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Mike McHugh had had enough of dogs. He'd never been overly fond of them, but had put up with them for his wife's sake. When he first met her she'd told him of her dreams of owning a big house in the country and making a living breeding and training dogs, but she didn't seem to be making any plans towards it and he told himself it was just a hopeless dream, it would never happen. Much like his own dream of owning a playboy mansion.
By the time they'd gotten married and the honeymoon phase was over she'd started badgering him about babies and puppies. He figured the puppy would be easier to deal with and told himself it was just the one dog, it wouldn't be too bad. It might even be nice to have a companion around that loved him unconditionally and didn't nag him about things.
Before that puppy had reached adulthood she'd decided it needed a little brother or sister, a playmate to keep it company throughout the day whilst they were at work. The argument made some degree of sense and he was getting tired of saying no, and he told himself that it was just one more dog. Maybe this would be the last of it.
The first puppy was female, and the second was male. He hadn't thought much of it, at the time. It didn't occur to him that they might procreate, and when she mentioned that she didn't want to neuter the new pup he told himself that it was all for the best really. He couldn't bring himself to do that to any other male, even a dog.
When those two pups grew up and had puppies of their own, he let the wife advertise in local papers and she sold the puppies for quite a lot of money. They were pedigree, apparently. He didn't really know what that meant (other than 'a lot of money') but he was pleased with the result. When his wife suggested they breed the dogs again he told himself that it was just once more and they could really do with the extra cash. Besides, it was keeping her happy.
Now, this went on for quite some time, so for the sake of cutting a long story short...Mike was now living in a big house in the country and making a living breeding and training dogs. Just as his wife originally intended. And he'd had enough of it. The dogs were loud, annoying, obnoxious and smelly. And just when they'd finally manage to train them properly and they started to be useful as well as quiet and less annoying in general, the wife would sell them and they would start the whole wretched process all over again. It was enough to drive a man crazy.
Mike wasn't crazy (not yet anyway, as he liked to say), but he was fed up, and determined to do something about it. Providing that that something didn't upset his wife, who was quite attached to the miserable creatures and had proved quite resistant to the idea of him winning any arguments since the start of their marriage.
Now, before his days had consisted of scooping up dog shit and trying to teach a seemingly endless parade of dogs the same damn tricks over and over, Mike had been a scientist. A pretty damn good one, at that. Before she'd broken his will and forced him to move out here into the country surrounded by people who knew more about animals than they did humans, he'd been working with a team of top scientists on a rather secret project. For all he knew, they were still working on it without him, but he doubted they'd get very far. He was the visionary in that team, and visionaries were required when working on such staggeringly advanced technology.
He had a lot of time to think about those days these days, while performing such simple and menial tasks as throwing balls and filling bowls, and he'd been thinking about that old project a lot. They'd come close, a few times, and he still had some old notes from those tries tucked away in a dusty desk drawer. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that he knew what the answer was, that he could finish the project by himself. As an added bonus, he thought he might be able to get rid of all these damn dogs while he was at it.
He'd have to work in secret of course; his wife wouldn't like what he was doing. But that was okay. She understood that he needed to escape from all the dogs at times and had let him have a study to relax in. A man cave, as she called it. He could work there.
It took some time for him to gather all the materials and equipment he needed, but he got there a little bit at a time. Always in secret, of course. He would drive off to town for the weekly grocery shop and come back with an extra bag to stash in his study. She never noticed a thing.
Now for the hard part; the actual working on it, while being distracted by a constant slew of dogs barking and whining for his attention. His study may have had a lock on the door to stop the dogs getting in, but it sure as hell wasn't soundproof.
Mike blamed his first few failures on the dogs for distracting him. Then he blamed the next few on himself for still not having had the presence of mind to soundproof the door. Then he soundproofed the door. Then he argued with his wife who finally noticed something was amiss when she tried to nag him through the door and got no response. He managed to convince her that his hearing was going, and had to endure a few doctor's visits to make sure everything was okay. He blamed the next failures on those.
Eventually he had a working model to test out. It looked the part, and seemed to act the part, but would it pass muster? He tested it first with one of the other pups. It was the same size, the same breed. He didn't know what breed that was (as far as he was concerned they were all 'bloody mongrels') but he'd built it using these pups as models, so they must be the same breed.
Unfortunately the real puppy was far too wary of its robotic counterpart, and spent a good deal of time alternating between sidling up to it cautiously and backing off growling. Mike couldn't understand it. It looked exactly the same, it sounded exactly the same growling back at the pup, its tail wagged just like the real pups' did. But they weren't getting along. Maybe some more research was required.
He took the robotic puppy, which he dubbed RP, back to his study, told it to stay, which it did very obediently, somehow managed to ignore the sad little puppy-eyes that begged not to be left in there all alone, and left it there all alone.
He took the real puppy to another one of its littermates, who sniffed at it and then immediately bowled it over. He stood and watched for a while, while the puppies play-fought, and thought about RP. He could make it more playful and aggressive, but that kind of defeated the purpose of having a well-trained puppy around. And surely no-one would want a playful puppy, that was merely something you endured until they learned to behave themselves. He watched as a third pup wandered over, intrigued by the tussling, and stopped to sniff its brethren before joining in. If anything, this pup was more aggressive than the first two. That was no good.
Mike may have been a very clever man, but like all men he wasn't particularly perceptive. It took another four rounds of the puppies sniffing until he cottoned on; RP didn't smell right. How the hell was he meant to fix that? Come to think of it, what did puppies actually smell of? All he ever got from them was a general scent of 'dirtiness'. He didn't quite know how to describe it, he certainly didn't know how to reproduce it. He hoped that plain old dirt would do.
He went back to get RP, who was very pleased to be let out of the lonely study, but managed to show it by sitting still and wagging its tail frantically rather than the jumping, barking and whining tactics the other pups employed. He told it to 'heel', and trotted out to the garden to find some mud. RP followed obediently at his heels until he found a good patch.
Now, he hadn't really thought this through. He'd never intended for RP to run around playing and getting muddy, and hadn't given it a command for it. He tried telling it to 'play', 'roll over', 'run around', 'lie down in the mud and get fucking dirty you stupid mutt', but all RP did was tilt its head and whine quietly at him.
Eventually he gave up, told RP to 'stay there and don't come back until you smell like a dog'–a command which it only partly understood–and stomped off inside to have a good brainstorm at his desk. RP stayed where it was like a good dog, but with a very sad look on its face. It just wanted to please its master, and was upset that it couldn't understand his commands.
Mike didn't come back for a full two hours, during which many curious and investigative puppies approached RP, got confused by the lack of dog-smell on what was so clearly a dog, growled a bit, and eventually got bored and wandered off. RP endured all of this and stayed exactly where it was throughout, obedient as only a robotic dog could be. It did wag its tail quite a bit though, trying to make friends without being disobedient. It didn't work.
When Mike finally came back, he brought with him an old blanket that he promptly dropped over RP's head. In all the time he’d been gone he'd not been able to come up with a way to make RP smell of dog that was any more sophisticated than 'smother it in things that already smell of dog'. RP nosed its head out of the blanket and looked up at its master questioningly–he'd still not released it from the 'stay' command)–but its questioning look was just met with a glare. A glare, then a scowl, then its master turned on his heels, shouted back 'heel, ya stupid mutt' over his shoulder and stalked off into the house. RP decided that a new command must outweigh the old one, and followed its master with the blanket still on its back and trailing in the dirt behind it.
Inside the house, Mike found another puppy–he really didn't have to look very far, they were everywhere–and introduced it to RP to test out the new blanket-mod. This time they happily sniffed each other, tails wagging. First test passed, assuming you didn't count the fact that the real puppy was now biting RP's face, something that RP was happily enduring without fighting back, as a failure. Mike didn't. He very much approved of his new non-playful puppy. He wished they were all like that, but there were more tests RP had to pass first.
Just as he was thinking that, his wife came round the corner and the second test started a lot sooner than he had ever anticipated. She noticed straight away that this wasn't one of their puppies as she bent down to stroke it and check the name tag, a thing she did with every puppy as they had far too many around these days to remember all their names. But RP didn’t have a name tag of course; Mike's fault, he hadn't even gotten it a collar yet. RP wagged its tail excitedly at the first female human it had ever met and sniffed curiously at her hands as she did this. Mike hadn't taught it to sniff, but it was fully capable of learning by itself and had picked this up from the other puppies, and Mike was suddenly quite glad that it picked up this particular bad habit.
His wife didn't notice anything was amiss with RP, just that it wasn't theirs and yet for some strange reason had their dog's blanket wrapped around it; which, unfortunately, was still enough to start a barrage of questions about where it came from. Mike skillfully dodged most of them by telling her that the poor thing was abandoned by the roadside and had looked quite miserable and cold when he had found it, hence the blanket. Before she could interject with any more questions he insisted that it just needed some good old-fashioned TLC, picked RP up and deposited it firmly in her arms, where it received a smothering of cuddles and managed to lose its leg down her quite considerable cleavage. She seemed satisfied to mother it and baby-talk at it for a while, and he heaved a sigh of relief that the interrogation was over. For now, at least.
Mike's wife carried RP off to the kitchen, where she deposited it by a food bowl which she promptly filled with kibble. RP sniffed at the kibble, then sat back on its haunches and looked at her quizzically. Oh dear. She was visibly worried about this new abandoned puppy now, as she'd never known a dog to turn its nose up at food. She voiced her worries to Mike as she tried to coax RP into eating, talking constantly about things he didn't understand; conditions that might cause dogs to lose their appetite, both mental and physical. The basic gist he got was that she was worried that its previous owners might have mistreated it in some way and was wondering just how soon the vet could get here to check it over, and whether it was worth her looking it over herself first if the vet might be too long. Oh dear, again.
Mike listened to all of her ramblings in a kind of worried stupor, biting his lip and staring into space, completely unsure of what to do now that RP was in her hands. His wife called the vet, still trying to coax RP into eating all the while, and the vet agreed to drive right out there to give the new pup a check-up. He also told her to make sure to keep it comfortable and calm in the meantime and make sure it knew where its food and water was even if it wasn't eating or drinking from them right now. The wife relayed all of this to Mike, completely unaware of his current state of mind, and went right back to rambling at him. She did this a lot, he was used to it. It gave him time to think, assuming he could pull himself together enough to stop panicking and actually put his mind to the problem at hand.
...He couldn't.
Two hours later the vet arrived to find them all still in the kitchen, surrounded by various puppies. Nonplussed, he manoeuvred his way around all the pups, giving a bit of fuss to the ones jumping up at him before setting them firmly back down on the floor again. By this time nobody needed to tell him which puppy he'd been called to look at; it was the only one sitting patiently on the floor on its best behaviour. He picked it up, voiced his surprise that it seemed perfectly happy to be manhandled by a stranger, and set it down on the table to examine it. Mike felt sick. He had an idea of what was coming. He’d gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that the fur of his robotic puppy was realistic but he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to make it fully anatomically correct. I mean, who wanted to spend their time crafting dog genitals? Let alone the research that it would require.
Sure enough, the first thing the vet did was try to determine the gender of the puppy. He started into his routine check-up normally, chatting away with Mike's wife and asking questions...then stopped dead, staring. He took his glasses off, cleaned them, put them back on, and continued to stare. Nothing had changed. He asked Mike's wife to take a look at it, in a remarkably calm voice considering, and they both stared for a while. He asked Mike to take a look just to make doubly sure that they weren't both seeing things. Mike tasted blood, and realised he'd bitten his lip. He nodded dumbly and came to stare at RP's backside with the two of them. It was completely smooth, like a doll. Well, as smooth as it can be while covered in fur. Mike actually thought it was an improvement, but couldn’t say as such of course. He had known he would have to fix this before he could truly pass his robo-pups off as the real thing, but he really hadn’t meant to let anyone look this closely at this first prototype. He thought he would have time to come back to this unseemly work later. Whoops.
The vet, still staring in amazement, requested that he be allowed to take the puppy back to his surgery to examine it properly. The wife, still staring in amazement, nodded in agreement, finally having stopped her incessant ramblings. Mike had a very bad feeling about this but could see no way to disagree without arousing suspicion, so he let it go and also nodded in agreement. He was feeling rather overwhelmed and out of control, this whole situation was moving far too fast and he had no idea how he would deal with it.
RP whined unhappily when the vet took it away to his car, sad that it was going away from its owner and the new puppy friends it had made. The vet kept staring at it in amazement, shocked that it seemed so normal and healthy. It even kept falling over in the car and trying to stick its head out of the window, just like a real puppy. The vet was perplexed, and drove off shaking his head.
RP hadn't been built with any method of balancing in mind, and for its part was quite disturbed by the strange motions of the floor beneath it and the fact that it kept falling over. It was confused and lonely, and having just discovered the wonders of Mike’s wife’s cuddles that, for some reason it didn't understand yet, had made it feel safe, it tried to crawl into the vet's lap. The vet was still in shock and couldn't quite find his voice to tell it to go away but, having seen how well-behaved it was at home, let it climb onto him. RP was pleased, but this didn't feel as good as the cuddle the human female had given it. Maybe it was the lack of arms supporting it. RP tried to nudge the arm off of where it was resting and around it for comfort. The vet jumped at its cold wet nose and the slight electric shock that came from it, swore loudly, and lost control of the wheel.
***
When Mike heard about the car crash on the news he was unequivocally relieved. He comforted his wife who was far more upset over the loss of RP than she was over the loss of the vet that she'd known and worked with for years, and promised himself that RP 2.0 would, at the very least, be anatomically correct on the outside. No matter how much distasteful work this would require.