How to make friends and influence… dinosaurs?

This a flash piece I wrote for A. Merc Rustad’s wonderful Robot Dinosaurs. They didn’t choose it for publication, but that’s OK. Anything that makes me write, and finish, a piece, is good! Also, this one isn’t strictly about a dinosaur (although I only discovered that as I was writing it…)

She’s slumped in the sweltering shade in the garden, sweating and irritated, when she first hears the noise. Of course, that’s not actually strictly true – she was a kid when she first heard it in some corny old film, and there was one on that Bowie track. But this is the first time she’s ever heard the sound in real life.

It doesn’t register to begin with. There are cars driving past in the distance, and she’s just so hot that nothing’s really sinking in.

Then she thinks it might be a notification on her phone, some new app that makes a noise like… And that’s when she sees it. It’s gliding down in the middle of the lawn, about 50 metres away. She knows what it is immediately, even as she’s walking, disbelieving, towards it – a pterodactyl. Smallish, maybe 50 cm from one wingtip to the other. As she gets closer, she can see that it’s definitely artificial, but at the same time kind of… organic? Covered in dark brown stuff that looks like velvet or the short fur on a cat’s ear. It looks up at her from where it’s crouching awkwardly on the parched grass and goes “Squeeeeee?”

She can’t stop herself calling it Terry. It has a little crest on its beak, but not a very obvious one, so she can’t work out if it’s meant to be any specific gender.

She discovers that these days they aren’t called pterodactyls any more, but pterosaurs. And that in fact they aren’t even dinosaurs.

She never finds out where it came from. Nobody seems to be missing a robot dinosaur. Or if they are, they aren’t looking for it very hard.

She goes on a date with Johan, a guy she doesn’t really find attractive, just because his profile mentions that he’s a palaeontologist. They actually have quite a nice time, although there’s no way she’s going to invite him home.

Terry’s a pretty good houseguest. It seems to run on solar power, because it likes to spend a good amount of the day standing about in the sun with its wings partly open like a drying umbrella. The rest of the time it sits on her desk in a cardboard box filled with tissue paper, which it tears up periodically with its pointed beak, dropping the bits onto her desk as if bringing her gifts. It doesn’t ever eat anything, although it occasionally snaps at flies if they’re bothering her, which is endearing but kind of scary because it’s so quick. It catches them quite often, too, dropping the squashed remains on the little heap of paper beside the box. At night it insists on clambering up the stairs with her when she goes to bed, where it sleeps on her discarded clothes.

It smells of cinnamon and gun oil, and now so does she. Several people are complimentary about her new perfume.

Terry’s pretty ungainly on the ground, because its wings don’t really fold up tidily, and it has to walk like a bat, kind of on its elbows. But it can launch itself into the air by doing a surprisingly high leap off all fours, and once there it’s really quite nippy. They play frisbee in the garden, her throwing and Terry snapping the plastic disc out of the air and dropping it at her feet.

As the weather finally gets cooler, she notices that Terry’s moving more slowly, so she brings out the big daylight lamp and the robot pterosaur does its umbrella trick in front of that instead.

After it’s been with her about six months, Terry occasionally starts coming over and pecking at her keyboard, then peering at the screen. She shows it how to type “Terry”, though it doesn’t seem to understand. But a few weeks later she comes downstairs in the morning and discovers that she’s apparently ordered a whole load of electronic components from Kjell & Company, plus some stuff she can’t even identify from a lab equipment supplier. When she confronts Terry with the email confirmations, it gives a tiny pterosaur shrug and settles down in its box.

The deliveries start arriving a few days later. She feels ridiculous trudging up to the village shop in the snow to collect packages ordered by a pterosaur, but she does it anyway, bringing them back and laying them out on the garage floor. Terry shuffles up and down, inspecting the items and turning them over with its beak. She digs out her old laptop and sets that up on the floor too, and watches as the robot pterosaur taps away at the keys, occasionally using a rear claw or a forelimb to move the mouse.

It clearly understands English, but it never communicates with her directly other than with the odd squawk or crooning noise that a cat might make to its human. She wonders if it somehow can’t associate the sounds she makes with the symbols it sees on the screen.

At any rate, after a day or two using a freeware CAD program, it produces a neat diagram showing how all the parts fit together. She’s pretty good with a soldering iron, and she’s used to making models for wargaming, so it kind of makes sense. She prints out the diagram, lays out the tools she thinks she’s going to need, and starts work, with Terry watching closely.

It takes her nearly a month, because some of the organic parts have to be grown in glass beakers. They just look like blobs to her, but sure enough when she lays the blobs in the right place in the structure, they ooze into position like they’ve always been there.

And when she’s finished, Terry squawks in satisfaction and stabs at the Enter key on the laptop, and the second pterosaur – a bit chunkier, a bit more obviously robotic – looks up at her from where it’s crouching awkwardly on the garage floor and goes “Squeeeeee?”