This ties into a larger question I have of "what's childhood like?" but I'll try to stay on topic. With smart pets and puppet socks I have to imagine that mundane commands are easy to teach and don't even require a roll. You should be able to train them to use a toilet (if they're even remotely physiologically capable - and if they're not, you can fab up a custom toilet, even one that integrates into your existing one if modding your personal living area is not allowed). They should be able to communicate simple things to you such as missed feeding times, danger, etc. Although if you have the creds you may as well give your pet a muse designed to train it and give it the ability to override that animals natural behaviors via its puppet-sock, but this is potentially dangerous Most people probably don't need to worry, but if you're rich enough to have a pet saber-tooth tiger you should probably also spring for some quality firewall software at the bare minimum. Even if you back-up regularly and you're not worried about a hacker getting access to Fluffy and forcing her to tear you apart and eat your entrails, you're probably still worried about a hacker getting her to walk away with him without protest. Day to day, in areas where getting access to additional food is not an issue, there are probably [i]tons[/i] of pets. Though many are probably "working" animals in the same vein as seeing-eye dogs. People spend a disproportionate amount of money on their children, and I know I'd feel a lot better about my daughter going out for some social call or other if she was accompanied by a panther (one that is secretly a pod with an alpha-fork of myself in it and maybe some heavy weaponry). Further, pet ownership in EP is probably a lot easier. "House-training" is trivial; pet hair allergies no longer exist; pet's are more likely to do what you say. For these reasons ,it's even conceivable on a hab with a large pet-population that pets are allowed in public structures since they're more likely to be well behaved. Some confusion is possible between pets and uplifts. While in the future of EP, most people probably have memorized the list of which animals have been uplifted. Even if they haven't, a person's Muse will probably actively check to see if any given animal-form has a Muse or Mesh-ID or not. Still, there's nothing stopping people from having Gorillas, Ravens, and Octopodes as pets so the potential for confusion is low, but nonzero. In zero-g habs, birds are likely a popular group of pets, though it might require smart-birds to adapt to flying in zero-g. Another interesting possibility is transgenic dolphins. They would need a water reservoir and probably a gland to accept outside water and distribute it in just the right amounts to their skin (a lot hangs on whether or not you can keep their skin wet enough without causing them to drip). Add some thruster packs that read the dolphins motion and translates it into vectored trust and Flipper can navigate your zero-g hab almost as naturally as if it were Atlantica itself. And lets not forget dinosaurs. Personally, while a velociraptor would be all kinds of awesome, I would still prefer them as a pod than as a smart pet. Obviously some other dinos have size restrictions and some others would need to have poison-glands removed (in most habs anyway). On the flip side, one can imagine a hab heavily inspired by the Flinstones but that's easier to do in a simulspace. Finally, the completely unrecognizable: these pets are probably based on some existing genetic architecture, but have been gene-modded and body-sculpted to hell and back. Sure some might just go with a giant transgenic tarantula from a bad sci-fi movie, but why not go for some fleshy mound with 8 tentacles, a dog's head and panther-legs? Better yet, why bother with metallic cybernetic attachments that are permanent when you can get a symbiotic organism that you can keep in an aquarium, and then remove and attach to yourself when you need those eyes in the back of your head, tentacles, electrical senses or whatever. Clearly these are more likely in habs with extreme morphological freedom as one of their core-memes, but they're certainly out there. Only slightly off-topic, farm organisms might exist in some habs. While foodstuffs can be manufactured from raw components, it might also be useful to create transgenic organisms with neither brain nor pain receptors. Imagine a basket-ball sized nodule that grows a tail, perfectly cylindrical. It possesses regeneration genes so the creature can be harvested for meat repeatedly without killing it. Different species would have different flavors/textures or larger versions might have multiple tail/tentacles each one with a different flavor. (No we didn't [i]actually[/i] kill a human baby and cook it for you...but if we [i]had[/i] this is what it would taste like) Multiple edible fluids might come from another brainless creature, and a hybrid plant/animal with yeast genes might produce alcohol. Meathab is the ultimate example, but I think animal ships might be more appealing to some Especially a hypercorp that wanted to infect it with Watts-Macleod. (My ship is an Async, your point is invalid)

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Herbo wrote:

They conducted the same sorts of tasks typical smart rats do (dispensing repair foam/spray from their implanted reservoirs, cleaning up trash, singing Cindi Lauper songs, etc).

Oddly, a part of me goes "Why not have a Creepy do that for you?", but, then, rats are pets too. I think it'd be nice to have rodent repair workers living in my house. They clean up the spilled trash, repair damaged technology, and make life a little easier. Also, they're cute and cuddly.

They are also much, much harder for the evil TITAN overlords to hack and swarm into a chittering horde of evil critters hell bent on gnawing off your face. BioChauvinism might be at its worst on Luna and in the Republic, but it still exists in many other places (for good reason a lot of the time).

A biological system also has its own redundancies, checks and balances. Take for example, a bunch of hab-rats that clean up mess that people leave, take it back to a nest, and eat it. Without any further action on the habitat's part, the hab-rat population grows in response to a messier populace; it shrinks when there is less food to go around. If you're a smallish hab, there are better things you could be producing in your assembly units than more servitor-bots to clean up after seasonal tourists. On a similar strand of thought, this also frees them from requiring central guidance. If hackers think crashing your trash disposal units is fun, make something hack-proof. This might be why 'real' trees and parklands are prolific in certain habitats; they're harder by far to disable than computer-controlled carbon-dioxide-to-oxygen converters.