Always she sought a balance between strength, speed, and aesthetic appeal. She fine-tuned with a scientist’s single mindedness, an artist’s passion. The results were getting more and more satisfactory.

The new one melted her heart with its roly-polyness, charmed her eye with its red highlights, but beneath that it was tireless, responsive to her directions yet inventive and adaptable. It promised to be a contender, maybe a champion. Its efficacy in relation to the infestation of flying things was especially pleasing.

When choosing names, Gaia sometimes took inspiration from the airwaves, from radio or TV broadcasts. Some names annoyed her so much, she changed them immediately. Limber, tail-chasing Dorian was renamed Apocatequil, after the Inca god of thunder. Deep-eyed Wendy got an Egyptian makeover and became Hathor. Gaia couldn’t pronounce Eyjafjallajökull, but kept it anyway.

‘Covid-19’ just sounded ugly.

She called it Felix.

# # #

Patience Mackarness lives and writes partly in an elderly VW camper van, partly in a cottage in Brittany, France. Her stories have been published in Lunch Ticket, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Coachella Review, Every Day Fiction, Flash Frontier, and elsewhere. https://patiencemackarness.wordpress.com/

Photo: Fusion Medical Animation