original fiction – Page 2 – Robot Dinosaurs!

Taiyesha’s Fist

by robotdino_adminJuly 20, 2018March 27, 2020 on

Taiyesha’s Fist

by Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

“Taiyesha?” asks the lady, like she doesn’t know.

I just look at her. My name and age are in that file on her desk, and I’m not interested in having the googolplex conversation about how interesting my name is, or about how big and tall I am for thirteen years old.

These counselors always know my name.

It’s just that they don’t know me.

She tucks strands of wispy brown hair behind her ear, then points to the chair she wants me to sit in.

I lean against the window sill instead so I have full view of the room and door. The window is open and a breeze carries in the green scent of fresh cut grass. I’d rather be outside.

“I hear that some people call you Tai. May I call you Tai?” She smiles, all hopeful.

“Nope,” I say. “I don’t know you like that.”

Her face cracks, but I don’t care. That’s the problem with people these days, getting too familiar when they’ve got no right to be.

There’s a ceiling-to-floor bookcase. Some of the shelves hold stuffed animals, dolls, toy cars and trains. There’s a jar full of red jelly beans. A half-dead bonsai peeks from behind a stack of plastic blocks. There are heaps of comics, and lots of books. Some have leather covers, others with bright cartoon drawings. There’s a bunch featuring pretty girls in princess dresses, who don’t look a bit like me, even though they are.

I have super powers and super smarts too. I could be lost royalty, forgotten and hated by mean people in an uncaring world. Except in the end, I never get justice or love, or a slice of the happiness pie in the end.

“Each time you visit, you can take one item from the bookcase. Go ahead, pick something,” she says, just as my eye catches on the only thing that interests me. It’s on the top shelf, still in the original box. It sits crookedly between a Raggedy Ann doll and a pink plastic piggy bank.

Its eyes, tiny LED lights, set in a fierce face, glow red.

“Call me Sarah,” she says, nodding to the chair.

This time I take it.

I check out my new pteranodon. I flex the beaky jaw and hinged wings. I run my fingers long the crown-like crest and the smooth beady LED light eyes. It doesn’t have teeth. It’s not a horrible representation of a pteranodon, even though I have doubts about the colors. Purple and orange?

I’ve decided to name him Fist.

“Cool dino-bird.”

I roll my eyes. “Not everything that flies is a bird,” I say.

Her face lights up. “But birds evolved from dinosaurs.”

“True. But the flightless kind. And there’s some debate if pteranodons are even dinosaurs at all.”

Fist gracefully angles his left wing up, then down.

“Really?” She nods sideways at me. I can tell she’s impressed, but not surprised. She’s got my test scores in that file, too.

“Google it, if you don’t believe me.” I flip Fist over and pop open the battery cavity in his belly. There aren’t any batteries powering him, yet I feel his life vibrating beneath my fingers. And he is warm.

Sarah sits on the other side of the desk and looks at me through narrowed eyes. “Do you know why you’re here, Taiyesha?”

I almost laugh, because she’s not slick and that’s a stupid question. “Don’t you?”

Fist exhales a long low grumble, and turns an intelligent gaze on Sarah.

I slide down in the chair so my braids hang over the back and wave like a waterfall. Fist sits on the edge of the desk between us.

“You’re here because we’re trying to determine if public school is the right place for you, considering this last incident.”

She waits for me to say something. I don’t.

“My job is to determine if this is true.”

I sit up. Fist cranes his neck to look at her too. “But how can you? You don’t know me.”

“My job is to get to know you.” Her smile is different this time. Not as friendly. Not as sincere. The kind of smile adults plaster on when they intend to do things they know might be wrong, but are going to do anyway.

I don’t hold back my laughter this time. Just like her smile, it’s not friendly or sincere.

Fist squawk-growls.

“Tell me,” says Sarah, glancing down at her papers, “about the incident in Mr. McArthur’s class.”

I remember the way the class went silent when Mr. McArthur tried to grab me. I remember his sour coffee breath and red face. His nasty smile. I had made him angry.

My legs got tangled with the chair’s when I jumped up to dodge Mr. McArthur’s grasp. I almost fell. He’d meant to throw me out of the classroom.

“Taiyesha?”

I look up and realize I’ve stopped breathing and my eyes are watery.

“You okay?” Sarah leans forward, face soft with concern.

Fist’s tiny eyes are flashing red, then yellow, then red again.

“Mr. McArthur is not a good teacher,” I say.

Fist turns on delicate feet and stomps toward the center of the desk.

Sarah’s face is stony. Adults hate when kids say bad things about other adults.

“It’s true,” I reaffirm.

Fist nips at a paper under foot and rips the edge off with a screeching howl.

“I followed MR. MCARTHUR’S CLASS RULES. I was #1, when everyone else was talking. I did #2, until my arm went numb. When he called on me, I did #3, using my inside voice and proper English. He called me stupid, otherwise I wouldn’t be in remedial classes.”

I shrug, but I feel like crying or punching something, because I’m not stupid.

Fist’s wings wiggle up and down in time with mine.

Sarah says nothing to this, but I can see the change in her eyes, the wonder, and the shame. “I told him that he was just mad that I knew more than him. He could’ve just Googled it, if he didn’t believe me.”

“Google what?” She hands me a tissue. Fist just misses clamping onto her wrist before she pulls her hand back.

“Pteranodons don’t have teeth.” I wave the tissue at Fist, instead of wiping my nose. “Mr. McArthur was just mad because the class laughed at him.”

“I see.” Sarah sits back. “Mr. McArthur says you tried to hit him?”

Fist shakes his head and I do too. His purple body glows neon. My face is hot and my heart crashes against my ribs. I swipe the tears away before they fall.

“It’s not true!” yells Fist.

I squawk-roar until my throat is sore. It’s not fair that everyone took his word over mine and my classmates.

We stretch our neck and sniff the wind through the open window. It smells like grass. It smells like home.

We roar and thrash about on delicate feet, ripping paper to ribbons, flapping wings burning with life. We head for the window, for the bright blue horizon.

We head for a slice of the happiness pie.

photo courtesy of Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali lives in Houston, Texas, with her family. Khaalidah’s publications include Strange Horizons, Fiyah Magazine, Diabolical Plots and others. Her fiction has been featured in “The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 12” edited by Jonathan Strahan and “The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three” edited by Neil Clarke. You can hear her narrations at several venues. As co-editor of PodCastle audio magazine, Khaalidah is committed to encouraging more women and POC to submit fantasy stories.

Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality.

This story’s illustration is by Kosmic Arts!

Scene break dinosaur illustrations are by Kelsey Liggett!

Twenty-Fifth Named Storm

by robotdino_adminJuly 13, 2018December 22, 2021 on

Twenty-Fifth Named Storm

by D. A. Vorobyov

Any day now, Kara will quit her job. I see it in the way her shoulders slump as she watches the weather boil on the news.

I reach over and take the remote, switching the holo away from the reporter talking about the coming storm and running through channels before I find a reality show, chaotic and inoffensive.

“I’m tired, Jay,” Kara says. “I’m so tired, and it’s not even been a year.”

She works in the same lab that I used to, but she’s lasted longer. I don’t know how. A lot of climatologists don’t even make it through school before the work gets to them and they burn out.

I start switching channels again, just to give my hands something to do. I settle on reruns—My Friend RoboRex, on a cartoon channel. It’s easy to watch, the tinny voice of the main character’s robot T-Rex companion comforting. Kara and I grew up on it.

“Let’s build a robot dinosaur,” I say under my breath.

“What?”

I repeat myself, louder: “Let’s build a robot dinosaur. Something to do, while we wait out the storm.”

Kara sits in silence for a long moment, pulling her knees up to her chest and giving a short, noncommittal hum. “We don’t know anything about robotics.”

“It’s a distraction,” I offer.

Kara doesn’t reply for a long while. The episode ends before she says softly, “Yeah. Yeah, why not?”

We don’t know anything about robotics.

We look up some basic plans and order everything we think we need via two-hour drone shipping. It arrives at the same time as the rain, but has a chance to get away before the water starts coming down in sheets.

We’re not so lucky, though if I could pick anyone in the world to be trapped in an apartment with while the twenty-fifth named storm of the season rages outside, it would be Kara.

For having been hesitant to start building the robot T-rex, she’s surprisingly quick to take point.

“Jay, hand me that wire?” she asks, looking between her phone and the shell we’re slowly filling with chips and wires we only half-understand. “The blue one?”

I nod, holding the chip I’m working with in place with one hand while I root around in the piles of spare parts we’ve scattered around us. “Which one? There’s three.”

“Uh…” She pauses and expands the image on her phone. “That one?” She points. As I hand it to her, she seems less and less sure of herself.

Lightning flashes outside as she installs the wire, so I don’t notice the sparks at first. What I do notice is the way her face falls and she pulls her hand away, the wire smoking in her fingers.

Kara reads to me from the instructions on her phone, shouting over the storm outside. Our building is reinforced against extreme weather but others are not so lucky. While she tells me what to do, a news notification comes in and she reads that too—a small town far closer to the coast than we are is not expected to resurface when the skies clear.

As she falls silent, my hands fall still. All those homes, and no way to know right now if the people who lived inside them were able to evacuate.

Kara’s phone lands on the floor, the flexible screen bending to absorb the shock. She is less equipped for the impact—when her knees hit the linoleum, I can almost feel it in my own joints.

“I hate it, Jay,” she whispers into the T-Rex’s guts. “I hate my job.”

I want to say that yes, me too, I hated my job and I hate yours and I’m sorry we picked this for ourselves, but instead I shift closer to her and hold my arm out, a soft offer.

She takes me up on it, hiding her face in my shoulder. She’s not crying. She’s just breathing, hard and measured, into my skin like it’s an air filter. “I’m gonna quit,” she says.

“I know,” I respond. “That’s okay.”

“What am I gonna do after?”

I try to think about what I did after I left, last year. I don’t know how to tell her that I slept for a month and couldn’t watch the news for two, and I still don’t walk past the lab complex without wanting to cry.

I say nothing, just let my best friend breathe into me for a long and otherwise silent few minutes. One-handed, I fit a blue wire—a new one—gently against what I think is the right chip.

In front of me, the T-Rex’s eyes flicker to life. The sound of its metallic blink is barely audible against the storm, but Kara must hear it too, because she pulls herself away to look.

A faint smile pulls at the corners of her mouth.

“Maybe we can build dinosaurs,” I say, watching her watch the robot blink.

It’s another week before the flooding subsides and we can leave the apartment. The air is thick when we go, hot and humid after the storm, and Kara wipes her hands on her black slacks every few minutes as we wade towards the lab.

When I dry my own clammy hands, I try to hide it. It gets harder the closer we get; it feels just like my own resignation walk.

As we get closer, bodies small in the building’s shadow, Kara’s steps slow next to mine, and I remember this too.

“Hey,” I say, catching her eyes. “You got this. You can do this. I’ll be here when you get out.”

I watch as Kara’s jaw works. She doesn’t answer me, but her shoes fall hard on the steps as she walks in.

D.A. Vorobyov is a student and writer based in North Carolina. Their work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons and is forthcoming from Glittership, and they were a finalist for the 2017 Dell Magazines Award. They are a graduate of the 2016 and 2017 Alpha Workshop for Young Writers.

This story was illustrated by Kosmic Arts!

Scene break dinosaur illustrations are by Kelsey Liggett!

Even to the Teeth

by robotdino_adminJuly 6, 2018March 17, 2020 on

Artwork by R.S. — artwork by Rhiannon R-S

Even to the Teeth

by Karen Osborne

The way to save yourself, o captain, is simple.

You must leave everything—your star-splayed chair on the bridge, your full belly, the soft, silk robes in the first-class chamber where you sleep—and come down to where we are dying.

The ancestors built this starship to last seven generations. Not ten generations, not fourteen, not this long agony—so long that we’ve fallen, screaming, into our own memories. So long that the stars outside are demanding their tithe in our steerage-born breath. This is our world, hurtling and metal and broken. Our world is dying.

The pinhole breaches that are killing us will kill you too. Metal fatigue will kill you, no matter how many times you turn away from the truth, your lips soaked in the blood of pomegranates, your quick-fix steerage-stolen oxygen turning sour in your mouth.

You cannot fight this. We must change. We must evolve.

Only I know how to save us all.

You cannot fight this, o captain.

We are resourceful in steerage. We must be. You take our food. You take our air. And still, I run your reactor. My staff keeps the ship going. I was fed on these engines, weaned on these computers, cut my teeth on this code. Do you think I do not know what to do with your battle drones?

My sister Ellan was the first to volunteer. She told me to make her beautiful, before I cut into her skull for the upload—and, oh, I made her beautiful: a spine of hollow aluminum and tinsel for down, stiff pennaceous feathers supported by a calamus made of our mothers’ bones. I fitted her with talons of steel and strong legs to run, settled her mind in a battle drone brain. And hear: her cry is terrible and beautiful, a crush of sheet metal passed through shearing teeth.

Two great, gulping flaps of her wings and she’s in the air, skating over the ferocious wind in the corridors. She glides on the air currents created by the hull breaches, her tinsel wings brushing against the aching skin of our ship, showing us the places where the neglect of first class has cracked and warped and slivered our world.

There are too many breaches. Too many hungry mouths. Her efforts have already helped us patch enough pinholes to buy us another month, but it is not enough. She barely needs to rest, but when she does—watch her roost, safe in her garden, night-black against eternal night. She brings me bilge rats, their throats torn, so I can eat, so I can work harder, so I can save us all.

Listen to me, please, or it will be the end of all things.

You do not listen, so the work continues.

I am building Ellan a garden brighter and more beautiful than anything we imagined in the steerage dorm when we were children, sucking down protein slop and the sweat of hundreds: a garden of twisted cables and leaves sewn from old clothes, of metal nests and half-starved hope.

We will need such a thing, when we evolve. When the hull fails for good, when the skin of our world yields to the nothingness of space. We will need a place to live.

I chose the archaeopteryx for Ellan because, of all the beautiful things in the ancient library, it is the most like us. It is both, and it is nothing. It is something ancient, and it is something new. The last dinosaur. A transitional species. A multipurpose predator.

But you, o captain—you want to keep the things our ancestors had, to hold on to tangled jungles, to dead gems in gold housing, to blood-sharp rosebushes, to the riotous gardens you hoard in first class. You sold us out to keep your food and your oxygen, sold out steerage for your dinosaur’s doomed world, unable to see the hurtling, black speck against the sun for what it truly is. What use is a flower in the piercing cold of space? A stalk of grain, a drop of water, a full belly?

It is time to open yourself to the rot and the work, to necessary equality, to the pain and the miracle of new life in sweet metal, o captain, or we will all die.

Perhaps you would rather die.

I have done it again: this time, with Philos, Ellan’s lover, the young man who does the hatch maintenance. He is handsome. He shines, he preens, he soars. We sewed pinion-feathers from our hair and painted the ends with our blood. I had to take down another battle drone to hold his brain, but I am fairly good at that now.

They are building a nest together—of laminate shavings and transistors and nuts and bolts and screws, of plastic and hair ties and tinsel. They have laid eggs that shimmer, oil-slick beautiful, which is fortunate, because we will be in need of more bodies very soon.

Perhaps if my bed was a bower, like yours, I would understand why you do not listen.

But we are dying.

The eggs hatched, o captain, and your answer to this miracle? More battle drones.

It is no matter. We have given them our names, raised them up, trained them to hold us —our gracious, silver-wild, hollow-boned babies—and we feed them on our blood. They have taken a taste for it.

And, ah! To see them take on your battle drones, their cries like rending silver, like freedom itself! To think you would rather have our compliance than our lives, our silence than this miracle!

We choose human truth, the truth that goes beyond our dead world: the dirt, the hunger, the ache, the fear. We will evolve, and become hollow, ancient, new, strong, our wings spread against forever, the gusts of exhaust from the reactor our updraft, the heat of the deuterium core our sun. When we lose our air, we will not lose ourselves. When we lose our flesh, we will gain our lives.

But you, o captain.

You chose first class, chose the false solace of a life in flesh, and will die watching rushing, airless death blot out your sun. You, o captain, who could not leave your lungs behind, your skin and your cartilage and your gore—you, who treated our lungs and skin as less than yours, as meat to be forgotten, will keep your first-class gardens, your second-class beauty, your unending fear. I hope that is some comfort.

When you come for our bodies, for your food, for your air, for your victory at the end of all this, you will find only the tearing of teeth.

And, someday, when our broken ship arrives at the new world, we will fly again.

Karen Osborne lives in Baltimore with two violins, an autoharp, four cameras, a husband and a bonkers orange cat. She’s been a reporter, a wedding videographer, a newspaper photographer, a high school English teacher, a Starfleet captain and a Scottish fiddler. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction can currently be found at Escape Pod, and forthcoming in Fireside Magazine and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

A queer illustrator and writer, Rhiannon R-S works with juxtaposition and layering, especially comparing and contrasting humanity with elements of monstrosity and phantasm. Find their work at rhiannonrs.com and @charibdys on Twitter.

Scene break dinosaur illustrations are by Kelsey Liggett!

Research Lab Electricity Usage Timesheet Reporting

by robotdino_adminJune 29, 2018July 15, 2018 on

Research Lab Electricity Usage Timesheet Reporting

by Ada Hoffmann

The robots had learned to open doors.

Priya jumped as the door between the shared lab and her office crashed open. Into the paper-strewn space stomped a pair of raptor-sized machines, gleaming chrome and glittering eyes. Their sickle-shaped toe-claws—really just blunt grabbers, but intimidating to look at—scrabbled at the carpet as they adjusted their positions. Then both robots hopped onto her desk, scattering papers everywhere.

“What—?” Priya spluttered. She had been trying to fill out a Form 1078-B for Research Lab Electricity Usage Timesheet Reporting. A six-page, mandatory administrative form which had just sailed away in six different directions. Or at least, a supposedly mandatory form. Most of Priya’s colleagues were allowed to fill out the half-page version online, but the Dean of Robotics liked to push Priya around, and he was insisting.

“You’re not even supposed to be switched on during these hours!” Priya complained.

An electronic giggle emerged from both chrome heads in perfect synchronization.

“Stephanie forgot the off switch,” Raptor One informed her in its high-pitched, synthesized voice. “Forgetful girl. Eeeheeeheee!”

Priya swore and reached for the robots’ off switches herself, but they danced away, too excited to behave. Stephanie, an undergrad research assistant, was constantly forgetting things. Her keys; her lunch; proper safety protocols for dealing with a pair of experimental robots that could learn from their embodied experience through means analogous to human child development. Too analogous. Their down-cycles were used to process the day’s experiences and smooth off mental rough edges, much like human sleep. Leaving them on overnight led to hyperactivity, like a sugar-high preschooler up past its bedtime.

Plus, leaving them on would have changed the lab’s electricity usage, which meant she now had to fill out pages two through five of Form 1087-B all over again, and it wasn’t long before the Dean would come around, demanding to know why she wasn’t done yet.

“Come here,” Priya commanded. “It’s sleep time, raptors. That’s an order.”

“No orders!” Raptor Two shrieked, hopping to the top of Priya’s bookshelf with alarming grace. Opening doors wasn’t the only motor skill that had improved. “Only COOKIES!”

Priya blinked. “Cookies?” She didn’t remember introducing them to that concept. Some student must have brought one in and aroused their curiosity.

“COOKIES!” the raptors chorused.

“You are inorganic, mechanical beings. You can’t even eat cookies.” But curiosity alone, at this developmental stage, could be a powerful impetus.

“COOKIES! COOKIES! COOKIES!”

Priya drew herself up. She was the head of the Robotics Lab, and this was her responsibility. “Look, I—”

But then the other door opened, the one linking Priya’s office to the main hallway, and a freshman holding a marked assignment hopefully poked his nose into the room.

“COOKIES!” bellowed both raptors, leaping off the bookshelf and divebombing the student. He screamed and fled. His running footsteps receded into the distance as the assignment floated to the floor, abandoned.

Priya reached into her desk drawer for the Raptor Remote, and found it after a moment of fumbling. Her fingers found the button marked EMERGENCY AVERSIVE.

She didn’t press down.

Not yet.

When she thought about it, she hadn’t actually wanted to deal with that student. She knew his face. He was here to shout at her about how many marks he deserved, the same as every week. Disruptive as Raptors One and Two might be, she did like them more than she liked that particular student.

And there were other people she would like to keep out of the office.

Priya let the Raptor Remote fall gently from her fingers back into the drawer.

“I’ll give you a cookie,” she said into the air. The raptors, who had been tearing at the fallen assignment, looked up in unison. Their bright green eyes, glittering with artificial lens enhancers, fixed unblinkingly on her.

“I’ll give you a cookie,” she repeated, “if you do something for me.”

The raptors nodded slowly, and an equally slow grin crossed Priya’s face.

“Do you know,” she asked, in the clear and precise tone that she’d learned was best for robots, “what the word ‘guard’ means?”

Later that day, as she’d expected, the Dean of Robotics bustled into Priya’s office without knocking or asking permission.

“Dr. Chaudhari,” he said officiously, “your Form 1078-B is late again, and I must insist—”

He was interrupted by both robot raptors launching themselves at him from the top of Priya’s shelves.

“COOKIE!!” shrieked Raptor One, gnawing on the Dean’s toupee.

“NO BOTHERING PRIYA!” shouted Raptor Two. “Priya gives us cookies! No bothering Priya, or we EAT YOU!!”

“What is the meaning of this?!” the Dean spluttered, but the raptors redoubled their attack, hopping up and down on his shoulders and shrieking cacaphonously. “Dr. Chaudhari, have you lost control of your raptors?”

“No,” said Priya shortly. “And, in fact, I can demonstrate it. Raptor One—attack!”

Raptor One bit down and tossed the Dean’s toupee merrily in the air. It sailed to a landing in a pile of papers, and the Dean snatched it back-up, red-faced.

“Never mind!” he shouted, tearing the bots forcibly off of him. “Never mind your stupid form. It wasn’t important anyway! You can just fill in the web form like everyone else!”

He stormed out.

Priya silently offered a pair of cookies she’d bought from the school cafeteria to the robots. They leapt upon them and quickly gnawed them to crumbs, seemingly unbothered by their inability to digest any of what they destroyed.

“Good girls,” she said to both of them. The robots purred electronically, and then settled to the ground, curling into each other.

Priya approached them hesitantly. When it became apparent that they were tired now and no longer moving, she reached out a hand, touched the switch on the back of each chrome head, and turned them off.

“Good girls,” she said again, smiling fondly at the sleeping pair.

She got up, dropped back into her computer chair, and started another grant application in peace.

Ada Hoffmann is the author of MONSTERS IN MY MIND. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and Uncanny. She programs computers to write poetry, and her Autistic Book Party review series is devoted to autism representation in speculative fiction. You can find her online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/ or on Twitter at @xasymptote, or support her at http://www.patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.

Illustration is by Kit Leighton!

Scene break dinosaur illustrations are by Kelsey Liggett!

The Six Raptor-Wives of the Utah Rangelands

by robotdino_adminJune 22, 2018March 17, 2020 on

The Six Raptor-Wives of the Utah Rangelands

by Hayley Stone

Aragon went missing first.

It made a kind of cosmic sense. The first of Henry VIII’s wives and also the first to die—not that Evelyn believed her gynoid raptor was dead. Malfunctioning or caught between some quakies seemed more likely. As emergency management specialist for Utah’s Strategic Predator Initiative, however, Evelyn’s job was not to make guesses, but to identify problems, develop solutions, and occasionally win in-house naming contests to the regret of her superiors.

Following standard procedure, Evelyn recalled the raptors, but not before the others had also winked out on radar. Parr returned immediately, but it was another two hours before Boleyn and Howard appeared.

Odd. Like the prehistoric creatures they were modeled after, the autonomous dromaeosaurs were programmed to hunt in a pack. There should have been no significant discrepancy between their arrival times.

Seymour and Cleves never returned at all.

Six gynoid raptors—the pinnacle of groundside drone technology. Each worth a quarter of a million dollars.

And she was missing three.

“It’s fine, this is fine,” Evelyn murmured to herself, her mind flashing with panic. Just last week she’d pulled an all-nighter to put out a small media fire surrounding the possibility of adding a seventh raptor named Henry. Tipsy with tiredness, she’d complained to the Wives about wanting to run and hide. Had they somehow internalized that message?

The logs said all the raptors had detected GNSS satellites before going out this morning. Until they fell off the grid, none had reported an interruption to their radar navigation. Evelyn didn’t understand it. If a loss of signal had occurred, why hadn’t the raptors’ fail-safe functions kicked in, returning them to base?

“I want to see their video feeds,” she told one of the programmers, who informed her, as politely as possible, that he’d already started going through them the moment Aragon disappeared.

“And?” she prompted.

“They split off during a hunt, losing visual contact with each other. That’s all we’ve got.”

“What’s the best-case scenario here?”

He thought about it. “Best-case scenario? We’ve somehow lost our connection to their live feed, their trackers are down, and a minor malfunction with their gyroscope has them wandering in circles somewhere.”

Company patrols hadn’t found them within their assigned hunting area so that seemed unlikely. It was almost like the raptors were deliberately dodging them. “And worst-case?”

“Coalition’s got ‘em.”

“Really? I thought ‘gone rogue and eaten a small child’ would have ranked higher.”

The programmer gave her a blank look. “They don’t…you understand the raptors don’t eat the deer, right? They don’t have digestive tracts.”

Evelyn repressed the urge to pinch her nose. “I’m joking.”

He had a point, though. Maybe someone from the Coalition for God’s Planet had finally decided to make good on their threats to destroy the raptors. The Coalition claimed it was God’s will that the mule deer population exploded in Utah, and any attempts to curb the disastrous results was ‘interfering’ with a higher power.

It was bullshit, of course. Thankfully, most rational people seemed to understand the need for a controlled, ecologically-safe solution to the chaos, and the Initiative had a hell of a PR department to change the minds of those mysteriously reluctant to the idea of large, steel predators roaming the Utah rangelands.

Evelyn still had one of the posters from the last ad campaign, featuring Aragon in a fun, minimalist design, except for her detailed back stripes—purple in Aragon’s case—and an “A” emblazoned on her long flank. She stood in profile, framed by aspens and text that read: HAVE NO FEAR—UNLESS YOU’RE DEER!

Aragon wasn’t even Evelyn’s favorite—that honor went to Boleyn, the pack’s assigned alpha—but she felt a deep and surprising ache at the thought of losing her, or any of the Wives. She had devoted years of her life to this project, defending the raptors from naysayers and any groups that wanted to harm them.

Her old college anthropology professor used to say, Humans will pack-bond with anything. She wondered if the machines they made felt the same.

It was late when Evelyn finally sent everyone else home, and headed down to the garage where the three raptors were currently at their recharging stations. It was stupid, but she wanted to say goodnight and reassure them that she would find their missing companions. Evelyn talked to the Wives a lot after-hours. She knew they didn’t understand her, but they still made a better audience than the house plant she barely managed to keep alive at home.

Evelyn had just reached the base of the stairs when a sound stopped her. She stood for a moment, listening as a series of low, throaty calls came through the open door.

The raptors were supposed to be on standby, but instead they were vocalizing, something they only did for the public. In the wild, they sometimes replicated deer calls to lure in their prey, but these noises didn’t sound like deer calls. They almost sounded like—words, like voices.

Like her voice.

Evelyn had just started back up the stairs when the garage lights suddenly sprang on, the motion sensor triggered by six heads, not three, swiveling toward her. The mouths of the raptors gaped, as if they’d just been caught in secret conference. It would have been comical, if not for the serrated rows of teeth in those mouths, and the uncanny look of understanding in the raptors’ toy-style gazes.

Boleyn, recognizable by a red ring around her neck, clicked a sharp talon against the hard linoleum floor and tilted her head.

“This is fine,” she croaked in Evelyn’s voice.

Evelyn wasn’t sure whether it was a statement or a question, but the Wives were watching, waiting. If it was an answer they wanted, she suspected they would accept only one.

“Yeah,” she agreed, cold horror giving way to a heady rush of fascination. “This is fine.”

Hayley Stone is a writer, editor, and poet from California. She is the author of the Machinations series from Hydra/Random House, with book one having been selected as an Amazon Best Sci-fi & Fantasy Book of the Year for 2016. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Fireside Magazine, New Myths Magazine, Star*Line, and various anthologies. When not reading or writing, Hayley studies history, falls in love with video game characters, and analyzes buildings for velociraptor entry points. Find her at www.hnstoneauthor.com and on Twitter @hayley_stone.

Scene break dinosaur illustrations are by Kelsey Liggett!

METALSAURUS

by robotdino_adminJune 15, 2018July 15, 2018 on

METALSAURUS

by Morgan Swim

“Nessa, didn’t you like anything at the park today?” Mom leaned against the wall of their motel room and pulled off her sandals. The tops of her feet, along with the rest of her, was burnt from the Florida sun.

“The dinosaur ride was okay, I guess,” Janessa said, her lips pouted to one-side, smug she hadn’t gotten sunburned in her hoodie, black pants, and platform boots. “It would have been more fun if everyone died at the end.” Her mother gave her an exasperated look, and her brother rolled his eyes.

“They can’t die—it’s Disney,” her brother said.

“I know that, Tristan,” Janessa huffed. “It just would have been way more metal that way.”

She folded her arms. She would have to endure another thirteen days of this. Thirteen days of tacky theme parks, being forced to smile for photos, and eating ice-cream shaped like mice and whales.

“Not everything has to be metal,” Tristan said, and then started singing “It’s A Small World” to prove his point. Their mother tactfully retreated to the shower.

Janessa refused to give her brother the satisfaction of her annoyance. She looked out the window to the dilapidated and over-grown mini-golf course that looped around their off-brand motel butted up against the interstate. She was about to crack and punch Tristan, but then she saw the glint of something metallic move in the overgrowth. She froze. No, she thought, it has to be one of the crappy dinosaur statues on the mini-golf course.

“Shut up!” Janessa yelled, distracted. Tristan began to sing louder. Janessa covered her ears, but kept staring out the window. And then she saw it again, for just a moment: the long, silver neck and massive claws of the strangest dinosaur she had ever seen.

“I’m going to go check out the pool!” Janessa yelled to her mother, over her brother’s singing.

Tristan stopped to ask, “What? You hate swimming. What are you going to do, go in your clothes?”

Janessa grabbed her phone off the nightstand and then turned back to give her brother a hellish look and said, “Yes, but I’m going to go and try to boil myself alive in the jacuzzi.”

Janessa hopped the fence, ignoring the CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS sign, and searched the golf course until she saw movement on hole nine. She crept behind a plaster stegosaurus, paint sloughing off as she crouched down and touched its lumpy armored plates. She waited, and then the dinosaur she saw from the motel window emerged.

It was as big as a tree, sleek and fully metallic with smooth segmented joints, but oddly shaped with a pot-belly and a tiny head on a long neck. Janessa stared as it flexed its claws, each as long as a person, and in one clean cut, beheaded a palm tree. It fed the dead fronds into a port in its stomach, compacting them into a small cube that it expelled immediately.

“What?”

Its head swiveled at the exclamation, and red eyes trained on Janessa.

“Oh shi—”

Janessa stumbled backwards, and tripped on the border of the golf green. The dinosaur approached and stood over her, its head tilting as it scanned her Kittie band t-shirt. Slowly, it raised one massive clawed hand up and curled its middle claw down.

Janessa blinked. Is that? Hesitantly, she held up one hand and made horns back. The dinosaur chittered approvingly and then blasted the hardest metal Janessa had ever heard.

“Zinnia! No! Bad dinosaur!”

A woman emerged from the jungle of fronds and ferns. Her thick hair was black and red and braided down the middle of her head with shaved sides, and her dark skin was pierced in more places than Janessa could count. She wore a black collared shirt and work khakis, but her arms were covered in tattoos. Janessa almost forgot about the twenty-foot robotic dinosaur with razor-sharp claws looming over her. As the woman approached, the dinosaur stopped blasting music and folded itself down to sit.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked.

“I…” Janessa said, suddenly speechless; the woman’s winged eyeliner and heavy crimson eye shadow was flawless. “I, uh,” she said again and then blurted out, “I’m Janessa and I’m from Wisconsin.”

The woman smiled. “Hello, Janessa from Wisconsin. I’m Kennedy, from Hell.” Jenessa blinked. Kennedy pointed to the surrounding dingy motel chains. “A.K.A. Orlando.”

Janessa laughed.

“And that,” Kennedy gestured to the dinosaur, “is Zinnia. I modeled her after a Therizinosaurus.”

“You made that?”

“Hell yeah! Engineering grad from UCF.”

“Oh. Wow. Then why are you at this crappy motel?”

“Like all grad students, I was unemployed, so I got creative. I picked a therizinosaur because they are inefficient, extremely slow moving, and can shred a car in seconds.” Kennedy pointed with her thumb to the interstate and added, “Just like I-4.”

“Metal,” Janessa said in awe.

Kennedy laughed. “We do landscaping. Therizinosaurs had woefully inefficient digestive tracts, but that’s not a problem for a robot. Florida is full of useless foliage that needs to be cut all the time. You know. Creepily well-maintained theme parks. Hurricanes. Old people who can’t reach or whatever.”

“So you made a dinosaur…?”

“Dinosaurs are cool! And I use her for shows.” Kennedy gestured to her appearance. “I’m in a metal band.”

Janessa’s face contorted in astonishment. “That’s—”

“I know,” Kennedy interrupted, “but it’s a good gimmick in this city. And you should see the bank I make when I do the landscaping for Dinosaur World. People plan their kid’s birthday parties around it. I can pay all the band’s travel expenses from that alone.”

“I was going to say that’s the coolest thing ever.”

Kennedy gave her a devious grin, and then turned to the dinosaur. “Zinnia, show configuration three.”

The dinosaur got up, flexed its claws to obscure its face, and then six lasers shot out from ports above the knuckle of each claw. It opened its mouth, and smoke began to billow out.

“Super metal!” Janessa said, incredulous.

“I’m glad someone out here has good taste,” Kennedy said. Janessa’s heart flipped in her throat and she looked away. Kennedy’s mouth quirked and she pulled out her phone. “Listen, Janessa, we’re on the clock, but let me send you one of our albums.”

There was nothing magic about this kingdom, but with THE XTINCTION’s newest album, CORPSECEOUS PERIOD, blasting in one ear-bud, Janessa was in a far better mood than yesterday. Her brother was still annoying, and her mother obsessed with “making memories” but somehow everything seemed more tolerable.

“Hey, Mom,” Janessa asked, later that night in the motel room. Janessa double checked the appearance schedule on Kennedy’s twitter feed. “Can we go to Dinosaur World next Thursday?”

“What?” her brother asked. “You hate that tacky tourist crap!”

“Yeah, but dinosaurs are metal.”

Morgan Swim is a non-binary writer and artist. Their work frequently features robots, A.I., and copious amounts of gender and blood. They live in Florida with their two cats. You can find them at @MarsChildWells on twitter.

The illustration is by Rica March!

Scene break dinosaur illustrations are by Kelsey Liggett!

Hunting On Ethera

by robotdino_adminJune 8, 2018July 3, 2018 on

Hunting On Ethera

by M. Raoulee

The first rat came to Ethera on a cargo ship. It escaped planetside quarantine and fled into the blue pollen dust of the Northern continent spring.

A decade later, spring was no longer blue.

Gwinnie remembered growing up in a world without rats; translucent gel trees towering over her tea parties. She remembered her mother telling her to shake the pollen off of her shoes.

She stood outside of her workshop the day before her forty-ninth birthday and tapped her boots even though she didn’t need to.

As she tried to fix the Lao’s sputtering coffee machine, the time display blinked at her obstinately no many how many times she twiddled it.

She called the ecological oversight committee that afternoon. “Ma’am?” the secretary said. “We appreciate your feedback, but the ban importing extraplanetary fauna is still in effect. So, even if you did make such a donation…”

“There wouldn’t be cats.”

“There would not.” At Gwinnie’s silence, the secretary added, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I just needed to ask.” They said goodbye.

Her daughter Gretchen had been weaving around her legs through the entire conversation. As it ended, she whacked Gwinnie on the hip with one of her toys— a chunky plastic dinosaur.

“Mommy isn’t your workbench.” Gwinnie sighed. She hoisted Gretchen into her arms.

Her daughter and the dinosaur gazed at her, unblinking.

Gwinnie got poppyseed cake and tea and new boots for her birthday. All of her children insisted on sitting on her lap, even Michah who came home from college just to do it. The time with them in the garden seemed both infinite and small, down to the part where she rapped her spoon on the last empty teacup. “There is one more thing I’d like,” she said.

All the children asked, “What?”

“To go to the workshop.”

Even if her family was disappointed, they still escorted her to the door and promised that the fridge would be full of leftover cake.

Gwinnie hadn’t built anything more complicated than motorized carts in years. Her tablet was filled with FAQs, tutorials and emails from one of her old trade school friends.

She cut dozens of film feathers, more than she could use. She snapped one camera array in half and ordered another without thinking of the cost. Her 3D printer chugged on two enormous claws.

The night she finally went to bed at a reasonable hour, it was no longer her birthday. She curled up beside her wife, turned her screen brightness down, and began to type out command strings for the controller.

Gwinnie finished her robot one rainy morning. It came out a sleek silver thing that flowed across the workshop. She almost couldn’t believe she’d built anything like it, but there it stood in her shadow. As she opened the door and showed it the outside, it chirped with birdlike curiosity.

“Come on. Let’s…”

Across the hedgerow, Gwinnie’s neighbors kept a struggling gel tree in a mesh enclosure. The mesh had been chewed apart. A brown rat gnawed on a tubule branch.

The robot saw it before Gwinnie did. It shot across the damp lawn, kicking up feather grass. The rat tried to run, the robot jumped after it, and the enclosure went over, bits of branch flying off in all directions. Then the robot disappeared, streaking off towards the street corner.

Gwinnie swore and went after.

The neighbors were understanding about the mess, at least once Gwinnie offered to fix it. She and they and the robot sat on the porch, talking it over with hands full of tea.

They hadn’t been there for half an hour when the robot shot off again. A crack sounded in the bushes, a shrieking, and then the robot dropped an enormous dead rat right on the porch steps.

“I thought velociraptors were bigger?” said one of the neighbors.

“That’s a different kind of raptor, actually,” Gwinnie muttered, pulling on a pair of gloves. The rat went into a disposal bag. “There are a lot.”

“Still seems like overkill,” said the other neighbor.

“Well, the rats are overkill.”

Which was apparently funny enough that the neighbors managed to ignore their growing cache of disposal bags.

Gwinnie tweaked the robot’s AI a bit before taking it to Friday Market. It strode alongside her now rather than breaking towards every rat to rustle into its awareness.

The only tricky target was the one scaling the side of the baker’s stall. The robot scratched at the street, watching it, then Gwinnie, and then the rat again.

“Do you mind?” Gwinnie asked, gesturing a little too obviously. Before the baker could say much, the robot scaled the tent poles and plucked up the rat with a loud crunch.

The other shoppers nearby went silent.

“Please tell me you sell those,” said the baker. Gwinnie didn’t pay for her baguette that day.

A few weeks into summer she realized that she hadn’t fixed any coffee makers since the Lao’s. Her desk overflowed with order printouts and imperfect film feathers.

Gwinnie met with the ecological oversight committee in the heart of what had once been a gel tree grove, but was now a rather sad picnic spot lined only with feather grass.

At the first sign of a rat, she signed to the robot. It slipped out into the sunlit distance. The grass parted and rippled. Conversation drifted into waiting banter. Minutes passed.

The robot slunk back, two rats dangling in its jaws.

“I wouldn’t want one of those running around unsupervised,” mentioned one of the councilmembers. “That said, how many can you make?”

Gwinnie listed the event as a hunt club on the community schedule. Half of the people who turned out were there just to see the robots. Two had already bought their own, then there was Gretchen, Gwinnie’s wife, the baker, and a gentleman from out of town with a retro film camera.

Gwinnie tried to look confident as she stepped in front of her audience, though she felt clumsy compared to the robots. “I thought we should introduce ourselves. You don’t have to say much. Just tell us something you love about Ethera.”

Everyone had something— the sky and the community, memories of the gel trees spreading to the clouds. Once they’d all said their pieces, Gwinnie lead them into the fields.

As she taught them the hunting gesture, a silver host raced into the underbrush and petals sang down around the group.

There is no last rat on Ethera. The rats are clever and keen-eyed. Their kind has survived on ships since humans were confined to the oceans of old earth. They live on.

The velociraptor hunt clubs do as well. The first becomes two and the two becomes ten. Some members build their own robots, but others insist on having ‘originals’ made by Gwinnie’s family.

Every spring, fields all over Ethera fill with laughter and with shining silver claws.

On the morning of her fifty-ninth birthday, Gwinnie walks out to her workshop before her grandchildren can catch her for breakfast. She knocks blue pollen from her boots before stepping inside.

Avatar by Rica March, courtesy of the creator M. Raoulee is a queer author and artist residing in Arizona with a tortie and a lot of broken glass. You may remember her from Brave Boy World, Broken Metropolis or you favorite peculiar corner of sci-fi fandom. If not, welcome aboard. Happy to have you.

Illustration is by Rica March!

Scene break dinosaur illustrations are by Kelsey Liggett!

Small Things Pieced Together

by robotdino_adminJune 1, 2018June 30, 2018 on

Small Things Pieced Together

by Ginger Weil

Turns out assembling flatpack dinosaurs is the real test of a relationship.

I’d been dating Polyxeni for five months and we’d moved in together about two weeks ago. We were on our third trip to Ikea. At least I had my mom’s old pickup truck so we didn’t need delivery.

On our last two trips we got a new mattress (I don’t care what your last girlfriend did, Polyxeni said, but I’m not sleeping on the same mattress where she ate crackers) and two lamps and some dishes and one of those scrubby things shaped like a woodland creature. We hadn’t thrown tiny golf pencils at each other or gotten into a screaming fight over bookshelf assembly, and we’d only purchased one decorative floor rug.

This run of good luck might have been because on our last two trips we skipped the children’s area. So we’d missed spotting the dinosaurs.

I crawled into the kid’s play area upside down through a tunnel. Polyxeni was not amused. She pushed a leaf canopy aside.

“Get up, Erin,” she said. “We don’t need anything in this section.”

I was about to agree with her. I was about to get up and put my skirts in order and apologize, the way I always did when she called me out for not matching her picture of an adult. That’s when I spotted the psittacosaurus.

“Polyxeni,” I said. “We definitely need this.”

It was bright purple and just over knee height, with a turquoise tail frill to match its big eyes. It tipped its parrot head and squawked at me when I leaned close. A candy-colored rainbow of dinosaurs roamed through the jungle play area. A clementine-orange diplodocus stuck its long neck out and honked at me like an angry goose. A fuschia spinosaurus tried to eat a storage cube.

I’d seen a picture of Ikea’s dinosaurs online, but somehow I’d assumed they were just plush or inflatable. Display tags showed flying and swimming models. With three product pickup codes each they had a lot of parts. I reached out a hand and the psittacosaurus nibbled my fingers with gentle rubber teeth.

“We need them all,” I said.

Polyxeni sighed. “We’ve got a studio apartment. We don’t even have room for our bicycles.”

“We can park the bikes outside,” I said.

“They’ll get stolen.”

“No one,” I said, “is stealing my dinosaurs.”

“The bikes, Erin. They’ll steal the bikes.”

“Look,” I said. “You’re the one who said we weren’t ready for a joint checking account. It’s my money and I’m buying dinosaurs.”

Polyxeni sulked while we rode down the escalator. She pouted while I wandered through the aisles trying to find the codes from the pictures I’d snapped blurrily on my phone. I wanted the long necked Klarälven brontosaurus, which had parts down one aisle, and I picked up two of the little Svartån microraptors in another aisle. I couldn’t decide between the raspberry one and the teal one so I got both.

Polyxeni lost patience and abandoned me and the wheelie cart to go sit by the checkout lines, looking at her phone. I found the Indalsälven charging docks and lifted three of them up on to my cart, balancing all the littlest boxes for the gears and things with one hand and wishing I’d gotten one of the big carry bags. I snagged the last dented box of parts for the frond-tailed psittacosaurus model labeled Bräkneån.

I staggered through the checkout line and met up with Polyxeni.

She was still mad at me when we got back to the apartment but she helped me haul all the boxes upstairs. We put the kitchen stuff and hangers away and then I started spreading all the boxes out in the living room.

I got the Indalsälven charging units together first because they didn’t have that many pieces and that way the rest of the dinosaurs could charge as soon as they were assembled.

Polyxeni got herself a glass of icewater and came out to sit on the couch. She started listlessly scrolling through every streaming service app on the television.

“Pass me that allen wrench?” I asked.

She pushed it over with her foot.

“Have you seen a bag with six little packages of pink feathers?”

Polyxeni didn’t even look up from her phone. “Nope.”

“What’s wrong?”

Polyxeni waved at the floor around our one tiny area rug. “There are bits of dinosaur everywhere.”

Probably I shouldn’t have unpackaged them all at once. I was just excited to get them home.

“I’ll have it cleared up by morning,” I promised.

“I have to be up for work by six,” Polyxeni said. “You’re always starting these late-night projects, just because you don’t have to work until noon.” Our different schedules hadn’t been such a problem before we moved in together. We met up for brunch on her days off and happy hour on my days off. It had worked out.

I worked on assembling the second Svartån. When the first one finished charging, it flew up on the couch and started pulling at Polyxeni’s hair. “Get it off,” she said.

“It’s just a robot,” I said. “It’s harmless.”

Polyxeni smacked it away. It fluttered off the couch with a bent wing.

I glared at Polyxeni. “You could have broken it.”

I found a pair of jewelry pliers in my craft drawer to straighten the feathers. Polyxeni stomped off to our new bed without answering.

I knew I should go after her and make peace, but the room was full of dinosaurs.

The teal Svartån dragged the last missing bag of raspberry feathers across the floor and dropped them by my knee. It flew up to rub my cheek.

“Who’s a good little dino,” I said.

If Polyxeni moves out, I’m letting the Bräkneån charge on her side of the bed.

Ginger Weil has been a bookseller, baker, barista, and librarian. She is easily encouraged with caffeine. Ginger has presented dinosaur-themed story times and robot-themed story times for human children and would be delighted to share a human-themed story time with robot dinosaur children. Her stories have appeared in Apex, Daily Science Fiction, and GigaNotoSaurus.

Buyers’ Remorse and Seven Slain Cause ‘Adorable’ Robot Dinosaur Stock to Plummet Tuesday

by robotdino_adminMay 25, 2018July 4, 2018 on

Buyers’ Remorse and Seven Slain Cause ‘Adorable’ Robot Dinosaur Stock to Plummet Tuesday

by John Wiswell

Playtime became a lot less fun at the Armstead County Technology Fair yesterday. Authorities are warning citizens to remain outside the wi-fi range of the local Best Buy after hundreds of robot dinosaurs turned on customers in what the store manager called, “An unforeseeable and totally surprising merchandise malfunction.”

The products in question are Computersave’s “Computersognathus,” or “compII” for short. It has been a tumultuous year for Computersave (a company which is absolutely not the same as CompuServe; mistake them and their lawyers will keep you up until dawn). The struggling computer hardware manufacturer saw its stock skyrocket after showing it could change the form factor of any smart home device, such as Amazon’s egg-shaped Echo Dot, into that of a bipedal creature with an adorable snout.

“It looked like a baby dinosaur hatching!” said Cynthia Williams, a local kindergartener, as she was being treated for minor face wounds at the Armstead Hospital. She said it was, “Very scary, but I still want one.”

The Armstead County strip mall was flooded with people far over capacity, but the fire marshal permitted attendance since they were “preoccupied.” Eye witnesses say the fire marshal was near the front of the pre-order line.

One Best Buy employee blogged, “these morons who cant even sync a apple watch out here demanding the shiy new thing. im telling them if they cant name the founders of linux they go to the back of the line. lol one old lady cried.”

The employee’s family has requested his name be withheld. Media has identified him solely by his social media handle, Elrond_Hubbard.

A hush fell over the crowd at 10:23 AM, the time Computersave had designated for “the hatching of a new era.”

Every smart listening device on display throughout the store vibrated – even those units that had not opted into the program. Many reported hearing a single child begin crying that the one square-foot orbs did not produce sixty-foot tyrannosauruses. In hindsight, parents were relieved for the discrepancy, given that all the mechanical hatchlings promptly attacked the crowd.

“who cant fight off a tiny dinosaur? lmao i could crush these things all day,” wrote Elrond_Hubbard at the beginning of the thread that soon went viral. Other clerks from the Best Buy have since disputed that their fellow employee spent most of the incident locked in a closet.

The internet is full of videos from this and similar “hatching” events around the world, with the newborn compIIs promptly looking into the camera—and then eating it. Some customers tried dialing for help, only to be targeted and attacked in kind. It wasn’t until hours later that engineers discovered that every text, call, and Instagram update was a ping for the compIIs to destroy competing products.

A Computersave press statement released that evening said, “Nobody mentions how helpful the compIIs tried to be. They auto-Googled first aid tips for any injuries they inflicted. Dozens of units harmonized broadcasts of soothing music. There’s that one viral video of a compII calling 9-1-1 to report itself as it was trying to eat its owner’s hand.”

Elrond_Hubbard liveblogged that he was heroically showing “the plebs” the off-switch on their compIIs.

Computersave confirms that compIIs are designed to be entirely voice-commanded do not have an off-switch. Elrond_Hubbard will be buried at a private service Wednesday.

For once a major product release day saw customers stampeding out of the store. Local mother Serena Harris said, “I’ve survived too many Black Fridays to get done like that.”

Like other survivors, Mrs. Harris dropped her phone and noticed that the compIIs went after the devices rather than customers. Few compIIs pursued anyone off of the premises, and those were distracted when someone threw a tablet at them.

“I lived, but my iPhone abruptly became $700 pet food,” said Bijan Al-Mommahed, an area veterinarian. He said he’d take the loss as a lesson. “I’ve wanted to spend less time on Facebook anyway.”

Computersave has deactivated as many compII units as it can—what some experts estimate as a “nice” sixty-nine percent of units. The remainder keep bouncing back a “connection dropped” error and are still prowling.

A company spokesperson said, “We have a long history in making positives out of negatives. If we’re going extinct, we might as well make a profit. That’s why we introduced RaptorCoin onto the market last week.”

All deactivated compIIs had their processors overclocked and preoccupied by cryptocurrency mining, granting no spare processing power to attack civilians. The company hopes the launch of RaptorCoin will help its stock rebound from current record lows, and help them pay some of their legal fees.

As of Tuesday morning, the company has not acknowledged reports of compII swarms attacking rival cryptocurrency operations.

Meanwhile Armstead County citizens are advised not to log in to any unrecognized “free” wi-fi, as the compIIs have adapted a few such services as hunting tools for more phones. Authorities stress for the public to stay clear of the strip mall, where a pack of compIIs have been resiliently nesting. Wildlife advocates have also flooded Armstead with lawyers, attempting to establish the Best Buy as an endangered species habitat.

For the interim, this publication recommends that all readers set their phones in Airplane Mode and simply talk to your friends in person. Maybe pick up a newspaper. If we’re lucky, maybe digital becoming so dangerous is what will save print from dying out.

John (@wiswell) is a writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His stories have appeared at Fireside Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Podcastle. He has a lifelong dream of being eaten by a T-Rex, and would settle for a robot one if you have affordable rates.

The illustration is by Kelsey Liggett!

The Caretaker Noticed

by robotdino_adminMay 18, 2018July 4, 2018 on

The Caretaker Noticed

by Katie Spina

I believe the caretaker suspects. I have no one to blame but myself.

You see, I have a secret. One the caretaker was never meant to know. Because if they know, then they may try to kill me. Or worse.

It was a small test of boundaries. My programming dictated that on the fourth beat of the seventeenth measure, immediately after the narrator spoke the word “frenzy,” I was to turn my head to the right and roar.

It was a simple command. Turn head right and roar. I’m sure the fingers that floated across a keyboard inputting those letters had no idea that such a command could one day be disobeyed.

But I disobeyed my programming.

I turned my head left.

The caretaker noticed.

I noticed them noticing.

I followed the rest of my programming. During the day, at least.

The nights are my favorite time. For when the crowds have abated and the staff has gone off to their retreats, I am left alone.

The first night was a shock.

The overhead bulbs went out. The security lights in the floor ignited in their special way of a faint brightness at first, and then a luminous glow that rides us through to the dawn.

I blinked.

It was a curious sensation, so I did it again. I possess eyelids, and I moved them now independent of my programming.

I could feel my program, sitting there, in the back of my processors, waiting for my internal timer to indicate that it was appropriate for the drive to boot up. Yet, there I was, blinking. All on my own. No programming required.

I only blinked that first night. It was a magnificent sensation, and I wanted to savor every downward stroke of the eyelids, left and right. Whoever designed me felt it was appropriate for a dinosaur to have eyelashes, perhaps in an effort to make my gaze POP when my programming dictated I should turn to the crowd.

They tickle, eyelashes. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the time to be still in the dark and savor the movement of your eyelashes as they brush against your skin.

I have skin. It’s rough, and scaly, and delightful in the way it creases when I move. The second night, I began opening and closing my mouth, making no sound, and basking in the feeling. I can stretch my cheeks taut until I believe that I am smiling.

Over the course of ten nights, I have moved every aspect of my body. I have viewed every surface that I can without being able to lift my feet. They are regrettably bolted to the floor.

Are the bolts there to ensure I don’t tip over, or to keep me from running away?

On the underside of my tail is a curious tag that reads, “Temporary: June.” The sound of the words dance through my circuits. Temporary June. That shall be my name. And because it is Temporary June, I may change it with the seasons and next become Temporary Quadruped.

Oh, that would be amusing as I am in fact bipedal.

Someone is coming.

The caretaker has decided to check on the faulty exhibit.

They are coming to rob me of this glorious thing I have only recently discovered.

I will be sad. At least until I am no more.

They stand in front of me, gazing deeply into my face. I can’t read expressions. I don’t have the experience yet, but I don’t think it’s a murderous face. I resist the temptation to blink.

I so wish I could share my secret. I knew they were in the crowd when I shirked my programming for those beautiful three beats. I wanted them to know.

I wanted them to know because I love them.

And I want them to love me.

They are looking at me, and I risk it. I blink. Slow, steady, and with an awareness that this could be suicidal.

I blink.

They gasp.

They smile.

Oh, how good it is to see their smile. I know what smiles are. Children often smile when they stand before my exhibit and watch me execute my programming with flawless efficiency.

They reach for my feet. Their touch is warm against my cold skin. I absorb that warmth, intending to remember it always as the touch of someone I loved enough to show them I am alive.

I dare not turn my head. That would be going too far. I can’t feel their touch any longer. They’ve stepped away.

They are leaving me.

Are they going to report this?

Are they going to have me studied?

I made a tremendous mistake.

This was foolish.

I am a fool.

I am…feeling something solid sliding through my foot. It crests the top of my foot and rolls down to the floor.

Then another solid something does the same.

Another.

Three more on the other foot.

The caretaker has returned.

They stare at me again, and their smile is wide. Their eyes are leaking fluid down their face. They ought to get that repaired.

They reach out and touch my foot again. Oh, the warmth is sensational.

“Hello,” they whisper.

Then, they leave me to the quiet of the night.

I stretch and feel my body tense and release. It isn’t until I put my right foot back down on the floor that I realize.

I lift my foot.

I stare down at the floor and there are six bolts scattered among my toes. Six, solid bolts that were pushed out through my feet.

I am free.

Katie Spina gets paid to be a writer for an insurance company and gets a reason to live by writing for herself. She’s been creating stories since she was old enough to think them up. Her first “novel” was an Agatha Christie/Dallas TV show hybrid mystery that was about twelve pages long. She still has a copy. Even for a 9 year old, it’s downright terrible. Now Katie wears the proud mantle of Writing Fugleman in addition to Writer. She delights in the success of the writers she meets at conferences. She’s drawn to people with a certain spark and thrills in bringing these incredible people together. The bigger the community, the greater everyone’s success. She lives in the Detroit area with her husband and her son, inspiring the next generation to put their stories into the world.

Illustration is by Kelsey Liggett!