by Mary E. Lowd
Originally serialized in Daily Science Fiction, November/December 2022
Part 1: Comfort Animal
The wide timber frame arch rose high above Dr. Miriam Loxley’s head, presaging the size of the animals kept in the enclosure. All the movies, books, and games came rushing back to her — she’d grown up with the Jurassic Park franchise. She knew all of the paleontologists and geneticists involved in The Prehistory Zoo had too. Somehow, they’d taken those stories as a siren’s call, instead of heeding them as a warning.
“What made you think this was a good idea again?” Loxley said.
Angie Cartwright laughed and walked right through the arch with her bucket of steaks. “Don’t look so worried!” she said. “You’re going to love this. Just listen to the idea, and keep an open mind.”
Reluctantly, Loxley followed Cartwright up to the curving wall of iron bars behind the timber arch. All she could see behind the bars was vegetation — ferns and palm fronds. “So what’s the idea?”
Cartwright set down the bucket and pulled out a dripping red steak with a gloved hand. “You know how cheetahs are really anxious, so zoos give them their own comfort dogs to calm them down and socialize them?”
“I’ve heard of that, yeah.” Loxley’s voice got low, like she was afraid to summon whatever lurked behind the prehistoric greens. “But we’re not talking about cheetahs.”
“True,” Cartwright said. She flung the steak, juicy and dripping, into the enclosure. It left red spatters on the concrete at their feet. A snap and rustle in the jungle of greens suggested that the steak never hit the ground. Cartwright picked up another one. “And that’s why our first attempts… Let’s just say, failed.”
“Let’s say more than that,” Loxley breathed, staring into the vegetation. She could see eyes looming high above her in the dark green shadows. “Let’s be very, very specific.”
“Okay,” Cartwright admitted. “So, as the subjects grew, the first batch, well, once they reached full size, they ate their comfort dogs.” She held the dripping steak with both gloved hands and looked down at the concrete ground where red juice drip, drip, dripped. “It was heartbreaking. We knew better than to name the dogs, but you can’t help getting attached anyway.”
Loxley wondered what kind of dogs they’d been. Probably Labradors.
“But we found a solution,” Cartwright said, flinging the second steak.
A feathery snout emerged from the jungle greens and snapped up the steak with nightmare teeth, deadly sharp and longer than Loxley’s forearm. The prehistoric ancestor revived by science bobbed its head, ruffled its dusty purple neck feathers, and flapped comically tiny wings. It screeched like a murderous chicken, but motions that would have been funny on a small bird were terrifying on a creature several times Loxley’s height. She stepped back from the cold iron, feeling deeply grateful for the protection of those bars. She hoped they were sturdy.
“See, the T-Rex chicks were adorable playing with the dogs, and more importantly, the chicks seemed to be picking up on the dogs’ training. But as the chicks grew, they paid less and less attention to the dogs. They seemed to have trouble considering an animal as small as a normal dog to be more than, well, a snack once they hit full size. So what they needed was something that could keep up with them. You know, while they were growing. Something bigger.” Cartwright threw another steak between the iron bars, but this one wasn’t aimed at the feathered monstrosity. It sailed right past the T-Rex into the greenery and disappeared with another rustle. And a happy woof. “Of course, we had to mix the dog genes with a few other animals to get them big enough…”
A giant black-furred creature with floppy ears and a lolling tongue in its grinning, panting mouth emerged from the greenery. The T-Rex cawed and butted its feathered head against the gigantic dog affectionately. If the T-rex chicks had learned tricks and training from the dogs, what kind of hunting tips had the dogs picked up from the grown T-rexes?
The dog howled, baying like any goofy Labrador Retriever impatient for a treat.
“Can I throw them a steak?” Loxley asked, wondering if a steak was really enough of a treat for a creature so large.
Cartwright gestured welcomingly at the bucket and pulled an extra pair of rubber gloves out of her back pocket. Loxley pulled the gloves on and grabbed one of the cold, squishy raw steaks, trying not to think about how similar dead cow flesh was to her own living flesh.
Loxley knew she had to ask what genes Cartwright had added into the genetic code of this mixed-species dog. In order to grow a Labrador Retriever to the the size of an elephant without giving it all kinds of health issues, they must have designed an elaborate chimera with all kinds of genetic horrors and unexpected possibilities hidden inside it. Loxley’s job would be to tease out the dangers, try to bandage the situation together and avoid a classic movie-style disaster. But for now, this moment, she couldn’t get over the sight of that panting grin. The giant Labrador had the biggest, happiest grin she’d ever seen.
You could get lost inside that grin. Literally.
As Loxley flung the steak between the iron bars, she asked, “Who’s a good dog?” and tried not to picture the inevitable — being hunted down by a pack of giant wolf-kin working together with dinosaurs. Giant teeth and claws, crunching bones and slicing flesh.
If her fate was behind those bars with teeth like swords, at least, she could try to make friends with it. Maybe when this all went to hell, that would buy her a few minutes. Maybe when they broke out from behind those bars, they’d hesitate before eating her. Maybe it would be enough. She flung another steak and shuddered. “Good dog,” she said. “Good T-Rex. Have another treat!”
* * *
Part 2: Herding the Brachiosauruses
“Look, you’re overreacting,” Angie Cartwright said to her wife, Dr. Miriam Loxley, as she drove the two of them across the beautiful stretch of golden savannah on the west side of Hali’corra Island. Warm air flowed through the open top of her company jeep, and she could hear the peaceful, melodic cries of the brachiosaurus herd singing to each other in the distance. She hoped that seeing the gentle, plant-eaters would calm her wife down or cheer her up. Anything other than holding her head in her hands, staring into the distance like she’d seen death itself in a cage.
Loxley hadn’t taken well to seeing the T-Rex pavilion. Maybe that hadn’t been the best choice for a first stop on this trip. She’d started ranting about those old Jurassic Park movies and messing with nature. Cartwright had expected better from a fellow scientist in a similarly unfairly maligned field, let alone her wife. Loxley worked on gene-modding humans into their fursonas, letting them live out their furry dreams, and her work had been at the center of several protests. She should know better than to judge Cartwright’s work so quickly.
“I’m surprised okay?” Loxley said, voice hollow. “I knew you were working on something big…” She trailed off, thinking about how excited Cartwright always was, like she was bursting with secrets to share, but unable to talk about any of them until after she’d gotten special permission to bring her wife to the island. And even then, Loxley had been required to sign an NDA. “I just didn’t realize it was dinosaur big.”
“Or Clifford the Big Red Dog big,” Cartwright countered, trying to cover a smile at her own joke. She parked the jeep in the middle of the field and pointed toward the tree line.
Loxley could make out the brachiosaurus herd, their legs and necks like trees, in front of the forest of prehistoric plants, each painstakingly revived and altered to grow on this particular island.
Loxley knew what Cartwright was doing. She was trying to let her wife’s favorite dinosaur do the convincing. Loxley loved brachiosaurus. And giraffes. And flamingos. Anything funny-looking with a long neck. But a herd of brachiosauruses peacefully cruising across a field wouldn’t erase the image in her mind of that T-Rex and its gengineered companion dog. Sure, Labrador Retrievers were cute at any size, but they’d never been meant to be that big.
Even so, she was here now. It couldn’t hurt to watch.
As the brachiosauruses strolled, moving away from the trees and into the savannah, Loxley made out stripes on their sides — long swaths of tree bark brown alternated with swampy green, emulating the pattern of light in the forest behind them. They came closer, and over their doleful, sonorous song, a sudden incisive yip! coincided with the herd changing direction. A gigantic dog came into view, circling around the slow-moving brachiosauruses. This dog had a bright orange, flowing mane and long, pointy face, split into a cheerful grin. A collie. Except as tall as a house.
“You developed herd dogs to manage the herd dinosaurs,” Loxley observed drily.
Loxley had grown up with collies. Cartwright had been right that seeing one would tug at her heart strings.
“I should have shown you this before the T-Rex,” Cartwright said. “I just got so carried away… The T-Rex is our crown jewel.”
Loxley frowned. “This doesn’t change how dangerous a T-Rex is.”
“I know,” Cartwright admitted. “But what we’re doing here really is safe, and I didn’t drag you here to help fix some horrible mistake we’ve made. It’s not like the movies. And I guess I kinda forgot how startling it can be when… you know… you first find out about it.”
Loxley shot her wife a troubled look. Now that she knew what Cartwright had been working on, she didn’t like the idea of her flying off to Hali’corra Island three days a week. And yet, Cartwright had been doing exactly that for years. Nothing had changed, except Loxley had been allowed to see behind the NDA.
“Why are you showing me?” Loxley didn’t believe in hiding from knowledge. And yet, right now, she kind of wished she just didn’t know that The Prehistory Zoo had gone full-on Jurassic Park.
In retrospect, how had she missed it? Way out on an island, with a name like that…
Loxley supposed that people had failed to see bigger things than dinosaurs when they just didn’t want to see them.
Oh god, if she’d failed to see through something as big and obvious as this, what else was Loxley missing in her life? Was Cartwright keeping other secrets from her? Personal ones? Was her marriage in trouble? The hands still on the side of her head pressed harder, digging her fingernails into her scalp.
“Woah, now, Miri, don’t panic, it’s nothing bad.” Cartwright put a hand on her wife’s arm and helped Loxley to ease her hands down from her face.
The two women stared at each other, one staving off panic that felt totally irrational but seemed to be a physical response to the adrenaline of meeting dinosaurs in the flesh for the first time, and the other one… calm, smiling, almost impish.
“What then? What is it?”
“Well, we live on a really, big, isolated farm… and there’s plenty of space…”
Realization dawned: “You want to adopt one of the dogs.”
Cartwright’s impish smile grew into a full lopsided grin. “Well, yeah, there’s this one dog, Galileo. He’s a scruffy mutt, and he didn’t work out with the dinosaurs… but…”
Loxley could see everything she needed to know about this dog in Cartwright’s face. Her wife was already in love. And it was true that their farm was big enough to safely hide a gigantic, secret, NDA-covered dog.
“Look, Galileo is the sweetest dog you’ll ever meet.”
And probably one of the biggest.
Loxley stared at the giant collie in the distance, running happy circles around the brachiosauruses. Dinosaurs were scary in the movies, but out there, they were just big, weird sheep for a collie to play shepherd with.
And the dog was just a dog. Domesticated. And clearly well-trained.
“Alright, Angie, let’s meet this dog.”
Cartwright’s grin grew even wider. She knew that her wife had only agreed to meet the dog, but it’s really hard to say ‘no’ to a dog when he’s looking at you with big — really big — brown eyes.
* * *
Part 3: Tiny Cartoon Dinosaurs
Dr. Miriam Loxley was waiting for her wife in a computer lab that looked like it could have been part of any college campus or tech startup. Rows of computers sat on desks decorated by empty pop cans and various fidget toys. If she hadn’t known she was in the middle of a prehistoric jungle on a secret island, filled with genetically reconstructed dinosaurs, she would never have guessed by looking around here.
The lab was mostly empty of people. It was the weekend, but one woman in the corner looked up from her computer and tilted her head quizzically.
Loxley thought she recognized the woman from some of her wife’s work parties. She raised a hand and waved tentatively. “Hi, I’m Miriam. Angie’s wife. You’re Cheyenne, right?”
“Oh, yeah, hi Miriam,” the woman said, leaning back in her chair in a relaxed way that seemed designed to invite Loxley to come closer and chat. “So, what brings you here?”
“Angie wants to adopt one of the failed comfort dogs,” Loxley said.
Cheyenne’s eyebrows raised. “You must have a big estate. Anyone who can keep a dog as big as a dinosaur would have to.”
“Yeah,” Loxley agreed. “Huge farm in the middle of nowhere.”
Cheyenne nodded.
“So, what aspect of all of this–” Loxley gestured vaguely around. “–do you work on?”
“I’m an AI expert,” Cheyenne said.
Now it was Loxley’s turn to tilt her head quizzically. “What does AI have to do with growing dinosaurs and giant dogs to keep them company?”
Cheyenne grinned like she’d been waiting weeks for someone to ask her that. She tilted the closest monitor around to where Loxley could see it and put her hands on the nearest keyboard. She had several each of monitors and keyboards. Her fingers flashed over the keys, sounding like a sudden downpour, and a scene filled the monitor that made Loxley think of that old game, Zoo Tycoon. Tiny cartoon dinosaurs and dogs lumbered and frolicked through animated forests and savannahs.
“What’s this?” Loxley asked. “It looks like a game.”
“It feels like a game sometimes,” Cheyenne agreed, still grinning. Then her face turned suddenly serious. “Strictly speaking, the cutesy UI isn’t necessary, but the program underneath it will save us from ending up with dogs who need to be adopted out like Galileo.”
Loxley hadn’t expected Cheyenne to know the name of the dog that Angie wanted to adopt. “I guess there’s only one dog that failed dinosaur bonding, huh?”
“It’s not his fault,” Cheyenne said. “We started with a grab bag of dog DNA taken from all kinds of breeds and mutts, just throwing canine traits at a wall really, to see what stuck.”
Loxley frowned at that image. She didn’t like the idea of throwing dogs — even microscopic parts of dogs — at a wall like overcooked spaghetti. Although, she supposed the reality was arguably worse than the metaphor — raising puppies with T-Rex chicks to figure out which ones made friends with the rapidly growing dinos and which got eaten.
“So, how does the program work?” Loxley asked.
“We take brain scans of dogs, line them up with their gene profiles, and then use those scans to create AI versions.” Cheyenne went back to grinning like a cat who got to make mice run through mazes for her own entertainment and got paid for it. “We let the AI dogs play with AI dinos and see who gets along. Then we only grow giant versions of the dogs who will work well with dinos.”
Loxley and Cheyenne stared at the screen in silence for a while, absorbed in watching the little cartoon dogs and dinos play. The dogs playing with the T-Rexes looked vaguely like Labrador retrievers; dogs who looked like collies circled around herds of long-necked plant-eating dinos, just like Loxley had seen in the field on the way here.
Greyhounds ran alongside Gallimimuses; scruffy mop dogs tousled with ankylosauruses. Loxley wondered what kind of implications a program like this could have if it were ever released from under the pile of NDAs that The Prehistory Zoo made everyone who knew about it sign.
Would it work on humans? Could parents someday use a computer program like this to predict whether one fertilized egg would grow into a rebellious teenager and another would be more cooperative and studious? The idea gave her pause. It was a lot of power to put in people’s hands. On the other hand, didn’t people already select for pleasing personalities through sexual selection, only having children with partners they liked? At least, theoretically. Would this be so much worse?
Under the weight of those thoughts, Loxley’s own career — helping grown-ass adults alter their own bodies with gene therapy to develop bunny ears or cat tails to their hearts’ desire — didn’t seem so ethically ambiguous. Of course, she’d never found it as ethically ambiguous as all the protesters her own lab had suffered through seemed to imply.
If this place were public, those protesters wouldn’t be wasting their time on her.
“It’s fun, isn’t it?” Cheyenne asked, completely missing the tone of Loxley’s silence.
And yet, it was fun. And it was better than growing out a bunch of gigantic dogs with nowhere to go. She and Angie couldn’t adopt all of them.
“Yeah,” Loxley agreed. “It’s fun.”
“So, I guess you’ll be going to the birthday party then?”
“The what?”
“Well, I mean, if Angie brought you here to meet Galileo on a Saturday, I assume it’s going to be at the birthday party.”
Loxley’s eyes narrowed, betraying her complete confusion.
“Galileo doesn’t do great with dinosaurs,” Cheyenne said, “but he’s great with people. So, they’ve been having him do kids’ birthday parties.”
Now Loxley was completely lost. “But… the NDAs?” Not to mention Jurassic Park.
“Well, yeah, it’s only for the kids of company employees so far, but he’s a huge hit. When we go public, they’ll probably want Galileo to keep doing them as outreach. For kids with rich parents, of course.”
Loxley had been picturing Galileo in some sad pen somewhere — the gigantic dog equivalent of an animal shelter. But apparently, he was romping around with little kids in birthday hats.
“Oh, there’s Angie–” Cheyenne pointed back towards the entrance to the lab. “Have fun at the party!”
Nothing about this day had gone the way Loxley had expected. She was still shaken by the unexpected terror of seeing a real, live T-Rex for the first time, accompanied by a Labrador big enough to eat her in one bite. And yet, she couldn’t think of anything more fun than meeting her new dog — because really? what were the chances she’d say ‘no’ to this dog? — at a little kid’s birthday party, surrounded by cheerful faces and plates of cake and ice cream.
* * *
Part 4: Birthday Party at the Prehistory Zoo
Dr. Miriam Loxley felt weird attending the birthday party of an eight-year-old child she’d never met before. She didn’t have a lot of experience with children, and so their chaotic running, shouting, squabbling, cheering, tumbling and general antics whirled around her like a force of nature — beyond understanding or control.
Loxley’s nerves were already rattled by discovering that her wife, Angie Cartwright, didn’t just work with models of dinosaurs and their DNA. She worked with actual dinosaurs, proprietorially brought back to life by The Prehistory Zoo. Furthermore, Cartwright worked with gigantic dogs, designed to function as comfort animals for those nervous dinosaurs, removed from their own time period and turned into safari attractions.
And Cartwright wanted to adopt one of those oversized dogs.
The dog was supposed to be here. But so far, all Loxley had seen was a gaggle of eight-year-olds on a sugar high, crashing around a playground filled with plastic climbing structures designed to look vaguely like dinosaurs. Avant-garde deconstructivist dinosaurs.
A group of adults stood by a picnic table laden with bowls of chips, popcorn, and vegetables optimistically sliced into finger food sizes, all surrounding a towering layer cake, decorated with enough little plastic dinosaurs for every one of the numerous children to get one.
Loxley recognized Cartwright’s boss among the group of adults, all of them employees of The Prehistory Zoo.
Cartwright had gone over to say ‘hi,’ but Loxley hung back, pretending to be very busy with something on her phone. She didn’t feel like being social with Cartwright’s co-workers right now, let alone talking to the boss who had her wife secretly working with wildly dangerous dinosaurs, hidden behind the obscurity of an NDA.
Loxley was about ready to come to her senses and tell Cartwright that she wanted to go home. If she didn’t meet this big dog, then she wouldn’t fall in love with it like Cartwright had.
It didn’t make sense to get a secret, NDA-covered, giant dog. They already had a perfectly good, normal-sized mutt that they’d adopted from an animal shelter like normal people.
Then Galileo came romping onto the playground. His paws were as big as beach balls. His fur was thick, curly, and sandy brown, and his brush of a tail wagged like a flag above his monster truck-sized body. His tongue flopped out of his mouth like a big pink bath mat, and his eyes were the darkest chocolate brown. Not milk chocolate. No, the high percentage stuff that Loxley ate when she really needed a good strong hit of chocolate. Dark enough to get a chocolate high just staring at them.
Damn, Loxley though, too late. As soon as you see a dog like that, you’re in love.
Of course, every child on the playground felt exactly the same way, including the birthday girl. The boss’s daughter.
Loxley watched with a rising sense of discomfort that she stubbornly refused to label “jealousy” as the birthday girl bonded with Galileo. The big dog did a series of tricks — turning around, then the other way, rolling over, and finally dancing on his back feet — before being fitted with a custom saddle. He gave pony rides to all the kids — two at a time; the birthday girl plus one other kid. Over and over again, the birthday girl rode Galileo around the playground, hugging his neck and giggling. He was an extremely well trained dog.
Loxley sighed. They weren’t going to be taking this gigantic dog home to their farm. He was going to end up being an extra birthday present for that little girl. Loxley hoped Cartwright wouldn’t be too disappointed. Maybe the two of them could go find another animal shelter mutt to adopt.
It would be easier to get excited about the idea of a new normal-sized dog if she stopped watching this boat-sized ball of joy and love prance around the playground like the most huggable, goofiest pony ever.
So, Loxley made her way over to the side of the playground where Cartwright was snacking on the array of sliced vegetables. The other adults — all parents of the party-going kids — had dispersed, mostly to follow Galileo around, desperately trying to get cute pictures of their kids riding the big dog.
What were they gonna do with those pictures anyway? It’s not like they could post them to social media without breaking their NDAs.
“So, what do you think of Galileo?” Cartwright asked, nervousness tinging her voice. She clearly really wanted this dog.
“Honey, I don’t…” Loxley didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to be the bad guy here — especially when she was genuinely charmed by the big dog — but she also didn’t want to set Cartwright up for a worse disappointment when the dog inevitably became unavailable.
“But Moo-oooo-oom!” the birthday girl cried from across the playground, interrupting their sedate adult conversation. “I looo-oooo-ooove him!”
There it was. Loxley looked over to see the eight-year-old wrapped around Galileo’s front right paw like an environmental conservationist chained to a tree, staring down Cartwright’s boss like the woman was a bulldozer threatening to tear down a patch of beloved forest.
The boss whispered to her daughter, took the girl by hand and managed to dislodge her arms from around the dog’s leg.
Boss led birthday girl toward the table where Loxley and Cartwright stood, saying in a cheerful, announcing-to-everyone voice, “It’s time for cake and presents!”
All the children came running, and the adults gathered around behind them. Loxley and Cartwright shuffled out of the way, but hung by close enough to participate in singing “Happy Birthday” and each gratefully accepted a plate of chocolate cake.
As everyone ate their cake, the birthday girl opened present after present. The presents were impressive — all kinds of plastic toys and gadgets that Loxley had never seen before — but the girl kept stealing glances at the big dog who’d curled up on the playground behind them.
Galileo snuffled quietly in his sleep, leaned against a metal structure that looked like a cross between a jungle gym and a stegosaurus. Loxley could imagine leaning against his fuzzy side, feeling his breathing rise and fall, and falling asleep just like the little girl in My Neighbor Totoro.
But she shouldn’t think thoughts like that. Galileo was very unlikely to become hers.
Then the birthday girl was handed her last present — a box the right size for a dorm room microwave. The box wobbled as she tore at the paper, and when the top popped open, a tiny triceratops poked its pointed face out. The girl’s hands flew to her face and her mouth fell open. “Sarah!” she exclaimed, as if she’d known the tiny dinosaur for years, rather than just meeting her. “Oh, thank you! Her name is Sarah, and I’m the happiest little girl who ever was!” She threw her arms around the tiny, confused dinosaur’s neck.
Like that, the giant dog was forgotten.
But not by Loxley or Cartwright.
Loxley let her wife lead her by the hand up to the big, sleeping dog. His fur didn’t look all that long on him, relative to his size, but when she placed her hand against his sleeping body, the shaggy curls buried her arm up to elbow.
“I hope his fur doesn’t need a lot of brushing,” Loxley said.
“It doesn’t,” Cartwright said. “So…?” Her face was tight, the smile stretched thin as she prepared for whatever answer Loxley might give.
“Yes, of course, we can adopt him,” Loxley said, already thinking about what kind of dog toys she could devise for a dog this size. Reinforced bouncy castles to serve as squeaky toys? Some of the old tree stumps they’d torn out to serve as sticks? And with that saddle, she could ride him around the farm…
As if he could hear her thoughts, Galileo sighed happily in his sleep, and his tail began to wag.
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