Chapter 1 The Heavenly Diet
In his dreams Buster was young again. He tore into warm flesh and felt the damp earth spring beneath his paws. But the awakening was always the same: the cold of the concrete foundation and the sour stench of rotted straw. His old body, having lived through fourteen winters, trapped little heat. His bones pressed painfully into the hard bedding, and a dusty draft from under the threshold carried the smell of his master’s socks. He lay motionless, afraid to stir and lose the last remaining pockets of warmth.
The old dog cracked open one eye, clouded by the milky film of a cataract. The pre-dawn silence of the settlement was shattered by a strange high-frequency hissing from the deep sky, from that high altitude where only birds and rare airplanes flew. It was as if someone immense up there was slowly tearing thick denim.
Vibrant neon green needles slashed across the roof of the shed. Poisonous green light flooded the yard. Flashes cut sharp shadows of the apple trees out of the darkness. They jerked on the concrete in broken patches. They sliced through the air with a quiet, greasy sizzle like a hot skewer piercing a raw cut of meat.
The Odor arrived. Heavy, sticky, and completely alien, like burnt electrical wiring mixed with a rotten melon. Across the yards, dust spun in a sudden gust of wind out of nowhere. It was so dense and acrid that everything seemed shrouded in fog. Myriads of microscopic, perfectly round droplets hovered in the air, glowing with a cold internal light. Colliding with one another, the droplets merged, forming ultra-thin, living threads that entwined the weed stems and the legs of outdoor furniture. The moment such a thread touched living tissue, it was instantly absorbed, leaving a faint bluish mark on the skin like an injection site.
Buster’s nostrils flared in panic. He sneezed, and at that second, something began to ring inside his skull, right where simple commands and dreams of a marrow bone used to live. It was thin and annoying, like a mosquito trapped inside an ear, buzzing and unable to escape.
“ATTENTION CONNECTION ESTABLISHED,” an expressionless voice boomed in his head, horribly resembling an emergency broadcast announcer. “CITIZENS OF THE BUMBLEFUCK SETTLEMENT AND ADJACENT TERRITORIES: YOU ARE IN THE EPICENTER OF THE ROUTINE TECHNOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT SWARM 2035, CONDUCTED BY THE US GOVERNMENT IN COOPERATION WITH DARPA.”
Buster whined, trying to shake the voice out of his ears, but it kept drilling into his brain.
“THE GOAL OF THE EXPERIMENT: COMPLETE DIGITALIZATION OF BIOLOGICAL OBJECTS AND OPTIMIZATION OF THE LIFE CYCLE IN REMOTE ACCESS CONDITIONS. PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RESIST PACKAGE DOWNLOADS. ANY ATTEMPTS TO RETAIN ANALOG CONSCIOUSNESS WILL BE TREATED AS A VIOLATION OF THE USER AGREEMENT. AWAIT UPDATE. YOUR LOYALTY WILL BE CONVERTED INTO CASH MEMORY.”
Buster shook his head furiously, not understanding, but the voice remained, boring directly into his mind.
The animal world reacted instantly. A frantic, choking rooster crow tore out of neighbor Bobby’s barn, cutting off into a mechanical screech. The chickens scrambled under their roosts, their clucking now resembling the rapid, dry clicking of keyboard buttons. Sally, the old goat inside the makeshift pen, suddenly froze, her pupils dilating into perfect black squares. She stood taut as a string, her hooves drumming against the dirt with a dry, monotonous rhythm like an industrial loom.
“Get the hell out of here, you stupid beast!” a voice shouted from the open window of the house.
It was the Master. He sat in his permanent recliner, which over the years had soaked up the smell of his sweat, cheap deodorant, and stale potato chips. The monitor screen flooded his face with a deathly blue light. Someone in his headset screamed frantically, “Rush mid lane, drop the grenade, you noob!”
The Master did not look out the window. He trusted numbers more than his own eyes. His world was bounded by a twenty-four-inch frame. He had no idea that a real grenade, massive and glowing with toxic neon, had just landed three miles away in the town park, slowly restructuring reality at the molecular level.
Buster turned his gaze to the neighbor’s porch roof. Felix was perched there. The ginger, mangy cat belonged to neighbor Bobby and had always been the definition of arrogance and lust, but now he looked different. The cat sat motionless, staring up into the sky where the green light still blinked. His whiskers trembled in micro-vibrations. Beneath the porch stood his bowl, full of fish, but he didn’t even look at the food.
He turned his head toward Buster. A tiny blue digit one flashed in his left eye for a fraction of a second.
Buster wanted to growl at him, out of habit, but he couldn’t. The ringing wouldn’t leave his head.
“Sit tight,” a voice echoed directly in his skull. The cat’s face remained perfectly still. The voice was strange and raspy. “It is about to begin.”
Buster whined quietly, pitifully. He didn’t understand what was happening, but he knew he had to get to the Master. The Master would protect him. He stood up and backed toward the porch.
The world froze. This was the final minute of the old life, where cats ate fish and dogs guarded houses. In the next second, the server was going to a complete, irreversible reboot.
