Devices

 I wrote this piece today for a job proposal.  The proposal required 3-5 paragraphs of prose loosely about artificial intelligence.  The piece was supposed to be set in a fictitious South America where warring packs of  animals fight for dominance.  There may have been more to the description, but this is what I got out of it

November 15:  Now that I reread this, I realize why I never heard back from these guys.  Although I wish I could find their original proposal, which was the oddly written and confusing, probably why I didn't put much into this.

Devices

Ibis crawled beneath the dense foliage that clung to the boundary fence.  He knew there was a gap.  A way to get in.   He stayed close to the ground, smelling the damp, loamy soil.  His nose could identify small organisms beneath the ground.  Worms had a certain sweetness to them, the beetles were, perhaps, acrid or bitter.  There was also a bit of dried scat – probably from a coyote – that had an earthy, almost woodsy odor.  His nose was designed to detect, his innate ability.  What wasn’t innate is that he could identify the genus, phylum, order and class of every organism he encountered.  That ability was given to him.  Given to him by a force beyond nature.

At a slight clearing, Ibis found the gap he needed.  He slid his forepaws underneath the fence, then pulled his body through the tight space.  The raw metal edges of the fencing combed through his fur.  Once he was clear of the fence, he could see the building.  It looked dark and unoccupied, just as he had hoped.

Hours earlier, he had heard a familiar yelping.  Another pack had been rounded up, pulled aside and slaughtered.  The simians could detect the enhanced dogs, Ibis didn’t know how.  Even with all his improbable intelligence, Ibis knew nothing of his creation story.  One day he awoke in a kennel and had this particular clarity.  The other dogs behaved differently as well.  Something had happened.  After two days in the kennel they were trucked away, they didn’t know where, but all the dogs could smell the damp air. Then everything changed, the truck was attacked on a dark, moonless night.  Ibis was thrown free when the truck spun off the road.  He never saw the other dogs, he just ran wild through the dark tendrils of the undergrowth.  That’s where he had lived for the last months – surviving on a diet of subterranean delights, always keeping an eye for the simians.

Ibis jumped through a window in the one-room building.  The stench was awful.  When his eyes adjusted he could see the carnage, what remained of the pack.  Their heads were gnawed open.  Yes, it was the work of coyotes.  But it wasn’t typical coyote behavior – the bodies - the food - was left untouched.  These coyotes were soldiers of the simians.  Simians who knew to look for one thing…devices.  Ibis crawled along the floor, pawing through the bloody fur, examining the gnawed skulls of the dogs.  It was a messy scene, perhaps they could have left one device behind – even a piece of an implant.  Ibis needed to see it.  He needed just a piece of the puzzle.  He wanted to understand what he had become.