Pup
Dog-6 unresponsive to commands.
There were few things left in the world that could force a sigh from Zev Aarons’s chest, but the insistent message blinking in the corner of his display felt worth the otherwise useless effort.
If it had been any of the other models, he could have justified locking it in its bay and putting off the repair until they were out of the ruins, but Dog-6 was the only one small and agile enough to explore the collapsed penthouse that Lucky’s uncanny sensors had discovered yesterday. And ignoring that space was the kind of cardinal sin his backer would never forgive, so diagnosing and repairing whatever was wrong with Dog-6 could not be put off.
Zev ran the four working fingers of his remaining hand through his lengthening hair as he attempted to send one last signal, but there was no response. Dog-6’s video feed showed nothing but a clear path in front of it. He could send one of the others back to investigate, but whatever malfunction was blocking it would probably need his intervention anyway, and he didn’t want to stick around this shell of a town any longer than necessary.
Levering his chair back from the display, Zev unstrapped his usual prosthesis from his left arm and replaced it with the specialized one he used for machinery repairs before wrestling socks over the uneven stumps of his legs and fitting them carefully into the base of his exo suit. The suit took up a ridiculous amount of space in his cramped van, but aside from needing it to leave the vehicle at all, he didn’t dare go out into the shifting rubble without protection for what was left of his body.
After buckling the rest of the exo in place, Zev lowered the visor of his helmet and tapped his temple to be sure the overlay was working. There was no question the connection was current—not with that irritating message hovering at the edge of his vision. He quickly switched it off again and sidled to the van door, careful not to bump the delicate equipment with the heavy exo, then stepped out and turned his face toward the bleak landscape.
This town—he’d forgotten its name and didn’t care enough to look it up again—hadn’t been in the direct path of the asteroid, but the rippling earthquakes and wildfires had quickly taken their toll, leaving it as unfit for habitation as the vaporized no-man’s-land at the center of the crater. Zev started toward the place where he’d left the trailer that housed the six robot dogs, mentally kicking himself for the weakness that still forced him to park the van at the very edge of the outskirts, where it couldn’t be trapped by debris if the rest of the tottering buildings collapsed.
The condition of the desolate streets didn’t come as any kind of shock; he’d had a close-up view from six different camera angles for over a week now. But somehow seeing them with his own eyes, even through the visor, brought the devastation home in an entirely different way, and he tried to ignore the growing tightness in his chest as he wove his way through the too familiar piles of rubble.
Buckled roads and rusted-out cars, collapsed buildings and charred facades, glass fragments crunching under his exo and a fine layer of ash covering everything. He ought to be used to these scenes by now. Hadn’t he spent years carting the dogs in and out of abandoned cities like this? So why did they still affect him this way?
Faint wisps of memory licked at the edges of his mind like encroaching flames—screams, groans, and cracks; suffocating dust, raging delirium, and racking pain. Zev crouched down on an intact portion of road and closed his eyes, fighting desperately to control his breathing.
He just had to finish the job. Collect anything worth saving—or whatever portion of it the dogs could find—deliver it to his backer, and collect his pay. Then he could spend another few months hidden away in the corner of a truck lot, tinkering with the dogs and trying to avoid the petty wretchedness of the overflowing city teeming around him before venturing back into the wastelands.
Forcing a last deep breath, Zev pushed himself up and continued toward the trailer, trying to block out the sight of the rubble surrounding him and, even more, the memories attempting to flood in around it. They’d found him in a heap like this, holding to life by the barest thread—called it a miracle he’d lived, maimed as he was. It was while he’d lain in the hospital recovering from the multiple amputations and other surgeries that he’d first learned about the robot dogs. He hadn’t seen them when they’d found him—he’d been much too far gone for that. But in the long, pain-clouded days that followed, with only the frantic news coverage to keep him company, the idea of the small, agile search and rescue machines had wormed its way into his fractured consciousness and taken root there.
Of course by the time he was released from the hospital, all hope of joining an actual rescue mission was long gone, but his fascination with the dogs had remained strong. Twice, he’d assisted with jobs to find and extract the bodies of those who hadn’t shared his good fortune—if you could call it that—and finally earned enough to buy his first model, Roscoe, from an operator who’d seen the writing on the wall much sooner than he had.
Zev paused at a rusted-out shell of a bus and tapped his visor to check the direction. Dog-6 still wasn’t moving. He found the correct cross street and continued toward what was left of the one-time town square, noting the orange blip in the corner of the display that meant Chamesh was scouting somewhere nearby. She’d been his fifth addition, and her name had been a last feeble effort to care—about appearances, about anything. Though why he’d continued to collect dogs after the truly useful jobs had dried up, he’d never attempted to explain.
The funds for human recovery hadn’t lasted long—government pockets were quickly overwhelmed with the influx of refugees, and only a few private associations could pay to fuel a contingent of dogs for the time it took to even begin a proper search. A mixed bag of operations had supplied the next phase—corporations looking to salvage valuable equipment; wealthy families hoping to recover priceless heirlooms; developers wanting a detailed picture of the damage to assess the potential for rebuilding. But finally, the jobs had dwindled to their current supply of a few ultra-rich speculators scraping the abandoned streets for anything of possible value. And by that point, Zev’s entire savings, training, and rehab was bound up in the robot dogs, far too deeply to start over in a new career—if any other employer would accept a shell of a man who couldn’t perform the most basic of functions without an entire vanload of prosthetics.
Maybe that was another part of the reason he’d gravitated to the robot dogs; there was never any judgment from them about how little humanity was left in him, how little value he could offer the world. If he was a broken shell of the man he had once been, they were misshapen attempts to copy a natural world they’d never be part of, and somehow they belonged together.
Zev turned one last corner, and the trailer loomed into view in front of him, the glowing dot on his visor confirming that Dog-6 was still inside. Perhaps one day, that dying spark of humanity would rouse itself enough to give this last acquisition a proper name, for all that it mattered. But today was not that day.
Some faint, indecipherable sound niggled in at the edge of his headset—the wind through an unusual aperture, or possibly a hint of interference from whatever had caused Dog-6’s malfunction? Zev paused a moment to listen, then gave it up and approached the open door of the last compartment. Out of some deeply ingrained habit, he sent the “Exit” command again, knowing what the result would be before the transmission finished. A motor whirred, the persistent error message flashed on his visor—and something whimpered.
Zev started back so hard the exo nearly lost balance and landed him in the dirt. His mind reeled and his heart raced as he scrambled for an explanation. The dogs did not whimper—not a single motor, gear, or processor failing in the entire mechanism could make a sound like that. It had been too palpable, too natural, too—human. His breathing quickened, and his hand trembled in the grip of the exo as he bent to look inside.
Dog-6 was there, lying in its usual resting position. Its sensors lit and focused on his face as though looking up at him. Across its back sprawled a body—a tiny body clad in rags and topped with a head of tangled hair so matted in dust that he wouldn’t have even ventured a guess as to its natural color. Its arms were twined around Dog-6’s agile neck in a way that prevented it from rotating to display a view of the obstruction—not without potential injury to the intruder—and no matter the command, the dogs’ highest priority was set to preserve human life.
“Don’t leave, puppy…” The hoarse voice was barely a whisper, but the words rang in Zev’s ears as he extended a mechanical arm, then hesitated, years of whispers, shudders, and averted eyes crashing over the sliver that was left of his spirit. The child was clinging to a robot dog, for pity’s sake! Surely the exo couldn’t be that much more frightening, even with half a man’s battered visage trapped inside it. Swallowing hard, Zev freed his mostly good hand and brushed the thin shoulder.
The heat of fever rolled off the child in waves, but at the touch, it lifted its head and surveyed Zev’s face with wide, starry eyes.
“You came. Mama said you’d come. Mama’s dead.” The bony little chest convulsed in a coughing fit, and the thin hands clung so tightly to Dog-6’s neck that Zev half expected its head to snap off. But when the coughs faded to gasping breaths, the child rolled from the dog’s back and crawled forward on shaking limbs, burying its burning forehead against Zev’s collarbone and nearly melting into the angular plates of the exo.
Zev’s prosthetic arm wrapped around the fragile form without thought, and his natural hand rubbed circles across the heaving back. Who the child’s people were—who had been meant to come for it—whether they existed beyond the desperate fantasy of a dying woman—he could wrestle with those questions later. For now, as the finder, he bore the responsibility, and somehow that knowledge opened a cavern in his soul that he’d thought sealed as tightly as a crypt.
“You’re real.” The child nestled its head into the corner of Zev’s neck, rubbing against the scarred skin left exposed by his exo as though it didn’t dare lose contact, and Zev attempted to blink the moisture from his eyes and hold himself upright as the chasm flooded and burst, letting in the light for the first time in years.
“I am.” He gripped the child’s shivering body closer, working to bottle up the emotion as he took a step toward the van, then paused to look back at the waiting robot dog that had performed its duty so faithfully. “Well done, pup.”
It wasn’t until much later, when the little boy lay sleeping in Zev’s bed and he turned his mind back to the waiting display for the first time in hours, that he realized he had finally named Dog-6.
Copyright February 2026 by Angie Thompson
Photo by chagpg, licensed through DepositPhotos