It was drizzling outside when the dog trotted in through the bar's open front door and stood there, dripping like he owned the place. I was behind the counter, rinsing and wiping and towelling, and he came over to me, shedding and panting and dribbling. He paused for a good shake, then jumped up onto one of the stools. "Kibble," he said. "And keep it coming."

He was a medium-sized mutt, with a foxy nose and floppy ears. I went over and slid a paper placemat in front of him, put some water in a bowl, and set it down. He looked really depressed, so I said, just to give him one for free, "We don't see many dogs in here." I figured it was the least I could do.

"It was all I could find," he muttered as he dropped his head and drank, sloppily.

"No, no," I said. "You're supposed to say 'And at prices like these, you won't see many more.' See, I said ... "

He looked up at me. "What are you?" he asked."Stainless steel?"

I looked down at my silvery body. "I think it's some kind of carbon/ceramic composite, actually. It's supposed to look like stainless steel, though. The owners thought it went with the bar's 1950s Sci-fi motif. They've got a bunch of bodies out back that look like old movie robots, too, for parties. I just plug in from home and ... "

"Woof!" he said, sharply.

I raised my carbon/ceramic eyebrows.

"Sorry." He seemed faintly embarrassed. "Something this stupid is really hard to control. Still gets away from me sometimes." He panted a little, looking around. "When I first attached myself I can't tell you how arousing I started to find human legs."

I looked at him more closely. "What kind of augment are you? An AI or something?" I didn't think real sentience in animals was legal, after those lions stole that car from the zoo last year.

He shook his head, gradually transferring to a full body shake.

"No, no," he said. "I'm part of an alien invasion force. We're here to conquer your planet."

Bob, who was down at the other end of the bar, looked up. "When you do, see if you can do something about this beer."

"Quiet, Bob, or you get cut off."

"You think this is funny?" the dog asked, looking lasciviously at Bob's right thigh. "A great many of my species will die off if we cannot find proper hosts. This planet was supposed to be full of them."

"Hosts?"

"Look at the back of my neck."

###

I looked. Sure enough, there was a black slug-like thing huddled there, seemingly attached via tentacles, or proboscises, or something even more disgusting-sounding, to the spine and base of the skull.

"I am an extraterrestrial parasitical life form," he said, with as much dignity as he could muster, having just licked himself. "It's what we're here for. To enslave you all." He sighed heavily. "We were supposed to be here about two hundred years ago, but our ship had engine problems." The dog shook his head. "Don't ask. We arrived a little late, that's all. You wouldn't think that'd be such a big problem, would you?"

I didn't say anything. Hey, I work in a bar. I know a rhetorical question when I hear one.

He jumped down from the stool and started scratching himself behind the ear. "But then we get here and ... you know, I was the first one off the ship when we landed. Everyone else stayed in suspended animation — I was supposed to latch on to some animal life and ride it to the nearest town. Get more hosts, you know?"

I nodded, not knowing in the least.

"So what's the first thing I hit? Some metal robotic cat-like ... " he ran out of words, disgusted. "I nearly broke a stinger trying to inject my nervous tissue into its spinal cord — hell, turns out it didn't even have a spinal cord.

"To top it all off, I hit some kind of switch in the process, and the thing started following me around and singing. Didn't stop for hours."

I um-hmmmed sympathetically. Sleepy-Time Kitty. My kid had one of those. They're made to be nearly indestructible, I'm convinced, because the designers know full well that at some point adults are going to try to turn them off with blunt objects. A bunch of them wandered off from the factory a few years back. They never did find them all.

"I figured it was just some kind of fluke." He sighed again. "Look, would you mind scratching my stomach? I could really use that."

Okay, fine. I've done stranger things for tips. I went around the counter and squatted down next to him.

"You can see my species isn't exactly built for mobility," he said.
"We evolved to hitch rides, basically. So it took me forever to get to town, what with that damn robot ... thing ... constantly ululating and scaring off every lifeform within miles. Oh yeah, that's good, right there." His leg began to jerk.

"When I finally did get into town I managed to climb a tree, then dropped onto the neck of the first human to go by. Easy-to-access spinal cord; big, prominently displayed head; soft, puncturable epidermis — just as advertised."

###

The dog sniffed in disgust. "Turned out to be some 250-year-old codger who'd had every bit of his body replaced by synthetics. God, that hurt. Oh, sure, he looked young, he looked prime, he looked like the perfect host; but no, his skin was made of some kind of biomimetic organic metal with embedded high-tensile-strength polymer fibres. So he pulls me off — which wasn't hard, because now I'm spitting out diamond film coating and can't hold on to anything — and turns around to lecture some kids behind him about how in his day, children had respect and didn't throw fish at their elders. Didn't throw me at the kids, of course. That might have helped. No, he dropped me in a trash can."

"He was just being a good citizen."

"He called me a dead fish. Anyway, eventually I crawled out. My next try was no better. She had an Artificial Intelligence implant, so even when I did get control of her biological brain, the artificial one just took over. When I tried to use her interface to control the AI, her regular brain started running things again. It was hopeless. Her date thought she was having a seizure, so I broke and ran — "

"Ran?"

The dog glared at me. "— flopped into her purse. After a few minutes, I crawled over and grafted myself to her friend. But he had a prosthetic neo-cortex, wired up with high bandwidth fibre optic connections and Web links. Almost fried me like an omelette."

"Speaking of which, you still want that kibble?"

"Gimme." He jumped back up on to the stool. "Since then I've hit three remotely controlled robot bodies, five synthetic cortex replacements, two diamond/bio-composite spinal cords, seven prosthetic neural networks, ten artificially grown mechanical synaptic systems, two self-aware personal digital assistant grafts, seven fully implanted childcare AIs with defensive capabilities, and I don't know how many nanorobotic immune system enhancers. Have you ever been attacked by a nanobot swarm?"

I walked back to the other side of the counter. "I got caught in a swarm of bees once." I didn't have the heart to tell him I'd been wearing a boron nitride multi-wall nanotube body, so they'd mostly just tickled.

He made a dismissive sound. "Bees! When we left my home system, you people could barely put in an artificial hip. But now ... " He gave me a look of disgust you rarely see from a dog, unless you make it wear some kind of hat. "Then there was that guy under the bridge. Multiple personality disorder. Haven't you cured that yet?"

I shook my head. "Against the law. When they wrote the AI Emancipation Act there were a few loopholes, so now if your multiples don't want to be eliminated, they can sue you."

"He had a Medical Alert Sensor Implant. I barely touched him and he went off like a car alarm."

"It's fresh kibble, you know," I said cheerfully. "We're known for it far and wide. Shut up, Bob."

"Even your DNA is just one more old sock for you to play with."

I winced at the analogy, but figured it was just the dog in him breaking through again.

"The four perfectly good chemical bases you evolved with aren't good enough for you any more, are they? You and your hyper-slick blood vessels and biological microwave broadcasting abilities and redesigned viscera. What do you think all that does to an extraterrestrial parasitical life form? One woman last night had seventeen brains — all scattered in groups of little networking nodes throughout her body. How are we supposed to gain control of seventeen brains?"

I admitted there was a good chance no one had considered that.

"And that's not even mentioning the non-human genetic transfers. Shark cartilage! I hit a guy with a reinforced shark cartilage support framework. He'd completely replaced his skeleton with some kind of automorphing micromesh brace. What kind of human doesn't even have a spine, for God's sake?"

Political humour not seeming appropriate, I let that one go.

###

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."

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