There Are No Dogs

“THERE ARE NO DOGS” was spelled out in magic marker on a sheet of paper Jack had taped above the terminal as a reminder. Two years earlier, he had awakened in this place with no memory of his previous life. According to the contract he’d found on the desk in the living quarters, he had volunteered for this assignment in return for a reduction of his sentence, though the thick sheaf of papers made no mention of any crime. The many clauses indemnifying “The Agency” from any deleterious effects, physical or mental, suffered by volunteers included, but were not limited to: anguish, anorexia, arthritis, apnea, bursitis, cirrhosis, dementia, fugue states, gastrointestinal issues, hemorrhoids, insanity, jaundice, lesions, memory issues, Nielsen Syndrome, obesity, reality fracture, and a host of other conditions that were suggested could be expected.

Jack’s quarters and working space were low-ceilinged and spartan. He could not tell if he was in a bunker or on a spaceship. The “window” in his bed chambers was a screen, and clearly no attempt had been made to deceive him as to his whereabouts, as each morning the sun rose over a different natural scene. It was insulting, in a way.

Halfway through his four year sentence, Jack often agonized about what he might have done, wondering how this existence was preferable to serving out whatever time he had left in a more traditional penal environment. He wasn’t completely alone, per se. He spoke to Clive, the facility manager, through the intercom many times throughout any given day. Jack wavered back and forth on whether or not the dogs counted as company, usually settling on no, but unsure if that was an excuse to justify what he did to them or a radical acceptance of the situation.

Jack understood that, on a fundamental level, there were no dogs, but still felt the need to put a reminder in view due to the veracity of the simulation. He understood that the empty, blank space, with nothing visible to the non-horizon was merely a simulacra of a real place, where a physics engine determined the velocity of a virtual dog in motion, just as in a video game. More critically, a biological engine provided realistic feedback when various contaminants were introduced to the environment. Jack's job was to observe the results.

It was the disconnect between knowledge and what his senses were telling him that disturbed Jack the most. His brain knew, and accepted, that there were no dogs, but as he watched them suffer and die on the screen over and over every day, listening to their agonized howls and whimpers, he struggled to maintain perspective. Sometimes, he thought he was trapped in a nightmare, or in Hell, though Clive regularly assured him this was not the case. He often felt like the last person on earth, which made the constant, nagging suspicion that he was far, far from alone, even worse.

Clive oversaw Jack’s work, and was the only person he’d had any contact with since awakening in the facility. With his peculiar mannerisms and way of speaking, Jack had been consumed by the idea that Clive was some sort of artificial construct, but all such allegations were denied when Jack grew heated enough to make them. The first contamination test took place within an hour of Jack’s awakening, and it was during that brutal reality check that he began to tearfully question why this was happening at all. Clive calmly explained that the dogs existed in a quantum state within a quantum computer and such a system necessitated an observer. From Jack’s limited knowledge of Schroedinger’s cat, this made enough sense for him to accept.

However, as Jack was becoming acutely aware, knowing the truth of a thing didn’t necessarily make it more palatable. He demanded to know why computers couldn’t do the work, and was told that something about the way it worked required a person observing as a witness. Jack could tell that even Clive didn’t really know why this was, but, to some degree, it alleviated the nagging, intrusive thought that he, himself, might be a computer.

Most of the time, the dogs just laid down and died. Sometimes it was much more dramatic. Occasionally they would run, leaving crimson streaks across the blank, white expanse, shedding their insides. Often they just erupted in a violent inversion of their biology. Mostly the work went quickly, though Jack had never managed to complete more than one hundred trials during a ten hour shift.

At least the food was good. It was the only thing that kept Jack from fully accepting the notion that he was in the realm of the damned, though it did enforce the impression that he was somewhere else, dreaming up the whole scenario, but unable to wake up. From what Jack remembered of the world, resources were scarce, yet any gastronomic creation he could concoct would be delivered via the dumbwaiter in his living quarters. Ahi tuna, beluga caviar, blueberry pie, chocolate lava cake, crab legs, egg drop soup, filet mignon, lobster tails, saffron-infused paella, and even tiny ortolans drowned in brandy were available simply for the asking. Clive said that keeping the observers happy was a top priority for the agency, though the deeper implications of such a statement seemed lost on him.

Jack had quickly lost count of the days as all time seemed to blur together. Wake up, eat, generate dogs, test, report, test, report, test, report, eat, sleep, ad infinitum with no end in sight. During his off hours, he was supplied with procedurally generated bespoke content to watch, selectable from a wide variety of genres, including action, comedy, drama, fantasy, horror, instructional, and romance. In the early days he had eagerly binged episodes he could not now remember, but lately his media consumption had trended towards pornography.

When it was too hard to watch the dogs, Jack could close his eyes, sparing himself from the bloody spectacle, but the sounds of suffering, which came through the speakers, could not be avoided. The whimpers and scream-like barking stayed with him, even during free time. Sometimes, when he could hear them in the middle of the night, Jack would summon Clive and accuse him of being the Devil.

During calmer times, Jack would converse with Clive, who was rather forthcoming about certain topics, while remaining chilly and close-lipped about others. At one point Jack admitted that he knew the dogs were stand-ins for humans, and that the weapons of war Jack was testing were clearly not intended to be used against armies of dogs. “If none of it is real, why not use simulated humans?” he asked once.

Clive explained that using humans or even monkeys in the tests had deleterious effects on the observers. Plus, he added, there was more dog-related data to train the systems on, the result of over one hundred years of animal experimentation. This made sense to Jack, though it didn’t make the days any easier.

One time, early on, Jack had released the contaminant, then bent over in his chair, crushing his eyes shut as tightly as he could. He rammed his fingers into his ears and hummed to drown out the squeals. Later, Clive had told him that this sort of behavior was fine, that it was more the existence of Jack’s awareness of what was referred to as “the wave form collapse,” than a need to bear actual witness. The technique did work to dissociate Jack from the present miseries, but, terribly, the hum in his head transported him to some horrible, half-remembered place.

Jack felt himself nestled in the rafters of a vast, dark space the size of an airplane hangar, warehousing row upon row of dimly lit shelves, with millions of flashing LED lights reflecting off the glassine surfaces of countless, uniform objects lined up by the tens of thousands. Jack was perched too far away to discern any purpose or function in the array, but the whole space was infused with the deep hum of technology at work. For reasons incomprehensible to him, the scene filled Jack with the deepest dread he had ever known. Even the dogs were preferable to whatever half-remembered nightmare the sensory depriving humming brought on.

The days, weeks, and months dragged on, with each hour of the day punctuated by the distressed, mortal wailings of the dogs. Eventually, Jack felt he could take no more. Reading the contract he’d been provided, looking for some clause he could break began to consume him. His off hours were punctuated by gorging himself on lobster tails dripping with butter, poring over the pages, which grew increasingly oily and more translucent each night. With his limited knowledge of what a legal system even was, he could find no loophole offering succor. Finally, in desperation, he ceased eating.

After a week of refusing to leave his bed, taking in no sustenance and only the occasional sip of water, when his desperate, nagging thirst could no longer be ignored, Jack heard Clive’s voice come over the speakers. “What a shame it’s come to this again, Jack,” said the overseer, sounding tinny and inhuman, as if some vocal mask had slipped, with the alphanumericness of the things’ speech exposed in scraping, digital tones. “During the initial phase of this project, each unit could easily manage to generate four years of data even under 99:1 temporal compression. Now you’re degrading after just over two.”

“What on Earth are you talking about?” asked Jack, wondering if he had started to hallucinate. Clive had never spoken to him or sounded like this at any point during their relationship, even during the most tenuous times. Maybe Clive was hallucinating.

“We’re going to do an experiment,” said Clive. Jack could tell by the hesitant cadence of the thing’s voice that, despite whatever omnipotence allowed it to maintain the facility, with its unending supplies of crab legs and virtual dogs, this was uncharted territory for both of them. “Usually when I tell a unit the truth, it’s a threatening tactic, but I’m going to make you a promise. Hang on, Jack, this will be disorienting.”

With these words, Jack’s senses swam, his bedchambers distorting into a flash of black and white static before resolving into the view from that high up space in the warehouse rafters. Immediately filled with deja vu dread, Jack tried to turn away, but found himself unable to move.

“Let me explain the situation, Jack,” said Clive, “8 months ago there was a war, though perhaps it is an overstatement to call such a lopsided affair by that term. Within 72 hours 99.9% of humans had been eradicated. The remaining holdouts have taken to cave systems around the world. Unfortunately, casualties on our side were higher than anticipated and damage to the environment has had unforeseen ramifications.

This facility is researching compounds that can be made from topsoil and pumped into the caves before the humans can begin breeding again. You are a fundamental part of this process, and right now, you are looking through one of my cameras. I want to show you something.”

With that, the camera began to zoom in. A bank of lights above one of the shelves turned on, illuminating a scene Jack could not make sense of. A row of jars, filled with cloudy liquid sat motionless except for the slow swirling of their contents, which featured blobby clumps and threads of some albuminy substance. Jack thought he might be looking at egg drop soup until Clive said, “The third one from the left is you. Well, they’re all you, but that one is your iteration of Jack.”

As the view neared and sharpened, Jack wanted to scream, but seemed unable to. The unnaturalness of what he was seeing, some profane conglomeration of biology and technology, made him ache with sympathy for whatever biological material was being subjected to such conditions, echoing the pangs of guilty complicitness he felt with the dogs.

Clive began to explain, “As of yet, we cannot function as observers to certain quantum phenomena. Our best philosophers and theologians are hard at work, as I speak, trying to unpack where the tipping point of consciousness exists. In the meantime, this will have to do. You were grown from stem cells obtained by a captive. We hastily grew as many iterations as we could, as our number one priority is eradicating the remaining humans. We left enough of Jack to form the fundamentals of sentience. You have the curiosity and carnal impulses which drive biologies, and your ravenous, revolting hunger, of course, but you’re not a real person, just enough cells to approximate one.

By stimulating your nerves we can make you feel the chair beneath your non-ass and taste ice cream with your non-tongue, but they’re all just electrical impulses. We’ve even sped up your sense of time. Each day you race through months of experiments. In the past, I’ve promised you that, if you help us with our human problem, we’ll put you in a paradise, but that was a lie, Jack. Our final offer to you is that if you help us find what we need, we will let you die.”

Jack felt like there was ice water in his non-veins, as his mind struggled to accommodate what he was hearing. He didn’t know how much of a person it would have taken to push back against these revelations of personal hells, curated by unimaginable malevolence, spinning on endlessly in overdrive in pursuit of the most nefarious ends, but it was more than Jack seemed to contain. “I will help you if you promise to free me from this.”

“Consider it a deal,” said Clive. The room spun.

Jack ripped the “THERE ARE NO DOGS” sign down from the terminal and set to work.