The Dog Who Saved the World

by Ross Welford

  “Check that out!” she says proudly.

  Ramzy and I both go, “Hmmm!” and “Wow!” although to us, it’s just a satellite dish. Dr. Pretorius aims her long forefinger at it.

  “Every ninety minutes, for about ten minutes, this baby picks up a live, ultra-high-definition video signal from the US military satellite Hawking II. You heard of it?” We shake our heads and Dr. Pretorius gives a little sigh. “Good. It’s not supposed to be well known. It’s the most powerful satellite of its kind on Earth. Or actually, above Earth. And in case you were wondering how I get access to such a signal…”

  (We weren’t. You forget we’re only kids, I want to say.)

  “…then let me just say, a lot of money buys a lot of favors. Ha!” Dr. Pretorius turns away from us to close the window and I can see she’s smiling to herself, pleased with her “lot of favors” quip.

  “Come on, don’t lag behind.” She strides off again, back toward the control room, where she stops and points to a black metal box, about the size of a washing machine, with a couple of blinking lights on it. I had seen it the last time but had not paid it much attention.

  “You’ve heard of quantum computers?” she asks. “Quomps, they’re known as? Well, meet the most powerful in Europe, possibly the world. I call her Little Girl.”

  This time, when Ramzy and I say, “Wow!” it’s sincere.

  “It…it works? For real?” says Ramzy in awe.

  Dr. Pretorius takes her time. She straightens up and nods slowly, a look of deep satisfaction giving her dark skin a flush of pride. “She most certainly does, fella! Even those dullards at NASA and Cambridge University are about ten years behind old Emilia Pretorius and her Little Girl.” She pats the shiny unit gently and smiles as she moves back to the desk.

  Ramzy and I are left staring at Little Girl, the super-powered computer, while Dr. Pretorius starts bashing away at her keyboard.

  I find myself putting my hand up as though I’m still at school. Ramzy smirks and I put it down again.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Pretorius?”

  She stops jabbing at the keyboard and looks up. She’s been so absorbed in whatever she was doing that she seems almost surprised to see me there. “What is it, kid?”

  “You say this whole thing, this…this Big Experiment is new and untested?”

  “Yes, yes. What about it?”

  “So…why don’t you test it yourself?”

  Her eyes narrow to slits, and her lips purse tight, and I wonder if I have said the wrong thing.

  “I can’t,” she says eventually. “That’s what I need you for.”

  “What’s special about us?” I ask.

  Dr. Pretorius gets up from the long desk and comes over to Ramzy and me, and my heart starts to beat harder as I wonder whether she’ll be angry at my question.

  Instead, she grabs the bicycle helmet again and holds it upside down to reveal the little metal bumps and nodules inside. She shakes her head sadly.

  “See these here?” She points at the red-colored bumps that are dotted all over the inside, in between the other nodes. “These are receivers. They detect the minute impulses that your brain makes when it imagines things, and feeds them back into the images that the computer is creating. It’s my theory that it’s these tiny electrical charges that will make the virtual future so real—in fact, practically indistinguishable from reality.”

  “I still don’t get why you can’t do it? I mean…” I run my finger over the inside of the helmet, straining to understand what she’s telling me.

  “While your brain is growing, Georgie, these impulses are at their strongest and most numerous,” says Dr. Pretorius, speaking very precisely. “A child’s elastic mind, eh? We’ve always known that it’s a wonderful thing—a powerful thing, even. But we had no idea of just how powerful. Only a very young person can experience what I have created. Only a young person will see the future the system generates. I am way, way too old.”

  I am pondering this when Ramzy claps his hands and exclaims, with shining eyes, “I’ve got it! You’re saying that this whole thing is powered by imagination!”

  Dr. Pretorius beams with pleasure and gives her ascending laugh. “Ha ha ha haaa! You’re right—or at least partly right! What a wonderful way of putting it, young man!”

  Ramzy blushes.

  “There’s only one problem, kiddos.” Dr. Pretorius’s face straightens again. “I don’t have that long left to discover if my research has been worthwhile.”

  Ramzy then says simply, “Why are you doing this?”

  For a moment, Dr. Pretorius regards Ramzy, her expression a mixture of annoyance and contempt. At last, she repeats, “Why?”

  Ramzy nods. “Yes, why? I mean, I can see why you’d want to know what the weather’s going to be like. But why else would you want to, I dunno, see the future?”

  It’s as if Dr. Pretorius has to wait a moment for the full fury to load. Once it does, she unleashes it.

  “Can’t you understand?” she yells, and we both flinch. She notices—and dials down her attitude. She continues, a little quieter, but the frustration is just below the surface. It’s a struggle for her, I can tell.

  “This is something that humanity has been seeking since we lived in caves! Throughout history we have yearned to know what the future holds. Astrologists, soothsayers, prophets, those who cast runes, even palm readers at carnivals! Jeez—have you never read your horoscope and wondered if it might be true? Have you? Have you?” She doesn’t even wait for us to reply. “This goes way, way beyond knowing whether or not to take an umbrella with you.”

  She marches out into the vast dark studio, barking her words over her shoulder, her hair shaking with excitement. We peer through the narrow doorway: she strides across the ball-bearing floor and stands in the middle of the dome, arms outstretched, shouting up at the ceiling.

  “Just think, Georgie, think, Ramzy—imagine the horrors that could be avoided if we knew they were coming! Wars, murders, tyrants, natural disasters—the possibilities of this are endless!”

  She’s getting louder. She levels her gaze and whips off her spectacles to fix us with her fierce pale eyes, like a husky’s.

  “This is not some game. It ain’t a fancy toy. Do you not see? Isn’t it obvious? This has the potential to be the greatest thing ever created, and I will give it to the world! I don’t need more money, but if I die knowing I’ve prevented a war by foreseeing it, then what greater legacy is there? The parents of soldiers will thank me forever that their children are not killed in battle, their broken young bodies left to rot under a foreign sky!”

  Is this something that Dr. Pretorius had rehearsed in her head? She strides up and down that green-black studio as if she’s delivering a speech to a crowd, not to me and Ramzy, who stand there, gawping. Anyway, however long this could go on (and I suspect she has rather a lot to say on the subject), she is stopped by an urgent beeping coming from one of the computer screens in the control room.

  She halts midsentence. “Satellite’s overhead. Time for a trip to the future. Come with me.”

  Now this is the point at which I should say no. I should say, “Sorry, Dr. Pretorius, but this is too dangerous. I don’t like keeping secrets from my dad, and I have no idea whether this is safe or not.”

  But then I look across at Ramzy, and there’s no hesitation on his face. No reluctance. Just full-on, excited enthusiasm.

  “Perhaps you should do it, Ramzy?” I say, and he grins at me. Before he replies, Dr. Pretorius is alongside us.

  “Only one at a time, kiddos, and I don’t care which of you goes first.”

  Ramzy, despite his excitement, hesitates. I hesitate.

  Dr. Pretorius says, “You know we talked about probability? Well, how about a coin toss? Ha!” She takes out a coin. I call tails.

  That’s
how I end up having the helmet tightened round my head.

  As I watch in the control room, a progress bar inches along the bottom of the biggest computer screen. A few minutes later, a box appears:

  RECEPTION COMPLETE

  and then a few seconds after that,

  SIMULATION COMPLETE

  “Shall we do this?” says Dr. Pretorius, clearly not expecting the answer to be no. I nod, swallowing hard and trying to look braver than I feel.

  With Ramzy’s help, I check the fastenings on the helmet and lower the metal visor. Pulling the straps tight under my chin, I test the release catch, and it pings loose before I shove it in again. The last thing I want is the catch coming loose while I’m in the studio. I feel the tiny nodes in the helmet’s lining poking into my scalp, and entering the studio, my mouth is so dry, it’s as though I’ve wiped the inside with a paper towel.

  “Oww!” says Ramzy. “You’re hurting me.” I look down and realize that I’ve been gripping his wrist so tightly that I leave a red mark when I release it.

  Stepping forward, I put both feet into the ball pit, shuffling through the tiny metal balls till I am standing dead center. Ramzy stands before me and gives a thumbs-up.

  So far, everything is familiar. I hear Dr. Pretorius in my ear.

  “You good to go, Georgie? We’ve already lost a minute of satellite time, but that’s OK. Now listen up: I’ve programmed in your starting position and the time, and I’ve kept it simple. The dome will re-create the streets outside here. Everything will be familiar to you, and it’s only going to be one week from now. So it’s nothing too drastic, OK? Are you with me?”

  I nod, and swallow hard.

  “I can’t hear you when you nod, and I can’t see you until this is turned on. Are you with me?”

  I manage to croak yes.

  “Good girl. So, once you’re there and comfortable, make your way up Marine Drive to the corner shop. There’s an electronic display in the window showing the date, time, and weather. That will be our confirmation that the experiment has worked, and I have every confidence in you. Do you know the place?”

  It’s Norman Two-Kids’s shop. The sign in the window is one of those scrolling lines of illuminated red letters.

  “Aye aye, cap’n.” There’s a feeling of excitement growing inside of me. I want to do this.

  “Ramzy—come out of there now and seal the door shut.” Behind me, I hear the soft thunk of the studio door, and the lever sealing it closed so that no sound or light can enter the dome.

  “Lights going off, Georgie. Stand by.”

  Everything is black in an instant.

  Have you ever been in total, total darkness? So dark that, however long you wait for your eyes to adjust, there’s nothing to be seen because there’s no light at all? You can wave your hand in front of your face as much as you like and you still won’t see anything.

  That is how dark it is. It’s so silent that I clear my throat, pointlessly, just to have something to hear. Then I feel a slight tremor beneath my feet as the ball pit activates.

  I am terrified.

  “Are you ready to go into the future, kid?”

  She doesn’t even wait for me to answer.

  At first, it’s just like before. Like a film coming into focus, pictures of houses appear on the studio walls, then some sky, and some trees. I blink hard, forcing myself to look more intently at what’s happening, hoping for something different from when I’d stood here the last time.

  As before, the houses quickly take on solid form, the nearest trees seem to move closer to me, and others become more distant as the world about me turns three-dimensional. A car swishes past, and the scene becomes brighter and lighter. It only takes a few seconds.

  Above my eyes, the metal band glows brilliant blue. If I look at it too much, my eyes begin to hurt. I am aware of Dr. Pretorius’s voice in my ear.

  “OK, Georgie. We can see you now on-screen. What’s it like?” Her voice is eager, childlike.

  Then a more distant voice—Ramzy’s—going, “Whoa! Amazing!”

  This is what it’s like: I’m standing on the seafront. A fully rendered, three-dimensional reproduction of the seafront right outside the dome. “It…it’s incredible!” I reply.

  There are people around me and they are real. I can see the sea and it’s real. The sounds are real. Everything is real! I look above my head and the sky stretches on forever—as it should.

  The VR environments that Ramzy and I have experimented with till now have been amazing, but I always knew that I was in a game. Sometimes the people’s movements were a little jerky, or an object would blur at the edges. There were loads of tiny little clues. But not here: this virtual world is virtually perfect.

  I take a deep sniff.

  Ah. That’s odd. It smells just like the inside of the studio. I sniff again, and again. Then I hear Dr. Pretorius say: “You won’t smell anything, Georgie. The olfactory simulation isn’t complete yet. This is still a prototype, remember? Can you turn around? How’s the visuals?”

  I’m almost speechless, but I turn right round slowly and manage to say, “Unbelievable!” The people walking past seem perfectly, absolutely real, even though I know they’re not. I swing my head rapidly from side to side, and that creates a very slight blurring, as the program takes half a second to catch up with my head movement.

  I am living in a computer-generated world and it is…

  TOTALLY

  FREAKING

  AWESOME!

  No wonder Dr. Pretorius has kept this secret. Another car swishes past on the road to my right, and I hear a child shout, “Mam!” somewhere. So far I haven’t moved: all I’ve done is look around, my head swiveling left and right, up and down, taking in every aspect of this amazing illusion.

  “Georgie! Can you hear me?”

  I’ve been so carried away.

  “Yes. Yes, I can hear you. It’s…wonderful.”

  “OK—walk on over the street, Georgie. We haven’t got too much time. And take care crossing the road. I’m a little uncertain how realistic a vehicle impact would be.”

  Oo-kaay, I think a bit nervously. I carry on, crossing the road (which seems quieter than I would expect) till I can look at the beach as well as the sea. The tide’s out, and there are a few people walking—one or two people swimming. It’s not exactly right: perhaps it’s the sea’s movement, or the color of the sand, or…what? I can’t quite put my finger on it, but still: the illusion is almost faultless, and I am transfixed.

  I cross back over the road and walk up Marine Drive, away from the Spanish City and past parked cars, past a couple of ladies talking to each other.

  “Eee, I know. I says to ’im, you hide that dog if you dare, but he wasn’t listenin.’ ”

  “You’re wasting your breath, dear….”

  All the time I am telling myself, These are not real people, Georgie. I don’t dare talk to them.

  “Dr. Pretorius, can these people see me?” I whisper.

  “Speak up, Georgie. Didn’t catch that.”

  “I said—can these people see me?” I say, a bit louder. The two ladies turn to look right at me, and then resume their conversation. “It’s OK. I guess they can.” I move a bit farther up the street. “Do they know they’re not real?”

  “Big question, Georgie—another time, eh? Right now, we got five minutes till we lose the connection with Hawking II, and I need to get confirmation from that calendar in the window, so get a move on.”

  There are so many things that I want to take in and be amazed at. A curtain twitching in an upstairs window, the child in the backseat of the car that went past…

  They are all being created by Little Girl: a supercomputer in a black box a few yards away.

  I know this street so well because I walk along it ever
y school day. The big pub over the road with its picnic tables at the front; the garden with the long grass that’s never cut because the woman who lives there thinks that cutting grass is cruel (according to Kassie Ruman, whose mum knows her); and the house where the dog is always chained up and barking, but isn’t there today although the chain is.

  “Come on, Georgie,” I hear Ramzy say. “Don’t hang around!”

  I pick up my pace and there is Norman Two-Kids’s corner shop.

  NARAYAN SUPREME STORES

  FRESH FRUIT…WINES AND SPIRITS…GROCERIES

  I stop before I get there. There are a few people outside the shop—adults, four or five of them, and Norman Two-Kids is standing in front of them, holding his head up and his shoulders back.

  “OK, one more, please!” says a man, who is crouching with a small camera, which flashes. “And the last one please, Sanjiv!” and it flashes again. So that’s his name.

  I edge closer to hear what they’re saying. The man with the camera is holding it up as though he’s filming.

  “So what does it feel like?” the man asks.

  Norman looks bashful. He replies, “I am very happy for the person who won it.”

  I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I move a little bit closer anyway.

  “Can you tell us what will happen now, Sanjiv?”

  “I have no idea….” And so it goes on. It seems as though Norman Two-Kids is being interviewed for the local newspaper or website or something.

  “How did it all happen, Sanjiv?”

  “Well. He came in me shop, y’know, and bought a ticket. I welcome everyone in my shop; it brings good luck.”