Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  Maybe doing the equivalent of hitting him in the back with a sledgehammer multiple times had done some kind of real damage, and he’d bled to death internally. That would be… terrifying? Horrible? I quickly told myself that that wasn’t the case.

  The other possibility was that someone else had done this. Maybe if he was a particularly bad dude, which was strongly indicated by our brief interactions, he had a list of enemies ten miles long and someone had decided that it was a prime opportunity to get rid of him.

  I’d have to tell Dan, and we’d see if we needed to take any measures, just in case. I’m not sure how the law dealt with situations involving magical combat, but I had the feeling it wouldn’t be sympathetic to the story surrounding our Strip District activities.

  And if he’d died as a result of injuries I’d inflicted…

  Once again, I just didn’t want to think about that. I took the thought, threw it into a well, and started chucking all of the other explanations I could think of on top of it.

  “What was your name again?” I said.

  “Babd,” she said.

  “I have like a million questions for you.”

  “I may be able to answer some of them.”

  “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “I’m going to take a walk and get some coffee and breakfast. You’re welcome to tag along and stick around as long as you don’t get weird. Well, weirder.”

  She stood up, and her tail started wagging again.

  “Did you say ’Walk’?” she said.

  “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  I was being surprisingly placid about this. I’m not sure why. But what kind of reaction would have been normal? What’s the gauge look like on this type of thing? Maybe there isn’t one. Had I been exposed to so much rampant weirdness that this was my baseline now?

  As we went toward the front door, I instinctively reached for a leash that didn’t exist, hanging from a hook to the left of the door that had never been installed in this house. I felt a stabbing, and my breath caught for a moment. Old habits. Shit. It shouldn’t feel like this after years and years.

  You walk toward the front door with your dog, you grab the leash and you go. At first, you think about it, but then the muscle memory sets in, and what was conscious before is now reflex. And then you reach for it years later when there’s no leash and no dog, and a memory floods your system with something that makes you sad. Biology drives behavior which drives biology.

  “You are hurt,” said Babd.

  “I’m fine,” I said and opened the door.

  We walked. It was only about fifteen minutes to Square, enough time for some Q&A with Babd.

  Q: Are you magical?

  A: No. Yes.

  Q: How old are you?

  A: At least fifty years by your frame of reference, but it really doesn’t apply.

  Q: What’s your interest in me?

  A: You are doing something that hasn’t been done before. Harnessing forces in a way unique to my experience.

  Q: What do you think of me?

  A: I do not yet know you.

  Q: What’s your favorite kind of dog food?

  - no answer -

  Q: Is there anything else I should know about you?

  A: I do not yet know you well enough to know the kind of information you would find valuable.

  After that, we started seeing a few people out and about. I figured it wouldn’t be fantastic to be seen talking to a dog as though I expected to get a response, so I pushed pause on the Q&A.

  A couple minutes later, and we were at Square. I ordered a coffee and a Western omelet to go while Babd waited outside. When the food came, I grabbed one of the outside tables. It was chilly but sunny.

  I gave her half the omelet. She ate it, and when she finished, she sat. Her eyes closed against the sunlight, and she raised her muzzle a bit, that thing that dogs do when they’re soaking in the sun. Instinctively, my hand fell on her head, and I scratched. Then, I realized I was scratching behind the ear of a sentient being.

  “Oh sorry,” I said and pulled my hand away.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Biology.”

  I patted her head then and ate my eggs.

  After that, we sat silently and absorbed the light and warmth for while. It was nice.

  No one else was around, so I said, “Babd.”

  Nothing.

  “Babd?”

  The dog looked up at me, and it was just… dog. There was clearly a set of rules and regulations here that I was completely unfamiliar with. It seemed that Babd was no longer there. Or maybe she/he was. How could I even tell? I needed a consult with my favorite Praecant, but he was rarely up before 3 p.m.

  And I had work to do. I had that client in a couple of hours. I didn’t really need to prep, but I figured I should at least shower, shave and look presentable so as not to fulfill the worst of their expectations.

  I got up, and the dog did too. She followed me home but didn’t say anything else. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, so I invited her back in and made a little bed out of towels and a blanket on the floor. With a little coaxing, she walked over to it, turned around in a circle a few times and laid down.

  “You in there?” I said.

  She just smiled and panted a little.

  I had a couple of hours to kill, so I did the regular things. I took a really long shower, letting the hot water kick over my neck and shoulders. I tried to close my eyes and purposefully relax everything. That was hard to do. If I was a person who liked massages, a massage would probably be a good idea right about now.

  I shaved, and my chin was bruised and scuffed where Stoneface had hit me. I went over that part really carefully. My teeth were sore too. I was lucky that shot hadn’t broken anything. He was strong.

  Well, had been strong.

  And what about that? Stoneface was dead. I’d already gone over how bad that could potentially be from a number of troubling angles. It was a problem of a class that I wasn’t used to dealing with, and at the moment it seemed easier to stick it in a bin labeled “Stuff To Think About Later, But Most Especially Not Now.” I knew that wasn’t a great way to handle it, but I’m not sure I was capable of doing anything else.

  I brushed my teeth and got dressed. It felt good to think that the debris of the last couple of days was floating down the drainpipes. Except that it wasn’t. There was a not-talking talking dog sleeping in my living room, and a dead body in Shadyside. But then again, I’d kind of asked for this, right? When I’d started down this path with Dan, and the experiments, and Fox a year ago, even though I couldn’t have predicted these exact things, I should have at least expected something like it.

  Weirdness.

  Terribleness?

  I’m sure there’s a better word for it, but I’ll leave that kind of thing to the English majors.

  I still had a little time before I had to leave for work, so I grabbed Fox from the computer station and headed into the back room. The software wasn’t ready yet, but I had the feeling that the next few days were going to be hectic. I should install the new communications module I’d been working on sooner rather than later.

  I’d done a bunch of experimental work with Dan and his Sentist magic. With the right spells, he could both read minds and change them. I was able to trace the basics of it, so I had a small chip fabricated of specialized materials that was sensitive to human thought. I’d tuned it specifically to my own.

  I sat Fox on the workbench next to the little plastic bin that held the chip. Using a tool that looked like something from a dentist’s office, I pried open an access flap on Fox’s handle and slid out a tiny tray. There were locking slots for three chips there, my attempt at making him expandable in the future. This communications chip was the first try.

  As I picked the chip up with a pair of tweezers, I thought hard about it. A little red light on the chip flared for an instant. It was very much like an LED in construction with the exception that it was made fr
om alternative, magically sensitive materials. It could be powered by my thoughts.

  Like I said, the software wasn’t ready, but once I’d written the right drivers for the chip and gotten the AI software working correctly (and after a sufficient training period), I should be able to simply think of a payload and have Fox magically create it for me.

  That was pie-in-the-sky stuff though. Way down the road if it ever even worked at all.

  I texted my client with a meeting place: a particular bench in Frick Park. It would be out of the way, but not so out of the way that two people fooling around with a laptop there would be suspicious or even noteworthy.

  I wanted to take Babd along, but I realized that I didn’t have a leash or collar for her. You weren’t allowed to have dogs off leash in the park.

  Wait. Scratch that.

  I did have a collar. It was layered in amongst a bunch of other stuff in a little brown treasure chest I’d gotten from my dad when I was eight. So, I did have a collar, but it was off limits.

  There was a Total Pet in the plaza several blocks away, or at least I thought there was. I didn’t routinely buy pet supplies these days. A quick check on the Internet indicated that in fact it was still there, and it was open. Awesome. I’d swing by and grab a collar and leash on the way to the park. Maybe some dog food too. Did dog-possessing spirits like dog food?

  On my way out the door, I felt a nagging. I should probably take Fox. He sat there on the workbench, pure potential. It seemed stupid and even a little grandiose to want to take him along. There was no need for it with what I was doing. But, the nagging. Some part of my brain was running scenarios and simulations and was whispering: “Take him.”

  I resolved that I’d put him in the glove box. There if I needed it. I grabbed my backpack toolkit too.

  Out the door then, to the car. Come on doggy. Good girl.

  We drove the short distance to the plaza. I left Babd in the car, ran inside Total Pet and got the requisite collar and leash. We bopped on over to Frick, where there was plenty of parking. The weather was nice enough that I rolled the passenger side window down and Babd, being a dog, happily kept putting her head in and out of the air stream.

  Babd took the collar without complaint, and after I leashed her, we walked around until we came to the designated bench. Once again, it was nice to just sit in the sun.

  As we waited, I pulled out my phone.

  come by later? I messaged to Gwen. making some progress

  I’d been doing therapy sessions with Gwen at her insistence, and after the last couple of days, it felt like things were rattling around in my head in a really positive way. Stuff was chugging and surfacing that I hadn’t thought in years. She could probably help me make sense of it.

  Future project mental note: apply multi-tuning capabilities to the thought-activated chip I’d just installed in Fox so (if everything else worked out as I hoped) it could relay messages to select subjects just by thinking to them. I wondered if the Praecants had a patent office.

  No response from Gwen, but the app showed that she had at least seen my message.

  Might as well message Dan too, so he’d have something to do when he got up:

  Lots o questions. call me

  “Mr. Booth?” said a voice. That’s the name I use when I advertise my services. I looked up from my phone. A woman stood there with a laptop bag in her tightly clenched fist. She was tall and wore sweatpants and a jacket. Something about the way she stood and her makeup made me think that she didn’t usually go out in public in sweat pants. She looked at me like I was a complete piece of shit, which I kind of was.

  “I don’t know a Mr. Booth,” I said. “But are you having computer problems? Maybe I can help. Have a seat.”

  “I’d rather stand,” she said.

  “That looks really suspicious, and this is going to take a few minutes. I strongly suggest you sit and look like you just can’t figure out why this thing won’t turn on.”

  “My husband-”

  “Shut it,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”

  She put the laptop case down on the bench between us as she sat. Her body language was all crossed and facing away from me, and I can’t say that I blame her.

  I pulled the computer out. A decent Dell model, one with a regular hard drive as opposed to one of the SSD’s. I got out my tool kit.

  It took less than a minute to extract the hard drive, RAM, the processor’s RAM cache and the chip on the network card that carried the unique MAC address. I put them all in a little plastic bin from my backpack, opening the hard drive’s case as I did so. The platters inside were deep mirrors, reflecting my face with a dark purple cast. I squeezed a little green capsule from the backpack, causing a membrane inside it to break, then popped it into the container. I sealed the lid.

  A couple of shakes after the capsule had burst, and everything inside the container was coated with acid. I let it soak for a while.

  After counting to fifty, I opened the container, careful not to let any of the acid drip onto my hands or inhale the fumes too strongly. Then, holding the lid so that it acted as a strainer, I put the container close to the ground and poured the acid into the dirt. It wasn’t a lot, and it soaked in pretty quickly.

  I got a small, heavy-mil plastic bag out of my backpack, put a couple of rare earth magnets into it, and emptied the contents of the container into it as well. I sealed the zip lock.

  “Are you finished?” the woman said.

  “Relax,” I replied. “Almost done.”

  The last step was the noisiest. I took a quick look around, and there was no one in sight but her, myself and Babd. I carry a stubby but effective hammer in the backpack. I pulled it out and gave the bag four sharp blows. With each impact, I saw the woman stifle a jerk.

  “Someone’s going to hear you,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  I looked her in the eyes.

  Smash.

  “Everyone.”

  Bang.

  “I’m smashing.”

  Bang.

  “Bad, bad stuff.”

  She was shaking a little bit, and I saw tears lining the bottoms of her eyes.

  Damn it. I shouldn’t have done that. Mean.

  I wasn’t going to bother apologizing though. This wasn’t that kind of deal.

  “It’s done,” I said. “This is unrecoverable.”

  The bag was filled with broken, burned bits of plastic and metal, little sparkling shards whose digital secrets were now lost to the great dragon of entropy that wants every single one of us in its belly.

  She pulled an envelope from her jacket pocket. It was thick. As long as she was playing fair, and they always did in this situation, it contained six-thousand dollars in cash.

  “Do you want this back?” I said, pushing the plastic bag toward her.

  “Get rid of it,” she said. “All of it.”

  She stood up and turned to leave.

  “You know,” I said, “if any of this is in the cloud, this isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “I guess he’ll just have to risk it,” she said, almost a whisper.

  “Well, get in touch if they end up tracing traffic back to your house. I can probably help you out.”

  She walked away. I put the envelope in my backpack, followed by the plastic bag and laptop shell. I closed my eyes hard and took a long breath in, then out.

  Six-thousand dollars to destroy what was most likely felony evidence.

  “I missed the first part of that,” said a voice at my feet.

  Babd stood there.

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re back.”

  “Yes,” said the dog. “I was elsewhere.”

  “I noticed. Where were you?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “No.”

  Okay.

  “What were you doing? Is this your job?” she said.

  “Yeah. I guess.” I closed my eyes again. The mon
ey in the backpack was very, very necessary. I felt…

  I wasn’t sure how I felt. Closed off. I knew that what I was doing wasn’t good. Maybe it wasn’t bad-bad, like evil bad, but it certainly wasn’t good. I couldn’t really feel it, though. It was just stuff I was doing. Driving to a park. Hitting a bag with a hammer. I knew that I didn’t like it. That my mom and dad wouldn’t be happy if they were still around.

  Screw it.

  If you can’t open up to a dog-possessing spirit, then who can you open up to?

  “Got a minute?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Babd.

  “Okay. Four years ago, I was really doing great. Ph.D. candidate at CMU in computer science, undergrad degrees in electrical engineering and biochemistry. I did work in materials science, too. Everyone told me I was a genius since I was a kid, and I kind of am. A bunch of startups were after me, and I already had a good job.

  “We were having a family reunion. It was a big deal. Everyone was there, even a lot of the family that hadn’t come in in years. It was in a bunch of pavilions on a hill in North Park. We... "

  I blinked.

  “There was an explosion. Some idiot broke a gas line in the maintenance building next door. They never figured out who. I didn’t even know it happened. I don’t remember it. I was just… gone, I guess. I woke up four months later in the hospital. They told me I’d been conscious for weeks but wasn’t retaining things from day to day. I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember it.”

  “But they told me about the gas explosion. It pretty much blew the top of the hillside off. Everyone else…"

  “I was the only one who lived. Sixty-four people. My mom and dad. My sister. May-”

  My throat clenched. God damn it with the dogs again. I gathered myself for a second. Repeated blinking can sort of dry the eyes, I hear.

  “And that was it. I couldn’t get it together. I tried to go back to work. Finish my Ph.D. But I couldn’t. I don’t know if it was the concussion or just the whole thing. It got pretty bad.”

  “So now… well, you saw what I’ve been doing with Dan. There’s that. But to pay the bills, I do ’concierge’ IT work. Mostly it’s spying on husbands and wives or hacking systems that other people put in to spy on them. Or getting rid of nasty stuff that the wrong people find on their computers.”