They say large animals aren’t seen but heard. Ah, where is it? I know it’s here. About an animal. That’s the name of the story, and I’m going to write it. Enough of this bullshit. Enough of this wallowing in the shit of trying to take “animal story” in a non-traditional direction. I’m a dog who knows nothing about dogs, nothing about people, nothing about nothing. It’s not philosophical, it’s just a story. Now, write it!

People are always asking me, what’s it like being a talking dog? It’s a hard question to answer. I sometimes feel special and other times, well, other times I feel like the biggest freak in the world. Oh, so a talking dog, eh? Very original. Is it a person, is it a dog? Does anyone even care anymore? A fake talking dog? A computer program that thinks it’s a dog in a world of people. The dog is a projection in a house, in a zoo, a cage designed for it. It interacts with things. It has a relationship.

It’s a future saga. There you go. That’s what you’ll do to make it interesting. (Don’t worry about English style and grammar and spelling here, you’ll have plenty of time to worry over it later.) A talking dog in a world where everything is digital, holographic. People long for the realness, and the talking dog is what the zookeepers give them. Every animal real. The zoo is the most popular place because it is all real, certified real (CR). With tangible holography available, the zookeepers have become the new dot-com world for the nation. The one thing they’re making available to the world is realness. But the zookeepers themselves begin to one-up each other. The price of CR animals skyrockets, until even CR rats and pigeons, which once were seen as pests, not bring astronomical prices. Bugs are not far behind, although cockroaches are still plentiful, and nothing modern science, with its seeming magic can do about them. There’s never a need to certify cockroaches. They’re everywhere, and nobody would dream of fabricating one.

How to tell this story. Perspective of the talking dog would be very difficult. Nothing would happen. How would I get the story out there? Through conversations the talking dog has with zoo visitors? Are you real, CR? They would always ask, and the dog would assure them he is, walking to the field closure to let them touch him for a few seconds. Of course, touching a CR dog and a fabricated dog feels the same. The government agency who put their stamp of CR on real products and animals is the only way to tell the difference. Molecularly they even seem the same, even if they’re not (not sure how that works, but who cares? Stay with it).

The dogs were fakes with people at the controls. They alternated who controlled the dogs to teach them. They were under strict rules as to how they could interact with the talking dog. It was supposed to be a secret, but word leaked, and the researches had to share what they had found. The world went crazy. With just the talk and articles of the CR talking dog, the Cleveland Zoo, which funded the project and found the dog, became the leading zoo in the nation. Even before the talking dog was grown, people swarmed the zoo. They had the normal menagerie of CR animals. The uncertified zoos, where the animals, their looks, their feel, their smells were all fabricated, died out. There was something about realness that felt different—even though all the parameters (and this they tested diligently and often) were the same. A cloned animal was a CR animal, but a fabricated one, a tangible projection that gave off odor and heat and everything you think of as physical, was always missing something. But fabrication was good, it was good for the economy, good for the environment, good for the people, good for everything. Except it wasn’t real and somehow people knew it wasn’t real.

Every zoo is going to want one, and eventually, every person is going to want one. They already have real dogs, but they don’t have real talking dogs. The talking dogs are all fabricated, voiced by a computer, which is terrible and easily figured out, or by a real person, paid behind the scenes to act as the puppeteer to the Marinette that is the fabricated dog. The people want clones or offspring of the dog. The Cleveland Real Zoo is not willing to lose its main attraction. A CR talking dog. People will pay a fortune to see such an animal, to touch it, to talk to it. Everything else in the world is fabricated. From the food people eat to the cars they drive in and….