The Dog
This is a short story about AI, but it was not AI-generated. The story came to me in a dream, almost exactly the way I am about to tell it to you. Some of the details I added later after I woke up. The images were generated using Midjourney.
The Cube loomed in the distance. As my ride got closer and closer, it rose out of the parched earth like a scary final boss in a video game. I wasn’t that worried about the move, more curious. When I accepted my new position at the university, I didn’t expect them to ask me to move physical locations. That kind of thinking is so… twentieth century. Like, why would I spend 30 minutes just getting in and out of the darn Cube, get driven to a different location, just to collaborate with people in exactly the same way as I could through any Worldnet pod? It didn’t make any sense, but I couldn’t exactly decline the position either.
Well, here we were. I stepped out with my few personal belongings and walked towards the nearest entrance. My smart phone guided me and granted me access through a succession of gated doors, elevators, and escalators until I was deep inside the bowels of the beast. I only saw a few other people and cars on the way up.
Finally I reached my newly assigned home. It looked really nice. The sky looked really realistic with a bright sun and beautiful sky, the front lawn was nice and big, and the home itself was a nice cozy ranch style place with vintage brickwork, early 2000’s style for maximum nostalgia. I could get used to this.
I walked through the place and it immediately felt like home. All my favorite decor, kitchen appliances, and clothing styles were already there. My favorite foods and snacks were in the pantry and fridge. The backyard even reminded me of my childhood home, but with some nice upgrades. As I walked back there I said hi to my personal assistant, who looked like an older woman in her sixties. Very well done, I was almost fooled into thinking she was a real person sitting on my patio chair.
They even thought to allocate me two dogs! Even though I grew up with cats, I liked getting the practice with dogs. Very well done too, behaved exactly like I remembered real dogs acting when I was younger.
Except one of the dogs was a little… off. The dog looked like a smaller Cujo, but very friendly and really happy to see me. Like, so happy it was whining and shaking uncontrollably. This dog was way more excited to see me than is even normal for dogs of any species, real or manmade. So aggressive was its love for me that it kept running into me and jumping on me with unrelenting enthusiasm no matter how hard I tried to calm it down.
I started getting a little bit alarmed. This dog seemed to be defective, but there was nobody around to help me. This dog was so aggressive it would easily overpower my assistant. I tried holding it by the collar so I could read its serial number, but it was shaking so hard I couldn’t hold it still long enough to read it. I started booking it out of there and the dog chased after me, still smiling and shaking as it hunted me down. As I ran back indoors, I tried calling out to my assistant that something was clearly wrong with the dog. Infuriatingly, she assured me that they are engineered safely and nothing could possibly be wrong.
Barricaded safely inside the house, I whipped out my phone and called 911 with shaking hands. The operator, clearly a human annoyed at being bothered, asked me what was wrong and then reprimanded me that this line was only for emergencies. I tried insisting that a defective dog with sharp teeth was indeed a real emergency. Unconvinced but resigned to helping me, the operator asked for the serial number of the dog. I told him I couldn’t read it and they had better send someone out as soon as possible.
At that moment the frantic dog, desiring me so greatly that he had been banging against the patio fence, finally broke through and made a dash for me. I ran through the house, unfamiliar with the layout, trying to close doors and windows as I went to keep the mad dog at bay. But the dog seemed to know the layout better than me and kept circling around and finding ways in. I knew I had to make an escape.
I ran out to the front yard and towards my assigned vehicle. As I jumped in, I realized it was too late. The dog had broken out into the front yard, and I looked up in horror to see it leaping high into the air, about to jump into the open top convertible with me…
And this is where my dream ended. However, by popular demand, the story has continued into a series. To continue on, read Part Two: A Strange Case.
