Dogs of Orninica (7 page)

The other day, I saw a little pup trying to shake the drone shadowing her. She'd walk in circles, hop and roll, duck and zig-zag. All the while the drone remained hovering silently above, like it were tied to the little dear by a powerful magnet. Amused, the pup entered a tall building and rode the elevator to the roof. Sure enough, the drone was on the roof waiting for her, and I could hardly believe my eyes when, without any hesitation, the pup took a flying leap off the building. Of course, the drone dove down and grabbed her out of the air, setting her safely on the street below unharmed, but for a moment, the little pup was as free as a bird. The smile on her face was as wide as any I've ever seen.

No one else on the street even noticed what had happened, all consumed with whatever fiction played on their iYglass. But I walked up to the pup and shook her little hand vigorously, thanking her for breaking the routine, even if for only a brief moment.

It was risky, I know. The hovering drones all centered on me. But I had to show her that at least someone in the city was awake.

It just goes to show that even the ugliest, most sterile places in this world harbor glimpses of the amazing canine spirit. If only these poor, hapless dogs knew all that was taken from them before they were even born. Maybe they would wake from their slumber and finally fight back.

The Oninicans are so stunningly devout in their worship of man. It's so difficult for a freeborn Nureongi to understand this unceasing affection they have for a race of fur-less apes that caged and brutalized our ancestors, selling them as meat in grimy street markets.

Their religion is so alien to me. Our beliefs are so simple, it would only take a paragraph to explain what we believe in, while the Oninicans have volumes of holy books. The books of Bahman, Soupman, Greenlandon, Wandwohm, etc.

But it does have some semblance of logic to it, why they'd replace simple truths of nature with complex mythologies and rules. Sometimes all the noise in this city is enough to make even me forget the simplicity of existence. I have to cling to my memories lest they slip away.

When we are created, our bodies become a vessel to roving energy. Everything that exists has energy. When we die, the energy is released back into the universe, ready to be recycled again and again forever. This is all my soul knows and all it needs to know to exist.

But the Orninicans, so out of touch with their very state of being... Everything they know is told to them by their elders to quash the soul, to stack piles of brick and concrete over the simple universal knowledge they were born with. Maybe as they die, maybe then they can recall the simple truths of earthly existence that they've denied themselves since childhood. Maybe death is the only good, real thing they have left.

I believe in my heart that the typical Orninicans are good dogs, I really do. They've just lost sight of what actually matters in this transient life. It's much easier for them to hide their heads in their fictions and games than it is to see the rampant desolation surrounding them.

If I were born an Orn, I'm not sure I would fit in much better than I do now. I get the sense that no Orn truly feels at peace with their surroundings. But they go to such lengths to starve their doubts with electronic devices. They are always plugged in to some kind of device. Even as they sleep, a 'dream-inducer' device clings to their scalp, pushing manufactured dreams and advertisements into their heads, while sending their deepest thoughts back to the system to be logged and filed forever. Amazingly, they will this. They even incur debt to afford to buy the devices.

The sheer volume of entertainment is staggering, and so much of it has very little purpose. They have two basic types of fiction. Their dramas aim to shock the senses, with gruesome murder scenes and depictions of horrifying diseases. Nearly all the characters in their dramatic fiction are lethargic government workers; police, doctors, federal agents, forensics specialists, judges, social workers. The characters always solve the case at the end of the day, the government always portrayed as infallible, all powerful and benevolent.

Often the cynical and ill-tempered main character has a special skill, such as a photographic memory, or the ability to read thoughts, and uses the skill to serve the government in some way. Scenes of brutal violence are a staple of these dramas, most probably as an instrument to desensitize the placid public.

Their comedic fiction offers mild familiar humor. It comprises either of wealthy upper-class youths living together in the city, with jobs as executives or at top law firms, or of wealthy upper-class families living together in the suburbs, with jobs as executives, real estate agents or at top law firms. Sometimes there are talking hamsters added to the equation.

The goal of the comedy seems to be to give affirmation to the public that Orninican life is good, and everyone can be happy and successful if they just follow the formula and buy all the products their favorite fictional characters buy. I haven't been able to discover how this propaganda continues to work when the viewers begin to grow old and realize their lives are still woeful. Perhaps some kind of mind control?

The hundreds of hours of daily broadcasts are so similar and unchanging, yet I sometimes find myself consuming them as a mild distraction, if only to forget my worries for a brief moment. But I am strongly concerned there could be a deadening effect on my mind taking place. It gets harder to form my own thoughts the more of it I watch.

The Orns are prescribed countless numbing medications and mood stabilizers by their doctors to treat the many pains and anxieties they seem to suffer. It must be a lot easier for them to be quenched by this empty entertainment when they're taking mind altering narcotics everyday. Maybe I'd have a better understanding of their fiction, and their society in general, if I were also medicated. It seems to be a big contributor to their apathy.

The last time I went to a healer here, he insisted on prescribing me pain and sleeping pills for a twisted ankle. I was still new to this place, and it taught me a lot about how things work here. Everything is built to sell you a thing you don't need, that will somehow make it so you need to buy more things. It's a colossal maze with no exit, and being aware of that fact doesn't make it any easier to keep from falling into the trap.

I once was dazzled by a commercial for a set of knives that featured a charismatic chef using them to cut through sheets of metal. I was amazed by their sharpness, and imagined they'd be very useful back home in Nureongi. However when they arrived, they could barely slice butter. Their handles were made of flimsy plastic, colored like hardwood. This kind of dishonesty is common and accepted, and somehow the Orns continue to consume countless near-useless and poorly made products with great zest. Nureongi need nothing more than what we can carry in our teeth, yet to appear normal in this society, I need to surround myself with things.

I keep all but one of the rooms in my home filled with consumer goods. To keep up appearances, I must spend the majority of my time doing normal Orn things in front of my various screens and devices. But there's one small room I keep almost bare, with nothing more than a bamboo mat to sit on. I retreat to this room as often as I can, but obviously I can't stay off the radar for very long or it'll raise suspicions. It's the one place in this life where I can go to clear my mind.

Sometimes at the restaurant, when I'm rushing back and forth in the steamy hot kitchen to finish the orders on time, my feet swollen and sore, my back knotted and stiff, a calm comes over me for a moment. A moment of clarity I suppose you could call it. Suddenly, I see myself standing in the ancient forest that stretches as far as the eye can see. The pups are darting up the trees and diving into the waterhole, their laughter bouncing from tree to tree for miles.

The echoes of this laughter suddenly hit me and pull me to Nureongi in these moments, vibrations that have traveled all the way from the ancient forest, and somehow made it to my kitchen. In this moment, it's abundantly clear to me that I must do whatever it takes to preserve the lives of these pups that have never known the underside of the tyrant's boot. Even at the expense of my own spirit.

Doctor

Valued board members, I've finally realized a solution to our waste-disposal situation. As you know, the high cost of removing the nuclear waste from our power plants is biting into the bottom line. As we have interests in both the pharmaceutical industry, and nuclear power, why not combine the two? I'm actually kicking myself for not thinking of it sooner. We can turn the waste from the nuclear power plant into an over-the-counter nutritional supplement.

As per routine, I can use my standing as a highly esteemed medical doctor to give it my seal of approval, and we'll have our good friends in the National Food and Drug Department approve it for sale as soon as possible.

Of course, if we're to reach sales figures high enough to package and sell 100% of the waste product as a medical aid, we'll need to sell to the state. We can follow the usual tactic and lobby to have them add it to the water supply and staple foods. Certainly, it'll make a fine ingredient to add to the atmospheric geo-engineering initiative. Maybe even push it as a fire retardant, and write up a law requiring developers to coat building materials with it. It can be applied to bedding, clothing, toys... The sky's the limit.

I'll have one of the PR flunkies write up the copy describing the many positive effects of... Let's call it 'calciumme' or something, superficially linking it to calcium. “Growing pups need their calciumme,” no one can take issue with that in a public forum and be taken seriously.

We'll of course also need to scramble to market some new drugs and treatments to benefit from whatever side effects come from consuming the sludge. Those profits alone should be immense.

You might have noticed a little law being pondered in parliament yesterday, outlawing grass-eating once and for all. It cost us a lot of money, but I truly think this law will benefit us in the long run. Anything a dog can treat his maladies with without paying for it is just bad for business.

We released a series of stories in various news outlets calling attention to the addictive and sedative properties in grass, and engineered some paid protests in major cities against grass-use. There wasn't much response from the actual public, but with skillful editing, the media showed the world a hefty outcry against grass-use coming from an outraged populace.

We need to further our efforts in outlawing every preposterous natural remedy that's ever been used by these freeloading witch doctors anywhere in the world. We must safeguard the great institutions that grant us our comforts.

I'm thinking we'll leave grass outlawed for a few years, until dogs forget it used to be free, and then eventually allow it to be grown and sold only by specialized grass clinics that we hold the exclusive government contact to operate. It's the only way to monetize this common weed. But of course, we'll first need to alter the genes so that it doesn't actually treat anything, and enhance the addictive and sedative properties. And it goes without saying, add in some toxic genes to further advance our interests in the thriving cancer industry.

Meanwhile, the chemical companies are making a killing selling herbicides to the cities, that are frantically covering every patch of lawn with the liquid to prepare for the passing of the new law, so we're going to want our rightful cut of that. I'm meeting with the chem-co captains to negotiate our percentage tomorrow night.

Our profits are going to be unprecedented in the years ahead. When my dear departed grandfather started this company, he could never have imagined how far we'd come. Our path has been hard-fought, but with my guidance, we're finally at the top and it feels gosh-darn great. Thanks to our new promotional campaign featuring larger than life celebrity Harvey Fidelbrook, my grandfather's very first product, TongueFresh Ultra 
®
 is now the number one antipersperant in the world. And we're making a killing selling the associated chemotherapy machines to the hospitals. Congratulations to all of us.

However, if we want to really rake in the profits, we need to launch a marketing campaign to convince civilized dogs everywhere to spray TongueFresh on more than just their tongue. I'm thinking the anus and genital areas would be good candidates, it's always easy to convince the public to find some shame there. Maybe even launch a new AnusFresh and CrotchFresh line to get them to buy three cans at a time instead of one. I can already see the commercials playing in my mind, that jingle practically writes itself.

We can especially target the marketing towards the video-game playing crowd. The more hours of couch-sitting the customer does, the more he's going to need to freshen his big putrid bottom up. I guarantee those characters have some extremely musty behinds, that can make us richer than ever. And let's not forget how much of the population spends every day sitting in a cubicle. I want every single office worker in the world aiming a tube of AnusFresh at his behind at least three times a day by next year.

Our viral marketing campaign to promote dental-bubblegum over toothbrushes and toothpaste is a booming success. All over the country, pups and adults alike are throwing away their toothbrushes in favor of our much more convenient and tasty alternative. The blue flavor is especially popular, but orange is making great inroads in the minority communities.

The bad news, however, is that our toothpaste-making competitors are not happy. They are making demands that we feature a disclaimer on the packages warning that the bubblegum must be used in combination with an Orninican Dental Association approved toothpaste. I'm afraid we will have to accommodate them if we expect to keep the peace. They have a lot of influential politicians in their pockets that could really hurt our bottom line if they chose to.

But let's be realistic, it's not like anyone in our target demographic is going to be reading any labels on the product anyway. If they did, they'd read the list of ingredients we put in the gum and never dare put the vile stuff in their chubby little mouths.