Eclectic Sheep That Androids Never Dreamed Of

By Bob Lock

An eclectic flock of sixteen science fiction stories by Bob Lock. Ranging from a pixel pixie, the virtual reality lover of a crippled boy to squids in space, to gene-spliced human and animal creatures, to a robot in love, to a strange first contact scenario that even The Prime Directive would have trouble sorting out. I hope these tales make you laugh and perhaps cry and only in the places where they were supposed to!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Lock
• Release date: Jan 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465811226

Bob Lock

Bob Lock was born on the Gower Peninsular, Wales, back in the Dark Ages when there were no computers, televisions or FTL spaceships. (Ok, there still aren’t any FTLs whilst writing this, but who knows how long this bio might be around?) First published in Cold Cuts 1&2 (Horror anthos) Debut Dark Fantasy novel ‘Flames of Herakleitos’ published in March 2007 His Urban Fantasy Novel 'The Empathy Effect' (set in Swansea) published in September 2010

Book preview

Eclectic Sheep That Androids Never Dreamed Of

Copyright 2012 by Bob Lock

Cover graphics by Bob Lock and The Flock

Smashwords Edition

Bob Lock asserts the moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Front cover: The Flock

Anna Lock

Florence Ashford Lock

Robert Lock

Tony Harwood

Susan Harwood

Holly Harwood

Franco Rinaldi

Helen J Crahart

Joseph Cartwright

Summer Cartwright

Raphael Cartwright

Neil Williams

Stephen Theaker

Adele Whittle

‘Eclectic Sheep That Androids Never Dreamed Of’ is a group of sixteen science fiction short stories of mine which I have decided to compile into a Kindle book in the hope it will not only entertain you but perhaps tempt you into reading more of my work. Some of the stories included herein have been published before or have appeared on-line, some have not.

My preferred genre is science fiction but I also write fantasy, horror and occasionally, poetry.

Orion's Lost

Are we to be known as Orion's Lost?

For upon his belt our star-ships but dream

Relics on whose shells our names are embossed

Scant reminder of Earth's last dying scream

Distant stars we sought, this last trace of Man

As our globe we'd squandered with sparse regard

For we would conquest worlds! (That was our plan)

But we have barely left our own back yard

Our foolish grasp exceeds beyond our reach

And so here we rest as if to gather breath

Whilst our engines slumber and we impeach

The fickle fates that sent us to our death

The galaxies heave a relieving sigh

With a thousand year blink, wish Man goodbye

Eclectic Sheep That Androids Never Dreamed Of

By Bob Lock

Table of contents

Chapter 1 – The Pixelated Pixie.

Chapter 2 – Signs of life.

Chapter 3 – But everyone is different.

Chapter 4 – Squids in space!

Chapter 5 – To sleep, perchance to dream.

Chapter 6 – What visions in the dark of light!

Chapter 7 – Grow your own Earth.

Chapter 8 – First Contact.

Chapter 9 – Ecstasy.

Chapter 10 – Robbi and Abigail.

Chapter 11 – The Sweepstake.

Chapter 12 – Do we not bleed?

Chapter 13 – The 90thIntervention Of Natural Webster

Chapter 14 – Eyes Down

Chapter 15 – The Steam-Powered Singularity

Chapter 16 – The Descendants of Io

More from Bob Lock

Chapter 1 - The Pixelated Pixie

'Trodes slapped on. Enclosed within faux-leather womb, his eyes flutter and close. Just jacked in, with Sony booted up, running hot and ready. A flesh artifact in a sepulchre of electronics. Cooling fan whirls into life as micro-bearings whine in protest. Down the pipe-line he falls into a black data-highway. Feedback hits him. Jake’s cyberspace hand turns down the gain whilst digitized eyes watch nodes fly past. He is ever aware she might dwell within. Jake glances at their signature and then glides on. An epinephrine high, born from excitement not fear, flares a warning. He selects a mild sedative. Registers an electronic mosquito’s kiss as his ‘rack’ obliges with a transcutaneous hit.

Junctions now. He chooses one he knows well. Crashes through weak firewalls that crumble effortlessly, and then reaches Byzantine database and his desire. She waits as if sleeping. Brina, his dormant pixie of pixels.

Jake feeds her a squirt of code. She awakens and rises up; she is a kaleidoscope of swirling pixels, coalescing into an image of chromatic purity. Subcutaneous 'trodes tingle his groin as the pixie pouts her lips. Her skin is the colour of coffee. Jake smiles when her binary fragrance catches his sensory-enhanced breath. Her body flows to his side as they hot-dog a streamer to their favourite construct.

Adorations drip from his mouth. They cascade like tinkling bells around her feet. His whispered words of love are a statement unheard before. She accepts them with a sigh.

Then watching the sunset on a planet not yet fully formed, both run naked through lakes of cool mercury. Making love on shores of powdered diamond, two become one, in mind, body and electronic soul. Later, quietly lying on grass grown from his will, Jake traces the shape of her perfect hip with his virtual hand. She turns and smiles, but now with teeth of glass. Her eyes bore through to his mind, grasping the thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus and pituitary gland, gradually attempting to suppress his emotions. With panic he kicks out. He strives to push her back. She transforms, she is his love no more but a security program that has found him at last. His autonomic reflexes over-ridden, he tries in vain to jack-out.

Jake’s eyes open in wonder whilst Brina, the database defence system, increases his heartbeat to a rate he can never survive. She fulfils her objective, and the meaning of her Celtic name, Protector.

He dies in both worlds. She, his love, the centre of his universe, smiles a smile of digital satisfaction. Then, in a timeframe only discernable by a machine-mind, she wonders, was this one really in love or just in lust?

A picosecond passes, and across the world, one more hot-dogger jacks in, another hacker with an appointment to keep and a pixie to meet once again through the clandestine use of corporate machinery and becomes yet another heart for the pixelated pixie to break.

End.

Chapter 2 - Signs of Life

‘Squib’s extruded the wrong pseudopod again.’ Dryst’s voice grated on my nerves once more and I hoped I’d retained enough of my form to not show her how exhausted I really felt.

‘He’ll learn, just be patient.’ I replied knowing that patience wasn’t a word in Dryst’s vocabulary. Then I smiled inwardly at the thought of the word, vocabulary. I was even beginning to think like the phantoms we were chasing! Vocabulary, since when did we need vocabulary? We’ve always communicated by thought alone. Speech just isn’t necessary. But, to keep things in tune with what we are attempting, someone thought it would be a good idea to adopt the archaic method of communicating as a sort of homage to the creatures we’ve been sent out to prove existed. Or didn’t exist – which was what I thought anyway. I’m almost sure our Planetary Governors have concocted this little jaunt as a way of keeping the population entertained. Call me a conspiracy-theory fanatic if you will but what possible remains could there be of a civilization that has been extinct (by their method of telling time) for over one million years? We are meant to find those remains – if they are still around – I doubt if they ever existed in the first place.

‘He’ll learn... my arse. Squib is a liability. The sooner we re-absorb him and calf a new nursling the better. He certainly has more of your genes than mine.’ Dryst complained. I wiped a hand across my brow and shivered as the thought of another mating with her sprang to mind. The hand fluctuated momentarily and I thought I’d lost coherence but I caught it just in time and stole a glance at Dryst. She wasn’t watching me but was carefully studying our offspring – whose most recent pseudopod (which was supposed to be an arm) – was sticking out of the side of his head where one of his ears should have been. I sighed.

‘Just give him time. It’s a new experience for him. It’s a new experience for all of us. Everyone goes through phases where adaption to a new form can be overwhelming.’ Besides, I thought again, I certainly don’t want to meld with you again.