Farewell, Odysseus: After Dinner Conversation, #51

By J.G. Willem

Synopsis: A genetically enhanced super-human has to make an important choice about the person he keeps as a pet.

After Dinner Conversation is a growing series of short stories across genres to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family. Each story is an accessible example of an abstract ethical or philosophical idea and is accompanied by suggested discussion questions.

Podcast discussion of this short story, and others, is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Youtube.

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Jun 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393360872

Book preview

Farewell, Odysseus

After Dinner Conversation Series

BACK ON EARTH, I HAD a dog. Here, he has me.

I don’t know what to call him. He doesn’t have a name. The deos are beyond names. The sapiens are not.

Perhaps they have names with each other. They must. But their language hits my primitive ears like a dissonant warbling and means nothing to me. I can usually infer tone, which is helpful, and this is how I know the man likes me.

I call him Agamemnon, because he called me Odysseus, and when he showed me the works of Homer from millennia ago, I understood why. That is our bond: he is my captain, my master. I am his loyal servant. I guard and maintain his estate in Tumulo-Iugum while he walks the caldera of Olympus Mons on the planet Mars.

I don’t know what he does up there. None of us do.

What I do know is that while he is gone, I am in charge. I prowl the high walls at night and inhabit the watchtowers, looking out over the compound: a courtyard of bare, Martian soil surrounded by terracotta-tiled rooftops and the white stone columns that hold them up. I drink my wine a little less diluted than I would if he were there. It does get lonely, after all. The wine is like a warm blanket or a hug from my master. It dulls the aches and pains of aging, issuing in a pleasant numbness after the day’s travails.

To further combat the isolation, I communicate with fellow sapiens manning the walls of other estates via an interconnected system of speakerphones built into the towers and walkways.

There is one named Penelope, and she is my best friend. She tells me she has long black hair and blue eyes. When we are alone on the speakers, I feel as if the galaxy has dissolved around us, so it is only her and I in the void, floating, invisible to each other, yet linked by some cosmic tether that neither her nor I can reckon with but are grateful for.

I tell her that I love her, and she tells me the same.

We are the lucky ones, she tells me, and I agree with her.

There is another called Achilles, because he is tempestuous and often moody. Another, called Patroclus, because he is eager and naïve. Nestor, because he is wise. Hector, because he is brave. Paris, because he is foolhardy and selfish.

It must be obvious by now, but our masters are great admirers of the Greeks. Indeed,