Free Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec Page B

pole whose wires were cut long ago. It emits an unpleasant metallic screeching noise audible for kilometers.
    Plotkin heads back toward the hotel.
    A rebuilt Proton rocket with its four passengers in a small Japanese-built capsule is just taking off into the dry, pure, monochromatic blue afternoon sky. He stops to watch the fireball follow a slightly oblique trajectory south, toward an equatorial orbit, a line of white fire as pure as a painter’s sure stroke on the canvas of the world. He sits down on the side of the road in the grass, whose vivid green contains a multitude of subtle variations, and raises his eyes toward the zenith where this cloud of powder and fire has dwindled to an invisible point, its image now no more than an imprint on his retinal memory.
    It is only then that he sees that he is being watched by someone beside and slightly behind him. That someone is the dog.

    Plotkin watches the dog calmly, as it watches him.
    The traces of several surgical operations and a number of biomechanical prostheses are visible on the surface of the dog’s cranium. It is a Labrador-shepherd mix, or something like that; its coat is black, with a few tawny and gray spots on its belly and feet. Its hazel eyes are large and deep, with distant violet stars hidden in the irises.
    He immediately feels a profound sense of empathy with the animal. Cyberdogs were invented in the 2020s, after all the necessary technology had been developed during nearly two decades of conflict.
    Cyberdogs served as both scouts and patrollers, and thanks to transgenic manipulations of their cortices, the American and then Chinese armies had been able to turn them into very efficient bionic animal soldiers. As far as Plotkin can tell, this is an old Typhoon-class cyberdog, the highest class of them. It has a neurolinguistic center cloned from bonobo cells, with a vocabulary of around four hundred words—greatly superior to the current human average. Its surgically enhanced vision is greater than that of other canines—this area is not always so well provided for—and it can remotely control, via a GPS transmitter, certain security circuits in the hotel.
    Hiring former army dogs to protect capsule motels is quite trendy these days. As a security guard, it is fully as intelligent as half the human goons that ply the trade, and it will work for the price of a little drinking water and a bowl of genetically modified food a day. Not even a German or Swedish immigrant worker can be had under such conditions.
    He and the dog stare at each other. In the city below, half a million men go about their daily business. Another turn-of-the-century American shuttle, positioned on its pad, waits for an unknown signal for its transfer to the concrete runway, under the wide-open mouth of a hangar. The cosmodrome is empty, as is the sky. It seems that Plotkin and the dog are the only two beings in the world.
    “You are the guest in 108-West, aren’t you?”
    The sound of the dog’s digitized voice makes Plotkin jump.
    Naturally, the dog does not possess speech organs. Techniques developed at the beginning of the century had used a little microsurgery, a little genetic manipulation, and a little nanocomputer implantation to attain a yip that was relatively ill defined but remodulated by a phonatory control center bio-implanted in the larynx, which issued a partially digitized version of a voice. The end result is strange and, frankly, a little monstrous.
    There he is, and the dog, and the world, and all three of them are monsters.
    It is difficult to refuse to answer the dog, since that might be misinterpreted. “Yes,” he says. “And you’re the hotel security dog, I believe.”
    “Yes,” yaps the dog. “My name is Balthazar. I was created for the Marine Corps on February 6, 2032.”
    Nothing in the instruction program has taught Plotkin how to act with an old Marine cyberdog from the era when the United States still existed, though not for very much