Page 50 of Jorhee

“You too,” she said.

“Love you too, son. Bye.”

The screen went dark.

“Yes!” I shouted, jumping up out of my chair and doing a little dance. “My babies are coming home!”

Buster startled awake from his dog bed next to the desk.

“Wooooo!” he barked, adding his own two cents.

Johree chuckled at my antics.

“Bob, put up a notice at the spaceport and see if any of the freighter workers staying in town between jobs will take on the task of building a fence around a pasture while a construction bot builds the barn and stables Jesse decided he wanted.”

“You got it, boss dude!”

“He grows a little more eccentric every day,” Johree mused.

I laughed.

“He sounds more human, is all. A little odd for one, but still.”

Johree smiled.

“I happen to quite like humans. One especially.”

I walked around the desk and bent down so my face was level with his.

“Oh yeah? Anyone in particular I know?”

His kiss was all the answer I would ever need.

31

JOHREE

“What are those?” Jesse asked me three days later, pointing to shapes crawling across a field full of kilt-ha.

“We call them dung beetles,” I replied, “because of their shape and what they do.”

He blinked.

“Those are machines, aren’t they?” he asked, sounding rather unnerved.

I laughed.

“Yes, but designed to look and smell like the real thing, only on a much larger scale so as not to cause panic within the herd.”

“So, dung beetles, um, they eat shit, right? But these are machines, so what? They process it?” he hypothesized as several scurried out of the pasture to go sit in a line by the side of the road we rode along.

“They do. Send them into a pasture on the ‘collect’ setting, and they pick up the dung left behind, storing it under the massive shells you see they have. Once full, the farmer takes them back to the farm and sets them to ‘test’ mode, testing the pH of it all and checking for signs of an infection running through the herd or a need for something nutritional to be addedto their diet. Then he changes the command to ‘process,’ and they dry it while turning it into a fine powder, which is then excreted either directly into a field or into a storage pen for later gathering and dispensing.”

“A fancy-ass muck-spreading system. That’s awesome. Y’all would make millions selling this on Earth.”

“We are awaiting final permissions,” I informed him. “We have clearance on our end, but the humans are holding us up. They wish us to simply give them the schematics and patent it as a human invention.”

“They’re worried about competition driving their large companies out of business.”