Devoted(27)
“This here’s a dog-free campground,” he blustered. “Always has been dog-free, and I mean to keep it dog-free. You can’t have a dog on my watch.”
Reading the name on the khaki shirt, the stranger said, “I won’t be checking in, Frank. Cancel the reservation for Hawkins.”
“If you haven’t checked in yet, he can’t be your dog.”
Ignoring the Hater, the newcomer smiled down at Kipp. “Come on, boy, let’s blow this dump.”
As Kipp’s rescuer opened the front door, Frank the Hater made one last attempt to assert his authority. “He can’t be your dog.”
“Put your belt on before your pants fall down, Frank. I haven’t had dinner yet, so don’t ruin my appetite.”
24
Rosa sat for a few minutes in the grip of the strangest web of emotions that she had ever known. Spending this time with Dorothy’s recordings had sharpened her grief. Yet the videos of Dorothy and Kipp communicating with the aid of the alphabet wall and the laser pointer had been captivating, exhilarating. Sadness contested with elation in a way that she had never before experienced. Amazement, which was of the intellect, and astonishment, which was of the heart, matured into awe that weighed so heavily on her that she could not get up from the chair. And then she did.
She went to the alphabet wall and stood staring at it for a minute or two before kneeling at the motorized laser pointer. The device, based on Dorothy’s design, had been built for her by a local mechanic named John Cobb. Mr. Cobb had wondered for what reason she required such a thing. She’d told him that it had applications in a classroom and that she would say no more because, after a period of testing, she intended to obtain a patent on it. This lie satisfied Cobb as perhaps he would not have been satisfied if she had told him that she needed it to better communicate with her dog.
A flip switch on the center column turned on the laser pointer and the motor that operated it. Mounted on a gimbal, the pointer swiveled at once to fix its red dot on the letter A. Four canted pedals controlled the device. From left to right: The first pedal moved the red dot up; the second moved it down; the third to the left; the fourth to the right. They were meant to be pressed by a paw, but Rosa’s hand served just as well.
Remembering as best she could what she had seen in one of the videos, to get a sense of how laborious had been this method of communication, Rosa worked the answer to a question that Dorothy had asked Kipp: You say you can communicate with others of your kind at any distance. But how?
One by one, with the use of the pedals, the pointer now picked out the letters as Kipp had done, which Dorothy had written down as she watched from her desk, and which Rosa had copied.
Telepathy. Birds have a form of it, which is why every member of a flock can change direction in flight at the same instant. Elephants have it, the way they come from a distance to the side of one who is dying. But the Mysterium’s telepathy is much stronger. We call it the “Wire.”
Either the first of their kind learned English in some genetics lab where they had been engineered, or after escaping, maybe they picked it up by listening to the people who cared for them. The how of this was lost in the mists of their creation. Currently, however, the young dogs received the English language and packets of other knowledge from their elders over the Wire, in mere minutes, in what amounted to the installation of a program.
Many high-tech mavens, like the flamboyant Elon Musk and the lesser-known Ray Kurzweil, dreamed of the Singularity, the moment when human and machine intelligence would merge, ushering in the posthuman era. They claimed that augmented human brains, injected with a neural lace, would connect with one another by telepathy and almost instantaneously share vast architectures of knowledge and theory that once would have taken years for one person to teach another.
The Mysterium had achieved at least that one goal of the cult of the Singularity without the need to become partly machines. They didn’t know how this might have happened, whether their creators intended it or if the telepathy was an unanticipated consequence of the genetic engineering that had enhanced their intelligence. What was, simply, was; they saw no need to brood excessively about it.
Rosa switched off the motorized laser pointer and got to her feet and stood for a moment, trembling at the prospect of seeking out Kipp, wherever he might be huddled in grief, and trying to begin a life together. He had loved Dorothy with such devotion. No one had ever loved Rosa with such fervor. She doubted that anyone could. She was not as special as Dorothy and could only be a disappointment to Kipp.
She went to the windows that provided a view of the forest in which the overcast had laid down an early twilight. A mist rose off the lake, creeping uphill through the trees, its millions of tiny droplets reflecting what little light the day offered, fluorescing as if it were not a cloud but the ghost light of spirit legions haunting the day’s end.
Perhaps because Rosa Leon had been abandoned by a father who called her “the mistake of a mistake,” and because her mother had not loved her, and because she had grown up without the experience of affection that would have taught her how to make friends more easily, she acutely felt not merely the wonder of sweet Kipp and the Mysterium, but also the essential loneliness with which they surely contended even though telepathy was a powerful bond.
After all, they numbered only eighty-six, such a small community that existential angst must on some level trouble them. For lack of numbers, their kind could go extinct. New members of the Mysterium appeared on the Wire so seldom, the assumption had to be that the gene sequence that made them unique among all other dogs was not easily passed down from generation to generation. As far as Dorothy and Kipp had been able to determine, he alone of his litter was a Mysterian.