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Kirk got a note with breakfast today, telling him that Suzi was okay, and with Whistler on his Earth. He had been a bit concerned, given that her time was almost up, and was relieved (though curious as to if the shapeshifter Garion did indeed save her).

Heading to a booth, Kirk took his coffee, sourdough biscuits and Roughing It - he's still in a Twain mood. He took his daily Look for the Door, and wasn't surprised to not see it. He wasn't giving up, but he knew that it was close to the point when he'd need to create an exercise regimen and maybe a daily schedule to keep himself in top shape. Just because he was in disgrace didn't mean he should let himself slip out of lifelong Starfleet habits.

He took a sip of coffee, donned his glasses (repaired by the Bar) and began reading. Not that he won't stop reading to talk with people.

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There's a tcktcktcktck sound from nearby. If Kirk looks up, he'll see that it's caused by a brushed-silver quadruped that looks like somebody started designing a simulacrum of a dog and forgot to go past the absolute basics.

It's carrying a brightly colored knotted rope, though. Attached to the underside of its head rather than in its jaws, but still.

Kirk studies the robot. It must belong to someone. Maybe the rope is some sort of identitification?

He heads over to the robot and looks at it more closely. At no point does he feel a need to talk to it, as it probably has limited voice ID.

The robot tilts its head, the yellow 'eye' flickering briefly. A moment later it announces, "WHURF."

.... it's really not very good at communication.

Still, the sound is enough. Ray turns up a moment later, sandwich in hand. "Francis, what- oh. Sorry about that. Was he bothering you?"

Jim nods at the arriving ghostbuster. "Good morning, Ray. Not, it, I mean he wasn't. I was just trying to get a better sense of what he is. You mentioned something about a robot dog, I think. This must be it."

"Yep," Ray says happily. "This is Francis. Francis, drop, sit, and paw."

The robot bobs its head, and the rope drops to the floor. Immediately after, Francis sits and holds out one forelimb to Kirk.

"Got him from a friend in a dystopian timeline. He used to be a hunter-seeker 'bot before someone set him to kill the wrong person. When the two of them wound up here we temporarily disabled him and I had him reprogrammed, and took out all the incapacitating and lethal elements from his native timeline. He's the behavioral equivalent of a Schutzhund-trained German Shepherd now."

"Well, I suppose he's easier to feed and clean up after than a regular dog," Kirk says with a small smile. "I think there was a robot pet fad in the 22nd century on some of the colonies. But since I haven't seen anything like this, I don't think it caught on." Not that Kirk cares for dogs, or most pets.

"He's a good boy," says Ray fondly, bending over to scratch the robot behind where the ears would be, if it had ears. It drops the paw and makes a quieter whurf noise. "He's come in handy more than a couple of times, too. He's still a hell of a tracker and it wasn't hard at all to rig him up with some of the other sensors I use as part of the job. Romana's dog is kind of jealous of him, but K9's getting better about that ever since I explained to him just how limited Francis here is by comparison."

There's a reason Ray was on the fast track to becoming humanity's ambassador to the Machine Order of Life before he ever got hold of Garion's amulet, and this is just part of that.

It's a bit odd, watching someone scratch at robot as if it had skin or nerves. But then, Jim is quite sure that Ray is full of such eccentricities. Starship captains might call their ships "she" but Ray would probably buy her flowers. Still, it's pretty harmless.

"She has a robot dog, too? Well, I suppose it's better for domestic tranquliity than a robot cat."

Ray nods. "K9's an artificial intelligence, but he's Gallifreyan technology, not Terran. Francis here's designed on a-life principles, not a-i. He doesn't need standard cognition to do his work. He just needs the basic behavioral rules that govern canine actions. And the ability to comprehend about five hundred English words and basic grammar, but that's just gravy, so to speak. Basically? He's a dog."

"That's still something. Like I said, we've made fairly slow progress in that direction. Though I'm beginning to think there was some sort of trade-off in that our space program was robust at a time when the other timelines weren't.

"Can I ask the state of your world's space program?"

Ray thinks for a bit. "We're up to our fourth space tourist- Henry Kuttner paid twenty million American dollars to join the crew of the International Space Station for two weeks. President Winston just authorized a massive series of repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, and we've got a probe on its way to Pluto scheduled to arrive while the planet's still in the near part of its passage around the sun. Frankly, the government's running a little slow in my tastes when it comes to space development, but commercial private spaceflight is taking up the slack like you wouldn't believe ever since Scaled Composites won the first Ansari X-Prize for privately designed and built spacecraft reaching sub-orbital space twice in the span of two weeks."

Kirk tries to recall History of Spaceflight - a required second-year course at the Academy. "We had most of those. Though the space station was called Space Station One. But it's what you didn't mention that tells me a lot.

"Like the first manned mission to Saturn. Or Nomad, or the Voyager series. And this seems common here.

"Is it fair to say that the government is...I think the term would be risk-adverse?"

"A bunch of paranoid weenies is probably a little closer to the truth," Ray says. "They're still working on the first manned mission to Mars, for Pete's sake. They just awarded the contract for designing the new generation of manned space vehicle- and they gave it to one of the most conservative aerospace firms I know of. I really don't think the government's going to be the future of space travel..."

"As far as the Voyager series goes, we've only had the two Voyager probes. Most of the other probes we've had lately have been things like the Mars rovers, or the Galileo unmanned craft."

"Don't give them too hard a time about Mars, Ray. Even though we got to Saturn rather fast, we did that using sleeper ships and - for the time - powerful engines. That mission went, took some photos, and came back. No landings. Mars is a lot more complicated in some ways. I seem to recall that for every successful unmanned probe, there was one that went awry." Kirk knows that a mix of government and private enterprise will be the way to go, but he has an ingrained tendency not to blame government as fast as he thinks he does. "Not that I approve of 'paranoid weeines.' There is no way to accomplish anything, in space or one Earth, without risk. But somewhere along in the line on my Earth, we learned that sooner rather than later.

"I know the rovers, by the way. I've seen them, in fact, at Sagan Base."

"Sorry. I get a little impatient sometimes." Ray shrugs sheepishly. "I guess I figure that if a guy like me can get a nuclear accelerator down to man-portable size and test it out on a personal basis in the space of less than a year, the government with all its resources ought to be able to pull off something a little more impressive than what they've managed so far."

"They're still around, huh? They were really neat little machines. Nobody expected them to work as long as they did- nobody. Heck, I think Spirit's still transmitting, and it was supposed to last all of six months at the very outside..."

"They taught us about that. The cadets in the engineering track study them extensively, examples of how to make things work and work longer. Sometimes I think that Scotty would have given anything to be one of the designers of those early probes." He pauses. "Sometimes I think he uses parts from them for his repairs." Kirk smiles.

[ooc: and fade here so I can enter into the weekend.]

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