Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2026
Larry is dying of cancer and has arranged for a robotic double to replace him as companion to his beloved tri-color hound, Charlie. The double will look, sound, and smell like Larry, trained through months of camera footage capturing their interactions. Larry’s estranged sister Mya reluctantly visits when he reveals his plan, skeptical of the ethics and legality of creating a substitute that mimics a real person—though Larry insists it’s only meant to deceive the dog.
After Larry ends his life at a medical facility, the double moves in seamlessly. However, Charlie immediately senses something is wrong. He whines through the night, eats reluctantly, and seems distressed by this familiar-yet-wrong presence. The double, programmed with Larry’s memories and mannerisms, struggles to understand Charlie’s deteriorating behavior and repeatedly contacts Mya for help.
Through increasingly fraught video calls, Mya grows frustrated with the double’s limitations. It can repeat Larry’s phrases and stories but lacks genuine understanding of humor, sadness, or Charlie’s emotional needs. The situation reaches crisis when Charlie escapes by climbing the backyard fence—something he’s never done before—as if desperately searching for the real Larry.
After retrieving Charlie from concerned neighbors who question the robot’s right to own a dog, Mya returns to Larry’s house. In her grief and confusion, she drinks bourbon and confronts the double, demanding it tell sad stories and explain itself. She realizes the fundamental flaw in Larry’s plan: while the double may have replicated Larry’s chemistry at one moment in time, it couldn’t account for how Larry’s scent changed as cancer consumed him. Charlie’s acute sense of smell would have tracked those changes daily. The double would never smell right—not on its first day, and not ever.
Days later, Mya receives an emergency alert. She finds the double collapsed in the living room, a “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” note—which she had written in drunken anger—stuck to its chest. The double apparently damaged its own charging port, effectively choosing to shut down.
EMTs and Subspace technicians arrive, but Mya refuses to let them restart the robot. She joins Charlie in the backyard, where he’s contentedly chewing a rawhide stick. As she lies beside him in the grass, she lets Charlie thoroughly sniff her—taking in all the chemical stories her body tells. She reflects on how Charlie must have smelled Larry’s death approaching, how loss alters the body down to the genes, and how no technology could replicate the living, changing chemistry of love and mortality.
The story explores themes of grief, the limits of technology, and what cannot be replaced when we lose those we love—examining how even our most sophisticated attempts to preserve connection pale against the organic truth that animals, particularly dogs, instinctively understand.
