Right back atcha, Susie. :-)

* * * * *

Elsewhere, Gail pushed her chair back from her desk, and rested her forehead on its cool surface. Her twelfth attempt at generating a human-level artificial intelligence was unraveling before her eyes, and she couldn't begin to determine why. As had happened with Keith and Jerry, the errors were coming from the theoretical environment, not from the intelligence itself.

Dr. Crater reached towards the theremin to rewind the model back, try to find its flaws, but accidentally knocked over the bowl of candies that kept her awake through late nights in the lab. She absent-mindedly reached for one to put it back in the bowl, still focused on the glowing screen. She failed to notice the candy skittering away....

Whoa! Now I want to know what happened to the candy! And 'skittering' made me think of 'skittles' and made me hungry for more.

Oh boy...gauntlets are being thrown...time to bring my "A" game. My entry will be placed shortly....

He instinctively stepped back towards the ship like a frightened child to a mother. In front of him, the ground erupted in a cloud of red dust and rocks. A massive sink hole opened spewing white vapor into the thin Martian sky. Larry gripped the short ladder frame with both hands unable to move. He felt the ship bounce under the ground assault unfolding in front of him. A massive brown scissor claw the size of his ship reached out of the dust clouded depths. It rose into the sky blocking his view and came back down slamming into the cargo bay of the ship. The ship rocked under the devastation, throwing Larry on his back to the ground. He looked up as the claw reared up and slammed into the ship’s cabin. Larry heard twisting metal over his helmet external microphone. Several holographic images flashed red in front of his helmet. His suit was torn. Using a hand motion, he moved the images from his field of view, but one image in blue caught his eye. Oxygen was coming from the sinkhole! He jumped to his feet holding his right hand over the suit opening. Larry ran bounding towards the sinkhole and jumped. As he cleared the edge, a massive head rose up…

"No, " he said to himself. "Not a pebble--pebbles can't move by themselves. So it has to be alive." He focused his attention on the pebble, now moving again, in a random pattern, darting back and forth. He held his hand out to it, thinking of his cats back home. "Besides,I had those three xenobiology classes back at the Academy--they should be good for something!"

He was wondering if he could name the new life-form after himself, and what sort of paperwork and proof would be required, when a shadow appeared on the ground in front of him. Surprised, Larry turned to see what could be casting the shadow, and his surprise turned to terror as a huge pebble, over 10 feet high, moved rapidly torward him. His last thoughts as the "pebble" landed on him were that it was unwise to get between a mother and its offspring, and that he would never get to name his pebble.

A while later, in a quiet and low-key ceremony, the Journal of Intergalactic Biology published a new entry into the Lifeforms Registry: Giganticus Lawrencius Pebblius, sp." Larry's Giant Pebble.

I absolutely agree!

This is great. I laughed out loud, but I wish there was a quicker way to express that sentiment! When I read Giganticus Lawrencius Pebbilus, I imagined the old coyote/roadrunner cartoon where the action would pause on the coyote and say something like "Eatibus Anythingis" or "Appetitis Giganticus." I hope at the ceremony that they did something similiar for poor Larry.