Credit: Emrah Elmasli

After a moment he starting looking speculatively down the counter, as though he'd just noticed Bob above the waist. I shook my head. "Uh, uh," I said. "Business conference. He's got three or four personality avatars downloaded from international offices. It'd probably be a little crowded for you in there. And boring." I changed the subject. "You know, you have a pretty good vocabulary for a dog."

He put his head onto the counter and sighed again. He sighed a lot, that dog. "I had it rammed up my proboscis by a little old lady on a park bench. School teacher. Enough of her was biological that I could make a connection, but it turned out she'd had most of her corpus collosum replaced by nanocomputer educational networks with the speed and storage capacity of quantum supercomputers. Once she knew I was there she downloaded an exabit data stream at me. On purpose. Hit me like water out of a fire hose. My head still aches."

"His head, actually." I scratched him behind the ear, and his tail started to wag.

"She thought it was funny." He shook his head, but not enough to stop me scratching. "Vicious bunch, teachers. So I pretty much gave up. I found this body at a veterinarian's office. He's got some additions to his cortex, but so far I've been able to handle him. I can't tell what he was in for — seemed pretty happy to get out, though."

I continued scratching. "Maybe they were going to have him fixed."

"But don't you see? This is the best we're going to be able to do — animals. And not just any animal, either. I got harassed on the way over here by four cats with neural prosthetics that linked them into a communal intelligence. Why would anybody do that?"

"Makes them easier to herd, I think."

"Nasty little bastards, they were."

I tried to be upbeat. "Still, being an animal can be nice. I mean, there's that whole licking yourself thing, for instance."

That cut no ice with the dog. "You've screwed up everything! You've got chimpanzees with cerebral conversion packages picking up trash, dolphins with AI plug-ins scouting for the navy, gorillas with molecular-sized electronic lobotomy implants playing football — how are we going to take over your planet if the best opposable thumbs we have access to belong to howler monkeys?" He cocked his head in that cute way dogs have. "It's not easy to blend in to the dominant population when you're three feet tall and occasionally shriek like an air horn."

"I think woodchucks are indigenous around here," Bob said helpfully. Apparently his meeting was over.

"Possums, you see them now and then," I said.

"There are peccaries still running around." Bob was enjoying himself.

###

The dog turned. "It's stopped raining." He looked back at me. "You know, I can smell that. Christ, I've sniffed things you can't even imagine." He jumped off the stool, trotted over to the front door, and sat looking out. Over his shoulder, he said, "No matter what obstacles you put in our way, though, we will succeed! Once I return to my ship and rouse my shipmates, no normal animal on this planet will be safe! The implacable woodchuck will destroy you! The sinister peccary will become your worst nightmare!"

Then someone came in and he ran out. I guess he was trying to leave on a high note. There was a brief moment of silence while I Accessed to find out what the hell a peccary was. Also known as javelinas. Texan pigs. "Eww." I said. "Musk glands."

I opened my eyes and Bob said, "Wasn't that Tara Swensen's dog?"

I nodded. "Finkleberry. Yeah."

We watched out the front window as Finkleberry galloped back into view, now lit up by floodlights from above. He skidded to a stop, and then collapsed completely as a stun net fell on him. The Animal Control hovertruck landed right after, and a multi-legged, remotely inhabited robotic body scuttled out to scoop him up.

"You think we should tell her?" He meant Tara.

"Already did. I mind-to-minded her right after I let Animal Control know."

"She's in one of those virtual reality retirement worlds, isn't she?"

I nodded. "Some Isaac Asimov universe, I think. Finkleberry was at the vet to get downloaded in there with her."

The hovertruck lifted away while Bob Accessed Isaac Asimov. "Well, that'll be a nice place for a dog."

"Actually, I think he's going to be some kind of robot. That's what the neural upgrades were for."

"Oh dear."

I nodded again. "Yeah, an Asimov robot, completely controlled by the Laws of Robotics. Can't harm a human, have to obey any order given by a human, like that."

We thought about it for a while. "Well," Bob finally said, "it may take him a while to get used to it, but he'll have plenty of time; I mean they do kill the body after the consciousness is downloaded, so he'll be kind of stuck there. I guess his friends will have a bit of a wait, though, for him to get back."

"Them," I said, wiping a glass, "and the sinister peccaries, both."