Chase

by Linwood Barclay

  The dog’s tail thumped with slightly more energy this time.

  “I guess I never actually introduced myself,” the boy said. “My name is Jeff.”

  Another thump of the dog’s tail.

  “Jeff Conroy. I’m twelve years old, and I live with my aunt, whose name is Flo. She’s my dad’s sister, or was my dad’s sister, I guess, since my dad is dead. I guess she’s still my dad’s sister, even if he is dead. I don’t know. Anyway, I live with her because both my mom and my dad are dead. It happened last year. Their names were Edwin and Patsy. Edwin is kind of a strange name. You don’t hear it that much. Patsy is sort of normal, although it sounds kind of old-fashioned. I think it’s kind of a nickname for Patricia, which was my mom’s proper name on her birth certificate. Well, I guess it would have been on her death certificate, too. And the girl who’s been helping me and who got you all the food is Emily Winslow. She’s kind of okay, considering when I first met her I thought she was kind of a snot.”

  Jeff had no idea just how closely the dog was listening to his every word, understanding him, even feeling sad for him.

  “So I help my aunt run her business, and I really, truly hate my life,” Jeff said. “I miss my parents, and I also miss a dog I had once, named Pepper. My aunt made me get rid of him. The only thing that’s made me kind of happy in a long time is finding you.”

  The dog twisted his snout towards Jeff and raised his head.

  “What?” Jeff said, leaning closer, then gave a little start of surprise when the dog licked him, touching his chin and going right up over his lips, catching the tip of his nose.

  “Hey,” Jeff said, and hugged the dog’s head.

  Jeff wasn’t sure how long they would have stayed like that, but then they heard a noise downstairs. They both jumped and turned their heads to the top of the stairs.

  “It’s me!” Emily cried, running up the steps. She had a computer bag slung over her shoulder. She slid it off and unzipped it in one fluid motion, brought out the computer and put it in her lap after sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her beanbag chair.

  The dog watched her closely.

  She drew a cord out of the case, plugged one end into the side of the laptop, and handed the other end to Jeff.

  “Plug in the dog,” Emily said.

  “Aye, aye, captain,” Jeff said. He parted the dog’s fur once again, found the port, and connected the cord to it. “It fits.”

  “Of course it fits,” Emily said. “You think I don’t know my stuff?”

  “I’m clearly not as into computers as you are.”

  She didn’t look at Jeff. She was staring at her screen. “Okay,” Emily said, more to herself than to Jeff. “Tap here…click here…and…nuts.”

  “What?”

  Jeff scurried around on his knees and looked over Emily’s shoulders. He pointed and said, “What is that?”

  “Okay, so the computer has detected whatever program is in that collar, but it’s asking for a password before I can get in.”

  “Whoa. So there really is something in there.”

  “Well, I guess,” Emily said. “Maybe he’s like a doggie bank machine. Before he gives us any money we have to know the PIN.”

  Jeff ignored that. “You’d think if that connection is there so that we can find out whose dog this is, his owner wouldn’t want to slow you down with a password. They’d want you to get in, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe…They seem to be asking for five digits here.”

  “So, like, we pick a number between zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, and nine, nine, nine, nine, nine?”

  She half turned her head, not far enough to see Jeff, just far enough to make a face that he could see. “Helpful,” she said.

  The dog began to bark.

  “Arf! Arf arf arf!”

  “What is it, sport?” Jeff asked. “You want something else to eat?” He reached for the bag Emily had brought earlier, dug out a cracker, and put it close to the dog’s mouth.

  He turned his snout away.

  “Maybe with some cheese?” Jeff said, reaching back into the bag.

  “Arf!”

  Then a pause.

  “Arf arf arf!”

  Then another pause.

  “Arf arf!”

  Yet another pause.

  “Arf arf arf arf arf arf arf!”

  “What’s with you?” Jeff asked.

  Finally, “Arf!”

  “Quiet!” Emily said, raising her head and shouting at the mutt. “I’m thinking here! Trying to figure out if there’s some way around this password.”

  Jeff waved some cheese in front of the dog’s nose but he rejected it just as he had the cracker.

  “Arf!

  Arf arf arf!

  Arf arf!

  Arf arf arf arf arf arf arf!

  Arf!”

  “He’s driving me crazy,” Emily said. “He doesn’t make a sound for ages and now he’s giving me a headache. Do you want us to find your owner or not?”

  Jeff decided to eat the piece of cheese himself. “What kind of cheese is this?” he asked Emily.

  “Huh? It’s havarti.”

  “It’s good.”

  “Arf!

  Arf arf arf!

  Arf arf!

  Arf arf arf arf arf arf arf!

  Arf!”

  The dog was looking right at Jeff, who realized that he seemed pretty agitated. A far cry from a few moments earlier, when the dog was licking Jeff’s face.

  Emily stared in puzzlement at her screen as the dog began to bark again.

  “Arf!

  Arf arf arf!

  Arf arf!

  Arf arf arf arf arf arf arf!

  Arf!”

  “Hang on,” Jeff said very slowly to Emily.

  “What?”

  “Enter one, three, two…uh, seven, and then…one.” Chipper started to wag his tail while Emily scowled at Jeff. “You just making this up?”

  “Just…try it and see what happens.”

  Emily typed in the series of numbers he’d given her, held her finger over the return/enter key, then came down on it hard.

  She stared, bug-eyed, at the screen.

  “It worked,” she whispered. “How did you know? How could you possibly know?”

  “The dog told me,” Jeff said.

  “No, really, how did you know?”

  “I’m serious,” Jeff said. “His barks. He was barking out a series of numbers.”

  Emily’s mouth hung open. “That’s totally nuts,” she said. “And yet…I’m in.”

  “In where, exactly?”

  Jeff was back to looking at the screen with her. There was a lot of white space, kind of like the space on a smart phone before you start texting. At the top was a row of buttons, all with different tiny icons.

  “I still don’t believe you,” Emily said. “There’s no way the dog—”

  “Look,” Jeff said.

  Something was happening on the screen. Letters were starting to appear. Letters that turned into words, and then an entire sentence. Four, in fact.

  Jeff is not lying, Emily. I gave him the password. I was starting to think you would never figure it out. Way to go!

  They both looked from the screen to the dog. He was staring right at them.

  Then, more words on the screen.

  Hi! My name is Chipper.

  The dog fixed his eyes on the boy.

  I am so glad I finally found you. I need your help!

  Back at The Institute, Wilkins was very concerned about doing his job properly. There’d been rumours going around all day about what had happened to Simmons. He had displeased Madam Director, and no one had seen him since.

  Of course, Simmons had screwed up big time. He’d let H-1094, the animal known around the lab as Chipper, get away. Big, big mistake. It was bad enough that the animal had failed to live up to its potential. But at least a defective hybrid could be treated like a wrecked car. It could be harvested for its parts. And
there were a great many of them in H-1094. The dog’s eyes alone were worth more than four million dollars. They could be used again in another animal. Same for a lot of the other implanted hardware. The GPS, the recording system, the software that allowed such a primitive creature to think.

  To communicate.

  That had to be the single most astonishing achievement at The Institute. Finding a way to let the animal communicate with you. Giving it the power—not of speech, exactly—but of turning its thoughts into words so it could provide information. You could put a dog out into the field and have it record things for you, allow it to be your eyes and ears, but sometimes you needed your operative (and that’s really what Chipper and the others were: operatives) to just tell you what was happening. Not everything could be interpreted from the data that came into the control room. You needed some judgment, and that had been built into the programming. You didn’t want the dogs to tell you everything that was going on around them, just the things that mattered.

  What they’d done, in effect, was given the dog a second brain. An artificial intelligence that had melded with the dog’s own cognitive abilities and instincts.

  It just hadn’t worked the way it should with Chipper. Those canine instincts too often came to the forefront.

  Still, they’d accomplished a lot within this building. Even if Chipper hadn’t worked out, many of the other animals looked promising, and once they’d perfected the process with the dogs, then they could move on to—

  No, best not to even think about that. Many of the people working here weren’t even supposed to know about the next step. Some employees who’d been privy to the long-term goals of The Institute and had raised ethical and moral concerns were no longer getting a pay cheque.

  In fact, Wilkins had reason to believe those employees no longer existed.

  You couldn’t have someone going to the New York Times or CNN with tales of what was going on here. Wilkins had never even told his own wife the truth about the kind of work he did. Sharon believed he worked in a medical facility, reading patient X-rays. There was no way he could ever tell her what he was up to. The biggest challenge every day was preparing conversational stories to tell her over dinner. He had created a small, fictional universe about his workplace, invented names for colleagues, given them back stories filled with gossip. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now Sharon wanted to meet these people. Have them over for dinner, maybe get together for drinks.

  That was not happening.

  And even if it ever did, Sharon was never going to meet Simmons.

  Simmons had seriously underestimated Chipper. The dog even used his security card to get away! When Chipper had escaped, very little of his software was operational. Rebooting it from the control room had been difficult, particularly when the animal had been in some kind of metal container, which, he later learned, was the cargo hold on that bus.

  But once the dog had fled the bus station, Wilkins had gone back to work on the GPS issue, as well as trying to activate the visuals. The animal’s eyes not only allowed it to see where it was going, it let The Institute see what it was looking at. Planted into Chipper’s retina was a camera lens no larger than the head of a pin. All Wilkins had to do was make a few computer clicks to bring the camera into operation to see what the dog saw.

  Wilkins had been having some trouble getting that going, too.

  And just when he thought he had the GPS fully operational—he had managed to locate the dog in the general area of some garbage dump outside Canfield—it went out. Just like that! In the midst of all these thoughts, Wilkins suddenly sensed a presence behind him.

  He turned away from his computer screen and there, towering over him on her four-inch heels, was Madam Director, arms folded across her chest, eyeing him sternly through her black-rimmed glasses.

  “Give me some good news, Wilkins,” she said.

  “Yes, well, I was just in touch with Daggert on the scene to tell him of an approximate location of H-1094. After that I lost the GPS but I’m working on that and a visual feed.”

  “Define working on.”

  “Well, uh, you know, working my darnedest to get it up and running as fast as I can.”

  “How long?” she asked.

  “I, uh, am not sure. Any second now, I hope.”

  “Hope,” Madam Director said. “We don’t run on hope here, Wilkins. We run on results.”

  “Of course, of course. Let me, uh, let me just see what I can do here.”

  Wilkins began frantically tapping and clicking. “What I was thinking is, if we can get the visuals up and running and we can view the surroundings, that will help us with location while we work on the GPS.”

  Droplets of sweat sprouted on Wilkins’s brow. He could sense others at nearby stations working hard not to look at him. They were completely focused on their own duties, praying the Director would not choose to look over their shoulders next.

  “Hang on, hang on,” he said. “I think we may have the lens in the right eye coming on here.”

  Having both cameras—one for each eye, of course—provided better images and depth of field, but to have even one working would be a bonus.

  “Here we go!” he said.

  There was static at first, then jagged horizontal bars, then an image. It moved for half a second, then froze.

  “This is supposed to be live video, yes?” Madam Director asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “What you have there is not video, Wilkins. It’s an image. A picture. It’s frozen.”

  “Yes, yes, I can see that, but—”

  “What is it, anyway?”

  At first, Wilkins wondered if the dog might be looking in a mirror, because what was looking back at them was an eye.

  A big eye.

  But it wasn’t a mirror. If it were a mirror, there’d be black and white fur surrounding that eye. Maybe a snout, and a black nose.

  This eye was framed by an eyebrow across the top, a hint of an ear to the right, and a tiny bit of nose to the left.

  This was a human being. Face to face with Chipper.

  “Where is this?” Madam Director demanded.

  “I can’t tell,” Wilkins said. “I can’t see anything beyond this bit of face. It could be indoors, outdoors. It could be anywhere.”

  Madam Director leaned over Wilkins, got her own face to within a foot of the screen.

  “That,” she said slowly, “is a boy.”

  “This is not happening,” Emily said. “This dog—”

  “His name is Chipper,” Jeff said, pointing to the screen of her laptop. “He just told you right there.”

  “This Chipper is not talking to us,” she said. “This is some kind of a joke. Someone is playing a trick on us.”

  Emily tipped her head back and said, in a loud voice, “Whoever you are, very funny!”

  Words came up on her screen.

  Not a joke! This is for real!

  “Who’s your owner?” Jeff asked Chipper. “Who’s your, you know, master?”

  You!

  “No, no, you don’t understand. Who looks after you? Where’s your home?”

  Can this be my home? I like it here. Lots of things to smell.

  “Um, well, this is just an old abandoned train station. You must have come from a better place than this?”

  “Stop,” Emily said. “This is nuts. Dogs don’t talk.”

  “He’s not talking,” Jeff said. “He’s communicating with us. A talking dog, well, that would be nuts.”

  “This is nuts, too!” Emily said.

  “Then how do you explain it? You found that port, you wanted to check it out, you got your laptop. And now we’re having a conversation with Chipper.”

  “With a dog.”

  A different kind of dog!

  “What do you mean?” Jeff asked. “You look like a dog. Are you a computer?”

  Part computer, part dog!

  “What did you mean when you said you wa
nted us to help you?”

  They are chasing me.

  “Who’s chasing you?”

  White Coats! They want to end me.

  “You mean…kill you?” Jeff said. Emily, who’d been rolling her eyes a few moments ago, was now giving Chipper her full attention.

  Yes!

  “Why would these guys in white coats want to kill you?”

  I got away. I hid on a bus. I found you!

  “You mean, more like I found you,” Jeff said. “I nearly killed you with the truck! You really, really scared me.”

  I am okay. There are things you have to do. Fast!

  “Like what?” Jeff said.

  Turn things off.

  “What things? What things have to be turned off?”

  Emily said, “He must be talking about these settings. There’s all these icons and stuff across the top of the screen.”

  “So, you don’t think it’s a joke anymore?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But I can tell you I’ve got a pretty bad feeling about all this. I think I should tell my dad.”

  “Your dad?”

  “He used to be a cop.”

  No!

  “What do you mean, no?” Jeff said to the dog.

  No police. They will know!

  “He’s not a cop now,” Emily said. She shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m arguing with a dog.”

  Jeff said to her, “You’re way smarter than I am with computers. Study that thing. Turn off anything that looks like it connects to these white coat dudes he’s talking about.”

  Yes! Do that!

  Emily studied the screen, did some clicking. “Okay, I think I know what to do here.”

  To Chipper, Jeff said, “Okay, let me try to figure this out. Who are the white coat guys?”

  They run The Institute.

  “The Institute? What’s The Institute? Is that, like, a community college or something?”

  Secret place.

  “Like a government agency or something?”

  Chipper nodded his head several times.

  “This is where they turned you into some kind of computer dog? And you escaped because they were going to kill you? And now they’re looking for you?”

  Very good! That is it!

  “Do they know where you are?”