By me, with art by Sam Messerly.
Click here to read from the beginning.
It started with a sauropod visiting me. His name meant Thinkwilder, and he was quite an unusual beast, if I do say so myself. His particular classification in your world—I had to look this up—is saltasaurus. Maybe you know them—they are sauropods with bony armor on their backs. Anyway, Thinkwilder was eccentric. He lamented that his kind has very bland skin coloring, so he had taken to painting designs on his hide. In the frozen world, those designs would tend to stay on longer, too, so he could pretend those swirls, or stripes, or rainbow polkadots were natural.
Anyway, when Thinkwilder came to visit me in my humble quarters, he had much more subdued colors, but the designs were still wild—mostly black stripes in surprising and intricate patterns, like eyes peering out of his limbs and torso. I was put off by the effect, especially in combination with his intense and sour expression and somber, erratic tongue-clicks. Furbud didn’t like him either, and trumpeted a warning at his approach.
“You are Warbell, I think, right? Right?” he said. (Well, he used my real name, not the nickname you gave me, but for convenience’ sake I am using “Warbell” in this story.)
“You are Thinkwilder,” I said. “Shh, Furbud.”
Furbud trumpeted disconsolately. Like a blat, blat, blaaaat.
“Confirm that you are Warbell,” said Thinkwilder. “I know my name already.”
“Yes, I am Warbell,” I said. “What is it you want?”
“Yes,” said Thinkwilder, bobbing his head and clicking his tongue. “You are Warbell. I have been talking with all the dinosaurs who have lost someone, on the other side over there in the living world. You lost your mate in that place, right? I mean she died.”
I didn’t smile at Thinkwilder. At that time, I wasn’t smiling much. I glowered.
“It’s no secret,” I said. “What do you want?”
Thinkwilder whipped his neck up and down again, and my ceiling contorted away so that he didn’t hit his skull. (In large part because of the influences of humankind, the dinosaur kingdom began making houses especially for those who paired off as mates. However, we added some clever bits like ceilings and doors that shift in height or width for dinosaurs of different sizes when they visit.)
“But doesn’t it bother you?” he said. “Why did she die? Did you ask?”
“What do you mean?”
My mind suddenly flashing back to the readout on Razzberry’s body monitor.
“Warbell, you are not the first I’ve talked to,” he said. “The first I talked to was myself, because I am gathering information. Because my wife died, too.”
“Well, I am sorry to hear that,” I said. “But I am not here to help you gather information.”
“Did they say your mate died of a heart attack?” Thinkwilder asked. “Even though we are cyborgs now, and we can’t get heart attacks.”
Furbud was getting more agitated, but I was the one really starting to freak out inside.
“They said there were malfunctions…” I began.
“Was one of the malfunctions,” Thinkwilder said slowly. “Was one of the malfunctions the fact that your mate’s bodily organs were disappearing?”