Buddy System
Flash-fiction - by Dan Micklethwaite
“We should make an Archaeopteryx,” Carrie-Anne said, as I handed over her latte one morning. Which nearly made me drop it on the Harryhausen model—from The Valley of Gwangi—that she kept as a mascot at the side of her desk. But while that would undoubtedly have been a disaster, maybe even a friendship-ender, it would also have been a fair cause for declining; a fitting reminder of my recent mistakes.
I’d botched the pneumatics on the only Iguanodon, consigning it to stalking around with a limp, and I’d fractured the tail of the Ankylosaurus in a careless collision with a maintenance cart. And that was just the past week.
I’d racked up so many errors by that point, in fact, that management must have been debating whether or not they should fire me. And, as painful as the notion was, I had even been wondering if I should save them the trouble.
Fortunately, before I confessed as much to Carrie-Anne, I realised she must have preferred that I stay; it was the only possible explanation for why I’d got another chance. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve her support, but I was grateful I had it. Incredibly so. Regardless of my blunders, this was work I believed in, work I’d been training for, and I still had a lot I was hoping to prove.
She had more to prove as well. I knew if I stayed I could learn a lot from her, and from being at the true cutting edge of our field. She often talked about pushing the technology further; said that like everything, these bots would evolve. If they didn’t do so automatically, in response to new data, then Carrie-Anne was determined to help them along.
For the opportunity to witness that, I couldn’t thank her enough, but she blushed when I tried, being modest as ever.
“What?” She shrugged, sipping her coffee. “If I let you go now, I’ll only have to interview some untrained replacements. Either that or I guess I could try to rebuild you, but I’m still not quite ready to do that just yet.”
The Reserve was meant to integrate robotics and nature, to demonstrate how the former could help conservation. For all the damage that technology had done to the biosphere, it had now advanced far enough to start making amends.
It was Carrie-Anne who proposed dinosaurs as the right place to start—the most famous of all extinct animal types, revived in a bid to stop other such losses.
That was the crux of the project’s publicity, its pitch to investors.
That was what made me apply for the job.
It also brought a backlash of scaremongering media, which claimed that the bots would attack all the animals and maybe even break loose to destroy the whole world. All very Crichton. But they didn’t have a reason to consume any flesh. Their AI couldn’t bypass their behavioural strictures; no violence was possible against endangered beasts.
They would mainly be there as a kind of alarm system, to provide updates on changes in environmental conditions, incipient sickness, or the arrival of other, contradictory threats—not only the increasingly desperate poachers, but also the self-styled ‘Darwinist liberators,’ who claimed the creatures instead would be much better served by being left to adapt or else die in the ‘wild’.
To make sure the bots didn’t undermine this role by confusing or panicking the original fauna, the plan was to pair only compatible species. “Bionic Buddies,” Carrie-Anne called them, and though I knew she was joking, the name kind of stuck.
Six months down the line, we had a Centrosaurus for the rhinos, a Triceratops for the elephants, a Brontosaurus for the giraffes, and some smaller bots to watch everything from stoats to echidnas.
But we didn’t have anything to safeguard the birds.
I threw myself headlong into the robot design process, twelve hours a day in front of three widescreen monitors, and I always double-checked my calculations and coding before I even thought about letting Carrie-Anne take a look. She still found a few little faults here and there, but always stayed patient, and was comfortable with letting me watch her solve problems, in the hopes that I’d then fix the next lot myself.
As much as I felt I was truly improving, I remained astounded by how fluently she drew up the prototypes and how quickly she coded the basic AI. Though this was ostensibly my make-or-break project, I was relieved Carrie-Anne was the Lead Engineer.
Some days, I was reduced to just bringing her coffee—always a latte, from the Reserve’s cafeteria—but I wasn’t concerned about being overlooked. Regardless of the actual division of labour, I was still being useful; the Archaeopteryx would still be at least partly mine.
More than that, it would be ours.
To show that she acknowledged this and was willing to share credit, she’d insisted that I be in charge of the colour scheme and a few other design features, and that when the time came we should both be in the Hatchery to initiate the build.
I was in favour of naming it Archie, but Carrie-Anne overruled and chose Harper instead. That didn’t change how I felt. When we first let it loose on our patch of savannah, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been prouder. While Carrie-Anne stood beside me drinking her latte, smiling with a foamy moustache on her lip, I could only gawp at our dinosaur’s progress, my own cappuccino going cold in my hand.
It was surreal, yet beguiling, to watch the proto-bird robot strutting round on the grass. The synthetic plumage wasn’t exactly in-keeping, spanning as it did the full visible spectrum, but I was delighted with the work that I’d done, nonetheless.
Even more so when Harper at last became airborne; when it joined with the circling kettle of vultures, in their drab colorations, it stood out like a phoenix come forth from the ash. And though it moved jerkily in comparison to its avian charges, we felt like the Wright Brothers, like true pioneers.
Carrie-Anne’s name especially deserves to stand beside theirs, to stand beside that of her own idol, Harryhausen. She deserves for her legacy, at least, to be safe.
I turned to thank her again, for whatever she’d done to prevent me being fired and ensure I was here for a moment like that. But her smile let me know that it didn’t need saying. She simply tapped her recyclable cup against mine, sipped some more coffee, and turned back to watch as Harper came in to land.
It was at two-thirty in the morning a couple of weeks later that the Triceratops emitted an intrusion alert. Though it wasn’t part of the job, and we certainly weren’t trained for it, Carrie-Anne was among the first to react. I guess she just wanted to see for herself exactly how well our deterrent was working.
I was curious too, but unable to join her. I’d taken some leave to visit my folks.
I have to remind myself, often, that there was nothing I could have done.
I couldn’t have guessed, because not even she did, that the poachers hadn’t actually come for the animals; the bots we’d created were state of the art, and the thieves clearly sensed bigger profits from them.
Carrie-Anne saw a jeep full of armed men chasing Harper and pinning it down to the ground with a net. I can only imagine the anguish she felt, witnessing such an attack in person. It was awful enough just to hear about later. To hear about Carrie-Anne rushing off to confront them, before any of the gamekeepers could come to her aid.
I’ve done it again, I realise—brought two cups of coffee instead of just one. Sipped the latte by accident. It’s the only mistake I can afford today, or any day from here on out, until I complete this new model: another Bionic Buddy, but with upgraded specs.
My reflection is clear in all three of the monitors and in the void before loading. The synthetic feather is shining in all of them, fixed as it is on a chain round my neck. It was all they could find afterwards, and it’s the last thing I have to connect me to her.
Well, along with the model, the eponymous beast from The Valley of Gwangi, which I’ve placed as a mascot at the side of my desk.
She was spot on, I think, about dinosaurs being an appropriate symbol—a sign that extinction can be overcome. But while that was the genesis of this project, Carrie-Anne always dreamed about pushing things further.
I just want to honour that and build on her legacy.
And although it’s painful, the sight of this feather, it also reminds me how much I have learned. How much she taught me.
Granted, it might still not be enough for rebuilding a human, but surely it’s the least that I owe her that I try.