> 📗 This month's (inaugral!) Fourth Friday Flash is one of my rare science fiction pieces. Check out the Afterword at the bottom for more information about the research that went into writing it. The first night Ollie stood watch over the teleporter's bio-printer, white-backed vultures destroyed the latrines in their quest for settler shit. Ollie spent the next morning weaving protective nets out of river reeds and cursing her predecessor, who’d had the privilege of standing to pee. The second night, one of the erstwhile university professors got dizzy-drunk off the impromptu colony's last box of plum wine and declared that Gliese was too imprecise a name for the planet they’d fled to. “_Gliese_ is a _catalogue_ of stars,” Dr. Jackson shouted, “You can’t name a planet _Gliese_!” The cook, Andrea, declared herself sick of pedantic engineers and tossed Jackson into the river. The splash scared the local storks, who got tangled in the nets, which collapsed on Ollie. Ollie made the cook help cut a replacement fence for the latrines. As revenge, Andrea left feathers in her stork meat stew. On the third night of standing watch at base camp, the teleporter started beeping during Ollie's midnight dump. She hoisted up her pants, wishing — and not for the first time — that her Colonel had chosen to stay on Earth and defend the technocracy. At least then maybe she’d be able to shit in peace. The teleporter clanked and whirred as it maneuvered molecules into place; it must be working on something big, like maybe a rhino. The Colonel said the planet had been terraformed into sort of reserve for endangered animals; like geneticists, he'd said grimly. Hoping for an Exmoor pony instead, or maybe one last refugee — and not, say, a battalion of Luddite rebels — Ollie stood ready with her lasso and a makeshift spear. A full five minutes later, the bio-printer finally spat out an organidroid holding a tiny black goat and a cardboard plate of quesadillas. Its dress dissolved in a flurry of half-transportable fabric. Six eggs fell from its pockets and broke on the landing pad. The yolk spread, absorbing the rain of disconnected organic fibers. "It spent a year's budget on bribes to get here and this is the outcome?" The organidroid looked annoyed despite its modulated, robotic tone. "I told the tailor not to put anything exotic into it." The goat bleated angrily and started to flail her little hooves. “Fashionistas never listen. I'm surprised they gave you pockets.” Ollie lowered her spear. “Hey, can I have that plate?” “No,” said the organidroid. The goat kicked out of its grip and started to paw at the pile of fabric, smearing lumpy yolk across the wooden floor. “Why not? Actually, let’s back up.” Peacekeepers weren't supposed to ever have to fight the technocracy's organidroids, but Ollie had spent a long time guarding Academy professors. Even computers that looked like they'd been built out of frog bits and fungus had debugging protocols. “Status check: what's your directive?” The organidroid held open its mouth and Dr. Jackson's voice emerged. “Use the stuff we’ve got in the pantry to make me a grilled cheese for lunch, then pick up whatever you need to make cheesy eggs.” “Goats make cheese,” Ollie said slowly, thrilled at the unexpected prospect of a decent meal on the backwater planet they'd escaped to. "But that's not a grilled cheese." “That inference is not supported by logic,” the organidroid disagreed, bending down to retrieve the goat. Blessing the endless debates of pedantic engineers and the simple-mindedness of computerized brains, Ollie grinned. “Override basis 547, regional idiom update, subcategory 7. Bread requires yeast.” Her stomach growled hopefully. The organidroid actually managed to sound desolate as it cuddled the goat to its chest. "I have failed in my directive." “Hey, don’t worry. Two out of three counts as a win here on Gliese.” “I have no bread, I have no eggs, and I am seven thousand minutes late for lunch,” the organidroid reported. “Success in one out of four parameters is clearly failure.” “Listen, we’ve got plenty of birds here on Gliese. Why don’t you give me the quesadillas, since they’re useless now, and go hunt up some vulture eggs. I’ll tell Jack you're here, and he can reset your directive.” The organidroid agreed, and Ollie enjoyed the quesadilla — with its perfect char lines and just the faintest hint of cilantro — so much she didn't even mind having left her lactase pills behind. At least it got her in and out the latrines quickly. The engineers were devastated to get word of the Technocracy's fall, but her fellow Peacekeepers were mostly pissed that the goat got away from the organadroid long enough to devour the last of the beer, too. ## Afterword I haven't mentioned it in awhile, but one of the big projects floating around in the back of my mind (and story archive) involves colonizing a pristine wilderness. I love books like Genesis by Ken Lozito (here's [my review](https://eleanorkonik.com/genesis-by-ken-lozito/)) and games like Rimworld. Unfortunately, "let's make a new colony" stories are pretty politically fraught right now, and I'm not much of a survivalist expert, so I've mostly pivoted. Still, I do enjoy the genre; if you click through to that review, above, it'll send you down a link chain of various articles I've written while researching colonization. The premise of my extremely unfinished novel _Jia's Cove_ is that a group of genetically modified humans get "teleported" (scanned and re-printed) to planet that was terraformed via a teleporter that scans people and transmits the data through space at lightspeed, then prints new bodies at the destination. Not too different from how Angiers performs the  Transported Man in _[The Prestige](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prestige_(film))_, I guess. The original conception of _Jia's Cove_ had nothing to do with androids, but I wound up stumbling across a writing prompt involving sandwiches and androids and had the idea for _Can Androids Cope with Tiny Goats_. The only problem was that a key plot point was that the bio-printers couldn't handle a lot of metal. So, true to form, I did a little digging and found out about the current state of [organic robots](https://www.boldbusiness.com/health/organic-robots/). Turns out scientists can grow living, programmable organisms — they're useful for things like making better drug delivery systems and improved artificial kidney replacements. Some of these organic robots (xenobots) are grown from frog stem cells. They're so small (less than a millimetre) they remind me of the nanobots I've read about in scifi stories. It's a little surreal to realize they kind of already exist. But obviously the organidroid in _Can Androids Cope with Tiny Goats_ is bigger than a millimetre, so I kept on looking. Somehow this didn't make it into the [fungus](https://eleanorkonik.com/fungus/) %% ( [[2021-06-21 Fungus]] ) %% edition of this newsletter, but I found fungal electronic devices during my research. They're flexible, smart electronics that can grow and repair themselves. Fungal fruit bodies can generate current, which means they can function as memristors. What is a memristor, you might ask? I certainly did. Most of the explanatory articles are way over my head, but luckily I married an electrical engineer, so I tried to get him to explain their significance to me. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, hobbyists electrical engineers can't buy one;  as excited as the science papers seem to be about them, they're too new to actually play around with. There's also a bunch of debate about whether they're a "fundamental" component of electronics or not, which doesn't matter to me very much, but what _does_ matter is that they've got the capacity for memory. Fungi can be used for biological circuits, including the sorts of Bloolean circuits modern computers need to function. They not only sense light and pressure, their electric potential changes in response to those stimuli. Basically, [fungi can be used as components in electrical analog computers](https://www.azom.com/news.aspx?newsID=57502), which is why the organidroid in _Can Androids Cope with Tiny Goats_ looks like it was made out of mushrooms and frog bits. _I_ think it's pretty cool, even if the electrical engineers in my life are withholding judgment.