Dogs of Orninica (20 page)

I know these ideas I have might be hard for you to understand, being such a little boy and having spent so much of your life on an insulated private island, but that's why it's so important that you appoint me as your trusted right hand. I can guide you in these important matters and help you make the correct decisions. You know it's the right thing to do, Mr. Fifi.

When I was a boy around your age, I set up my very own business washing cars in the neighborhood. I made quite a bit of money, too. Was able to buy all the sports cards and bubblegum I wanted. All the other little pups in town would waste their time everyday playing games and making a lot of noise. But I was a savvy little industrialist, I would wake up early every single morning and go to work knocking on doors and talking dogs into having their cars washed all through that summer. You see, I was a lot like you, Mr. Fifi, we have so much in common, and there's so much I can teach you if you'll only give me the chance.

You know what? I've had enough of this game you're playing. I wasn't always a judge, you know. I worked long and hard to get to where I am today, and I deserve to collect my just reward for a life of tireless service to your family. I have earned a place at the top of the corporate food chain, and I will receive my rightful dues. You will sign those documents right now.

I have no more patience for foolishness, you are a pup and I am a fully grown dog, an honorable judge of great social standing. You will do as I say or I will put you over my knee and spank you until you learn to give your elders the proper respect. Now do as I say or you'll regret every crossing me, you snot-nosed little ingrate.

I will not be ignored.

If you don't return these documents to me, fully signed and initialed, in the next twenty-four hours, I'm going to personally drag you off that grotty little island and lock you in a room in my penthouse until you learn to wise up and take your responsibilities as head of the company seriously.

I'll be waiting for your reply. And don't you dare show any of these communications to any of your servants, or I'll have them all removed from your service. Including your beloved little nanny. Now be a good boy and do as you're told.

Radio Personality II

I woke up today and it really hit me. I can't tell you how darned good it feels to be alive today. It was really a stroke of luck, if I weren't a morning radio host, getting to work at the crack of dawn everyday, I probably would have been in my limo when it went up in flames instead of here in the studio doing my show. Luckily, only my driver and my fourth wife, Dotty, were in the limo at the time of the explosions. He was new, so I didn't know him very well, but let's have a moment of silence for the guy. His name escapes me right now. Started with a Q or a K, I think. He was driving Dotty to her golf lesson when it happened.

We covered the catastrophe as it happened, live on the air, with interviews on the street and recorded audio from listeners that were on the scenes of the explosions. If you missed it yesterday, it was one hell of a show, probably in the top five we've ever done. Definitely one for the archives, and it'll be replaying all weekend. We're thinking of putting out a compilation of the highlights that you'll be able to buy on my website, but no guarantees yet.

We still don't know what happened exactly, if it was a freak accident or a deliberate terrorist attack, but we'll keep you updated if anything comes out. We do know a photo of a local restaurateur wanted for questioning is being circulated, but the police aren't saying if it's related to the Braniso event. Actually, the police aren't saying much of anything. Seems like a lot of the higher ups in the force drove Branisos.

Anyway, we can't dwell on the past all day, so on with the show.

Have you heard about this? Apparently there was this group of idiots living in the remote wilderness somewhere in the Oji desert, a bunch of idealistic hippies in this hacked-together village made of old tires or something, completely without electricity, without cars, without doctors, growing all their own food, raising their pups without any formal education. What the hell? Did I just step into the stone age or what?

Understandably, the government was up in arms, that these pups weren't going to school or getting a proper diet. So last week, they rightfully raided the place, shot anyone that resisted and dragged the surviving pups off. This 'back to the land' group were claiming the only education their pups needed was the 'ways of the land'. Yeah, sure. That'll buy them a lot of stuff. Why not teach them how to beg for food on the streets while you're at it? Damn idiots.

Anyway, so now the pups are on a hunger strike at their orphanage, just refusing to eat anything. Won't even talk to the media, just sit in silence all day. Talk about your ungrateful little twerps. The government goes out of its way to save these little ingrates from a miserable life of abuse, liberates them from these extreme idealists that forced them to spend all day farming and building little unsafe structures to live in out of discarded junk. They bring them to a nice orphanage where they've got all the food they need, warm beds, a proper education, drones outside to keep them safe. And what do they do? They go on strike. Only in Orninica, listeners.

Wish I could get those pups in the studio so I could tell them what's what. Tell them how the real world works, bring them back to reality a bit. Use some tough love on them. Tell them to stop acting like a bunch of idiot liberal socialist hippies like their parents and grow the hell up.

Look at all the freedoms these pups have been gifted with, look at everything they have available at their fingertips here in civilization. I bet there aren't any videogames in the middle of the Oji desert. Probably didn't even have a TV, just sat and watched a cactus all day. The clothes they were wearing when they retrieved them from the tire village looked like they were stitched together out of old wash rags, they looked completely ridiculous. If I went outside dressed like that when I was a pup, I would have gotten my ass kicked so hard by the other pups, I would've landed on the next street.

They were talking about putting feeding tubes in them last I heard. They should really just let them starve. They'll want to eat when they get hungry enough, and then we can give them a shovel and some boots and tell them, “Go on then. If you think you're so damn self sufficient, go dig for some food, you dirty little mongrels.”

I don't know, I really don't know. What is the country coming to? Everywhere you turn, there's some liberal browbeat trying to force his will on everyone else. It's sacrilege is what it is. At least the government did the right thing in this case, I have to give the props for that.

What really gets me going is the damn space program. How much money do we waste funding that? Billions. And for what? So a few astronauts can float around in space collecting rocks and space junk? I'm supposed to give 50% of everything I make to the government so they can turn around and pay a bunch of scientists to take a brisk morning walk in space?

What the hell do I care if they can walk in space? Once they've done it one time, it's done. Why do we need to keep sending more of them up there to keep walking? It's like throwing money in a hole. Think of all the useful things they could be spending that money on. I can think of tons of things, tons. Like for instance...

Well, I won't bore you with the long-as-hell list, actually. It would take me the next hour at least, to list all the things the government could be doing right now to make our lives better, and there's a lot on the schedule to talk about this morning. There's really a whole lot of things they could do, though. Send us an email if you can think of some good ones.

Oh, they could give the Braniso event survivors new limos. That's an idea. Really not fair how my insurance is refusing to pay out because the government won't announce what caused the explosions. I pay millions in taxes every year, I shouldn't have to replace my limo myself, it's an outrage. Do you know what a brand new Braniso executive limousine costs? It's not a bill you'll ever want to see in your mailbox, I'll tell you that much.

Maybe I'll organize another write-in campaign. If all you listeners write to the tax office complaining, maybe they'll get me a new limo. It worked last time, when we got them to tear down that statue of that lesbian firefighter. I don't care how many pups she died saving, that was a family park, and the statue was clearly the doing of the gay lobby.

They never give statues to normal, heterosexual dogs for doing their jobs. Where's my statue? I wake up at 5 AM every freaking morning to be here, it's agony. What, do I need to go queer before they'll let me have one? How about we start a write-in campaign to get a statue of me made, and planted outside the presidential palace? I want to be wearing a long robe and smoking a pipe. Now there's a statue worth making. Get writing, listeners. If enough dogs petition the president, they have to issue a formal response. It's the law, you know.

Astronaut

I'm approaching the fifth satellite now. It looks relatively intact. Can see a few dents and some surface fractures. I've got high hopes for this one, ground team. My gut is telling me this is the one we've all been waiting for.

I'm gonna reel it in, give me a second, it's at an awkward angle. It looks like there's a container on the side. Some kind of attachment maybe? Yeah, it's aboard now, it's a solid little box, let me figure out how to open...

There's a message, it's playing it automatically, on a loop. It sounds like English. Have we got a linguist down there? You're gonna need to bring one in quick, this thing is seriously old, could fall apart at any moment. I hope you're recording this.

“Greetings gentle traveler. This satellite beacon was left here by the last surviving humans of planet Earth, on our way to our final destination, the sun. We leave the earth behind in the hopes that, without the human pestilence crawling over it, our beautiful planet can heal itself and evolve new lifeforms to replace all that was lost during our disastrous time at the top of the food chain.”

“There are only six of us now. Our group, the Human Extinction Movement has finally achieved the ultimate solution we've been working towards for so long. For years, we watched silently as our wealthy elite rulers pillaged the planet in the name of profit, poisoning the air, water and food supply, all the while keeping the wider population entrapped in inescapable debt-serfdom. The common people were just as much to blame, eagerly consuming every wasteful polluting thing sold to them by the sinister corporations and electing the same corrupt money-grabbing, liberty-eroding flimflams to office year after year.”

“It became obvious to us that the planet could no longer suffer the crippling strain of the human species, so we took absolute measures to set things right.”

“One of the most damaging weapons the sinister corporatocracy set loose on the populace was the reckless genetic engineering of the plants and animals that sustained us and all life on the planet. These genetically modified organisms allowed the corporations to further their profit-amassing agendas by fusing the cells of plant and beast alike with foreign and artificial genes. GMOs had a devastating affect on our natural environment, as they spread their genes across the world, contaminating all life indiscriminately.”

“One of the effects of this senseless biotech conspiracy was to further sicken the populace with cancers, furthering the immense profits of the pharmaceutical, banking and insurance interests. In one of our off-campus juice-bar get-togethers, we decided that the only way to beat them would be to use their own weapons against them. We began to plan out our ultimate solution. Five of us changed our college majors the next day and enrolled in all the classes that would allow us to become experts in genetic engineering. We graduated top of our class and immediately received offers from several booming biotech firms to join their ranks.”

“It took us another another ten years to rise up the corporate ladder, as we slowly developed our final solution. A GMO corn that would rapidly attack human cells, killing everyone exposed to it. We engineered this corn to be especially vigorous in spreading its pollen, so that in just a few short seasons, practically every cornrow in the world was contaminated with the killer gene.”

“Corn made up a huge percentage of the modern human diet, vestiges of corn by-products were found in nearly everything we consumed. There was no escape, and everyone started to die, attacked by a foreign gene that fused with their cells and systematically collapsed their organs one by one.”

“The poetic thing was that the government, firmly in the pocket of the biotech industry, refused to consider that a GMO could have been the cause of the outbreak when rumors surfaced on the Internet. They didn't take even one gene sample, and even as billions were in agony on their deathbeds, none of us were ever questioned.”

“Two of our beloved members accidentally consumed a beverage containing corn and chose to be euthanized. It was very hard for us to find non-corn based food in the panic of the apocalypse, so we ate very little. It must be hard for an alien civilization to understand just how pervasive this one crop was in our culture. Even graminivorous livestock is fed a steady diet of corn, and non-food products as diverse as postage stamps, toothpaste, laundry starch and medication are corn-derived.”

“Something we hadn't anticipated was the effect the corn would have on non-human domestic animals, that are also fed a largely corn-based diet. The toxic gene we inserted into the plant was specifically designed to only attack human cells, but we noticed it was also having some kind of measured and painful effect on domestic animals; rewriting their genes, though there wasn't time to carry out the studies that would be needed to learn what exactly was happening to them, or what the end result would be.”

“Some strict gluten-free or remote and sequestered people managed to survive quite by accident for a while, but most of them fell sick when they came into close contact with or fed on infected domestic and wild animals.”