low gravity, and they perform every action with ritualistic care. That they are prey to a kind of superstitious neurosis is the worst that can be said of them. They are xenophobes, but they have not indulged in any frenzy of interstellar extermination, like the Kröshtlolammitans, who are sworn not to rest until they annihilate all sapient species, including themselves. No, Turnagún’s perversity runs deeper than all that, and it’s only discovered by tracing the paths that crisscross its firmament.

The jovian-moon-submoon system that is Úb-Kalgán-Turnagún goes tumbling around Túus and Ébo, a G-class sun and a dim red dwarf, respectively. A third star, the cold and faint white dwarf called Ħaâħ, encloses the system inside a steeply inclined orbit. Common knowledge has it that catastrophe accompanies Ħaâħ, the Dreadful Eye, during its approach to the inner system once every other century. For its part, Úb has a highly excentric orbit for a life-bearing planet. Depending on the alignment of all these celestial bodies, sunsets on Turnagún can turn out pink like roses for lovers, red like blood-pacts with demons, or they can drown in a green hue reminiscent of watered-down chard soup.

Coming to the matter of birthdays, then. Turnagún experiences three yearly cycles simultaneously: short, long, and super. Accordingly, a birthday happens—or, rather, befalls a Turnagúnian, when the world completes an orbit around Kalgán, which is a short year. A short year lasts only a few minutes less than a day on the moon-moon, it being nearly tidally locked, but not quite. Annual birthdays, then, come almost every day. Days, of course, do not correspond with sunsets and sunrises, since the world’s spin is not what causes the sun to move across the sky, but instead it’s the procession of the moon-moon’s parent around its own Jovian parent what brings about the sunrise. To make up for that, a year will have at least one sunset at some point during the day. Unless, of course, the suns are eclipsed by either the parent moon or the Jovian, in which case the second trimester might be the day’s second nighttime. Then again, a day could have more than just one sunset, depending on the cosmic dance, so there’s the bright side. You can go ahead and make yourself a sketch, if you think it would help—it won’t.

Meanwhile, a long birthday befalls once every Kalgánian year, when the super-earth goes around the Jovian, Úb. Unfortunately, Kalgán’s orbit is much faster than Turnagún’s. To spell it out clearly: the long year is shorter than the short year, and the year is shorter than the day, but only by a few minutes, and also depending on which year one is talking about, the long or the short, the long being some hours shorter than a day, and none of these having anything to do with the coming and going of summer and winter, which follows the Úbian year, which is none of the above.

The milestone of a long birthday is too frequent to be much celebrated, and not even short birthdays are considered worthy of great fanfare, though cake does take place, traditionally. We note in passing that Turnagúnians don’t have sweet tastebuds, so the cakes in question are sad, salty affairs. In any case, it’s so difficult to guess the right day without some serious arithmetic, that not being able to remember one’s own age is considered the mark of adulthood.

And if the matter were laid to rest here, it could be handled like any other migraine. But we still must consider the super-year of Úb going around the binary stars. At this point, it is customary for the author to solicit the reader’s patience while a complex matter is explained, but in this case the recommendation is that the next paragraph be skipped by those who prefer avoiding the risk of an aneurism.

On all manner of worlds, civilizations mark the solstice. These are celebrated because they are important for agriculture, or simply because they are worth noticing. Turnagúnians are burdened with the linestice, when Turnagún, Kalgán and Úb form a straight line—it turns into a prolinestice when the stars Túus and Ébo fall into this line behindÚb, and a retrolinestice when the stars are on the opposite side. There’s summer and winter linestices of both kinds. It must be taken into account whether Turnagún is sandwiched between Kalgán and Úb, or if it’s Kalgán in the middle, and all the variants of these celestial events when it comes to the perpendicularstice.

Complications are compounded by the inclination of the orbits of Turnagún around Kalgán, the inclination of Kalgán’s orbit in the Úb system, and Úb’s inclination in the plane of the planets, of which there’s a damnably large number, not to mention the 38° angle to the ecliptic of the Túus-Ebo orbit around the pair’s common center of mass. The third star, Ħâħ, blazes into the dance, too, turning astronomical pandemonium into something no devil would want any part in. Then we come to consider the tangentinox, the intersectionox, the diametrictictonox and the radionox, and don’t forget the chordstice and the secantstice.

Unsurprisingly, there has never been a form of government in Turnagún that was not an astrologocracy, meaning government by astrologers. It’s natural: as on every planet, civilization is highly dependent on where things stand in the sky. Farmers must know when to plant and harvest; fishermen need to know at what depth the sea-parrots swim, which depends on the various lights in the night’s sky; hospital workers want to know when to expect an uptick in admissions, and everyone benefits from knowing that they have been feeling down only because of seasonal mood-swings. Not to mention, there’s an understandable interest in predicting earthquake season in a tectonically active world.

So, there’s that, but also, and this is the crux of the issue, everyone knows someone who got married against the advice of an astrologer, like when Úb was on the right side of Kalgán and Ébo was on the left of Túus just after the equianglistice, and the marriage was a disaster, they divorced and the kids are just the worst. Everyone has an uncle who bought a house during a retrolinestice, which is a no-no according to common astrological wisdom, and the house burnt down thereafter; the insurance company wouldn’t cover. Everyone has a sister-in-law who invested while Ébo was eclipsed by Ub’s second moon counting outwards on a winter radionox, and she lost everything. When the conversation turns to politics over Sunday-family-lunch, one can frequently hear opinions to the effect that when parliament last discussed tax reform, it was a Kalgánian month that started during the first quarter of the short year while it was nighttime, and look what we got for that bit of trouble, a recession, see if you think it’s such a good idea to keep horoscopes out of politics.

The thing is, on Turnagún astrologers are not merely taking advantage of confirmation bias. They follow the strictest rules of scientific discovery. They postulate a hypothesis, say, for example, that the second tangentonox after a linestice is a bad moment to get a haircut. They then collect a dataset of people who cut their hair during such an occasion, they collate and compare with data gathered at other times, they make and test predictions, and only then will they announce a new fortunetelling. If the astrological community agrees with the findings, the fortune is added to the Almanac.

Turnagúnian astrologers are proven right with a frequency and precision that can’t be done away with as statistical artifact or the result of vagueness. Over there, astrologers win at the horse track 79% more often than the average gambler. And, unlike elsewhere, they do not feel like they can’t access the mystical forces while in the presence of a disbeliever. It’s just a question whipping out calculator and sextant, do some advanced trigonometry, and there you go: it’s Neightime Fun to come in first in the third race.

Yet astrologers are not considered a lucky bunch, and hardly anyone wants to join the profession. They are blighted by mental health issues, paranoia being one of the main concerns, together with late-onset dyscalculia, anxiety-induced alopecia, and sleepwalking. Most omens, it is said, are bad omens, and most good omens are just bad omens read backwards.

When the Ambassador for the Galactic Community made contact with the Turnagúnians, at first she was received quite politely. At some point, however, the Ambassador was explaining about the wider universe, most of which can’t be seen from Turnagún because of the Nebula. She told them that the Galaxy is a great disc of stars spinning around a central bulge, and at that very moment the attitude changed. She was told to go away and never, ever come back. It seemed like a puzzling overreaction, at first, until it was noticed that the galactic year is not accounted for in the Turnagúnian cosmology.

The second outsider was a missionary. He landed, preached for a bit, got to the part about God stopping the sun in its track—a myth found everywhere among mono-helionic cultures—and was told in no uncertain terms that he had about thirty seconds to leave, or else there was going to be trouble.

The third visitation was by a party. They landed their rocket on a beautiful spot at the beach, set up a tent, blasted some beats, opened a thousand bottles of champagne, and put some effort into the concept of having a good time. Suddenly, a dozen Turnagúnians came out of the underbrush, wearing pelts and wielding spears. The party people thought they had stumbled upon uncontacted, pre-tech people, which could add to the entertainment. Only, these natives were not so much awe-struck by the spaceship and the laser-lightshow, as they seemed—one survivor said—like if someone’s dad had shown up to take his vomit-covered disappointment back home. Which is not the attitude you expect to find in a spear-wielder wearing loincloth.

“Hope you don’t mind us landing on your planet unannounced, you know how it is,” the visitors said, quickly moving past the awkwardness of first contact. “Come join us! We’re having a party!”

“What sort of party?” asked the one who seemed to be the leader.

“It’s a party for this one! Get over here, you rascal, meet the locals! It’s his birthday! Today he turns fifty!”

~

Bio:

From Santiago, Chile, Arturo Sierra now has gone out into the world. For the most part, he has led a completely uninteresting life, and, with any luck, it will stay that way.

Philosophy Note:

In a famous quote by Saint Augustine, he claims to know exactly what time is, as long as no one asks him to explain what it is. According to modern physics, time is the thing that’s measured by clocks, and you better stop asking nosy questions before you’re told to mind your own business. Clocks, here, meaning anything that repeats in a pattern, like the phases of the moon, the place where the sun sets, the vibration of a caesium atom, or a spinning pulsar. We were handed a nice clock by nature in the form of our planet’s orbit around the sun, yet still we follow the lunar calendar for religious reasons, and the mismatch gets very confusing, and it still took a long, long time until we got the solar year right, and how come that it used to start snowing in June, when I was a kid, but now it happens in September, and I bet that caught you off guard if you have always lived in the northern hemisphere.
This piece is part of a series of twelve vignettes about the strange and fascinating matter of birthdays as they are celebrated all over the Galaxy. You see, not all clocks are so easy to read, and some have very weird handles.

Fiction

subroutine_trace

by Martha Hipley

The ewe’s corpse is so sun-scrubbed and wind-swept that it is little more than a pile of bones and dried sinew arranged in the rough form of a sheep. A drone approaches, cresting over a hill while guiding several thousand still-living sheep who bear little resemblance to the dead creature. It rises and leaves the herd behind, approaching the rest station where the bones are clustered around the seal of a mechanical gate. A light above flashes in acknowledgement as the drone sends a signal. The gate begins to slide on its rails, hooks against one of the animal’s ribs, and hums with effort. Some small percentage of livestock die in each year’s migration from accidents or thirst – an inconsequential loss.

The drone hovers just above the carcass and hooks around the spine and ribs with its claw-like manipulators. It reverses, pulling the skeleton free. It falls apart in a clatter of bones and dust. The gate slides open on its rails.

One rib remains tightly in the grip of one of the claws. The drone scrapes it against the ground, forming first a line, then a loop, then a full figure-eight. The drone loops wider and wider, extending the figure into a bouquet of circles gouged in the dry, red dirt. From above, it resembles something like a flower, but there are no flowers in this terrain, no fruition, no surplus.

The drone returns to the herd and guides the sheep through the open gate. They trample over the figure, grinding it into a ghostly whisper. They leap over the bones, as insignificant as anything beneath their feet in the Martian terrain.

The shelter is simple: a wind-shield ring to contain the sheep, a vinyl canopy stretched across a curved steel frame, purified reservoirs of water collected from the cloud-seeded rain, some additional bots to scrape through any droppings and sanitize the space between seasonal visits, an array of solar panels for powering the system. The sheep pass through a gauntlet of antiseptic sprays.

The drone hovers above the gate until the last ruminant enters. It signals for the gate to shut and flies to a docking station. It locks in for the night, the rib still held tightly in its left manipulator. The animals sleep.

#

At sunrise, the drone undocks and guides the sheep back through the gate. The dry, bleached rib is light and makes little impact on the drone’s powerful flight. It holds the bone aloft as it cruises, almost like a shepherd’s crook. Fresh from rest, the sheep bound across the hills, grazing as they go, stripping the engineered bluegrass to its roots. They cover a comfortable twenty kilometers in the low gravity, guided by the drone to the next rest station. The gate opens, and the animals enter. The portal slams shut, but the drone does not rest.

Instead, it loops the station’s perimeter, flying low. It scrapes the bone into the red dirt a second time. It carves out figure eights, linking them together in a daisy chain around the station’s ringed wall. With each loop, the chain grows darker and deeper. When the sun finally sets, the drone enters the dock.

#

The next day, the red dirt runs almost black with rain. The gate hangs open while the sheep bustle and blister, scraping up what grass they can within sight of the shelter. The drone flies high in a one-kilometer loop, powering against the wind, occasionally swooping and diving to drive back clumps of sheep that stumble too far from safety. In the early afternoon, the drone guides the animals back into the shelter. They are wet and underfed.

One hogget, a young ram, prowls the enclosure, scraping its horns against the curved steel wall. The drone swats at it with the rib bone and swerves as the ram steps back and charges forward. Its horns clang against the wind-shield like thunder. It paces back and then slams against the wall again. Its horns are undamaged. It returns to the depths of the herd, obscured by larger and louder animals. The drone loops the interior, waving the rib bone until the animals finally sleep.

#

The following day is blown out and harsh with summer sun. The sheep move swiftly. The drone skims close to the herd, waving the bone past the animals’ blank eyes. By midday, the beasts show no interest in the wilted grass along the trail. They rush through the gate of the next shelter and collapse in the shade or fight over the water stations. The drone locks the gate and flies out into the hills.

Far from the terraformed grazing paths, the drone flies low over an expanse of open, red dirt. It grinds the tip of the bone into the soil in perfect, concentric circles, each new circle with an exact one-meter increase in diameter. The image nearly spans an acre when the rib bone snaps against a half-buried rock. The drone discards the shattered bone and flies back towards the shelter. The hoggets still hum with nervous energy in the cool evening. The drone enters its dock.

#

The summer heat is even stronger. The drone opens the gate and prods the animals from their resting places in the shade. The older animals are the first to exit the shelter, closely tailed by the lambs. Only the hoggets still loop the shelter, as though reluctant to leave the cool, rebellious in their hormonal state. One by one, they trot out into the sun as the drone swoops and swerves to prod them along until a single young ram remains, undeterred by the aerial maneuvers. It gulps from an abandoned water trough and kicks at the dirt.

The drone approaches. At first the ram begins to trot towards the gate but then suddenly doubles back and sprints towards a far wall. The drone follows at a close distance. With its back to the wall, the ram steps back slowly, then charges. Its target flits up several meters, letting it skid forward in the dirt. The ram turns, and the drone flies low.

This time when the ram charges, the drone reaches out with both manipulator claws, locking them around the creature’s horns. The drone’s blades hum with effort as it lifts the animal into the air. The ram hangs limp. The drone flies towards the open gate.

#

The drone crests a hill, flying out ahead of the herd. It accelerates as the next shelter appears in the distance. At the gate, the sun-bleached skeleton of a young ram lies contorted – several bones are smashed beneath the gate’s rails. The drone pulls at the skeleton with its manipulator claws, shaking it until the last bits of sinew snap and the bones scatter. It hooks one claw through the nasal cavity of the skull and hovers, holding it aloft in the fading sunlight. It flies low and traces two perfect lines in the red dirt, one for the tip of each horn. It returns to the herd and guides them to the shelter. It closes the gate but does not yet dock.

~

Bio:

Martha Hipley is a writer and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland who lives and works in Mexico City. Her stories have been published in Maudlin House, VOLUME 0, and ARTWIFE, among others. When not working, she enjoys training as a triathlete and boxer.

Philosophy Note:

In this moment when we are bombarded by tech companies pushing generative language and image tools as “intelligent,” I wondered what I would really consider to be an artificial intelligence. This story follows an engineered device actively choosing to rewrite its own objectives, acting with violence, but doing so to follow a very human desire to create. Raphaela Vogel’s I have no questions, only answers installation at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City inspired the first spark of this story, but other inspirations I have held in mind while writing include J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine, and the essential Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Measure of a Man.”

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