Runner-up: Electric sheep
Nancy Graham
Published November 14, 2008 at 7:34 a.m.
Nancy Graham was vice president of a government services firm, Corporate Operations for Policy Studies Inc., until leaving to write full time. She has sold stories to Weber: The Contemporary West and the online magazine Wazee. She recently attended the Tin House writers’ workshop in Oregon, studying with author Dorothy Allison, and is working on a novel.
Contact her at ngrahamco@gmail.com
Eustace had witnessed many strange things while living rough on the Denver streets, but until today he had never seen an exploding sheep. Ten feet in front of him a ball of fleece and hooves had tumbled through the air, emitting bits of flotsam. A tuft of wool landed on his sleeve like a particularly fat snowflake.
When he joined the crowd gathering around what remained of the sheep, Eustace realized that no blood had been spilled. Instead, circuit boards and connectors protruded from the mangled pelt, as though the sheep had chosen a laptop for lunch. A little girl took her thumb out of her mouth and looked up at her mother. “Fake?” The mother nodded. The sheep twitched.
The sheep had been marching in the annual Stock Show parade when it was struck by one of the hover trains that surged up and down the 16th Street Mall. Eustace, who had grown up on a farm, never let January’s bleak chill keep him from the parade. Animals herded through the downtown canyons created pleasing juxtapositions: the tang of wet concrete overlaid by the ammonia of manure, black and white Holsteins silhouetted against red brick, the bellow of a buffalo echoed by a delivery truck’s horn.
The guilty train sat a few feet above the pavers, humming softly. On the far side of the mall, the rest of the sheep herd stood motionless with blank eyes, uninterested and uninteresting. Eustace imagined the parade backing up behind them. Beauty queens would stop midwave while clowns drove their golf carts in tight, angry circles. Clarinets would squeal and fall silent.
A handsome man in chaps and a cowboy hat strode across the mall toward them. A black and white dog trotted at his heels. The cowboy stood frowning at the sheep. “That certainly wasn’t supposed to happen,” he muttered into a microphone clipped to the bandanna tied artfully around his neck. “Get someone from transport over here ASAP. Street clean-up, too.”
The dog looked back over its shoulder at the rest of the flock with a warning glance, as if to remind them that there would be consequences for bad behavior. Then it sniffed at the carcass, which threw a spark onto the dog’s snout. The dog yelped and stepped back, looking up at the cowboy. “Not now, Sidney. I’ll explain later.” The cowboy made a downward motion with his open palm. The dog dropped obediently and laid its head on its paws, nose a careful distance from the sheep’s hindquarter. The dog stayed motionless, but its eyes flicked back and forth, monitoring the crowd, the cowboy and the sheep.
Someone laid a heavy hand on Eustace’s shoulder, and he turned. It was Big Sammy, an old acquaintance from homeless days. Sammy had quit drugs about the same time Eustace stopped drinking, and they had drifted into separate versions of an afterlife. Sammy worked at a Native American center on Broadway, while Eustace traded night watchman duties for a room at a residence hotel, an arrangement made during the Great Resettlement. Their paths rarely crossed these days. But Eustace remembered that Sammy also loved the Stock Show and wasn’t surprised to encounter him in the middle of Larimer Street. They shook hands, then turned back to regard the carcass.
“Bet the parade people are a bit, ” Sammy paused for effect, “sheepish about this.”
Eustace smiled to acknowledge the joke, but deep inside he recognized sadness. The parade of animals had been his annual link to a life less urban, if not more peaceful. Before the war, before the hospital, before the years of cold nights, Eustace had been comforted by the cluck of chickens when he hid in the barn. He had laid a hand on the sticky flank of a newborn calf and felt it struggle to draw breath. Ducks had led him to secret pools in the river and taught him to dive.
“How long do you think they’ve been using robots?”
Sammy shrugged. “Hard to say. You suppose all the animals are fake?”
Eustace considered for a moment. “Not all of them, I think. Can you really fake a pig rooting for food? And cow drool? That can’t be fake, can it?”
Before Sammy had time to reply, a woman in a transportation authority uniform bustled up with a handheld device and a radio. The cowboy put his hands on his hips and yelled. “You got any idea what a Psuedo Sheep costs, lady?”
“Now, let’s stay calm, campesino. Were we informed that there would be animatronic entities in this parade?” She was tall and looked him straight in the eye. Eustace, who was always interested in shoes, noticed that the cowboy’s boot heels were higher than the ones on the transportation lady’s shoes.
“Yes, the paperwork was filed.” The cowboy folded his arms and glared at her.
“Well, I didn’t get it, so it apparently wasn’t filed properly. I’m in charge of the entire parade route.” She poked him in the chest for emphasis. The dog sat up and growled at her. The cowboy shook his head at the dog, and it lay down again.
“How much does one of those sheep cost, just out of curiosity?” Sammy wore a friendly smile. “And did the taxpayers foot the bill? I mean, how much does a real sheep cost? A hundred bucks at most, right? So I think if you were going to start using expensive fake sheep at our expense . . . ”
“The sheep are privately funded, sir.” The cowboy touched the brim of his hat in salute and turned back to the transportation lady. “We were assured that the biometrics on the trains would be tuned to accommodate semi-sentient life forms.”
“Semi-sentient?” The woman consulted the screen on her device. “I don’t see anything here about semi-sentient — or any other level of sentient — life forms.”
Eustace’s Resettlement counselor had taught him to ask for clarification in his sober life; it had saved him from many social gaffes. “What exactly does ‘semi-sentient’ mean?” he asked the cowboy.
A hint of irritation passed over the man’s face, but he quickly donned a friendly smile. “It means that the sheep can see and hear, sir. They have senses.”
Sammy hooted. “But no common sense! I mean, that sheep just waltzed right out in front of that train. Like, forgive me, a lamb to the slaughter!”
“A train, I might point out, that should have stopped after detecting that something sentient was in its path.” The cowboy glared at the transportation lady. “After all, that’s how it moves so fast from stop to stop without hitting people.”
Sammy was slapping his thigh now. “So the train didn’t have any sense, either. Makes sense!” A few of the crowd members were laughing along with him. After all, nothing had been killed. It was OK to be amused.
A man on a scooter zoomed up to the group surrounding the sheep. “I’m Dr. Mercer, designated vet for the parade. Hear we have an animal down.” He pushed down the kickstand and dismounted.
The cowboy turned. “Nice to meet you, doc, but this is more a case for an electrical engineer.”
The doctor squatted next to the remains. The dog sat up and looked alert. The vet stroked the dog while he gazed at the pile of wool and wire with a puzzled expression.
A young woman with a pierced lip and dreadlocks leaned in. “Do you think the sheep committed suicide?” The entire crowd turned toward her, eyebrows raised. “I mean, maybe it knew it was sort of a sheep but not really a sheep and couldn’t stand to live that way.” The transportation lady and the cowboy exchanged expressions that Eustace recognized from his institutionalized days. The authority figures were asking each other how to handle a potentially unhinged personality.
The transportation lady decided to take the serious route. “I’m sure that’s not so, dear. This sheep — robot — could apparently take in some information from the outside world, but it isn’t as if it had a soul, or even a brain, per se.”
The cowboy couldn’t let this rest. “Well, it most certainly did have a brain. You should have seen the processor in this thing. Big honking CPU. It could interpret the information from the sensors and change direction, or stop, or . . . ”
“So maybe the train meant to kill the sheep?” Sammy was grinning from ear to ear. “It must have a brain, too. Why didn’t it stop? What brought on this murderous rage?”
A gaggle of suits out for their noontime stroll arrived clutching Styrofoam food storage containers. “Oooh, actionable liability for sure,” said one of them, rattling the ice in his to-go cup with glee.
“Yeah, mutton v. mass transit,” another contributed. They all laughed.
Eustace spoke loud enough to cut through the merriment. “Why? He addressed this to the cowboy. “Why use a fake sheep?”
The cowboy tipped his hat back on his head, exposing a pale strip of forehead. He blew out a puff of air. “Lower cost of maintenance and potential for reuse outweigh the initial investment. Simple math, sir. Not to mention that no one has to clean up after them. There are lots of applications: petting zoos, decorative additions to country estates, movie sets.”
Eustace shook his head. “But it isn’t right. We come to see real animals. That’s the best thing about the parade.”
The cowboy shrugged. “Not my call, sir. I’m just the account representative. And Sidney, well, let’s just call him tech support.”
The black and white dog had waited patiently, but now it got to its feet and barked sharply, twice. The cowboy sighed and knelt next to it. “Look, Sidney. I was going to tell you, really I was. We ordered them with the proper scent output to make you think they were real and needed to be herded. People like the show. They like to see you nipping at heels and all.” The cowboy took off his hat and held it against his chest. “I’m sorry.”
The dog gazed back across the mall at the herd waiting quietly for further instructions. Then he shook as if he had just emerged from a cold pond and padded over to sit on Eustace’s foot. Eustace patted the dog’s head tentatively. The dog — Sidney, the cowboy had called him — shifted his weight against Eustace’s leg and sighed.
Sammy looked the two of them up and down. “Got yourself a new friend, Eustace.”
The cowboy put his hat back on, got to his feet and carefully brushed off the knees of his jeans. Two guys in purple jackets came up the block toward them. One of them was pushing a trash container on wheels; the other carried a broom and dustpan. They stood staring down at the mess, scratching the backs of their necks. One of them inserted the dustpan under a hoof tentatively but jumped back when it twitched in response. The cowboy sighed, got back down on his knees and began to load the wooly remains into a garbage bag by hand. The trash men watched from a respectful distance. The transportation lady used her handheld device to fill out a form and handed it down to the cowboy for his fingerprint.
When the debris was nearly under control, a mounted policewoman clopped up to the onlookers and called down from her saddle, “Out of the street, folks. Need to get the parade started again.” The crowd of onlookers parted like the Red Sea and shuffled off to their respective curbs.
Eustace looked down at the dog. “I’m leaving.” The dog stood and licked his hand. “Sidney, huh? Kind of a silly name for a dog.”
They headed away from the parade, toward the residence hotel that Eustace called home. As night watchman, surely he was entitled to a canine assistant, or so he would argue. “And don’t expect any fancy food.”
The dog stopped to sniff a cow pie, but then hustled to catch up with Eustace. The two of them paused at the end of the street and looked back. Sammy waved at them and then turned back toward the flock of sheep that were finally flooding across the mall, going “Bah, bah, bah.”
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