Woof

Though the snow glistened off the white picket fence, and the sun struck it at precisely the angle you would have expected – while positioned in the “capture” designation – it did not wake John. John was already awake. And as he walked downstairs, stole down them, he looked right at it, dark in the corner, unlit.

“Tree, on” he yawned.

As the lights pinged an orderly march – red, blue, orange, yellow, green – his quick glance prolonged, and he calculated. He glanced over it, a mountain, inspecting and measuring equally. Some seemed right. Others, pointless. He smiled in anticipation.

He honored the traditions he knew. He flipped the Coffee switch, pressed the Creamer button, and swiped the Waffles to the left. In measured minutes, while he watched his favorite cartoons, breakfast was served. As he assembled the parts, created something familiar and something portable, he heard some slight rustling upstairs. Up he walked, smiling.

“Oh John, you didn’t have to!”

His mother was delighted, and put on the smile he loved. He saw a hint in that smile. Having already surveyed his bounty, John could not hide his anticipation. Knowingly, and with the hidden grace and appreciation of parents, his mother and father rushed the breakfast.

“Now, John which pres –,” but John heard only his father’s beginnings, as he was off on a tear of anticipation. He could not click the disassembly buttons fast enough. He was no longer struck by the mechanization – the twisting, unwinding, the undoing of red, green, white, an unfurling candy cane, atomization in reverse – it provoked no curiosity in him, not anymore. No – only the contents mattered, now.

In the shadows of these organized, redgreen stacks, John frowned. An hour of disassembly – a pile of disappointment. He was not yet old enough to feign, not even at grandma’s handmade sweater. “Johnathan,” his father said, “Your grandmother Ruth made this by hand. Do you know, in our time, in this year, how rare – ” But John heard nothing except the gears of the next disassembly apparatus. His father finished his speech, muttering.

At his age, in this time, John could never have anticipated what came next. The references were long lost. Once, when John was two, his father took something out – a “disc,” he called it – and made Johnathan watch with him, staring at a wall. “But daddy,” John asked, “Why can’t I touch? Why can’t I touch?”

“Well, John, this is how it used to be. We had to keep our favorite videos, then. Our memories and our art and everything we thought was...good. Everything was kept, and you could hold it, all of it. It was –”

“Bweakable!”

That day, he met John with laughter and smiles. He could only chuckle, then, at a five year old’s sense of the world, of time and place. He knew he could teach John about what used to be kept, about the memories and the importance of the tangible. He believed it, but it was Christmas now, years later, and there was one last present. A present he had hidden.

“Oh, John –” a wry glance in her direction, an exchange, “Gosh, would you look at that. It seems like you missed one. Way in the back there. That blue one. Do you see it?”

Tucked away, its glisten had missed John. He almost did not believe his father at first, but his mother’s smile, too bright against the lights, gave it away. This was it. Trampling adapters and modifiers and even that brand new Simulation – the Achilles one, as authentic as they came – he ran to it. The others were no longer important.

“Now this one, John, sweetie, this one we wrapped by hand, so be caref –”

A thud. A simple sound, soft. John’s finger thudded – and thudded, and thudded – against the paper. It shone and vibrated, just as his mother and father. “John, we wrapped it ourselves! There is no paper apparatus. It isn’t mechanical. You have to rip it by hand.”

His faced begged. He knew he had what he wanted; feeling the weight of it, shifting it, he measured the proportions in his mind. The proximity, the immediacy of the frustration crept into his face. His father reached out.

It froze them all, the crinkling and ripping sound. No one spoke; no music played. “Oh, it must be our Audio Synch again – been acting up all week. I’ll be right back. Go ahead, John, open it!”

John’s father leaned in. “See, son, that’s it, you just – you just have to go right ahead and,” pointing the bright twinkle in his eye, “Rip the paper!”

Before he could, John reconciled. It had been years since he dropped it. The last glass his mother and father kept, a trinket, an item so lost and irrelevant he only held it out of confusion. When he ran with it that day, when he yelled out, “Mommy, daddy, I get to play with it!” he hardly knew what he held. A family heirloom, and a symbol so obvious, so simple, it could only escape John at that young age. As the glass shards spread, geometrically arranging themselves across the kitchen floor in their perfect chaos, his father silently left the room, leaving John’s mother to the lecture and to the cleanup. His mother told John a story about his father’s father, and the origins of the glass, about how it was used a long time ago, part of a set from his childhood.

“Breakable things, John, were very common then. In fact, we were all a bit more breakable, in some ways.” John did not understand this, nor did she need him to. She swept and remembered, alone.

Now John began to rip, though he peeled at first, in order to feel the weightlessness and ease, in order to understand the sensation. The sound bothered him the most; it was not orderly, nor organized. It did not appeal to his mind, this chaos; it tugged at something he did know he withheld. This was a primordial realization; at 10, he did not understand it. It was a sound that felt like an ending. It was a sound of thunder.

“Dad, it’s…it’s…” John held it up, the trophy he had not earned and felt he deserved. The K9000. The only one, the one his father spent months chasing. To have suffered an endless stream of holo calls, and instant messages, and even that dreadful visit to the veterinarian – a trip from which he never fully recovered – those meant nothing to him now. The K9000 was all Johnathan wanted, and they knew it. And Jonathan knew that his joy was all they desired, all that brought them together, anymore. His beam reflected the white beyond the window. This was a full room.

"But DAD, how did you guys ev –"

"Heh! – Do you love it or what? We had to –"

"Honey, what’s that? Did he ope –?"

"Dad, no way, no WA –"

"Now, Johnathan, we need to firs –"

"I’ve got to show Bobby ohmygod he’s going to FL –"

"Wait, I want to scan for a pho –!"

Of this moment, the K9000 knew nothing. In its box, it waited, patient and perfect, a monument to a world in order. A world sure of itself.

Reverberations – random, askew –  and wrinkles scattering in the back of his mind, John slowly checked the box for its opening apparatus. The moment before, the abyssal tearing, had not left him. As if remembering a world unknown and passed, a breakable world, he slowly tapped it and then remembered how it could all unfold so quickly, so perfectly, just as people had intended it. Just as it had been designed.

"Dad, will it need a charge, or can we I take it out right aw –"

"Well, John, that’s right – the tech I spoke with assured me it would need at least a full day’s charge. So what we’ll have to –"

But John was gone, of course. He was taking the full measure of it. Checking its colors, and re-assessing his expectations. A quarter inch shorter than it looked on the holos; not as dark a hue as he’d hoped – especially on the back-right paw; a collie – surprising, and soft and light compared to the ‘gram ads which also let him see and feel; but then there it was, waiting: the soft dim of white in its eye.

This caught him. Then it began to choke. His attention squirmed, turned on itself and desperately spun, but his gaze could not leave. The eyes stared back, past and through John –  into his past. Back to the final visit to his grandfather before he passed. The faint glow in his eyes – not a twinkle, a death knell, a sentence to impermanence. A vortex of sand. Vacant and abandoned – neither understood an ending, and it was the first time John felt close to him, terrifyingly close. He ran out of the room, his father chasing him down hallways too white to be explained, too impossibly cleaned, insisting that it was a good ending – not the bad kind. “Grandpa cannot understand our conversations now, John,” his father had explained, “But he knows we are here. He can feel us; he doesn’t have to say anything. Just be with him John. Be with him near the end. We need – we must...”

Looking crookedly away through the blinds, he wondered if the K9000 understood their conversation. He wondered if its command module would yet be activated, if those dark pits, the bottoms of which were now all too visible, all too close to John, followed him, traced him, as his grandfather’s emptiness followed him that day.

Turning away in pain, John looked to his mother. Her smile pulled him, like a covering blanket, and, briskly, his mind wandered back to the perfection of the morning. His smile returned.

John had never held something so complete; something so incredible and produced. A single tear dropped, wicked immediately away by his t-shirt – an original “poly," some variety of organic extract, as his father told him – Ash Ketchum, and absorbed into the carpet, lost. He couldn’t see himself, then, and didn’t know how to measure it out. Stunned and placid, each holding the other and altogether frozen.

“Aw, sweety, could you just smile again a minute, I want the scan to capture everyth –”

“Now, Jonathan, listen for a second. Your mother and I – we did everything we could, really. We know how much you deserve this 9000. We know how much you wanted it, son, and we love you, so we –”

It took John time to start, but his lines had been programmed, rehearsed and internalized and measured, and it sounded perfect when he responded: “Mom, Dad, I promise you: I’ll take my best care of it, I will. I promise I’ll take great care and look after it every day, and I won’t be too rough. I won’t even show Bobby until –”

“We know, John, we know. Your father and I are just so proud of you. Why don’t we just go ahead and turn it on? Why wait? We’re so happy that you like it!”

“Now, Catherine, I do believe it needs a charge first. I don’t think we can just –”

A faint whir. The clicking is off in the distance; a sound that permeates yet does not penetrate. A calming whir which spoke. Mom, Dad – reassured, both smiling and beaming, directing it all at John. John, whose face cannot stop vacillating between the knowing of having it all and the fear of having all of it. John knew where it was. He did not have to be told; he had been born into knowing and he touched it and flicked it as soon as the aberration appeared alongside the belly of the K9000.

“Well would you look at that –”

“Hey, John, sweetie – look!”

He did not need to be told; he was already exploring. He knew where to start. Back at the white, the deep white, the recesses that shook him and which he wanted, desperately pleaded, to understand. It took him back to the tearing, and he looked away before he turned red. He wondered how its hairs were made and placed. He needed to know how its tail moved like the metallic swing set on his father’s desk – how it punctuated itself with perfection. He had to understand its ratio of brown to white to black. It was almost too much, too perfect, and its first step, taken with calculus, all too infinite – it depressed the strands of carpet it was always meant to depress. All three gaped.

Here it was.

Then, in a red scroll which replaced the faint white:

“AWAI…TING…RESP…ONSE…PROT…OCOL.”

“Well, that seems like a good place to start, John. Better give it a name.”

John kept his smile, clung to it, but in his mind, he was gasping and desperate for a hold. It came back to him again – the tearing sound, the simple destruction. His creation of infinite folds, the grotesque imperfections completely irreparable, damage he had done, a thing he had disfigured in a world otherwise boxed, wrapped – flawless. It rang. It called.

“John, sweetheart, you know you’ve had such amazing grades this quarter in binary class. Why don’t we use something from that class, you know? Like, ‘010101’? That would be so cute don’t you –”

“I don’t…I…I don’t know –”

“Now, I think that would be a little wordy, John. How about naming it after your grandpa? I know he’s passed, but he’d love it, something so traditional, you know? My Gosh, nobody does that, nowadays. What do you say, John?”

John stared past them both, over their beige couch, through the dustless drapes and white windowpane, up into the blue sky. He had never noticed it before – the blue, the whiteless blue. The blue that rejected the white. The blue which denounced John now, mocked him from such a distance as he had never noticed, never felt. A sky denied its chaos; a world without nature, standing alone with only its humanity left. He felt a resentment, now – a tearing.

“Well, John, it doesn’t matter much, for now. Let’s just go with the default name. ‘K9000, set response protocol to ‘Default.’”

Next, in red:

“K900…0 UNI…T 012…AWAI…TING…FIRST…COMM…AND.”

“Well, hell, 012 is pretty close to that binar –”

“Honey, please, not on Christmas. Now John – what should we do first? What do you want from it? Sweetie, this is so exciting! Why don’t out that manual, let’s have a look at –”

John could not scream. His throat was tight, his breathing out of pace and rhythm; he needed it to scream for him. He needed a bark, uncontrolled. He needed it to lash out and run as he ran that day in the hospital. He needed it to act without calculation, to fail at understanding anything, just as he had failed. He needed a moment – a gesture – to embody all the things he would never know, never experience.

John whimpered, “Unit 012, bark.”

The red:

“SET B…ARK…THRE…SHOL…D SEL…ECT M…EASU…RE 1-…10.”

Before John could cry a 10, a 100, a number incomprehensible and immeasurable, his father, overtaking: “Well now, we can’t have a yipper running around on this beautiful day! Not on Christmas, huh? Let’s try a 1 to start. Unit 012, set bark threshold to 1.”

No one noticed, not in the light of the sun or the reflection of the boundless, rolling snow, or later in the holo scans, or sensory recordings, or cerebral archives, that John was now broken. He shattered without pattern, without geometry – everywhere: in the kitchen, on the fence, across the sky. He could not recognize himself, anywhere, anymore. The pit of his stomach spoke to him for perhaps the first time; he did not speak – he knew what his parents would offer, what they would shake, count, and provide. He spun off the white child security lock in his mind, horribly bored, afraid.

He tore himself from the carpet and stood erect above Unit 012. He felt every measured strand of the carpet push against his feet, the perfection pulling him down, the spaces between the strands too impossible for him, now.

“John, sweetie, what’s –”

“John, son, would you rather we –”

He muttered about feeling sick. He turned to them, and his smile was a pathetic taunt which flamed failure; they would never understand it. He heard as he turned and fled for the stairs: “Aw, he’s just feeling overwhelmed. Hey, let’s just send 012 after him – that will definitely cheer him up!”

He could not ignore the patter, though he was desperate to. The perfection of the sound ripped at him and placed him at the base of the stairs. He wondered if this was just as it was meant to be. If this was the position that was meant for him, if it matched this disgusting plan.

As Unit 012 ran laps through his legs – perfect figure eights, the textbook traces and outlines that John had only ever known, hated, that he rejected – he felt cold, and slowly selected to go up the stairs.

Unit 012 was given no command. It followed him.