To communicate.
That had to be the single most astonishing achievement at The Institute. Finding a way to let the animal communicate with you. Giving it the power — not of speech, exactly — but of turning its thoughts into words so it could provide information. You could put a dog out into the field and have it record things for you, allow it to be your eyes and ears, but sometimes you needed your operative (and that’s really what Chipper and the others were: operatives) to just tell you what was happening. Not everything could be interpreted from the data that came into the control room. You needed some judgment, and that had been built into the programming. You didn’t want the dogs to tell you everything that was going on around them, just the things that mattered.
What they’d done, in effect, was given the dog a second brain. An artificial intelligence that had melded with the dog’s own cognitive abilities and instincts.
It just hadn’t worked the way it should with Chipper. Those canine instincts too often came to the forefront.
Still, they’d accomplished a lot within this building. Even if Chipper hadn’t worked out, many of the other animals looked promising, and once they’d perfected the process with the dogs, then they could move on to—
No, best not to even think about that. Many of the people working here weren’t even supposed to know about the next step. Some employees who’d been privy to the long-term goals of The Institute and had raised ethical and moral concerns were no longer getting a pay cheque.
In fact, Wilkins had reason to believe those employees no longer existed.
You couldn’t have someone going to the New York Times or CNN with tales of what was going on here. Wilkins had never even told his own wife the truth about the kind of work he did. Sharon believed he worked in a medical facility, reading patient X-rays. There was no way he could ever tell her what he was up to. The biggest challenge every day was preparing conversational stories to tell her over dinner. He had created a small, fictional universe about his workplace, invented names for colleagues, given them back stories filled with gossip. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now Sharon wanted to meet these people. Have them over for dinner, maybe get together for drinks.
That was not happening.
And even if it ever did, Sharon was never going to meet Simmons.
Simmons had seriously underestimated Chipper. The dog even used his security card to get away! When Chipper had escaped, very little of his software was operational. Rebooting it from the control room had been difficult, particularly when the animal had been in some kind of metal container, which, he later learned, was the cargo hold on that bus.
But once the dog had fled the bus station, Wilkins had gone back to work on the GPS issue, as well as trying to activate the visuals. The animal’s eyes not only allowed it to see where it was going, it let The Institute see what it was looking at. Planted into Chipper’s retina was a camera lens no larger than the head of a pin. All Wilkins had to do was make a few computer clicks to bring the camera into operation to see what the dog saw.
Wilkins had been having some trouble getting that going, too.
And just when he thought he had the GPS fully operational — he had managed to locate the dog in the general area of some garbage dump outside Canfield — it went out. Just like that! In the midst of all these thoughts, Wilkins suddenly sensed a presence behind him.
He turned away from his computer screen and there, towering over him on her four-inch heels, was Madam Director, arms folded across her chest, eyeing him sternly through her black-rimmed glasses.
“Give me some good news, Wilkins,” she said.
“Yes, well, I was just in touch with Daggert on the scene to tell him of an approximate location of H-1094. After that I lost the GPS but I’m working on that and a visual feed.”
“Define working on.”
“Well, uh, you know, working my darnedest to get it up and running as fast as I can.”
“How long?” she asked.
“I, uh, am not sure. Any second now, I hope.”
“Hope,” Madam Director said. “We don’t run on hope here, Wilkins. We run on results.”
“Of course, of course. Let me, uh, let me just see what I can do here.”
Wilkins began frantically tapping and clicking. “What I was thinking is, if we can get the visuals up and running and we can view the surroundings, that will help us with location while we work on the GPS.”
Droplets of sweat sprouted on Wilkins’s brow. He could sense others at nearby stations working hard not to look at him. They were completely focused on their own duties, praying the Director would not choose to look over their shoulders next.
“Hang on, hang on,” he said. “I think we may have the lens in the right eye coming on here.”
Having both cameras — one for each eye, of course — provided better images and depth of field, but to have even one working would be a bonus.
“Here we go!” he said.
There was static at first, then jagged horizontal bars, then an image. It moved for half a second, then froze.
“This is supposed to be live video, yes?” Madam Director asked.
“That’s right.”
“What you have there is not video, Wilkins. It’s an image. A picture. It’s frozen.”
“Yes, yes, I can see that, but—”
“What is it, anyway?”
At first, Wilkins wondered if the dog might be looking in a mirror, because what was looking back at them was an eye.
A big eye.
But it wasn’t a mirror. If it were a mirror, there’d be black and white fur surrounding that eye. Maybe a snout, and a black nose.
This eye was framed by an eyebrow across the top, a hint of an ear to the right, and a tiny bit of nose to the left.
This was a human being. Face to face with Chipper.
“Where is this?” Madam Director demanded.
“I can’t tell,” Wilkins said. “I can’t see anything beyond this bit of face. It could be indoors, outdoors. It could be anywhere.”
Madam Director leaned over Wilkins, got her own face to within a foot of the screen.
“That,” she said slowly, “is a boy.”
Twenty-Three
“This is not happening,” Emily said. “This dog—”
“His name is Chipper,” Jeff said, pointing to the screen of her laptop. “He just told you right there.”
“This Chipper is not talking to us,” she said. “This is some kind of a joke. Someone is playing a trick on us.”
Emily tipped her head back and said, in a loud voice, “Whoever you are, very funny!”
Words came up on her screen.
Not a joke! This is for real!
“Who’s your owner?” Jeff asked Chipper. “Who’s your, you know, master?”
You!
“No, no, you don’t understand. Who looks after you? Where’s your home?”
Can this be my home? I like it here. Lots of things to smell.
“Um, well, this is just an old abandoned train station. You must have come from a better place than this?”
“Stop,” Emily said. “This is nuts. Dogs don’t talk.”
“He’s not talking,” Jeff said. “He’s communicating with us. A talking dog, well, that would be nuts.”
“This is nuts, too!” Emily said.
“Then how do you explain it? You found that port, you wanted to check it out, you got your laptop. And now we’re having a conversation with Chipper.”
“With a dog.”