Swarm X1048 – Ethological FieldReport: Canis Lupus Familiaris, “6” by F. E. Choe (Clarkesworld #210, March 2024)1 opens with a puppy being born “not long after the disaster”:
Your mother huffs the air around you. She licks at your face, your belly, your tiny paws.
And we watch, transfixed though we have watched countless births on this planet by now, your pinhead-sized nostrils, the soft pinches of flesh around your eyes, the line of your mouth. We watch and wait for your forehead to furrow by the slightest millimeter. Anything.
Our bodies thrum with anticipation. Move, little one. Move.
Do anything but lie there so stiff and still as you are.
Your mother whines. She pants. Labor pains wrack her ribcage, your siblings impatient to arrive. You are running out of time to begin.
Move, little one. We jostle against one another, flash with anxiety.
Some of the more heedless among us separate from our luminous cluster and sink down through the air to hover closer to you, small bodies of light which pulse with distress.
And finally, you move. A small twitch, a tremor at the base of your tail.
Life kicks across your spine, and an electric relief washes through us.
It ripples through the synched network of our bodies, a burst of ultraviolet light.
We name you 6, and you are the most beautiful creature we have ever seen.
The observers are aliens, a swarm of energy beings which are on a dying Earth to record as much of the planet and its life before it meets its end. The rest of the story sees some lovely detail about this, such as them learning the communication choreography of bees, but a large amount of their time is absorbed by their observations and interactions with the dog. This sees, among other things, the dog’s first encounter with a coyote, and human “cleaners” finding the dog’s mother and littermates and shooting them.
Towards the end of the story (spoiler) the aliens learn the planet is deteriorating faster than they thought and that they only have sixteen months left to complete their task. When they realise they are not going to be able to collect all the data they wanted to there are recriminations about the amount of time they spent with the dog.
When, finally, the dog reappears after having been missing for a time, it tragically dies of cancer several weeks later. The swarm looks on helplessly as it dies, and afterwards blanket it and record everything they can in a final act of remembrance.
This is a short but very effective piece that successfully manages to combine a number of aspects—the dog, the alien swarm, the natural world, a dying Earth, etc.—and caps it off with a very emotional ending (especially if you have ever lost a family pet).
One for the Best of the Year anthologies.
**** (Very Good). 2850 words. Story link.
1. This is one of the 2025 Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll short story finalists, and also appears on the 2025 Locus list.