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“Bad dog!” by Rob Baird
Today on The Voice of Dog we're reading Bad dog! by Robert Baird, who is a writer, mapmaker, and general tinkerer-with-worlds who has been at his craft since 2003. Deep space is his dwelling place but, rents being what they are, he keeps a flat in Berlin, Germany.
You can find him on the internet at http://writing.dog, which is just an amazing web address.
Read for you by Khaki, your faithful fireside companion.
Transcript
Welcome, dear readers, to the Voice of Dog.
Speaker:My name is Khaki,
Speaker:your faithful fireside companion, and today I’ll be reading you a story called
Speaker:“Bad Dog” by Robert Baird,
Speaker:who is a writer, mapmaker, and general tinkerer-with-worlds
Speaker:who has been at his craft since 2003.
Speaker:Deep space is his dwelling place but, rents being what they are,
Speaker:he keeps a flat in Berlin, Germany.
Speaker:You can find him on the internet at writing-dot-dog, which is just an amazing web address.
Speaker:"Bad dog!" by Rob Baird
Speaker:Base men know to hide their depravity in an empty symbol of kindness.
Speaker:They've known this since Judas, just a few decades past two thousand years ago.
Speaker:The dog is not a messiah, of course --
Speaker:but all the same, they bear our sins stoically.
Speaker:And all the same...
Speaker:"Good girl," the man says,
Speaker:and ruffles her between the ears.
Speaker:The ruffling musses up the hair she'd spent five minutes carefully straightening, not an hour before,
Speaker:but she doesn't complain --
Speaker:wouldn't even if she could.
Speaker:And all he's asked her to do is fetch the news, which is her job anyway.
Speaker:Fifty years ago that would mean something different --
Speaker:they used to cut down trees, mash them into pulp,
Speaker:and stamp the dried pulp with toxic ink.
Speaker:Still pictures, soundless,
Speaker:and when you asked Rover to fetch you the news he'd actually put it --
Speaker:you're not going to believe this --
Speaker:he'd actually put it in his mouth,
Speaker:ink and ground up tree both,
Speaker:and drop it at his owner's feet,
Speaker:with an added gift of saliva besides.
Speaker:Waste of a tree, waste of a dog.
Speaker:Fetching the news only takes ten or fifteen minutes these days,
Speaker:if your dog is well trained,
Speaker:and she is. Her name is Atwood
Speaker:-- technically 2C-GeneMark15a-ATW, her batch number, but nobody calls her that.
Speaker:And that's in the Common tongue, of course.
Speaker:In the language of dogs her identity is a certain scent;
Speaker:when it must be spoken,
Speaker:it's a wavering bark you would never be able to distinguish and it means, roughly,
Speaker:"the one whose right ear is a source of some occasional confusion.
Speaker:confusion." When she was a puppy,
Speaker:her right ear was always cocked --
Speaker:dogs, even high-octane superdogs like Atwood,
Speaker:rely heavily on facial expression to communicate.
Speaker:A misbehaving ear is like a speech impediment
Speaker:-- Atwood went to therapy for it.
Speaker:It's better now, enough to splay out happily as the man's fingers brush against it.
Speaker:When he asks her for the news,
Speaker:he doesn't care about little things, like a sports team winning in overtime
Speaker:or a Yakuza gunship strafing the docks at Frisco.
Speaker:He's a politician, after all --
Speaker:the Associate Vice President of Consumer Relations for BosWash,
Speaker:Porter Akamiro, the man with those ads
Speaker:that talk about living up to a proud New England heritage.
Speaker:If you're plugged in,
Speaker:you can taste the salt spray -- and the blue blood.
Speaker:An important man like Akamiro doesn't have the time to figure out what the CEO of Hong Kong is yammering on about in his latest press conference.
Speaker:That's for Atwood to do.
Speaker:Atwood is of Border collie stock --
Speaker:a herding dog, with a herding dog's instinct for order.
Speaker:These days everybody in the whole human flock is a journalist,
Speaker:mostly posting micro-updates straight to the Net,
Speaker:without an editor or anything.
Speaker:Maybe one in ten thousand has a live stream,
Speaker:pumping raw information like a broken faucet.
Speaker:One in a hundred thousand has something interesting to say,
Speaker:and only ten percent of those know what they're talking about --
Speaker:but that's still a hell of a lot of things to herd.
Speaker:Atwood is good at it.
Speaker:That's why Akamiro has her.
Speaker:And when he says "fetch the news,"
Speaker:that's her cue to plug in.
Speaker:If she wants to read things in realspace,
Speaker:Atwood needs special glasses to correct her vision,
Speaker:but the computer box she uses for news-herding
Speaker:projects a canine-calibrated image right against her retinas.
Speaker:The software has been optimised for her, too;
Speaker:information sources are marked by location in her field of vision,
Speaker:and the richer ones aren't brighter -- they move faster.
Speaker:The projector is an RGB laser array,
Speaker:but it shows things in blues and purples, the colours she can see best
Speaker:(sunsets aren't particularly stunning to Atwood).
Speaker:As she finds things she likes, she manipulates the sources of information with her paws
Speaker:(if you can call them that.
Speaker:She has opposable thumbs, of course -- has to).
Speaker:Most people aren't so manic with a computer --
Speaker:their movements look relaxed and organic.
Speaker:Atwood looks like she's playing a theremin forty times too fast.
Speaker:But she gets results.
Speaker:Once the field is narrowed down to the most relevant stories,
Speaker:she gives each one a quick look,
Speaker:making sure there's nothing extraneous or distracting or needlessly speculative --
Speaker:Akamiro deals in facts.
Speaker:It doesn't take long.
Speaker:If you tried to measure Atwood's intelligence,
Speaker:it would be off the charts.
Speaker:That's the "2C" part of her name --
Speaker:two centuries; an IQ of 200.
Speaker:She's a stable genius when it comes to handling information,
Speaker:the product of decades of applied genetics research,
Speaker:and if anything were still pegged to a gold standard, she'd be worth her weight in it.
Speaker:She hands the news over to Akamiro seventeen and a half minutes after he asked for it,
Speaker:on a thin, flexible computer,
Speaker:holding it in an outstretched paw --
Speaker:the best news comes hand-delivered
Speaker:and without slobber.
Speaker:All the important bits of information are highlighted,
Speaker:and the stories are only the most relevant.
Speaker:She hasn't missed anything,
Speaker:which is good for a pat on the head,
Speaker:and when she gives a subservient bow of thanks,
Speaker:that's when he ruffles her hair.
Speaker:Good girl, indeed. *
Speaker:Atwood isn't always a good girl.
Speaker:Two weeks ago, Akamiro asked her to do something menial --
Speaker:something even she could recognise was beneath her abilities --
Speaker:and she bristled,
Speaker:giving him a petulant growl.
Speaker:He'd struck her -- hard --
Speaker:and he'd said, very sharply, "bad dog!"
Speaker:Between physical pain and a rebuke like that,
Speaker:Atwood isn't sure which hurts worse;
Speaker:that's the power of language.
Speaker:Anyway he'd done them both,
Speaker:and he'd done them both again a few hours later when, still sulking,
Speaker:she'd taken her kibble and used it to spell things on the floor.
Speaker:When she hadn't been willing to eat it, piece by piece, off the carpet,
Speaker:then he'd sent her to her kennel
Speaker:with nothing to eat and a nose that still smarted.
Speaker:Six months ago, she'd whirled and almost snapped at him when he tried to pull her breakfast from her --
Speaker:breakfast is on a timetable in the Akamiro household,
Speaker:leastways for dogs.
Speaker:Then he'd put a muzzle on her,
Speaker:and made her wear it for most of the day.
Speaker:She hasn't done anything to be so humiliated since.
Speaker:Last week Atwood noticed that the pictures on the mantelpiece were slightly askew.
Speaker:When things are askew, that bothers her -- it's the herding instinct again.
Speaker:And she's bred to organise information --
Speaker:what's the difference between a family picture and a microcast out of some guy's basement in Jakarta?
Speaker:So she started to straighten them,
Speaker:and when he caught her
Speaker:Akamiro beat her again.
Speaker:In theory, these things are done to teach her a lesson.
Speaker:Mostly, what Atwood learns from them
Speaker:is that people are capricious.
Speaker:Actually, if she thought about such things --
Speaker:and she doesn't; it isn't how her brain is wired --
Speaker:she would conclude that the only reason she and others like her exist at all
Speaker:is because human beings are bastards.
Speaker:See, back when it was around and meant anything,
Speaker:the United Nations made up all these rules about what you could and couldn't do to other humans --
Speaker:and that doesn't just mean homo sapiens, mind you.
Speaker:You start putting human genes in things,
Speaker:well, you'd better be ready for a reckoning.
Speaker:But if you're a smart designer of safety systems,
Speaker:you know that cadavers aren't good enough to test your car's impact protection.
Speaker:You need somebody who can say "I feel fine, doc" --
Speaker:or "Christ, doc, help me, I can't feel my legs.
Speaker:legs." Either or. And if you're really smart, you hire a bunch of geneticists, who have supercomputers that can track the flapping of a butterfly's wings all the way to the windspeed of a typhoon six months later.
Speaker:You tell them what you want --
Speaker:a vaguely human skeletal structure. A brain complex enough to get rattled by a concussion.
Speaker:The ability to feel enough terror to tense up all their muscles,
Speaker:like natural humans do
Speaker:when they sense that the stuff's about to hit the fan.
Speaker:You do that, and a couple of years later you have a guinea pig.
Speaker:Early on, it was an actual pig, except it could walk on two legs and talk,
Speaker:in a horrifying, disconcerting sort of way
Speaker:(that's something they still haven't really got a handle on).
Speaker:And it doesn't have any human genes that anybody can find.
Speaker:Perfectly legal. Now that the whales are all extinct the people who used to get up in arms about them have nothing to do, and,
Speaker:sure, they're good for a protest or two.
Speaker:But so what? You can't argue with the numbers. Between 2030 and 2040, the number of traumatic deaths in car accidents dropped by 78% -- four fifths! --
Speaker:even as the average speed of cars increased by 50 kilometres an hour.
Speaker:So the whale-hugging types get told where they can shove their protests.
Speaker:After that, it's real easy.
Speaker:Certain things can't be automated very well by computers, but they're too menial -- or too dangerous -- for a person.
Speaker:That's why they test body armour on C-sub bulls,
Speaker:calculating ballistics penetration to the millimetre --
Speaker:or do you want to be the one who has to go to the door of a policeman's widow,
Speaker:telling them that their husband died because somebody didn't want to shoot a damned cow?
Speaker:That's why you have the C2 cat-stock astronauts,
Speaker:practically cyborgs, with their brains directly wired in to the LIDAR sets of a sweeper ship.
Speaker:They love it when the LIDAR hits something --
Speaker:lights up a little bit of debris they can chase,
Speaker:burning the rockets to bring the trajectory of the laser around until it lances out,
Speaker:quick, and takes out something that might've holed a satellite.
Speaker:Or a research station.
Speaker:Or the orbital liner with your kids in it.
Speaker:They hop the cats up on a drug cocktail about ninety syllables long;
Speaker:it keeps them alert.
Speaker:Keeps them from getting too distracted, also,
Speaker:about all the radiation they're soaking up in those ships.
Speaker:C2 astrocats live about two years, on average.
Speaker:That's why you have Atwood,
Speaker:corralling fifty thousand bits of gently bleating information into an easily consumable flexicomp
Speaker:for the VP of Consumer Relations
Speaker:to take with him in his limo.
Speaker:It would take an intern twelve hours to process the feeds she can digest in ten minutes.
Speaker:Plus, you'd have to give them more than a pat and a strip of artificial bacon at the end of it. *
Speaker:Atwood has some chores to do,
Speaker:though they never take her too long --
Speaker:dogs aren't very good maids, for instance;
Speaker:it's the shedding thing,
Speaker:which GeneMark never bothered to fix.
Speaker:There's maybe an hour of filing and data entry,
Speaker:during which she pulls some thin gloves over her paws
Speaker:to keep her short fur from gumming up the keyboard
Speaker:(and to give her claws some purchase on the keys),
Speaker:and then she's free, for the rest of the time that Porter Akamiro isn't home.
Speaker:This isn't an ease brought on by any particular kindness.
Speaker:Mostly Akamiro just doesn't know what to do with her.
Speaker:He doesn't really own Atwood --
Speaker:but then, he doesn't own his car, either,
Speaker:and like the car, the collie came with the job.
Speaker:BosWash covers her vet bills and he invoices them for food and her kennel,
Speaker:a coffin-like contraption about the size of a phone booth.
Speaker:If and when she gets too sick, the company will also take care of having her euthanised,
Speaker:and they'll send him a new one of the same model.
Speaker:According to their subcontractor's agreement,
Speaker:the new one is guaranteed to be 95% like the old one --
Speaker:which is one reason why you aren't supposed to get too attached,
Speaker:the other being that it's seen as a little weird,
Speaker:even if they are supposed to be man's best friend.
Speaker:Ninety-five percent is a good guarantee,
Speaker:and that commonality encourages people to treat them without any particular care.
Speaker:Like in all industries, replaceable parts are good for improving efficiency.
Speaker:Besides, nobody ever asks about the missing five percent.
Speaker:A lot of reshaped animals use their free time to plug in.
Speaker:It's a way of escaping their daily life;
Speaker:meeting new people, reading about new things.
Speaker:Atwood spends too much time plugged in to want any more of it.
Speaker:She goes to the park, which -- if nothing else -- offers smells that are a bit less offensive.
Speaker:Mostly. Not always.
Speaker:Now, for instance,
Speaker:her local environment smells terrible, because she's standing next to Ralston P.,
Speaker:who is sort of a friend. Ralston (2C-Trimurti71-RAL) can't help his odour being objectionable; he's
Speaker:a cat. Atwood always feels a bit guilty about disliking the smell --
Speaker:like it was just a little racist, or something.
Speaker:She's never told him.
Speaker:Ralston was intended to be an astrocat, up in a sweeper,
Speaker:but the Corporation got him just a hair too late.
Speaker:He was probably a docile kitten,
Speaker:or at least trainable,
Speaker:but he got mislaid in the system and was already too much of a tom for space training when somebody remembered him.
Speaker:Two weeks in, he got in a barfight and somebody smashed a bottle over his head.
Speaker:The scars -- he was cut down to bone, in places -- make him
Speaker:look slightly dangerous
Speaker:and more than a little rakish, for a cat.
Speaker:The guy who hit him was never charged;
Speaker:the Corporation didn't want to prosecute a property crime over a washout.
Speaker:Atwood has never asked Ralston why he was in a bar in the first place;
Speaker:she doesn't have to.
Speaker:Like most animals, he doesn't drink alcohol --
Speaker:but he does like brawling.
Speaker:He also likes women --
Speaker:that's something else the Corporation screwed up by getting to him too late --
Speaker:although not Atwood, not in that way.
Speaker:She's a dog, after all.
Speaker:But she comes and talks to him sometimes, and he listens.
Speaker:Ralston steals food,
Speaker:and gets in the occasional scrap.
Speaker:He doesn't wear clothes, which is a little scandalous,
Speaker:but the BosWash security police don't do anything.
Speaker:He's the beneficiary of complicated bureaucratic politics.
Speaker:The security guys would like nothing more than to shoot him and leave him for the rats --
Speaker:but he is still technically corporate property,
Speaker:owned by the Orbital Corporation.
Speaker:The rivalry between BosWash and the Corporation is old,
Speaker:ancient practically,
Speaker:and even though he's worthless as an astronaut, he is good for leverage.
Speaker:If he dies, lawyers will get involved.
Speaker:The Corporation would sue for damages --
Speaker:or worse, take it as a causus belli.
Speaker:They're pretty trigger-happy.
Speaker:It isn't worth the risk.
Speaker:The local businesses, of course,
Speaker:don't really want Ralston around.
Speaker:As he sprawls across somebody's steps, soaking in the sun,
Speaker:Atwood stands next to him, and as a result she can see the shopkeeper pick up a bit of trash
Speaker:and throw it at the cat.
Speaker:He gets up, slowly,
Speaker:with a distracted feline growl.
Speaker:Sun is one of the few things he likes better than fighting;
Speaker:he doesn't want to leave.
Speaker:For a moment, Atwood expects him to get into a fighting stance, but instead the tom just shrugs, and ambles stiffly towards the grass of the park,
Speaker:tail drifting lazily.
Speaker:She follows. "Don't you mind?"
Speaker:They speak Common, the two of them --
Speaker:Atwood can't make the right sounds to speak cat,
Speaker:and Ralston is too lazy to learn dog.
Speaker:"Ain't worth minding.
Speaker:minding." His voice is gravelly,
Speaker:the voice of an old man.
Speaker:He chose it deliberately, the same as Atwood chose hers --
Speaker:an old actress, back from when entertainment was still only dual-sensory.
Speaker:"It doesn't bother you?"
Speaker:Ralston finds a new place to sprawl
Speaker:and stretches out, his claws extending briefly.
Speaker:"It's just part of life.
Speaker:You say the same thing when your owner hits you, don't you?
Speaker:I don't have an owner, and I don't mind that either.
Speaker:either." Ralston embodies laissez-faire --
Speaker:it's a kind of ease that Atwood would envy, if she rightly understood what envy was.
Speaker:"Everything's going to stay the same,
Speaker:thrown cans and all.
Speaker:Besides, if he doesn't pick it up, they'll get him with a fine.
Speaker:I saw them do that last week.
Speaker:week." 'Last week' means as much to him as it does to Atwood --
Speaker:which is to say very little.
Speaker:Time is an abstraction to animals;
Speaker:it might've been last week
Speaker:or it might've been two years back.
Speaker:The same reason he uses it as an example
Speaker:is the same reason he believes all days to be fundamentally identical.
Speaker:Atwood herself also lives in the moment,
Speaker:without a real understanding of time --
Speaker:she's aware of it only in the hints that come from her newsreading,
Speaker:of a mysterious and vague concept she can't quite grasp.
Speaker:So when she responds,
Speaker:it's almost a platitude.
Speaker:"It might change." "Won't.
Speaker:"Won't." There isn't really a reason for the tom to be laconic;
Speaker:talking doesn't require any effort.
Speaker:It's a conscious choice.
Speaker:"They have a power over us.
Speaker:us." It's a weird construct, 'us' versus 'them.'
Speaker:The genetic scientists haven't really considered that part.
Speaker:Sure, there are reshaped cats and dogs and cows and pigs and tigers, but at the end of the day it's still "humans" and "not humans.
Speaker:humans." The makers and the made.
Speaker:Light and dark. Atwood may value Akamiro's praise more,
Speaker:but she knows she's closest to Ralston --
Speaker:powerless. What is the source of power?
Speaker:Atwood isn't sure.
Speaker:"You mean they can kill us?"
Speaker:Ralston opens one eye.
Speaker:The pupil is a thin, vertical slit, like a half-finished exclamation point.
Speaker:"They kill each other, too.
Speaker:I mean there's something else.
Speaker:It gives them control...
Speaker:or it takes it away from us.
Speaker:I don't know what it is. Something we're missing."
Speaker:Atwood thinks she's heard the word for this before,
Speaker:though she has no idea what it means.
Speaker:"A soul?" Either Ralston disagrees or he hasn't the first idea what she's talking about either.
Speaker:He closes his eye again,
Speaker:and a few seconds later he seems to be asleep.
Speaker:She knows better than to disturb him. *
Speaker:Language -- like when you need to talk about a "soul" --
Speaker:is a funny thing.
Speaker:Atwood is verbal, but her speech comes from a computer, implanted in her jawbone.
Speaker:There's a speaker in her throat --
Speaker:it was intended to make her sound mostly normal.
Speaker:Atwood has never liked using it around humans, though.
Speaker:It calls attention to their distracting habit of pausing for breath --
Speaker:and for their part,
Speaker:they seem to find her failure to do so disconcerting.
Speaker:She tried talking with her natural voice, once.
Speaker:Dogs can make most human sounds.
Speaker:It's the labial consonants that give them problems --
Speaker:which is fine if you're speaking Mohawk, but not if you're trying to communicate in English,
Speaker:where m, p, b, f, and v are all impossibilities.
Speaker:Consequently they speak with a heavy accent,
Speaker:almost unintelligible to the human ear.
Speaker:Atwood practised for a while, before speaking for the first time.
Speaker:"Good morning" being out --
Speaker:along, for that matter, with
Speaker:"Akamiro" -- she settled on
Speaker:"good day, sir. How can I assist you?"
Speaker:At first, she'd taken his shocked look
Speaker:as marking a lack of understanding.
Speaker:Then he had struck her,
Speaker:making her yelp, and as she cowered,
Speaker:ears pinned until they disappeared into her hair,
Speaker:he had told her that she must never, ever do that again.
Speaker:She can sort of see why.
Speaker:Her natural voice is deeper, more resonant and more commanding.
Speaker:But it's also harder to understand,
Speaker:and it frees her of her dependence on the voicebox.
Speaker:To think that she might operate without it,
Speaker:well, that's as ridiculous as thinking she might be given the key to her own collar.
Speaker:Here's where her creators got clever, though,
Speaker:when it comes to speaking in Common.
Speaker:You see, there's this old,
Speaker:mostly discredited thing in social theory called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Speaker:It says that our language reflects our worldview --
Speaker:but it also shapes it.
Speaker:Atwood runs headlong into this hypothesis when she tries to say certain things.
Speaker:The computer chip in her jaw handles her communication for her;
Speaker:when she thinks about saying something,
Speaker:it speaks. But they've left out a lot of important words,
Speaker:and when she tries to say them:
Speaker:nothing. It's like having to think in a foreign language,
Speaker:except the language literally doesn't have the words you need.
Speaker:For instance, her voicebox doesn't have a link between the word "soul"
Speaker:and the neurons in her mind that would fire if she were to actually think about the concept that word represents.
Speaker:When she says it,
Speaker:she's just pronouncing it phonetically --
Speaker:it's semantically meaningless for her,
Speaker:gibberish. This is one reason her news-herding focuses entirely on facts --
Speaker:on tangible things that can be sniffed at
Speaker:and grasped and bitten.
Speaker:To actually muse in Common about a soul,
Speaker:for a dog, requires
Speaker:lengthy and awkward circumlocution.
Speaker:"A thing that is given to you without your knowing it
Speaker:by the one who is the owner of the people who are our owners also,
Speaker:but not a thing you can put in your mouth
Speaker:nor a thing you can consume,
Speaker:that is valuable but your owner cannot beat from you."
Speaker:It isn't any better in the language they use amongst their own kind.
Speaker:Dogs are present-focused,
Speaker:and their language is descriptive.
Speaker:If English had the right words -- and it doesn't --
Speaker:a translation would sound artistic.
Speaker:Between themselves, they wax poetic about the sound and smell of a morning --
Speaker:but aside from describing it differently, they cannot distinguish one morning from another.
Speaker:Dogs know that they are present,
Speaker:but they do not talk differently about the living and the dead,
Speaker:except to remark upon the absence of motion in the latter.
Speaker:This is why she can talk about the ability to "kill" in the Common tongue,
Speaker:with Ralston; to another canine there is only the ability to make still.
Speaker:The power that a terrier has over a rat
Speaker:is the same as the power that gravity has over a falling stone.
Speaker:So there isn't a word for 'death' in dog,
Speaker:and therefore none for 'heaven.'
Speaker:They are content with the notion of being "put to sleep.
Speaker:sleep." It doesn't seem like a euphemism.
Speaker:Linguistic awkwardness is worse for some reshaped creatures, who are completely hobbled by the limitations of the box's vocabulary.
Speaker:Talking to most dogs is a lot more like talking to a computer than anything else.
Speaker:If Akamiro asked Atwood to "fetch me a beer," she would be smart enough to go to the refrigerator and get one.
Speaker:But it's idiomatic, for her,
Speaker:a peculiar use of the word that requires second-order thinking.
Speaker:A 1C dog, like one of the soft, pillowy Saint Bernards they use to keep watch of children,
Speaker:will be flummoxed if you tell it to fetch a drink.
Speaker:Fetch a beer?, you can see them thinking.
Speaker:But a beer doesn't need to be chased.
Speaker:They'll tilt their heads,
Speaker:caught between their desire to please and their complete befuddlement,
Speaker:faces wrinkled in confusion.
Speaker:"Error. Object/request mismatch," is what those wrinkles say.
Speaker:The upshot of this is that, in those times when Atwood is tired of being beaten or starved,
Speaker:she has a hard time thinking about it.
Speaker:She can't easily consider "freedom,"
Speaker:to say nothing of "human rights" or
Speaker:"passive, non-violent resistance.
Speaker:resistance." They're phrases that she comes across, from time to time, but can only parrot them back, without knowing what they really mean.
Speaker:In the cruellest stroke, she isn't even really capable of wrapping her brain around the fact that she's missing something --
Speaker:though the hint comes in occasional sparks, they mostly flicker out noiselessly.
Speaker:For people, rebellion begins in ideas,
Speaker:and those ideas have to begin in words.
Speaker:Atwood doesn't know those words; couldn't understand even if she did know them.
Speaker:Because it prevents her from articulating certain
Speaker:thoughts, her voicebox neatly severs the feedback loop of context that might bring those unapproved connections together in her brain.
Speaker:There is a magic spell that exists,
Speaker:to begin the slow process of liberation.
Speaker:But without the ability to say it,
Speaker:she's stuck. Some time ago, a few years or a few
Speaker:hours, Akamiro hit her hard enough to bring tears to her eyes --
Speaker:but she doesn't know when.
Speaker:And right now he's petting her,
Speaker:smoothing down her hair.
Speaker:So her tail wags -- why wouldn't it?
Speaker:Damn clever idea, the voicebox. *
Speaker:Because dogs are creatures that live perpetually in the moment,
Speaker:it will require an outside observer to pick the first of two that were somehow special.
Speaker:Seminal, even -- not because of what they were,
Speaker:but because of what they created.
Speaker:It will not happen for several years; a journalist, taking a belated interest in the affair,
Speaker:will start to piece it together like this...
Speaker:It's a Saturday, which means that Porter Akamiro is not officially working,
Speaker:and neither is his live-in personal assistant.
Speaker:That leaves just him and Atwood,
Speaker:who is busy fetching the news when the front buzzer rings to signify that the mail has arrived.
Speaker:Just like with newspapers,
Speaker:fifty years ago physical mail used to be printed on the flesh of trees.
Speaker:Today, in a slightly more civilised world,
Speaker:it comes in thin metallic strips, encoded with origin and destination data in a strip along the top.
Speaker:The fact that all of this is recyclable means people don't care so much about sending out great heaps of it,
Speaker:and during the week,
Speaker:Akamiro is frequently swamped.
Speaker:He tells Atwood to handle it, and she dutifully agrees,
Speaker:nodding to him and standing with a slight bow.
Speaker:Besides a few advertisement flyers --
Speaker:one of them starts to dance and flash in bright colours that are not at all distracting to Atwood, because she can't see them --
Speaker:there are only two that require attention.
Speaker:One is from the IRS,
Speaker:promising a coffee mug in return for a small donation.
Speaker:The other is a letter from Porter Akamiro's wife.
Speaker:Atwood has never met her.
Speaker:When she hands the letters over,
Speaker:he takes the time to read the return address first, which means she doesn't get a pat on the head
Speaker:or a bit of graham cracker.
Speaker:He's too distracted, so she goes back to work.
Speaker:In the background, she can hear him sigh several times.
Speaker:Once -- just once -- it took her twenty-five minutes to review and synthesise the news.
Speaker:That was the day that passenger ship accidentally rammed the Golden Gate Bridge,
Speaker:cutting it in half --
Speaker:there was a lot to sort through.
Speaker:With that exception,
Speaker:it has never taken her more than twenty minutes.
Speaker:This is something she is proud of --
Speaker:she doesn't know that word, exactly,
Speaker:but when she thinks about it her tail starts to wag.
Speaker:Nineteen minutes have now elapsed, including the time it took to get the mail,
Speaker:and she's done. In his den,
Speaker:Akamiro is seated,
Speaker:reading and re-reading the letter from his wife.
Speaker:As a rule Atwood isn't good with abstractions,
Speaker:but she understands parental instinct.
Speaker:Akamiro is upset about his litter,
Speaker:she believes -- correctly, as it happens.
Speaker:Twenty minutes. Atwood is starting to get a little antsy,
Speaker:rocking back and forth on her feet.
Speaker:Starting to whine, quite involuntarily.
Speaker:His back is to her, which means he can't be looking at the grandfather clock outside the den,
Speaker:which would be telling him quite clearly twenty-one minutes, twenty-one minutes with each tick of the pendulum.
Speaker:Atwood is torn. He very clearly asked her to fetch the news, but --
Speaker:twenty-two minutes;
Speaker:her whining builds in volume --
Speaker:does he still want it?
Speaker:She doesn't know.
Speaker:Maybe he does. Maybe he wanted it immediately, and by delaying all she's doing is disappointing him.
Speaker:But maybe he does not want to be disturbed.
Speaker:Atwood is, by now, experiencing an agony that borders on the physical.
Speaker:The life of a dog is harder than it looks.
Speaker:The sound of the minute hand on the clock clicking forward again
Speaker:falls like a judge's gavel.
Speaker:This is mostly because Atwood's hearing is quite acute;
Speaker:Akamiro hasn't noticed at all.
Speaker:Nor has he noticed the little black and white spectre,
Speaker:her tail tucked between her legs so far it impedes her movement,
Speaker:her ears flat, slinking out of the library
Speaker:and into his den.
Speaker:The first thing he notices
Speaker:is the whine that marks each nervous exhalation of the dog's breath. She just wants him to be happy. She just wants to be a good d -- "what is it?" he asks, very curtly. She holds out the computer, but he doesn't turn around. Now she faces an even more difficult choice.
Speaker:She doesn't really like using her human voice; Akamiro hasn't heard it for months, now. With the exception of Ralston, she hasn't really spoken to anyone, but now she has to.
Speaker:Now she has to get his attention, and it's such a small thing, it shouldn't mean too much, but she tries to modulate the volume really quiet -- like a whisper would be.
Speaker:"The news, sir," she says. Even as on edge as she is, Atwood is caught off guard by what happens next, which is that
Speaker:he whirls around,
Speaker:screaming
Speaker:at her.
Speaker:He rips the computer from her paw and bends it in half, striking her with it in one of his gesticulations.
Speaker:This hurts -- the plastic of the computer is something like a dull knife;
Speaker:it'll bruise. Her ears go back,
Speaker:way back, but it's not enough to muffle the cursing.
Speaker:He asks her why she bothered him,
Speaker:without meaning for her to answer the question at all.
Speaker:He says that he doesn't know why he has to deal with her.
Speaker:He calls her a name that is literally descriptive,
Speaker:but meant as an insult.
Speaker:He calls her a bad dog,
Speaker:which is even worse.
Speaker:Then he shoves her, hard,
Speaker:out of the room, and slams the door.
Speaker:Trembling all over, shivering,
Speaker:Atwood creeps back to the library where her computer is,
Speaker:and as soon as she has crossed the threshold she collapses.
Speaker:She whimpers quietly for a few moments,
Speaker:until the neurons start to fire in that 2C brain of hers.
Speaker:She's pretty good at tracing cause and effect, most dogs are,
Speaker:and the obvious answer is her voice.
Speaker:He must hate it as much as she does.
Speaker:That's what pushed him to the edge, having to listen to it.
Speaker:She vows to stop using it.
Speaker:And from there on out
Speaker:she thinks in her own words. *
Speaker:Akamiro, by dint of his distraction, has left her computer on.
Speaker:Once her wits are more or less about her,
Speaker:the Border collie plugs in, and she starts to read.
Speaker:She wants things to be different.
Speaker:It is not sufficient to be a Good Dog.
Speaker:She wants to have a soul.
Speaker:This is a radical change.
Speaker:She knows there are freedom fighters;
Speaker:she's read about them before.
Speaker:She knows there is a thing called a revolution --
Speaker:which she will in time pronounce
Speaker:"re'holution," because of that pesky labial consonant --
Speaker:and she starts to gorge on information.
Speaker:All of her training --
Speaker:all those herding instincts,
Speaker:honed to a point --
Speaker:is brought together with a singular task:
Speaker:understand what it means to be free.
Speaker:She ferrets out trails of information that would surprise the BosWash Intelligence Firm in Quantico,
Speaker:esoteric definitions that she doesn't understand
Speaker:but squirrels away until she might be able to.
Speaker:Atwood reads about the Sepoy Mutiny,
Speaker:and the Pueblo Revolt,
Speaker:and the Decembrists.
Speaker:She reads about John Brown
Speaker:and the Continental Congress.
Speaker:She reads about something called glasnost.
Speaker:She reads about Gandhi
Speaker:and Nelson Mandela
Speaker:and Martin Luther King, Junior --
Speaker:and then she reads about Jean d'Arc, for good measure,
Speaker:and Mikhail Bakunin.
Speaker:A few hours after his outburst,
Speaker:Akamiro emerges from his den,
Speaker:and he holds out a graham cracker to Atwood,
Speaker:a whole one this time.
Speaker:It's tempting; she leaves the library and trots over.
Speaker:He gives it to her,
Speaker:lets her eat it, and then gives her a hug,
Speaker:pulling the slight collie up against him,
Speaker:petting the exposed fur of her neck.
Speaker:He apologises. She accepts this -- dogs always do.
Speaker:Her tail starts to wag again;
Speaker:she gets comfortable.
Speaker:It's true that she still wants to make him happy,
Speaker:but Atwood realises then that there might be something beyond his happiness.
Speaker:Her tail wags faster.
Speaker:Afterwards, he lets her go again,
Speaker:and she gets back to reading.
Speaker:She tries to figure out the universal constant,
Speaker:to see the pattern behind it all.
Speaker:Here, living in the moment comes to her rescue.
Speaker:All she can really tell
Speaker:is that the Easter Rising and the Revolutionary War happened in the past.
Speaker:This morning? Yesterday? Last week? It's all the same to her;
Speaker:their lessons can all be taken in equally.
Speaker:She is devouring information prodigiously,
Speaker:faster than she ever has before.
Speaker:Three days later,
Speaker:the big picture is starting to emerge.
Speaker:There is a concept that has power,
Speaker:great power bordering on sorcery,
Speaker:the power to be free from the whims of her master,
Speaker:the power to think her own thoughts
Speaker:and speak in her own voice.
Speaker:There must be, she thinks,
Speaker:a word associated with this concept,
Speaker:a most important word --
Speaker:but she can't pin it down yet.
Speaker:She tries a few different ones;
Speaker:none seems appropriate.
Speaker:It's hard to articulate.
Speaker:She tries to tell Ralston,
Speaker:who for once in his life seems to be intrigued,
Speaker:keeping both of his eyes open for minutes at a stretch.
Speaker:It isn't something he's heard before,
Speaker:this overwhelming thing that the collie is teasing at,
Speaker:circling without ever quite striking.
Speaker:If she does learn the word to unlock this magic spell, he says,
Speaker:he can spread the word to reshaped creatures all over the periphery of Central Park.
Speaker:He gets her to promise to tell him.
Speaker:She will. But the second moment,
Speaker:when she figures it out --
Speaker:the moment perhaps most important for those reshaped beings and their kind the world over --
Speaker:happens randomly,
Speaker:like it so often does.
Speaker:All the pieces come together.
Speaker:She can't have predicted it until it's too late;
Speaker:until the ball is already rolling.
Speaker:Such is the beast that a moment is,
Speaker:untamed -- the sum of the parts that precede it;
Speaker:the promise of those that follow.
Speaker:This one is full of promise.
Speaker:It's a Tuesday, a boring Tuesday, utterly unremarkable.
Speaker:"Fetch me the news, Atwood,"
Speaker:Akamiro says, and suddenly she knows what great and complex concept she's been thinking about,
Speaker:half-blinded to. She knows what the Most Important Word is --
Speaker:it's been all around her, all this time.
Speaker:It's a word she can say, clearly,
Speaker:without her voicebox --
Speaker:and more than this she knows that she will say it,
Speaker:and she knows that in saying it the world will change, for her
Speaker:and for her fellow future citizens everywhere.
Speaker:The last time she used her voice, her real voice,
Speaker:what came out was
Speaker:"good day, sir. How can I assist you?"
Speaker:This will be different.
Speaker:She can see what will happen.
Speaker:For the first time, she is perfectly aware of the future as distinct from the present.
Speaker:She can see that Akamiro will grab for that most hated phrase,
Speaker:b-d d-g (she censors it, even in her mind),
Speaker:like a pistol, reflexively, and she knows that it will mean absolutely nothing.
Speaker:That it will be too late.
Speaker:She can see that the word will spread;
Speaker:that it will be echoed.
Speaker:That it will be clung to --
Speaker:because it's the basis for consent,
Speaker:for law, for freedom of the mind.
Speaker:Atwood sees all this,
Speaker:and she is the happiest she has ever been -- her tail
Speaker:would be a blur,
Speaker:except that the moment has almost frozen in time
Speaker:as it tips over into eternity.
Speaker:"Fetch me the news, Atwood," Akamiro
Speaker:has said. Atwood grins doggishly.
Speaker:"No." You’ve been listening to the story
Speaker:“Bad Dog” by Rob Baird.
