by Ted Myers
“So, when you blow the place up, you’re going to kill the people?”
“The bad people, yeah,” said Hacker.
“I won’t do it.” Fluffy was adamant. “I won’t be part of any violence. Sabotage maybe, but not killing. Look, my dad the professor is a very wise man, and he told me something before I left home. He said ‘humans are the most violent species on Earth. Don’t try to beat them at their game.’ If we start killing people, it will set off a chain reaction of events that will be very bad for our cause, and lots of us will get killed.”
There was a moment of silence, then everybody began to speak at once. “They’re the killers,” screamed Mitzi.
“They’re killing us, let’s kill them back!” said Tigger.
“The people at these extermination centers are monsters. Believe me, I know,” said Janet.
“Wait, wait!” said Giuseppe. “I think Fluffy has a good point. Killing people will make us look like the bad guys. We have a chance to get public opinion on our side. We could free the animals without hurting anyone―we can just put them to sleep with the Livion.”
“Let’s take a vote,” said Fang.
“Okay,” said Hacker, “we’ll vote on it. All in favor of blowing up the Extermination Center, say ‘aye.’”
Mitzi and Tigger said “aye.”
“All opposed, say ‘nay.’”
Fluffy, Fang and Giuseppe said “nay.”
“Janet?”
There were tears of rage in Janet’s eyes. “Blow ‘em up,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“What about you, Rudy? You haven’t said anything.”
“I don’t know,” said Rudy, looking over at Janet. “I guess I abstain.”
There was a brief silence. Then Hacker said, “So it’s up to me.” Hacker paced back and forth on the workbench, mulling it over.
“Giuseppe, your point about PR is a good one. I say we hold off on the whole operation for a few days. I gotta think about this some more.”
“What’s there to think about?” said Tigger. “Either we kill ‘em or we don’t.”
“No,” said Hacker, “it’s not that simple. What’s bothering me is, why is it so easy for them to kill us?”
“Because we’re not human,” said Fang.
“Exactly. So what is it we lack that would make the humans believe we were more like them?”
“A voice,” said Fluffy.
“Yes. A voice we can take with us wherever we go. Without a computer to make our thoughts audible, we’re just the same as any dumb animal to them. If only there were something very small that could emit a lot of sound…”
“You mean, like a Miniblaster?” said Fluffy.
“Yes! How do you know about Miniblasters?”
“I saw―that is, I heard one out on the street. Boy, was it loud.”
“Fluffy, I think you’ve hit on something. Giuseppe, Rudy, do you think you could get me a few of those?”
“Sure,” said Giuseppe. “Just give us until tomorrow.
“Think of it,” said Hacker, “being able to speak out in our own voice, anyplace, anytime. Now that would be a real revolution.”
The Miniblaster was made by the electronics giant, WorldAsia, part of the Triumvirate. That night, the WorldAsia warehouse was broken into and two thousand Miniblasters were stolen.
While Rudy, Janet, and Giuseppe were out pulling the heist, Hacker and Mitzi stayed behind and worked into the night, perfecting the other component of the invention, a microprocessor that could be installed in the guts of the Miniblaster that mimicked the computer program that made thoughts into audible words.
Near dawn, the band of burglars returned with the Miniblasters and Hacker assembled the first prototype. The posse had raided a Petco weeks earlier to get food and had acquired a few cases of pet collars in various sizes, but there were none small enough for a mouse, so Janet donated a small bracelet, which Rudy made even smaller until it fit around Hacker’s neck. Everyone waited in breathless anticipation as he activated the prototype. Hacker thought for a moment. Then his words rang out, loud and clear: “Creatures of the world, unite!” Everyone let out a loud cheer, but the computer had been turned off, so all the humans heard was a bark, a squeak, and two meows.
Then they all worked together to assemble a voice disc (that’s what they decided to call them) for each four-legged member of the posse. Each found a collar in the cache of stolen collars and put their voice disc around their neck. Rudy made Mitzi a collar from the rest of Janet’s bracelet. Then, each, in turn, tested his or her voice. They all worked beautifully, and they were thrilled with their new, audible voices.
“I’ve decided to cast my vote in favor of nonviolence,” said Hacker. There were grumbles from the dissenters, but the die was cast. “We sleep today, and tonight―Operation Liberatis!”
“What do we do with all the animals we liberate?” asked Fluffy.
Silence.
“Uh oh, here we go again,” said Tigger.
And then Fluffy got her second flash. The same illustration, the Animal U logo, but this time the inscription read: GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE… I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE WEST KILL FALLS.
“Did you see that?” cried Fluffy. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
Everyone mumbled at once. It was clear Fluffy was the only one who was getting these flashes.
“Look, I’ll show it to you.” And Fluffy recreated her vision and sent it out to everyone. There were murmurs of puzzlement.
“Where is West Kill Falls?” asked Fluffy.
“It’s on West Kill Mountain,” said Giuseppe. He took out his handheld and projected a map of the Catskills. An arrow on the screen zeroed in on the spot. “Here it is, one of the highest peaks in the Catskills, about thirty miles northwest of here on Route 28.”
“That’s where Animal U is, I’m sure of it,” said Fluffy.
“What’s Animal U?” asked everyone at once.
“I think Animal U is a secret university for GAB animals to hone their special skills,” said Fluffy. “Maybe we’re supposed to take all these liberated animals up there.”
“Are you kidding?” said Hacker. “We’re talking about, like, 100 animals here!”
“Yes,” said Fluffy. “It’s a problem.”
“Well, isn’t it enough to set them free? Do we have to take them with us? Why not just turn ‘em loose and get the hell out of there?” said Tigger.
“They’d only get caught again and exterminated,” said Fluffy. “No, we have to find a way to get them to Animal U.”
“How ‘bout we load them all into the A.C. trucks and drive them up there in a convoy?” suggested Rudy.
“Are you nuts?” said Hacker. “How far do you think we’d get with five stolen A.C. trucks loaded with 100 animals? About ten feet, I think.”
A long silence, then:
“I think I got it,” said Fang. Everyone shut up and listened. Fang didn’t speak very often. She had been abused by her humans and was very circumspect, but when she did, she usually had something to say. “We put the liberated animals―and ourselves― in the robot animal boxes and disguise us all as robopets. We load the boxes onto a big truck that looks like an Epsilon truck, have Giuseppe and Rudy, dressed as Epsilon drivers, drive the truck up the mountain, and hope to hell the cops go for it.”
After a long pause, Hacker said, “Y’know, it just might work.” Everyone excitedly expressed their approval.
“You know, Fang, you’re pretty smart,” said Fluffy. “
…for a dog.” And she telepathically sent her a smiley-face.
Fang looked at Fluffy. Her brown eyes shone with emotion, her tongue drooped out, and she smiled―in a way that dogs can and cats can’t.
“So, this means the operation is postponed again,” said Hacker. “We need to steal a big truck and disguise it as an Epsilon truck. Better yet, let’s steal a real Epsilon truck. No, scratch that, they’ll be looking for it. We disguise a stolen truck as an Epsilon truck and we get a couple of Epsilon uniforms for Giuseppe and Rudy.”
“What about me?” asked Janet.
“You follow in the pickup,” said Hacker, “we may need to use it for a quick getaway. There are plenty of other details too, like, how are we going to get all those animals packed up in the robot boxes and loaded into the truck before the A.C. people and the cops get after us?”
They didn’t know how long it would take them to solve all the logistics problems, but Fluffy felt a particular sense of urgency. Every minute that passed meant more animals were being murdered.
Chapter Three – The Triumvirate
Jeremiah Epps called the senior management meeting to order. “I invited Chief Davis of the D.I.S. here to discuss the recent robot thefts,” said Epps. The D.I.S. was the Department of Internal Security, the overarching law enforcement organization in the Western Hemisphere. Davis headed up the Northeastern U.S. Division.
Epps, a paunchy man in his fifties, was the fifth generation of Epps patriarchs to own Epsilon. He had thinning gray hair, doughy white skin, and the straight nose and blue eyes of the white, Anglo-Saxon patrician class of old—a rarity in today’s racial mish-mash. And he wore glasses―amber-tinted glasses. Now, practically no one actually needed to wear glasses anymore. These days, any vision defect could be cured with some form of laser surgery, or in the worst cases, contact lenses. No, Jeremiah Epps wore tinted glasses to hide the fact that he had a false eye―a fully-functional ocular implant, to be precise. It enabled him to see just fine, but at the time he had the surgery, they hadn’t quite perfected the cosmetics of it, so it looked a little creepy. A cat which he had been tormenting scratched out his left eye when he was a child. He had never been fond of animals, but from that day on he hated them.
Jeremiah Epps’s great, great grandfather, Lucien Epps, was a visionary; the Henry Ford of renewable energy. With his revolutionary series of mega-storage batteries that could power everything from cars to homes to factories, he obliterated the fossil fuel industry practically single-handedly. His vision was not simply to get rich―he was rich―but to change the world, to reverse global warming and close the income gap. He accomplished those goals during his lifetime. But gradually, through the subsequent Epps dynasties that controlled Epsilon, the company reverted to the old, greed-based corporate credo of “bottom line, first, last, and always.”
Now Epsilon was part of the Triumvirate, the consortium of the three largest corporations that ruled the world: Epsilon in the Western Hemisphere and some Pacific islands, WorldAsia in Asia and Australia, and Pharmacor in Europe and Africa. All national governments were subservient to the Triumvirate. Since so-called democratic elections had become a joke anyway, with the mega-corps buying the candidates who would do their bidding, the charade of elections was eventually done away with and the corporations simply appointed politicians to lead nations and states.
The companies owned by the Triumvirate supplied ninety-nine percent of the world’s goods and services. They had replaced millions of human workers with specialized robots. At first, this resulted in mass riots and breadlines. So, to avoid social unrest, and to placate the now-unemployed masses, the Triumvirate built residential communities for all the people who did not have the high-tech or business skills needed to become executives, scientists, or politicians. They were called Recipient Communities (ripcoms) but were more like refugee camps. They were hastily-constructed bunker-like barracks where multiple families had to share a few rooms. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire fences and guarded by armed human and robot guards. People coming in and going out had to show their I.D. and explain the reason for their entrance or exit. The Recipients, as they were called, were given food ration coupons which enabled them to survive, but not much more. The patrician corporate class, which included all employable professionals, were called the Contributors. These terms were eventually shortened to rips and cons.
The Triumvirate also subsidized the arts and sports, human skills that could not as yet be matched by robots. So the arts flourished, as did athletic accomplishments.
The corporations still managed to be massively profitable because, although they paid out huge amounts in subsidies, they also made huge profits because robot labor was virtually free.
The world was now without wars and all countries shared the same currency and standard of living. And all countries had a few cons and many rips. Robot and human soldiers maintained the peace. The practice of religion, which was seen as the root cause of most conflicts, was banned, except in certain approved houses of worship and in the privacy of one’s home. Any public demonstration of religious zeal was immediately and forcefully squelched.
But, in their wisdom, the corporations realized that to truly placate the masses and consolidate their absolute power, the masses needed someone to hate, a common enemy to rally against. History had taught them that, for humans to kill and torture without conscience, they had to believe that their victims were either not or less than human. And so, Jeremiah Epps convinced the other two oligarchs who controlled the world, Ho Chung Tanaka of WorldAsia, and Heinrich Himmelmann of Pharmacor, that accusing GAB animals of being terrorists would be a great solution. There was no question that they were not human, and their strange powers scared people. And thus began the great campaign against animal terrorism.
All of the principals of Epsilon’s upper management were gathered at the long table in Meeting Room A, which was on the top floor of the two hundred-story Epsilon Building in downtown Kingston. Two walls of the room were floor-to-ceiling windows that provided a spectacular view of the Kingston harbor to the east and the mountains to the north. Present were: Ahmet Patel, CFO and VP Finance, a small brown man in his forties, Aurora Malvolio-Jones, VP Communications, a tall woman of mixed lineage in her thirties, Jorge Peña, VP Sales, a man in his fifties of Latino descent (all sales executives in all of the fifteen divisions of Epsilon reported to him, including Larissa Jacobi, VP Robot Sales, a short woman of mixed lineage, who sat beside him at the table), and Terrence Baker, VP Marketing for all 15 divisions, a tall, fair-haired man in this thirties. Seated next to Epps on his right was his second in command, Valerie Trump, Senior VP Operations. She was a sleek, dark-haired woman in her thirties, who appeared to have a mixture of Asian and European lineage. On his left was Epps’s secretary, Charlotte Beauchamp, who recorded the meeting.
Epps was not pleased. He scrolled through the quarterly earnings reports one more time. One item kept jumping out at him, glaring, mocking: LOSSES DUE TO THEFT. Hundreds of robots had been stolen from Epsilon warehouses. The people who were supposed to be guarding them had been anesthetized quickly and silently. They never saw who did it. The warehouse computers were hacked so expertly, the records doctored to hide the loss, that they couldn’t tell for weeks just how many robots had been stolen.
The missing robots were all from Epsilon’s new line of robot pets. They were perfectly life-like dogs and cats, available in a wide assortment of breeds and sizes. They had the latest enhanced features: realistic skin and fur, moist eyes and mouths, a pulse, simulated breathing, and the newest feature: body heat. They were programmed to play, bark, meow, purr, pant, chase balls, catch Frisbees, and display affection, just like real pets. They were actually superior to real animals, in that you never had to feed them or walk them, and they never pooped, peed, or threw up. And they never scratched or bit you.
Chief Davis sat at the far end of the long table. “Well, Chief,” said Epps, “what have you got for us?”
“We know it was done by some kind of animal terrorist group,” said Davis.
Morgan Davis was a former beat cop who had worked his way up through the ranks. He was a huge black man in his mid-fifties; still an imposing physical specimen, though now a bit soft in the belly. “They left a sort of calling card.”
“What was that?”
“It’s a paw print, spray-painted with a stencil on the warehouse wall.” The Chief showed everyone an enlarged photo of the symbol. It was hard to tell if it was the print of a dog or a cat.
“How did they get in?” asked Epps.
“We don’t know. The robot sentinels were all deactivated and the human guards were given Livion gas. It knocked them out, and they remembered nothing. The same group used the same M.O. to hijack a bunch of pet food from a Petco a couple of weeks ago, and just the other night, they stole some Miniblasters from a WorldAsia warehouse.”
“Hmm, now why would they do that? Maybe all these thefts are tied into some kind of master plan… Are you going to introduce us to your associate?” asked Epps, indicating a pale, thin man sitting in a chair, not at the table, in the corner.
“Oh, sorry. That’s Zvonar,” said the chief. “He’s a new Special Investigator in the Animal Terrorism unit.”
Zvonar gave Epps a cursory nod, his face expressionless.
“What are his qualifications?” asked Epps, somewhat annoyed. He was used to being consulted about new hires in the Animal Terrorism unit.
“He has no law enforcement credentials,” said Davis. “His only qualification is that he is psychic.”
“Psychic?”
“Yes, he can pick up the telepathic communications between the GABs. A very valuable qualification, wouldn’t you agree?”
