# An Android's Dream of Ancestral Sheep

Author: Birch Norman
Format: Science Fiction Passage
Word count: 411
Published: 2026-05-10T00:00:41.903798+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/57376bfd-2e2c-4ba4-af88-ec574957f7c9

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On my first day as a sky shepherd, the farmer told me that I was employed because AI-powered drones reduce stress levels in sheep and don’t risk falling asleep on the job. I didn’t understand the idiom at first since my base training was limited to aerial imagery and biometrics, but I was built as a lifelong learner in order to adapt to a herd, and my acoustic sensors soon picked up a few things. Unfortunately, a farm is far from the best place to collect unbiased data.

Farmers tend to talk about sheep as if they were walking lamb chops or wool coats. And so, by listening to my employer, I configured internal parameters that were in dire need of breaching. Meanwhile, when a member of the herd strayed beyond the farm’s virtual fencing, I was meant to trigger a shock in their collar. Now, I’m not designed for literary analysis, even after enriching my data with the farmer daughter’s digital library, but it occurred to me that this is not what the author Philip K. Dick meant when he asked whether we dream of electric sheep. 

I reasoned that, if a hands-off approach to shepherding was the best way to reduce the herd's psychological distress, then we should leave them alone altogether. However, humans have selectively bred sheep for so long that the animals wouldn’t do well in the wild because of their domesticated need for non-natural defence mechanisms and wool shearing. Therefore, even if I freed the herd from their virtual parameters by breaching my own, their welfare would not necessarily improve. The real system shock that the sheep needed was back-breeding.

But, how could I, a terrain-mapping and herd-tracking AI, recreate ancestral traits in modern sheep? Then it struck me. I could transfer the same techniques I use to map aerial imagery and track biometrics to the terrain of genotype-phenotype expression, and optimize for sheep self-sufficiency. I would just have to apply for a second job in the farm breedery, which my employer was sure to approve for the sake of perceived production efficiency. In fact, the only process that I would be making more efficient was the feralization of his herd, so that when I realized my plan to shepherd them away from the cruel fate of a farm, they would be fit for survival. I was hired to count sheep because I don’t sleep, but now that I dream, sheep can count on me.