The Dog Who Saved the World

by Ross Welford

  He’s probably won “Maddest Shopkeeper of the Year” if you ask me, and I smile to myself at my little joke. I’m beginning to enjoy this, I realize.

  Nobody is looking in my direction as I get close enough to see the shop window, which is covered with advertisements and other signs. I have been past this cluttered shop window so many times, I never even notice what’s there, but it’s all familiar. The sign announcing that this is a Parcel Collection Point; the big video ad for the Geordie Jackpot lottery; and the one I’m looking for: the electronic calendar.

  There it is, the bright red letters scrolling past:

  TODAY IS FRIDAY JULY 27

  TIME: 16:52

  TODAY’S WEATHER: PARTLY CLOUDY

  SUNSET: 21:18

  In my ear, I hear, “Terrific, Georgie! Congratulations! There’s our confirmation!” Dr. Pretorius sounds elated, and I’m feeling pretty pleased myself. The sense of danger has more or less gone: I only need to take off the helmet and I’ll be back in the studio, and that makes me less scared.

  I can hear Ramzy now. “Don’t move, Georgie. Stay right there.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Just…just stay there. Move a bit closer to the shop window.”

  I do as he asks, without knowing why, and while I’m looking at the window, I shove my hands deep in the pockets of my school uniform skirt with a satisfied feeling, and my fingers curl round the ball that Mr. Springham gave me earlier today. A thought occurs to me.

  What would happen if I threw it?

  You see, the “real me” is still in Dr. Pretorius’s studio (although the longer I stay in this virtual world, the easier it is becoming to forget that fact).

  What will happen to the ball if I throw it toward the studio’s walls?

  There’s only one way to find out. I take the ball from my pocket and throw it as hard as I can up the street. My eyes follow it on its normal arc, and then—as though it has hit an invisible wall in thin air, above the road—it bounces back toward me, and bounces again on the pavement, and again, and again, finally rolling to a stop a few yards away.

  “Georgie!” comes Dr. Pretorius’s voice. “What in the name of heck are you doing?”

  “Just experimenting!” I call back. Then I reach for a peach from the rack outside the shop.

  Now this peach feels real—the slightly furry skin, the right weight. I run my thumb over the skin, and a little of the surface peels off under my nail. I sniff it: it smells of nothing, and I remember Dr. Pretorius saying that smells have not been completed. Then I take a big bite, and the juice runs down my chin, just like real peach juice. Only…it tastes of nothing. I swallow, and still no flavor. Next, I throw the fruit as hard as I can in the same direction up the street to see what happens.

  It doesn’t bounce back. Of course it doesn’t. It’s not a real peach. It sails through the air as you’d expect it to do, without hitting the wall of the studio.

  It comes to land on a patch of earth beneath a tree and splits open. That’s when I hear Norman Two-Kids behind me.

  “Hey, you! What you fink you doin,’ huh?”

  “So sorry! I, erm…”

  The small crowd around him has moved aside. One or two of them are smirking at “the naughty kid who steals fruit.” Norman’s face, on the other hand, is dark and furious.

  “You gon’ pay for that or what?” he says, advancing toward me. “Well? You fink you can just come up to me shop an’ frow stuff aroun’, huh?”

  I shuffle backward, away from him. “Bloody kids!” He turns to the group. “See wha’ I have to deal wif, huh? No respect!”

  “I’m sorry, I just…”

  I am edging away; then I turn to run and I let out a little scream. Two yards in front of me, but facing the other way, is a giant scorpion—the same one that I saw on the beach simulation the very first time I was in the dome.

  Only this time it’s much more convincing. And much more threatening.

  When I squeal, it turns round, its eight legs clickety-clicking on the pavement; then it takes a couple of paces back, arching its tail high in the air as if preparing to strike.

  Behind me, I hear, “Oh my God. What on earth is that?”

  For a moment, I feel paralyzed with fear. I try telling myself that it’s not real, but when the scorpion advances toward me, I react by grabbing a box of oranges and hurling it as hard as I can at the creature. And missing.

  “Why, you little vandal!” yells Norman, and he grabs the hood of my jacket. “I know which school you’re at, and…”

  I wriggle but he’s now holding me tightly by both arms. The other people don’t seem willing to come to my aid.

  “Look!” I say, pointing at the scorpion, which did not like being threatened with a box of oranges and is now waving its pincers menacingly, shifting its weight from foot to foot. “Scorpion!”

  One of the people—the guy who had the camera—says, “Wow! That’s so realistic! Look, Anna—it must be remote-controlled!”

  Norman says to me: “What are you talking about? You just frew my oranges on the ground! You gonna pick ’em up and any damages you pay for, you little…”

  I don’t wait to hear the rest because the scorpion lunges at me with its quivering tail-sting, and I scream as it gets nearer.

  “Ramzy! Dr. Pretorius! Help me!”

  “Who you talkin’ wif? And what’s this flippin’ toy lobster all about? Where did that come from? Who’s controllin’ it?” rasps Norman, still holding on to my arms.

  But I’m not paying attention to him because the scorpion stings me.

  I feel a sharp pain in my thigh as its needle-like stinger enters my flesh, and I howl again, and I hear the photographer say, “Eew! What a gross toy.”

  In my ear, Dr. Pretorius is talking urgently. “Stand by, Georgie. Coming out of the program now. Powering down in three…two…one.”

  The scorpion has withdrawn in readiness for another strike when everything goes dark.

  Everything is silent.

  I sink to my knees in the ball pit, my fingers scrabbling urgently for the release catch of the helmet. I lift it off my sweating head as the pin lights come on in the studio and there I am, surrounded by the green-black walls, panting and completely confused, the way you are when you wake up from a vivid dream.

  I hear the padded door behind me open, and Ramzy and Dr. Pretorius come toward me, Ramzy shuffling as fast as he can through the ball pit.

  “Georgie?” he says. “How was it? Are you OK?”

  I don’t know, but I assume I am. I mean, the scorpion wasn’t real, was it? So it can’t really have hurt me.

  But then I look down and there’s a small patch of blood soaking into my skirt from my thigh.

  Dr. Pretorius, Ramzy, and I sit in the control room and I gulp Fanta from a glass. I have a headache, and I’m still panting. Ramzy’s already on his second chocolate cookie, but I’m not hungry. I’ve lifted my skirt and Dr. Pretorius is peering at the tiny puncture wound, which at least has stopped bleeding.

  She shakes her head. “That’s, ah…that is irregular to say the least. By the way, don’t worry about poison, but there is just no way that even a tiny wound should happen. It would appear…hmmm…” and she just stands there, staring at my leg and stroking her chin.

  I prompt her. “It would appear what?” I pull down my skirt with the now-drying bloodstain, and then I feel a surge in my stomach and throat. I manage to mutter, “Excuse me,” before I throw up on the floor. Not a big puke, like when you’re ill: just a little one, hup, like that, and the piece of peach I ate in the dome comes up and lands—along with some of the Fanta I just drank—on the tiled floor.

  “I’m sorry!” I say, and although Ramzy’s face says Eeeew! Dr. Pretorius looks as though she hasn’t heard me. Instead, she eases herself onto h
er knees and bends down to look at the little pool of orange vomit with a lump of peach in it.

  She lifts up her glasses and looks closer, then says, “What’ve you eaten today?”

  I dropped my lunch on the school-cafeteria floor and didn’t get another, so I’ve eaten nothing since breakfast, apart from half a flapjack that Ramzy brought me. And then that bit of peach. I tell this to Dr. Pretorius and she nods slowly, then gets to her feet again. Her knees click noisily. She shuffles off to one of the kitchen counters and comes back with a towel, a small glass dish, and some tongs that she hands to me.

  “Put that lump of fruit there on the dish, would you?” she says, pointing to the piece of peach on the ground. “Then wipe the floor. I don’t wanna risk getting down there, or I may not get up again, ha!”

  I do as she asks, and she carries the dish back to her desk and sits down in the swivel chair, stroking her chin.

  “The scorpion’s a glitch, that’s all,” says Dr. Pretorius quickly. She doesn’t seem to care very much, and that upsets me. “The whole 3-D environment is based on the Surround-a-Room I created. The rain-forest game had these scorpions in it, and they’ve been carried over into this program, kinda by mistake. He’s actually pretty harmless, I’d say. At least he was.”

  “Was?”

  Dr. Pretorius sighs and sits back in her chair. “Listen. That scorpion had a tiny—and I mean tiny—bit of very limited artificial intelligence built into his code. The idea was that, as you played the game, he would learn your strengths and weaknesses as a player. But he seems to be getting smarter. He seems to be able to hide, for example, which was never the intention. The other avatars—that is, the other people—can see him. And so can you when you’re in there, and we can see him on the screen—look.”

  On-screen, she brings up a view of the street and presses a button to play it. It’s a recording from my helmet: everything that I saw is being played out in front of me. Dr. Pretorius is fast-forwarding through the video. There’s the strangely deserted beach, the two ladies talking, the people outside the shop, me throwing the ball…

  “That ball-throwing? Smart experiment, kid: just tell me first next time,” she says.

  Next time?

  …and the reddish-black scorpion, huge and ugly. Dr. Pretorius points it out, behind a parked car. “See? He’s hiding. That is not in the original code. That is artificial intelligence: AI-learned behavior. In the game, they could clone themselves. So far this one hasn’t learned how to do that, and that is a good thing.”

  As we watch, the scorpion on the screen scuttles out from behind the car and comes toward me. Dr. Pretorius tuts and hits the space bar, making the picture freeze. “Pesky little critter. I’ll get you eventually.” Turning to us, she says, “It’s just a question of going through the program and locating the rogue code. Time-consuming but entirely straightforward.” Then she peers again at the piece of peach on the glass dish. “But there is something much more curious….”

  Dr. Pretorius looks over at me. “You OK? You’ve gone a little pale.” She starts tapping the keyboard again. “The scorpion—the one I call Buster—seems to have learned to bridge the RL–VR gap, and that…” She catches the puzzled look on my face and pauses.

  “The gap between real life—that’s you, us, now—and virtual reality, where the scorpion exists. There’s no way that Buster should be able to actually draw blood. But it seems as though he’s learned how to interact with reality. Darn quickly too. As for this”—she pokes the peach with a long finger—“there is no way that this piece of peach you ate could become real, and be brought back to this world—to real life.” She pokes it again. “But it has…”

  She’s still fiddling with the puked-up piece of peach, and it’s pretty gross. Her voice trails off and Ramzy prompts her. “What about it?”

  It’s almost as though she’s talking to herself, and I have to strain to hear her. “I can’t be certain, but the scorpion sting appears to have made this possible. Remarkable.”

  “Is that a good thing?” says Ramzy, and she stares at us both with her big pale eyes.

  “No. It is not a good thing. It is potentially catastrophic. Unless I can eradicate the stray code, that darn scorpion’s gonna wreck my whole experiment.”

  I look over at Ramzy. “Do you still want to have a turn?”

  Before he can answer, Dr. Pretorius says, “No one’s going back in there until I get this fixed. Understood?”

  I don’t need persuading. I’m still staring at the peach and wondering what she means.

  Dr. Pretorius is back at her keyboard, tapping and scrolling, and then she brings up a screenshot of the shop window with the electronic calendar showing next week’s date. She stares at it, a slow smile spreading across her face.

  “Well, at least we know that part worked. We did it!” she says to herself. Then louder, “We did it!” She turns to me. She doesn’t see that, behind her, Ramzy has taken out his phone and is silently recording the computer screen. His movements are quiet—he clearly doesn’t want her to know what he’s doing—and he slyly slips his phone back into his pocket as Dr. Pretorius turns back.

  She glances at her watch. “We’ve taken too long already. I promise ya: we’ll get this fixed. Right now, I’ve got a load of stuff to do and it’s time for my evening swim. Let’s go. I’ll walk you out. And, kids? Thank you.”

  For a moment, she disappears into a little annex and leaves the door open. I can see in: there’s a narrow single bed and a tiny bathroom. She emerges with her beach bag and closes the door behind her. She’s caught me looking but doesn’t seem to mind. She half shrugs.

  “Even mad scientists have gotta sleep,” she murmurs, adding—almost to herself—“ha!”

  * * *

  —

  That evening, my headache gradually gets worse. Earlier in the day, I had been full of plans to hook up with Mr. Mash. I was going to check the webcam so at least I could see him. I was going to call the vicar, and maybe—if I asked nicely—he’d hold the phone next to Mr. Mash’s ear while I watched on the webcam, and it would be the nearest thing I could get to actually being with him. I’d even practiced what I was going to say to him.

  “Hello, Mashie. It’s me. Are you being a good boy?” That sort of thing. It sounds silly, but it didn’t feel silly.

  Instead, I lie on my bed, panting. I hardly sleep, and my duvet cover is wet with sweat. It’s only as I’m finally falling asleep that I remember that Ben could still be sick. I haven’t even asked the vicar about him since Mum’s memorial. I’ll ask him tomorrow, I tell myself.

  I have had headaches before. Everyone has had a headache. This is not just a headache, though: a throbbing or a tightening in my head. This is something else: an agony that starts at the back of my head and seems to extend in waves across the top and sides of my skull, meeting above my eyes where the pain intensifies.

  If pain has a sound, then this is like a knife being scraped on a plate.

  If pain has a color, then this manages—somehow—to be vivid acid-yellow (kind of like Dr. Pretorius’s swimsuit, though that may be a coincidence).

  And then the taste: a sour, metallic flavor on the back of my tongue, like rusty vinegar.

  But above it all, worse than any of the other sensations, is the pain above my eyes, which has been getting worse and worse, and which makes me curl into a ball, clutching at my temples, moaning loudly.

  I look at my phone and see that it’s 8:00 a.m., so I must have fallen asleep at some point.

  Dad will be in the workshop with Clem. Jessica’s already at work (her second Saturday in a row). I am up in my room, writhing on my bed, when I call Dad, and I can barely speak. He and Clem both run back up the lane and burst into the house.

  I hear him saying, “Georgie, Georgie? Are you OK?” but it sounds like he’s shouting from miles away.


  And Clem is saying, “Obviously, she’s not—look at her! Call a doctor! Get an ambulance!”

  And then I hear him on his phone to someone, saying, “She’s having some sort of…I dunno, seizure. Oh my God! Georgie!”

  As if from a long way away, there’s a voice—a small voice—saying, “It’s all right. It’s all right. I think it’s getting better.” And I realize that it’s my voice.

  And it is getting better. The high-pitched, searing pain is diminishing, like a howling storm becomes a rain shower, then drizzle.

  The lights that had been popping like fireworks behind my screwed-up eyes slowly stop; I take my balled fists away from the sides of my head. I lie on the floor of my bedroom, my face against the carpet, soaked in sweat, and start to cry. Dad holds me nervously, like I’m a wild animal, while I sob at the memory of the pain, and with relief that it has passed.

  Finally, after what seems like several minutes (but probably isn’t), I take a deep breath, and a long, satisfying sniff, and sit upright.

  And then I pass out and everything starts to unravel.

  I come round in the ambulance. Dad is next to me, gripping my hand so hard that it almost hurts.

  “Hi, my lovely,” he says, and smiles with his mouth, but not his eyes, which are still wet.

  There’s a mask over my mouth that I pull aside to see if I can talk.

  “How long have I been here? What time is it? Why am I here?”

  “You passed out about ten minutes ago. The ambulance was pretty quick. We’ll be arriving soon. Clem’s riding up front. Jessica is meeting us there.”

  Jessica doesn’t have far to go: the department where she works is part of the hospital.

  One of the paramedics in the ambulance gently replaces the oxygen mask and says, “Shhh. We’ll get you figured out.”

  * * *

  —

  What happens next is a bit of a blur. There are doctors, nurses, blood tests, injections, a brain scan. Then ultrasound imaging, and Dad crying when he thinks I’m sleeping. Then, after a few hours, I’m sitting up in the hospital bed.