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Laws of Survival

Written by Nancy Kress

Illustrated by John Ward

My name is Jill. I am somewhere you can’t imagine, going somewhere even more unimaginable. If you think I like what I did to get here, you’re crazy.

Actually, I’m the one who’s crazy. You—any “you”—will never read this. But I have paper now, and a sort of pencil, and time. Lots and lots of time. So I will write what happened, all of it, as carefully as I can.

After all—why the hell not?

****

I went out very early one morning to look for food. Before dawn was safest for a woman alone. The boy-gangs had gone to bed, tired of attacking each other. The trucks from the city hadn’t arrived yet. That meant the garbage was pretty picked over, but it also meant most of the refugee camp wasn’t out scavenging. Most days I could find enough: a carrot stolen from somebody’s garden patch, my arm bloody from reaching through the barbed wire. Overlooked potato peelings under a pile of rags and glass. A can of stew thrown away by one of the soldiers on the base, but still half full. Soldiers on duty by the Dome were often careless. They got bored, with nothing to do.

That morning was cool but fair, with a pearly haze that the sun would burn off later. I wore all my clothing, for warmth, and my boots. Yesterday’s garbage load, I’d heard somebody say, was huge, so I had hopes. I hiked to my favorite spot, where garbage spills almost to the Dome wall. Maybe I’d find bread, or even fruit that wasn’t too rotten.

Instead I found the puppy.

Its eyes weren’t open yet and it squirmed along the bare ground, a scrawny brown-and-white mass with a tiny fluffy tail. Nearby was a fluid-soaked towel. Some sentimental fool had left the puppy there, hoping . . . what? It didn’t matter. Scrawny or not, there was some meat on the thing. I scooped it up.

The sun pushed above the horizon, flooding the haze with golden light.

I hate it when grief seizes me. I hate it and it’s dangerous, a violation of one of Jill’s Laws of Survival. I can go for weeks, months without thinking of my life before the War. Without remembering or feeling. Then something will strike me—a flower growing in the dump, a burst of birdsong, the stars on a clear night—and grief will hit me like the maglevs that no longer exist, a grief all the sharper because it contains the memory of joy. I can’t afford joy, which always comes with an astronomical price tag. I can’t even afford the grief that comes from the memory of living things, which is why it is only the flower, the birdsong, the morning sunlight that starts it. My grief was not for that puppy. I still intended to eat it.

But I heard a noise behind me and turned. The Dome wall was opening.

****

Who knew why the aliens put their Domes by garbage dumps, by waste pits, by radioactive cities? Who knew why aliens did anything?

There was a widespread belief in the camp that the aliens started the War. I’m old enough to know better. That was us, just like the global warming and the bio-crobes were us. The aliens didn’t even show up until the War was over and Raleigh was the northernmost city left on the East Coast and refugees poured south like mudslides. Including me. That’s when the ships landed and then turned into the huge gray Domes like upended bowls. I heard there were many Domes, some in other countries. The Army, what was left of it, threw tanks and bombs at ours. When they gave up, the refugees threw bullets and Molotov cocktails and prayers and graffiti and candle-light vigils and rain dances. Everything slid off and the Domes just sat there. And sat. And sat. Three years later, they were still sitting, silent and closed, although of course there were rumors to the contrary. There are always rumors. Personally, I’d never gotten over a slight disbelief that the Dome was there at all. Who would want to visit us?

The opening was small, no larger than a porthole, and about six feet above the ground. All I could see inside was a fog the same color as the Dome. Something came out, gliding quickly toward me. It took me a moment to realize it was a robot, a blue metal sphere above a hanging basket. It stopped a foot from my face and said, “This food for this dog.”

I could have run, or screamed, or at the least—the very least —looked around for a witness. I didn’t. The basket held a pile of fresh produce, green lettuce and deep purple eggplant and apples so shiny red they looked lacquered. And peaches . . . My mouth filled with sweet water. I couldn’t move.

The puppy whimpered.

My mother used to make fresh peach pie.

I scooped the food into my scavenger bag, laid the puppy in the basket, and backed away. The robot floated back into the Dome, which closed immediately. I sped back to my corrugated-tin and windowless hut and ate until I couldn’t hold any more. I slept, woke, and ate the rest, crouching in the dark so nobody else would see. All that fruit and vegetables gave me the runs, but it was worth it.

Peaches.

****

Two weeks later, I brought another puppy to the Dome, the only survivor of a litter deep in the dump. I never knew what happened to the mother. I had to wait a long time outside the Dome before the blue sphere took the puppy in exchange for produce. Apparently the Dome would only open when there was no one else around to see. What were they afraid of? It’s not like PETA was going to show up.

The next day I traded three of the peaches to an old man in exchange for a small, mangy poodle. We didn’t look each other in the eye, but I nonetheless knew that his held tears. He limped hurriedly away. I kept the dog, which clearly wanted nothing to do with me, in my shack until very early morning and then took it to the Dome. It tried to escape but I’d tied a bit of rope onto its frayed collar. We sat outside the Dome in mutual dislike, waiting, as the sky paled slightly in the east. Gunshots sounded in the distance.

I have never owned a dog.

When the Dome finally opened, I gripped the dog’s rope and spoke to the robot. “Not fruit. Not vegetables. I want eggs and bread.”

The robot floated back inside.

Instantly I cursed myself. Eggs? Bread? I was crazy not to take what I could get. That was Law of Survival #1. Now there would be nothing. Eggs, bread . . . crazy. I glared at the dog and kicked it. It yelped, looked indignant, and tried to bite my boot.

The Dome opened again and the robot glided toward me. In the gloom I couldn’t see what was in the basket. In fact, I couldn’t see the basket. It wasn’t there. Mechanical tentacles shot out from the sphere and seized both me and the poodle. I cried out and the tentacles squeezed harder. Then I was flying through the air, the stupid dog suddenly howling beneath me, and we were carried through the Dome wall and inside.

Then nothing.

****

A nightmare room made of nightmare sound: barking, yelping, whimpering, snapping. I jerked awake, sat up, and discovered myself on a floating platform above a mass of dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, old dogs, puppies, sick dogs, dogs that looked all too healthy, flashing their forty-two teeth at me—why did I remember that number? From where? The largest and strongest dogs couldn’t quite reach me with their snaps, but they were trying.

“You are operative,” the blue metal sphere said, floating beside me. “Now we must begin. Here.”

Its basket held eggs and bread.

“Get them away!”

Obediently it floated off.

“Not the food! The dogs!”

“What to do with these dogs?”

“Put them in cages!” A large black animal—German shepherd or Boxer or something—had nearly closed its jaws on my ankle. The next bite might do it.

“Cages,” the metal sphere said in its uninflected mechanical voice. “Yes.”

“Son of a bitch!” The shepherd leaping high had grazed my thigh; its spittle slimed my pants. “Raise the goddamn platform!”

“Yes.”

The platform floated so high, that I had to duck my head to avoid hitting the ceiling. I peered over the edge and . . . no, that wasn’t possible. But it was happening. The floor was growing upright sticks, and the sticks were growing crossbars, and the crossbars were extending themselves into mesh tops . . . Within minutes, each dog was encased in a cage just large enough to hold its protesting body.

“What to do now?” the metal sphere asked.

I stared at it. I was, as far as I knew, the first human being to ever enter an alien Dome, I was trapped in a small room with feral caged dogs and a robot . . . what to do now?

“Why . . . why am I here?” I hated myself for the brief stammer and vowed it would not happen again. Law of Survival #2: Show no fear.

Would a metal sphere even recognize fear?

It said, “These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Not behave correctly?”

“No.”

I looked down again at the slavering and snarling mass of dogs; how strong was that mesh on the cage tops? “What do you want them to do?”

“You want to see the presentation?”

“Not yet.” Law #3: Never volunteer for anything.

“What to do now?”

How the hell should I know? But the smell of the bread reached me and my stomach flopped. “Now to eat,” I said. “Give me the things in your basket.”

It did, and I tore into the bread like a wolf into deer. The real wolves below me increased their howling. When I’d eaten an entire loaf, I looked back at the metal sphere. “Have those dogs eaten?”

“Yes.”

“What did you give them?”

“Garbage.”

“Garbage? Why?”

“In hell they eat garbage.”

So even the robot thought this was Hell. Panic surged through me; I pushed it back. Surviving this would depend on staying steady. “Show me what you fed the dogs.”

“Yes.” A section of wall melted and garbage cascaded into the room, flowing greasily between the cages. I recognized it: It was exactly like the garbage I picked through every day, trucked out from a city I could no longer imagine and from the Army base I could not approach without being shot. Bloody rags, tin cans from before the War, shit, plastic bags, dead flowers, dead animals, dead electronics, cardboard, eggshells, paper, hair, bone, scraps of decaying food, glass shards, potato peelings, foam rubber, roaches, sneakers with holes, sagging furniture, corn cobs. The smell hit my stomach, newly distended with bread.

“You fed the dogs that?”

“Yes. They eat it in hell.”

Outside. Hell was outside, and of course that’s what the feral dogs ate, that’s all there was. But the metal sphere had produced fruit and lettuce and bread for me.

“You must give them better food. They eat that in . . . in hell because they can’t get anything else.”

“What to do now?”

It finally dawned on me—slow, I was too slow for this, only the quick survive—that the metal sphere had limited initiative along with its limited vocabulary. But it had made cages, made bread, made fruit—hadn’t it? Or was this stuff grown in some unimaginable secret garden inside the Dome? “You must give the dogs meat.”

“Flesh?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

No change in that mechanical voice, but the “no” was definite and quick. Law of Survival #4: Notice everything. So—no flesh-eating allowed here. Also no time to ask why not; I had to keep issuing orders so that the robot didn’t start issuing them. “Give them bread mixed with . . . with soy protein.”

“Yes.”

“And take away the garbage.”

“Yes.”

The garbage began to dissolve. I saw nothing poured on it, nothing rise from the floor. But all that stinking mass fell into powder and vanished. Nothing replaced it.

I said, “Are you getting bread mixed with soy powder?” Getting seemed the safest verb I could think of.

“Yes.”

The stuff came then, tumbling through the same melted hole in the wall, loaves of bread with, presumably, soy powder in them. The dogs, barking insanely, reached paws and snouts and tongues through the bars of their cages. They couldn’t get at the food.

“Metal sphere—do you have a name?”

No answer.

“Okay. Blue, how strong are those cages? Can the dogs break them? Any of the dogs?”

“No.”

“Lower the platform to the floor.”

My safe perch floated down. The aisles between the cages were irregular, some wide and some so narrow the dogs could reach through to touch each other, since each cage had “grown” wherever the dog was at the time. Gingerly I picked my way to a clearing and sat down. Tearing a loaf of bread into chunks, I pushed the pieces through the bars of the least dangerous-looking dogs, which made the bruisers howl even more. For them, I put chunks at a distance they could just reach with a paw through the front bars of their prisons.

The puppy I had first brought to the Dome lay in a tiny cage. Dead.

The second one was alive but just barely.

The old man’s mangy poodle looked more mangy than ever, but otherwise alert. It tried to bite me when I fed it.

“What to do now?”

“They need water.”

“Yes.”

Water flowed through the wall. When it had reached an inch or so, it stopped. The dogs lapped whatever came into their cages. I stood with wet feet—a hole in my boot after all, I hadn’t known—and a stomach roiling from the stench of the dogs, which only worsened as they got wet. The dead puppy smelled especially horrible. I climbed back onto my platform.

“What to do now?”

“You tell me,” I said.

“These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Not behave correctly?”

“No.”

“What do you want them to do?”

“Do you want to see the presentation?”

We had been here before. On second thought, a “presentation” sounded more like acquiring information (“Notice everything”) than like undertaking action (“Never volunteer”). So I sat cross-legged on the platform, which was easier on my uncushioned bones, breathed through my mouth instead of my nose, and said “Why the hell not?”

Blue repeated, “Do you want to see the presentation?”

“Yes.” A one-syllable answer.

I didn’t know what to expected. Aliens, spaceships, war, strange places barely comprehensible to humans. What I got was scenes from the dump.

A beam of light shot out from Blue and resolved into a three-dimensional holo, not too different from one I’d seen in a science museum on a school field trip once (no. push memory away), only this was far sharper and detailed. A ragged and unsmiling toddler, one of thousands, staggered toward a cesspool. A big dog with patchy coat dashed up, seized the kid’s dress, and pulled her back just before she fell into the waste.

A medium-sized brown dog in a guide-dog harness led around someone tapping a white-headed cane.

An Army dog, this one sleek and well-fed, sniffed at a pile of garbage, found something, pointed stiffly at attention.

A group of teenagers tortured a puppy. It writhed in pain, but in a long lingering close-up, tried to lick the torturer’s hand.

A thin, small dog dodged rocks, dashed inside a corrugated tin hut, and laid a piece of carrion beside an old lady lying on the ground.

The holo went on and on like that, but the strange thing was that the people were barely seen. The toddler’s bare and filthy feet and chubby knees, the old lady’s withered cheek, a flash of a camouflage uniform above a brown boot, the hands of the torturers. Never a whole person, never a focus on people. Just on the dogs.

The “presentation” ended.

“These dogs do not behave correctly,” Blue said.

“These dogs? In the presentation?”

“These dogs here do not behave correctly.”

“These dogs here.” I pointed to the wet, stinking dogs in their cages. Some, fed now, had quieted. Others still snarled and barked, trying their hellish best to get out and kill me.

“These dogs here. Yes. What to do now?”

“You want these dogs to behave like the dogs in the presentation.”

“These dogs here must behave correctly. Yes.”

“You want them to . . . do what? Rescue people? Sniff out ammunition dumps? Guide the blind and feed the hungry and love their torturers?”

Blue said nothing. Again I had the impression I had exceeded its thought processes, or its vocabulary, or its something. A strange feeling gathered in my gut.

“Blue, you yourself didn’t build this Dome, or the starship that it was before, did you? You’re just a . . . a computer.”

Nothing.

“Blue, who tells you what to do?”

“What to do now? These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Who wants these dogs to behave correctly?” I said, and found I was holding my breath.

“The masters.”

The masters. I knew all about them. Masters were the people who started wars, ran the corporations that ruined the Earth, manufactured the bioweapons that killed billions, and now holed up in the cities to send their garbage out to us in the refugee camps. Masters were something else I didn’t think about, but not because grief would take me. Rage would.

Law of Survival #5: Feel nothing that doesn’t aid survival.

“Are the masters here? In this . . . inside here?”

“No.”

“Who is here inside?”

“These dogs here are inside.”

Clearly. “The masters want these dogs here to behave like the dogs in the presentation.”

“Yes.”

“The masters want these dogs here to provide them with loyalty and protection and service.”

No response.

“The masters aren’t interested in human beings, are they? That’s why they haven’t communicated at all with any government.”

Nothing. But I didn’t need a response; the masters’ thinking was already clear to me. Humans were unimportant—maybe because we had, after all, destroyed each other and our own world. We weren’t worth contact. But dogs: companion animals capable of selfless service and great unconditional love, even in the face of abuse. For all I knew, dogs were unique in the universe. For all I know.

Blue said, “What to do now?”

I stared at the mangy, reeking, howling mass of animals. Some feral, some tamed once, some sick, at least one dead. I chose my words to be as simple as possible, relying on phrases Blue knew. “The masters want these dogs here to behave correctly.”

“Yes.”

“The masters want me to make these dogs behave correctly.”

“Yes.”

“The masters will make me food, and keep me inside, for to make these dogs behave correctly.”

Long pause; my sentence had a lot of grammatical elements. But finally Blue said, “Yes.”

“If these dogs do not behave correctly, the masters—what to do then?”

Another long pause. “Find another human.”

“And this human here?”

“Kill it.”

I gripped the edges of my floating platform hard. My hands still trembled. “Put me outside now.”

“No.”

“I must stay inside.”

“These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“I must make these dogs behave correctly.”

“Yes.”

“And the masters want these dogs to display . . .” I had stopped talking to Blue. I was talking to myself, to steady myself, but even that I couldn’t manage. The words caromed around in my mind—loyalty, service, protection—but none came out of my mouth. I couldn’t do this. I was going to die. The aliens had come from God-knew-where to treat the dying Earth like a giant pet store, intrigued only by a canine domestication that had happened ten thousand years ago and by nothing else on the planet, nothing else humanity had or might accomplish. Only dogs. The masters want these dogs to display—

Blue surprised me with a new word. “Love,” it said.

****

Law #4: Notice everything. I needed to learn all I could, starting with Blue. He’d made garbage appear, and food and water and cages. What else could he do?

“Blue, make the water go away.” And it did, just sank into the floor, which dried instantly. I was fucking Moses, commanding the Red Sea. I climbed off the platform, inched among the dog cages, and studied them individually.

“You called the refugee camp and the dump ‘hell.’ Where did you get that word?”

Nothing.

“Who said ‘hell’?”

“Humans.”

Blue had cameras outside the Dome. Of course he did; he’d seen me find that first puppy in the garbage. Maybe Blue had been waiting for someone like me, alone and non-threatening, to come close with a dog. But it had watched before that, and it had learned the word “hell,” and maybe it had recorded the incidents in the “presentation.” I filed this information for future use.

“This dog is dead.” The first puppy, decaying into stinking pulp. “It is killed. Non-operative.”

“What to do now?”

“Make the dead dog go away.”

A long pause: thinking it over? Accessing data banks? Communicating with aliens? And what kind of moron couldn’t figure out by itself that a dead dog was never going to behave correctly? So much for artificial intelligence.

“Yes,” Blue finally said, and the little corpse dissolved as if it had never been.

I found one more dead dog and one close to death. Blue disappeared the first, said no to the second. Apparently we had to just let it suffer until it died. I wondered how much the idea of “death” even meant to a robot. There were twenty-three live dogs, of which I had delivered only three to the Dome.

“Blue—did another human, before you brought me here, try to train the dogs?”

“These dogs do not behave correctly.”

“Yes. But did a human not me be inside? To make these dogs behave correctly?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to him or her?”

No response.

“What to do now with the other human?”

“Kill it.”

I put a hand against the wall and leaned on it. The wall felt smooth and slick, with a faint and unpleasant tingle. I removed my hand.

All computers could count. “How many humans did you kill?”

“Two.”

Three’s the charm. But there were no charms. No spells, no magic wards, no cavalry coming over the hill to ride to the rescue; I’d known that ever since the War. There was just survival. And, now, dogs.

I chose the mangy little poodle. It hadn’t bit me when the old man had surrendered it, or when I’d kept it overnight. That was at least a start. “Blue, make this dog’s cage go away. But only this one cage!”

The cage dissolved. The poodle stared at me distrustfully. Was I supposed to stare back, or would that get us into some kind of canine pissing contest? The thing was small but it had teeth.

I had a sudden idea. “Blue, show me how this dog does not behave correctly.” If I could see what it wasn’t doing, that would at least be a start.

Blue floated to within a foot of the dog’s face. The dog growled and backed away. Blue floated away and the dog quieted but it still stood in what would be a menacing stance if it weighed more than nine or ten pounds: ears raised, legs braced, neck hair bristling. Blue said, “Come.” The dog did nothing. Blue repeated the entire sequence and so did Mangy.

I said, “You want the dog to follow you. Like the dogs in the presentation.”

“Yes.”

“You want the dog to come when you say ‘Come.’”

“Love,” Blue said.

“What is ‘love,’ Blue?”

No response.

The robot didn’t know. Its masters must have had some concept of “love,” but fuck-all knew what it was. And I wasn’t sure I knew any more, either. That left Mangy, who would never “love” Blue or follow him or lick his hand because dogs operated on smell—even I knew that about them—and Blue, a machine, didn’t smell like either a person or another dog. Couldn’t the aliens who sent him here figure that out? Were they watching this whole farce, or had they just dropped a half-sentient computer under an upturned bowl on Earth and told it, “Bring us some loving dogs”? Who knew how aliens thought?

I didn’t even know how dogs thought. There were much better people for this job—professional trainers, or that guy on TV who made tigers jump through burning hoops. But they weren’t here, and I was. I squatted on my haunches a respectful distance from Mangy and said, “Come.”

It growled at me.

“Blue, raise the platform this high.” I held my hand at shoulder height. The platform rose.

“Now make some cookies on the platform.”

Nothing.

“Make some . . . cheese on the platform.”

Nothing. You don’t see much cheese in a dump.

“Make some bread on the platform.”

Nothing. Maybe the platform wasn’t user-friendly.

“Make some bread.”

After a moment, loaves tumbled out of the wall. “Enough! Stop!”

Mangy had rushed over to the bread, tearing at it, and the other dogs were going wild. I picked up one loaf, put it on the platform, and said, “Make the rest of the bread go away.”

It all dissolved. No wonder the dogs were wary; I felt a little dizzy myself. A sentence from some long-ago child’s book rose in my mind: Things come and go so quickly here!

I had no idea how much Blue could, or would, do on my orders. “Blue, make another room for me and this one dog. Away from the other dogs.”

“No.”

“Make this room bigger.”

The room expanded evenly on all sides. “Stop.” It did. “Make only this end of the room bigger.”

Nothing.

“Okay, make the whole room bigger.”

When the room stopped expanding, I had a space about forty feet square, with the dog cages huddled in the middle. After half an hour of experimenting, I got the platform moved to one corner, not far enough to escape the dog stench but better than nothing. (Law #1: Take what you can get.) I got a depression in the floor filled with warm water. I got food, drinking water, soap, and some clean cloth, and a lot of rope. By distracting Mangy with bits of bread, I got rope onto her frayed collar. After I got into the warm water and scrubbed myself, I pulled the poodle in. She bit me. But somehow I got her washed, too. Afterwards she shook herself, glared at me, and went to sleep on the hard floor. I asked Blue for a soft rug.

He said, “The other humans did this.”

And Blue killed them anyway.

“Shut up,” I said.

****

The big windowless room had no day, no night, no sanity. I slept and ate when I needed to, and otherwise I worked. Blue never left. He was an oversized, all-seeing eye in the corner. Big Brother, or God.

Within a few weeks—maybe—I had Mangy trained to come when called, to sit, and to follow me on command. I did this by dispensing bits of bread and other goodies. Mangy got fatter. I didn’t care if she ended up the Fat Fiona of dogs. Her mange didn’t improve, since I couldn’t get Blue to wrap his digital mind around the concept of medicines, and even if he had I wouldn’t have known what to ask for. The sick puppy died in its cage.

I kept the others fed and watered and flooded the shit out of their cages every day, but that was all. Mangy took all my time. She still regarded me warily, never curled up next to me, and occasionally growled. Love was not happening here.

Nonetheless, Blue left his corner and spoke for the first time in a week, scaring the hell out of me. “This dog behaves correctly.”

“Well, thanks. I tried to . . . no, Blue . . .”

Blue floated to within a foot of Mangy’s face, said, “Follow,” and floated away. Mangy sat down and began to lick one paw. Blue rose and floated toward me.

“This dog does not behave correctly.”

I was going to die.

“No, listen to me—listen! The dog can’t smell you! It behaves for humans because of humans’ smell! Do you understand?”

“No. This dog does not behave correctly.”

“Listen! How the hell can you learn anything if you don’t listen? You have to have a smell! Then the dog will follow you!”

Blue stopped. We stood frozen, a bizarre tableau, while the robot considered. Even Mangy stopped licking her paw and watched, still. They say dogs can smell fear.

Finally Blue said, “What is smell?”

It isn’t possible to explain smell. Can’t be done. Instead I pulled down my pants, tore the cloth I was using as underwear from between my legs, and rubbed it all over Blue, who did not react. I hoped he wasn’t made of the same stuff as the Dome, which even spray paint had just slid off of. But, of course, he was. So I tied the strip of cloth around him with a piece of rope, my fingers trembling. “Now try the dog, Blue.”

“Follow,” Blue said, and floated away from Mangy.

She looked at him, then at me, then back at the floating metal sphere. I held my breath from some insane idea that I would thereby diminish my own smell. Mangy didn’t move.

“This dog does not be—“

“She will if I’m gone!” I said desperately. “She smells me and you . . . and we smell the same so it’s confusing her! But she’ll follow you fine if I’m gone, do you understand?”

“No.”

“Blue . . . I’m going to get on the platform. See, I’m doing it. Raise the platform very high, Blue. Very high.”

A moment later my head and ass both pushed against the ceiling, squishing me. I couldn’t see what was happening below. I heard Blue say, “Follow,” and I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting. My life depended on a scrofulous poodle with a gloomy disposition.

Blue said, “This dog behaves correctly.”

He lowered my platform to a few yards above the floor, and I swear that—eyeless as he is and with part of his sphere obscured by my underwear—he looked right at me.

“This dog does behave correctly. This dog is ready.”

“Ready? For . . . for what?”

Blue didn’t answer. The next minute the floor opened and Mangy, yelping, tumbled into it. The floor closed. At the same time, one of the cages across the room dissolved and a German shepherd hurtled towards me. I shrieked and yelled, “Raise the platform!” It rose just before the monster grabbed me.

Blue said, “What to do now? This dog does not behave correctly.”

“For God’s sakes, Blue—”

“This dog must love.”

The shepherd leapt and snarled, teeth bared.

****

I couldn’t talk Blue out of the shepherd, which was as feral and vicious and unrelenting as anything in a horror movie. Or as Blue himself, in his own mechanical way. So I followed the First Law: Take what you can get.

“Blue, make garbage again. A lot of garbage, right here.” I pointed to the wall beside my platform.

“No.”

Garbage, like everything else, apparently was made—or released, or whatever—from the opposite wall. I resigned myself to this. “Make a lot of garbage, Blue.”

Mountains of stinking debris cascaded from the wall, spilling over until it reached the dog cages.

“Now stop. Move my platform above the garbage.”

The platform moved. The caged dogs howled. Uncaged, the shepherd poked eagerly in the refuse, too distracted to pay much attention to me. I had Blue lower the platform and I poked among it, too, keeping one eye on Vicious. If Blue was creating the garbage and not just trucking it in, he was doing a damn fine job of duplication. Xerox should have made such good copies.

I got smeared with shit and rot, but I found what I was looking for. The box was nearly a quarter full. I stuffed bread into it, coated the bread thoroughly, and discarded the box back onto the pile.

“Blue, make the garbage go away.”

It did. Vicious glared at me and snarled. “Nice doggie,” I said, “have some bread." I threw pieces and Vicious gobbled them.

Listening to the results was terrible. Not, however, as terrible as having Vicious tear me apart or Blue vaporize me. The rat poison took all “night” to kill the dog, which thrashed and howled. Throughout, Blue stayed silent. He had picked up some words from me, but he apparently didn’t have enough brain power to connect what I’d done with Vicious’s death. Or maybe he just didn’t have enough experience with humans. What does a machine know about survival?

“This dog is dead,” Blue said in the “morning.”

“Yes. Make it go away.” And then, before Blue could get there first, I jumped off my platform and pointed to a cage. “This dog will behave correctly next.”

“No.”

“Why not this dog?”

“Not big.”

“Big. You want big.” Frantically I scanned the cages, before Blue could choose another one like Vicious. “This one, then.”

“Why the hell not?” Blue said.

****

It was young. Not a puppy but still frisky, a mongrel of some sort with short hair of dirty white speckled with dirty brown. The dog looked liked something I could handle: big but not too big, not too aggressive, not too old, not too male. “Hey, Not-Too,” I said, without enthusiasm, as Blue dissolved her cage. The mutt dashed over to me and tried to lick my boot.

A natural-born slave.

I had found a piece of rotten, moldy cheese in the garbage, so Blue could now make cheese, which Not-Too went crazy for. Not-Too and I stuck with the same routine I used with Mangy, and it worked pretty well. Or the cheese did. Within a few “days” the dog could sit, stay, and follow on command.

Then Blue threw me a curve. “What to do now? The presentation.”

“We had the presentation,” I said. “I don’t need to see it again.”

“What to do now? The presentation.”

“Fine,” I said, because it was clear I had no choice. “Let’s have the presentation. Roll ’em.”

I was sitting on my elevated platform, combing my hair. A lot of it had fallen out during the malnourished years in the camp, but now it was growing again. Not-Too had given up trying to jump up there with me and gone to sleep on her pillow below. Blue shot the beam out of his sphere and the holo played in front of me.

Only not the whole thing. This time he played only the brief scene where the big, patchy dog pulled the toddler back from falling into the cesspool. Blue played it once, twice, three times. Cold slid along my spine.

“You want Not-Too . . . you want this dog here to be trained to save children.”

“This dog here does not behave correctly.”

“Blue . . . how can I train a dog to save a child?”

“This dog here does not behave correctly.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we haven’t got any fucking children for the dog to practice on!”

Long pause. “Do you want a child?”

“No!” Christ, he would kidnap one or buy one from the camp and I would be responsible for a kid along with nineteen semi-feral dogs. No.

“This dog here does not behave correctly. What to do now? The presentation.”

“No, not the presentation. I saw it, I saw it. Blue . . . the other two humans who did not make the dogs behave correctly . . ."

“Killed.”

“Yes. So you said. But they did get one dog to behave correctly, didn’t they? Or maybe more than one. And then you just kept raising the bar higher. Water rescues, guiding the blind, finding lost people. Higher and higher.”

But to all this, of course, Blue made no answer.

I wracked my brains to remember what I had ever heard, read, or seen about dog training. Not much. However, there’s a problem with opening the door to memory: you can’t control what strolls through. For the first time in years, my sleep was shattered by dreams.

I walked through a tiny garden, picking zinnias. From an open window came music, full and strong, an orchestra on CD. A cat paced beside me, purring. And there was someone else in the window, someone who called my name and I turned and—

I screamed. Clawed my way upright. The dogs started barking and howling. Blue floated from his corner, saying something. And Not-Too made a mighty leap, landed on my platform, and began licking my face.

“Stop it! Don’t do that! I won’t remember!” I shoved her so hard she fell off the platform onto the floor and began yelping. I put my head in my hands.

Blue said, “Are you not operative?”

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

Not-Too still yelped, shrill cries of pain. When I stopped shaking, I crawled off the platform and picked her up. Nothing seemed to be broken—although how would I know? Gradually she quieted. I gave her some cheese and put her back on her pillow. She