A Girl and her Neodog - Chapter 1, review version 1

Chapter I

The office-lab was not large and it had terrible acoustics; the walls reverberated with the neodog’s excited barking. The room’s human occupant spun on her chair and exaggeratedly put both hands to her ears. Trying to make a stern face and failing miserably, she begged the canine through her own laughter, “Rosie, I’m hurrying, I swear! Please, don’t bark so loudly!”
Rosie, the black, curly haired neodog responsible for the wall rattling noise, pranced around the room, spinning, play-bowing and barking encouragement to her favorite person. The redheaded young woman graced with this display grinned and rolled her eyes, “Settle down, baby dog. Honestly, people will think it’s another earthquake!” She turned back to her work station.
Rosie knew when she was getting a real scolding, and that had not even been close. She bowed down on her front legs in a dog’s invitation to play, and clowned around by scooting from side to side that way, head low and tail end high. She compromised on the ‘settle down’ request by ceasing to bark at the top of her lungs, but the prancing and the play bowing continued, perhaps a little less exuberantly than a moment before.
The woman pushed her thick auburn hair behind her ears as she leaned over her outsized full-desktop computer screen, squinting carefully at the half dozen charts and progress bars on display. She nodded slightly as she used her fingertips to drag and reposition a few of the chart windows around the screen. After a satisfied pursing of her lips, she spared a look over her shoulder at her four-footed companion.
At a casual glance, Rosie was a medium sized dog, about twenty-five kilograms with a black wavy coat. She closely resembled her source breed, the Portuguese Water Dog, although with an oddity that would certainly raise eyebrows at an American Kennel Club dog show. Rosie’s cranium was noticeably higher and much more elongated than any normal member of the species Canis lupus familiaris.
When Rosie realized her person was looking at her, she paused in her antics to look back adoringly, tilting her head sharply to one side and wagging her tail. The person she loved best in the world was about twenty years old, a little taller than average and athletically built, dressed in soccer shorts and a company polo shirt. Human’s often remarked on her person’s unusual copper red hair, but Rosie’s color vision was not up to appreciating that. For Rosie, the young woman’s scent was what was rare and special. The neodog’s tail wag rapidly escalated into a whole body wag until she gave up adoring to spin around happily.
After a couple of full turns, Rosie slowed down, her high brow furrowed and her head tilted to the side. In a very un-canine display of body language, she closed her eyes and took in a deep, long breath in a kind of inverted pant. Mouth open, tongue hanging out, she slowly pushed the air out of her lungs, blinked repeatedly and settled slowly on her haunches. Her wagging tail had nearly stilled during her deep cleansing breath, but now it resumed its rapid tempo. Otherwise, she sat more or less still except for an excited quivering.
One corner of the young woman’s mouth turned up as she turned her head to refocus on her displays and their progress bars. If she enjoyed the relative peace and quiet, her pleasure was short lived. Rosie managed to confine her fidgeting to little more than a wagging tail, but it was only moments before silence proved too much for her. She began to vocalize from deep in her throat, in a kind of doggy mumble, “Ruhr, rhurr row row roh.”
“I know, I know. Just a couple minutes more.” It was the exasperated tone of a mother grateful for whatever patience she could get from a toddler. Under her breath, the young woman mumbled, “At least I can hear myself think.”
With a slight squint, she stared at her computer screen, again tapping and sliding her finger tips across the display, dragging and resizing windows. A professional full-desktop monitor, the screen was a good hundred by a hundred and fifty centimeters and could be tilted at any angle from flat to vertical, like a drafting table. An indulgent uncle kept her in good equipment.
A cable ran from a jack on one side of the desktop to a device on a nearby lab bench. A vaguely oval ring supported by a pair of three-toed legs, the device had the flat looking finish of rubberized or weather proofed plastic in a dark green.
The woman’s long hair fell in front of her face. With one hand, she fumbled in the pocket of her shorts and produced a hair scrunchie, while with her other hand she tapped and dragged another window to one side. “One more down,” she said encouragingly as she fixed her hair back in a pony tail.
“Rahr roo aroo,” Rosie’s commentary went up in pitch, before settling into a steady, throaty mumble. Her powerful tail continued its steady wagging as she pranced with her forepaws, for all the world looking like she desperately wanted to leap up and shout, “Oh please hurry up!” Of course, she couldn’t do that; that was precisely her problem.
At long last, the final progress bar in the final window on the screen turned green. The human turned to the canine, stood up and said, “Alright Rosie, it’s finished now.”
This set off a positive fit of excited barking and leaping about from Rosie. The other half of the pair could only laugh as the neodog’s antics threatened to bowl them both over. Struggling to keep balance, the young woman managed to reach over Rosie’s head and disconnect the cable from the two legged ring. Precariously, she succeeded in lifting the device in both hands off its lab bench perch and hauling it over her own head. “Okay, okay! Back up for a second, you crazy dog!”
Quivering excitedly, Rosie stepped back and allowed the object of all her enthusiasm to be placed on the floor in front of her. As soon as it touched ground, the canine lunged to slide her head inside the ring. As her shoulders contacted the device, or perhaps just a moment before, it responded to the neodog’s presence as if it were a living thing. The ring portion wrapped and contoured itself around the animal’s chest and shoulders, while the ‘legs’, which anchored at the top of the ring and were no longer needed for support, curled up and over her head, becoming a pair of mechanical tentacles sprouting from her shoulders. The tentacles waved back and forth in the air for a moment, resembling drunken sea serpents, until something seemed to settle and their movements became crisp and precise exuding a sense of purpose. The three ‘toes’ at the end of each tentacle became articulated pincers, both sets of which clicked repeatedly.
A flood of words issued from a speaker on the chest portion of the ring-turned-harness, “I have my arms back! I love my arms! I love to talk! I love you Kim! Can we go play now?”
Kim knelt happily beside her neodog, reaching out and scratching both of Rosie’s ears; no mother ever took more pride in a clever child. “We need to go see Uncle Ted first, then we can go play. Today is Frisbee day.”
At this news, Rosie spun about with excitement. Barking from her mouth while shouting, “Frisbee! Frisbee!” from her chest speaker, she ran to the lab entrance, reached up with her right tentacle, grasped and rotated the doorknob with the pincer, and swung the door wide. Rosie the neodog bounded joyfully into the expanse of office cubes in front of her, barking happily.

Neo or not, like any dog, Rosie understood deeply and instinctively that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing at a run. She dashed ahead of Kim, charging through the forest of cubicles, advertising her progress with happy barks.
She rounded a corner into a comparatively open area. Without slowing down, she passed a woman sitting at a long desk and thundered through an open office door, ignoring the sign that read “Edward Hardy, CTO.”
She glanced around to be thorough, but her nose had already told her no one was in Uncle Ted’s office. Her head tilted quizzically to the side for a moment. She started to drop her nose to the carpet, but reconsidered and instead trotted to the long desk in the outer office.
With her chest speaker, Rosie addressed the blonde woman behind the desk, “Hi, Sharon. Do you know where Uncle Ted is? We have to go see him.” Her tentacles uncurled from their resting position on the neodog’s back and waved in the air, “See my arms? Kim just fixed them!”
Sharon had the slightly glazed look of someone not in the here and now. She tapped the phone bud in her ear with one hand, and focused on Rosie long enough to say, in a southern drawl, “Just a minute, sweetie, I’m on the phone.” She tapped the ear bud again, then made a broad circle with her arm, inviting Rosie to join her behind the desk.
When Kim strode around the corner, she found Rosie enjoying a gentle tail scratch from Sharon as the older woman was wrapping up a phone conversation. With an approving smile, she moved to lean against a nearby file cabinet and wait.
“… just remember, ya’ll don’t get to spend the whole time here drinking beer on Ted’s deck. You have to take me out to dinner too; I want to hear all about Mars!” Sharon paused, added a flirty “I’ll hold you to that,” and pulled the tiny phone bud from her ear.
She favored Kim with a “Hey, sweetie,” while granting Rosie the highly desirable treat of a two-handed tail scratch.
Kim replied with a pitch perfect North Carolina, “Heyy.” She harbored the none too secret opinion that Sharon had been in Northern California long enough that she must practice her accent in the shower every morning to maintain it. So far, solid evidence still eluded the younger woman.
She moved to sit on a clear spot on the office manager’s long desk. Cocking her head to one side in a very canine posture, Kim asked conspiratorially, “And just who was that?”
Sharon fluttered her eyes in a look of utmost innocence, “That, my dear, was a terribly handsome old friend of your uncle’s. A dashing soldier only recently returned from Mars; one Kermit McCullough.”
The redhead snorted, “Kermit? Really?”
Scandalized, Sharon replied huffily, “It’s a fine Irish name. Don’t be such a pill, he is a very nice man.”
“Well, he’d have to be.” Sharon made a sour face, but Kim ignored it, “On the other hand, I would love to go to Mars. Can I meet this guy?”
Rosie interrupted, brown eyes wide, “Kim, we have to go see Uncle Ted, so we can go play Frisbee!”
“You’re right Rosie, but I didn’t mean we were going to Mars right now.” Kim bent down to give Rosie a reassuring pat on the head. Looking sideways at Sharon, she asked, “Is Uncle Ted still in that meeting? He wanted to see us right after Rosie’s upgrade.”
“He is sweetie. He doesn’t want you to wait, said you should join them. I think he wants to show off Rosie and Gabby interacting. They’re in the ‘Asta’ conference room.” Off of Kim’s skittish look, she added, “Oh, just go right on in!”
“Isn’t this kind of an important meeting?” Kim’s spine had stiffened.
“Yes, but don’t worry about it, really. After all, they’ll be interested in Rosie, not you.” That remark earned a dirty look. Kim could do wonders with a raised eyebrow, but the older woman was not easily intimidated; she just stuck her tongue out in reply.
Spinning and scooting her chair toward the printer/binder behind her, Sharon said, “Rosie, I have some papers you can bring to Ted.” She turned back with a stack of packets, cover sheets emblazoned with a blue and white star logo and the words “Sirius Bio-Engineering” in a rakish font. She handed them to the eager neodog who accepted them reverently. Turning and dashing for the conference room, Rosie called, “Come on Kim!”