Chapter I
The neodog’s sudden barking startled her girl; the redheaded young woman jumped in her seat with a high pitched yelp.
Rolling her eyes, she put a hand to her heart and exhaled an exasperated breath. Then, with an angry ‘tsk’ that could not be heard over the background noise, she swept a finger tip over the nonsense characters on her touch screen before re-typing the correct command.
Eyes narrowed, she glanced up at the rattling walls before spinning her chair around. The office-lab was not large and had terrible acoustics; the echoing barks reverberated so that the thumb tacks holding up schematic posters and genetic maps threatened to shake loose from the walls. Eyes flashing, the young woman covered her ears with her hands and pinched her face tight as she gave the neodog a stern look.
However, at the sight of her neo’s wagging tail and silly antics, the stern face gave a twitch and dissolved into an indulgent grin. Dropping her hands and leaning well forward, she begged the animal, loudly, through her own laughter, “Rosie, I’m hurrying, I swear! Please, don’t bark so much!”
Rosie, the black, curly-haired neodog responsible for the wall rattling noise, darted around the room, dancing, spinning and continuing to bark encouragement to her favorite person. The young lady graced with this display grinned a lopsided grin and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Settle down, baby dog! Honestly, people will think it’s an earthquake!” Giggling, she reached behind her back and grabbed the edge of her desktop. With a pull, she spun back to her work.
Rosie knew what a real scolding was, and that had not even come close. She waggled her whole body in time with her sweeping tail, then dropped down on her front legs in a dog’s invitation to play. Looking up, tongue hanging out, she clowned by scooting from side to side in her playbow, head low and tail end high. She did not completely ignore the human’s ‘settle down’ request; she did stop barking at the top of her lungs, but there was no letup in her manic back-and-forth.
With both hands, the woman pushed her thick auburn hair back and hooked it behind her ears. Despite that, when she leaned over her outsized full-desktop computer screen, much of it came loose and fell across her face. Squinting, she scanned the half dozen charts and progress bars popping up on the display.
She chewed her lip and nodded to herself, simultaneously using the fingertips of each hand to drag and reposition chart windows around the screen. With a satisfied pursing of her lips, she straightened up, gave a firmer nod, and 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 robust build and a black, wavy coat. She closely resembled her source breed, the Portuguese Water Dog, although with an oddity that would have raised eyebrows at an American Kennel Club dog show. A breeder’s eye would have been irresistibly drawn to Rosie’s cranium, which was both higher and more elongated than any normal member of the species Canis lupus familiaris.
When Rosie knew she had caught her girl’s eye, her own eyes went wide and she paused in her bouncing to stare back. Her head tilted so far over to one side she looked ready to roll over entirely, while her powerful tail wagged in such wide sweeps that the tip brushed her own ribs.
Her girl, the person the neodog loved best in the world, was not so much a girl but rather a twenty year old woman, a little taller than average and athletically built, dressed in soccer shorts and a black polo shirt with a blue and white star logo. Humans often remarked on her unusual copper red hair, but Rosie’s vision was not up to appreciating rare shades of human hair color. Rosie emphasized other senses.
The neodog’s nostrils flared and her eyes half closed. For Rosie, it was the woman’s scent that was rare and special; a subtle mix of pheromones that spoke of redwood forests, ocean spray and grassy fields on hot days. It was the scent that told her she was home, no matter where the pair roamed. Lifting her nose and waving it in tiny circles, she inhaled the aroma of love and happiness, escalating her tail wag into a whole body wiggle until she had to celebrate by spinning around in circles.
After a couple full rotations, Rosie slowed down, her high brow furrowed as she again tilted her head to the side. In a very un-canine display of body language, she closed her eyes, lifted her nose with an open mouth and took in a deep, long breath in a kind of inverted pant. Mouth wide, tongue hanging out, she slowly pushed the air out of her lungs as she lowered her head and chest until her chin was on the floor in a yoga ‘downward dog’ posture. Another long slow breath, and she slowly settled her tail end until she was flat on the floor in ‘child’s pose.’ Her wagging tail had nearly stilled during her deep cleansing breaths, but its rapid tempo resumed as she lifted her head and blinked. Outside of her tail, she managed to hold herself more or less still, save for an excited quivering.
The corners of the woman’s mouth curled up and her eyes twinkled before she faced forward and narrowed her gaze at her displays and their progress bars. If she enjoyed the relative peace and quiet, the pleasure was short lived. Rosie had tamped down her fidgeting to little more than the sweep of her tail, but it was only moments until the silence proved too much for her. While the redheaded woman ran her eyes across her screen, her neodog 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.” She did not look at the dog; it was the exasperated tone of a mother grateful for whatever patience she could get from a toddler. Fingers drumming the edge of her screen, in an undertone she added, “At least now I can hear myself think.”
Narrowing her brown eyes until her eyebrows nearly touched, she stared at her computer screen, periodically lightly tapping it and sliding a finger tip across the display to drag or resize a window. It was a professional full-desktop monitor; the screen area was a good hundred by a hundred and fifty centimeters and it could be tilted at any angle from flat to vertical, like a drafting table. An indulgent uncle kept her in good equipment.
A thin, orange fiber optic cable ran from a data port on the side of the desktop to a device on the nearest corner of a cluttered lab bench. It was a vaguely oval ring standing on its own pair of legs, each leg with a three toed base. The object had a flat, dark-green finish that resembled a rubberized or waterproof material.
When she leaned a little further forward, the rest of the woman’s long hair escaped her ears and fell in front of her face. Her eyes, narrowed and unblinking, stayed fixed on her screen while she fumbled in the pocket of her shorts and produced a hair scrunchie. With her free hand she tapped the screen and dragged another window to one side.
“One more down.” She said it out of the corner of her mouth while she fixed her hair back in a pony tail.
“Rahr roo aroo,” Rosie’s commentary went up an octave in response, before settling into a steady, throaty mumble. Her tail maintained a steady, rhythmic wag and she began to knead the floor with her forepaws. She gave her head a little sideways shake and looked for all the world like she desperately wanted to leap up and shout, “Oh please hurry up!”
At long last, the final progress bar in the final window turned green. With crinkles at the corners of her eyes and a small, maternal smile, the human turned in her chair to face the canine. Her smile became a wide grin and she stood up and announced, “All right Rosie, it’s finished now.”
The animal’s response was a positive fit of excited barking and leaping about. The woman laughed as her neodog leapt up at her and threatened to bowl her over. She had to squeeze right up to the lab bench to edge out the neo and disconnect the data cable from the two legged ring. She gripped the device with both hands, but could not simply rotate around without smacking the legs into Rosie’s face, so she hauled the thing into the air and over her own head when she turned.
“Okay, okay! Back up for a second, you crazy dog!”
With an excited tremble, Rosie stepped back and allowed the object of her enthusiasm to be placed on the floor in front of her. As soon as it touched ground, while it was still rocking on its pair of legs, the canine lunged and slid her head inside the ring.
As her shoulders contacted the device, or perhaps just milliseconds before, it responded as if it were a living thing. The ring portion wrapped and contoured itself around her chest and shoulders. Extruding bands that locked themselves together, the ring turned itself into a harness. The ‘legs’, anchored at the ring’s top, and no longer needed for support, curled and lifted into the air, up and over the neodog’s head. They became a flexible pair of mechanical tentacles, sprouting from the canine’s harness at the shoulders, and they undulated randomly in the air for a moment. The waving tentacles resembled drunken sea serpents as much as anything else, until something seemed to settle and their movements became crisp, precise and coordinated. The three ‘toes’ at the end of each tentacle flexed to form articulated pincers, both sets of which clicked repeatedly.
The tentacles folded sharply along Rosie’s upper back and a flood of words issued from a speaker built into the chest portion of the mechanical 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 beside her neodog, her grin now stretching from ear to ear. She reached out and ran both hands over Rosie’s head and settled reflexively into an ear scratch. Her brown eyes sparkled; 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’s head shot up and her tail wag broke the sound barrier. Unable to contain her excitement, she chased her tail for two or three spins before turning to the room’s exit. Barking from her mouth and shouting, “Frisbee! Frisbee!” from her chest speaker, she ran to the lab door, reached up with one mechanical tentacle, grasped and rotated the doorknob with the pincer, and pulled the door wide. Rosie the neodog bounded into the expanse of office cubicles in front of her, barking her joy. Her girl, Kim, followed at a leisurely pace.
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 to the side for a moment as she considered her options. She began 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 seated 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 Reeves had the slightly glazed look of someone not in the here and now. She tapped the phone bud in her ear with a finger, 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 firm tail scratch from Sharon as the woman was wrapping up a phone conversation. With an approving smile, she crossed her arms and leaned against a nearby file cabinet.
“… 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 and tossed it into a little ceramic dish on her desk. She favored Kim with a grin and a “Hey, sweetie,” while rotating in her chair to grant 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 in the shower every morning to keep up her accent. So far, solid evidence eluded the redhead. 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 stuck out her chin and turned to shuffle some paperwork, “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 turned back and 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 other 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, covers 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 with reverence, carefully positioning them on her back, atop her harness. Rosie wiggled to convince herself she had a good grip on her delivery, then turned and dashed for the conference room, calling, “Come on Kim!”
updated June 1, 2009
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