james machell

by James Machell

All I remember from high-school religious history was that people used to believe in a deity who created them to appreciate and acknowledge his love. The lesson resonated with me, because at the time, I was experimenting with some of the biomaterials my grandmother got for my birthday. She brought a dog last year, but no matter how long we spent in the park together, it showed no more affection than the occasional wag of its tail.

Dad warned me to be patient. The only way to bypass the years it took to build up genuine affection was to be the creature’s mother, which gave me an idea. Using this year’s present, I induced pluripotency in the cells of a loose hair, and used them to develop a new dog, but with my own genes in her DNA. The result was a pet like my old one, except for the ability to comprehend the privilege of being taken on walks by superior beings.

“Nice dreams?” I asked one morning, as she stirred from the foot of my bed.

The dog nodded enthusiastically, but was still a dog, and hadn’t the vocal cords, let alone the articulacy, to describe what she was dreaming about. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that if an animal could speak, we wouldn’t be able to understand it, and he must have been onto something, for when I showed my dog a diagram of the emotional spectrum, and asked her to tap on her feelings, she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.

The dog simply was, every sensation blurring seamlessly together as if life was an event that happened all at once. I read somewhere that dogs even processed time differently to us, at a different speed or something. It made me think that if there really was a god, who existed outside the universe and within eternity, we wouldn’t be able to understand him either.

I named her Eve after the first woman, which I found especially poetic as the family dog was called Adam and she came from his side. It was strange to stare at myself in her eyes when they were so similar to mine. This distracted me from our board game, and I couldn’t help feeling humiliated when pushing pieces with her noise, she put me in checkmate.

The phone narrowly saved me from having to topple my king. It was the boy who sat next to me in science class. We spent our free periods in an art room where no one was around and he wanted to meet that afternoon. His love might not have been as abundant as that of my pet, who carried on nuzzling my leg as we spoke, but it was given for its own sake, rather than food and a place to sleep, which made it all the more special.

“Meet you at five!” I said, hanging up, having agreed to hang out at the mall.

I was so excited about our first rendezvous in public that I completely forgot my parents were out all day, leaving no one to mind our dogs. This wasn’t a problem for Adam, who kept quiet so long as he had food and water, but Eve wasn’t so simple. Intelligent enough to unlock doors, without the moral capacity to understand why it was wrong to chase cars or frighten the neighbour’s cat, she kept me prisoner whenever we had the house to ourselves.

My parents grounded me for a week the last time she got out, and since I was neither willing to cancel my date, nor go to the effort of padlocking the windows, I grabbed a bottle of pesticide from below the sink. Eve had some conception of death, having whimpered when my grandmother gave in to old age, but clearly none of her own. Though she grimaced at the taste, she kept on lapping, unable to conceive of it being anything other than medicine.

The first symptom of organophosphate poisoning was bewilderment. Her pupils dilated and she wandered around the house like dad after drinking beer. As later symptoms included vomiting and loss of bowel control, I covered the area around her basket with tissue paper and placed her in it to die. She snarled and gave up on life as I was putting on make-up, staring at me with her enormous dead eyes, as if to ask how I could have done this to her, but I didn’t feel bad, because I was a god now, and could resurrect her genes with another hair.

~

Bio:

James Machell is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and the outreach manager for Utopia Science Fiction. He has interviewed several writers of speculative fiction, including P. Djèlí Clark, John Clute, and Samuel R. Delany. Find him on X @JamesRJMachell or YouTube where his channel’s name is Fell Purpose.

Philosophy Note:

This story deals with the incompatibility of ethics with logic. Just as Achilles can never overtake the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox of motion, no one can assess the value of life by its availability. Suggested reading: The theological works of G K Chesterton.