Machine’s Best Friend

One of Mallory’s earliest advanced automaton models was his W-Unit, a four-foot tall, brass colored, strange-looking yet effective bipedal robot with one main directive: walking its owner’s dogs for them. Ever the entrepreneur, Mallory had noticed the increasing popularity of outdoor dog walking and had squeezed a new design out of the eternally faithful Atoc to capitalize on this and test out his idea of commercialized automatons. At this point, the mysterious little robot companion’s adaptive programming was still processing the concept of automaton designs outside of itself, and the W-Unit was never going to be perfect. Something had to give, and that something was aesthetics. While customers were initially turned off by the W-Unit’s bizarre appearance, the idea of a mindless metal slave to take out their pets for them was too appealing to pass up.

The W-Unit began to sell, and while it wasn’t anywhere near as lucrative as many of “Mallory’s” countless other innovations, he saw in its success the enormous potential of an expanded robotics line. So, drawing inspiration once again from man’s best friend, Mallory enlisted Atoc in the design of a new product: the aptly named K9-Unit. The K9s were far more popular than the W-Units. Their advanced programming allowed them to mimic the behavior of an ordinary dog without the hassle of feeding, cleaning, and all the other annoyances that accompany the ownership of a real animal. While many still preferred canines over K9s, the success of the latter meant that the W-Units gradually fell out of favor, since robotic dogs didn’t need to be walked regularly. As time passed, the lanky brass dog-walkers were quickly becoming in danger of falling into obscurity, and because of this even Mallory was unable to predict what happened next: The W-Units began glitching, abandoning their owners’ dogs and seeking out K9s to walk instead. It was difficult to tell if these malfunctioning bots truly felt a bond with their little metal companions, but one thing could not be denied: the two were meant for each other