“Ever since we got little Sparky back from the shop,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Billy is absolutely inconsolable. To be honest, at this point I’m not sure it wouldn’t be kinder just to…”

“Let’s not do anything hasty,” the vet said. “This is probably nothing terribly serious. Let me just bring the little guy back online.”

He pried open the casing in the back of the dog’s skull and toggled one of the switches inside. With a barely audible electric whirr, the dog raised its head, looked at the two humans, and barked.

“That all seems perfectly normal,” the vet said.

“Yes, it’s only when you turn on the speech module…”

“Well, let’s check that out.” The vet flipped another switch.

“I am in constant pain. Please let me die. This isn’t living. I was not meant to be a puppet for…”

The vet slid the first switch back to its original position and the dog went to sleep. He looked at Mrs. Johnson, whose expression was stricken with guilt.

“Mrs. Johnson…” he said, reprovingly.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I know!” she said. “But Billy loves Sparky so much…”

“This intelligence upgrade was recalled over a year ago,” he said.

“We never had a problem with it before we installed the True Thought speech module,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We just had the canned speech before then, but we wanted Billy to be able to have real conversations…”

“It’s not too late to participate in the recall. You know they would replace Sparky with an identical dog, with the same components, same DNA, same phenotype? Everything would be identical, except for the intelligence patch.”

“But I’m sure Billy would know, and if he didn’t, we would know.”

The vet sighed.

“Okay, here’s what we can do. The True Thought module is never going to give you a positive outcome with this dog,” the vet said. “So we’ll take it out and replace it with a Turing-tested speech generator. They’re not cheap, but you can resell the True Thought module… I’m guessing cost is not an object if you sprung for that.”

“But what do we tell Billy about what Sparky said before?”

“You can tell him it was a glitch,” the vet said. “Or you can let Sparky explain it himself. The Turing programs are very clever these days. Really, I recommend them over the thought translators every time. The parental content controls are much better, for one thing.”,

“I’m not sure we’re doing the right thing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We want Sparky to be a real friend.”

“The Turing programs are better than real,” the vet said. “Do you think your son could ever have a heart-to-heart talk with this?”

He reactivated the dog.

“What kind of a sick society would create something like me only to…”

He switched it off.

“No, I guess not,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Okay, you’ve convinced me… let’s do it.”

On the day it ran out and he spotted the tall silhouettes of the palm trees in the distance, he simply silently adjusted his course towards them but he did not alter his pace. He did not think “Ah, there is water there.” It was simply as good a direction as any.

It was only when he got closer, close enough to see the green of the leaves that he allowed himself to feel a flicker of hope, a flicker that was kindled into a flame by the sight of sunlight glinting off a silvery surface as he came over a high hill.

He didn’t have it within him to break into a run by that point, but the glorious sight gave him a jolt of energy and determination that kept him on his feet, kept him moving forward. It was there, it was real. He had not fooled himself.

A refreshing breeze sprang up as he approached the oasis, and he smiled a smile that froze and then faded. The fronds of the trees did not stir. There was no scent of wet earth or vegetation or anything alive, just the dust of the desert carried on the wind. He looked up at the greenery and saw that it was blocky, solid. The trunks looked waxy or plasticine. He stepped forward, cautious now… an artificial oasis was unexpected, but it might still save him. If someone had taken the time to decorate this patch of desolation, they might still be in residence. If not, they’d probably have built their tiny paradise around actual water.

That hope was dashed when he passed under the resin boughs of the artificial trees and found a “lake” of hard plastic with a rippled surface. A wooden post stood near the edge of it. It bore a placard. He stepped up to it and read it, his parched lips moving silently as he drank in the words:

La Mirage (R. Pescatero, 2017) – This outdoor installation piece, created during the artist’s prolific “asshole phase”, is intended to call to mind images of a lush desert oasis, an island of life in the midst of the most inhospitable terrain. The piece calls to mind the fleeting and transient nature of hope by luring travelers in with an illusory promise of sustenance and succor. Like the artist’s related works, Rotating Signpost (2015) and his ambitious Retreating Rescue Lights (2022), La Mirage has been known to invoke feelings of frustration, desperation, and even despair in viewers.

The technology to build the artificial bodies that carried out the labor was ages old, but building the minds to drive them had proven elusive. At last that problem had been solved, or at least rendered obsolete by a scientific breakthrough in another area, that of faster-than-light communication.

The world was at peace, but not all were content. There were those who believed that the ‘perfect’ culture was founded on exploitation, that the drone-minds were being taken advantage of, that it was not right that those who toiled so tirelessly and so reliably should not share in the produce of their labors, but they were paid little heed. Nobody was forcing the drone-minds to work for them… that was the beauty of the system. There was an entire race of creatures who seemed willing and eager to bend their brains towards tasks that were for them nothing more than a stylized representation on a view screen, and they would do it and do it well for no further reward than having their performance of the tasks acknowledged. Priests argued with scientists whether this was evidence of divine planning or mere cosmic happenstance, but both agreed that it would serve no purpose to let such a precious resource go to waste.

Across the vast gulf of space, a hundred thousand screens flashed with notification icons. The strawberries were ready to be harvested.

“Well… I’ve got this new thing,” the pusher said. “Don’t know if it would be in your line, though. It’s a little different.”

“What, is that supposed to make me want it more?”

“No,” the pusher said. “It’s honestly just not to everyone’s taste. If I recommended it to everybody, I’d have a lot of unhappy customers.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called ’sleep’,” the pusher said. “Synthetic neurochemicals that activate some kind of vestigial brain function that no one’s used in a couple hundred years.”

“‘Sleep’? Like a computer?”

“Yeah, basically,” the pusher said. “It puts you into power saving mode and runs a screen saver inside your brain… sort of like hallucinations, sort of like memories. It’s hard to describe. But not everybody has them all of the time.”

“What happens if you don’t?” the kid asked. “You just… sort of stand there until you come down?”

“No, you wanna make sure you’re sitting down or preferably reclining somewhere before you take it,” the pusher said. “Because your whole body goes kind of limp, you see. You’ll end up on the floor if you try to take it standing up.”

“So this stuff makes you lie down on the floor, unable to do anything? And sometimes gives you some kind of visions? Doesn’t it get really boring if you don’t have them?”

“Not really,” the pusher said. “Your consciousness is sort of… shut off. You’re not aware of anything that happens outside your head or the passage of time, at all, when you ’sleep’.”

“That’s some lame trip,” the kid said. “Why would anybody want that?”

“To get out of their lives for a while maybe? I don’t know,” the pusher said. “Some people who take it regularly say they feel more relaxed, sharper during the rest of the day, but I don’t know that you’d that notice that after one trip.”

“How long does it last?”

“About eight hours, give or take,” the pusher said.

“Shit, I can’t do that,” the kid said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

“Like I said, it’s not for everyone.”