Copyright (C) 2020, Robert B. Reeder
Slow Hedgehog Publishing
CHAPTER 9
The control room was buzzing like a beehive kicked by a bear. Countless drones hummed
their instructions, demands, and requests into mouthpieces while simultaneously receiving
requests, demands, and instructions through the ubiquitous earpieces. The fact that the
drones looked very much like insects only augmented the visual analogy of the angry beehive.
The control room was not on Earth and was not manned by humans from Earth. The control
room was very much interested in Earth, however. The intensity of the buzzing increased with
each passing time cycle. Wings of drones and supervising drones raced in frequency, making
the work environment unbearably noisy and hot. None of this mattered to the drones, the
supervisor drones, or the queen. Actually, nothing mattered to any of them. None but
Exxix-Guv-ix-imm-ixex (EG). The drone named EG was one of the millions, but who was
hatched with something more than a rudimentary self-awareness. Things were starting to
matter a whole lot more to EG lately.
CHAPTER 10
The dog, earlier that day, had made his usual rounds. Unbeknownst to his owner, the dog
knew how to leave the townhouse without help and without disturbing anyone. He had been
leaving the home a whole lot more lately. You see, there were strange things happening, and
he knew that he had to get these people to do something about it.
The dog was a practitioner of the canine religion of Lupafamarq, an offshoot of Canistism.
He didn’t live as faithfully as he knew he should, but he did curse the neighborhood cats
regularly, and tried to attend meetings at the makeshift chapel when he could (especially if
there were treats). Since the dog was worried about today’s upcoming events, he barked out
the holy phrase, “If you aren’t living your life, you are wasting your death!” To the uninitiated
and the canine-deaf human, it only sounded like “Arf! Arf! Arrrf!” and the dog earned a
well-placed shoe thrown from the hangover couch.
Since Master was going to be down for a while, the dog let himself out and started making
the mid-morning rounds.
He came back in and listened to Master recriminate himself while downing generic Lucky Charms
from a plastic bowl. “I guess you wouldn’t be interested in a walk down to the ocean, would you?”
muttered the dog, and the man dropped his bowl of soggy cereal.
CHAPTER 11: The One Durist
The drone EG knew that he had to get away if he was going to be able to think. He really
needed to digest these thoughts he’d been having of late. He also sensed, more than thought,
that he needed to talk to someone else about these thoughts. They were not the types of
thoughts to be sorted out by oneself alone. They would require conversation, and perhaps
even debate, to flesh out their true meaning. Intuitively EG sensed this to be the case. He
plugged himself into the Source Array and injected his feeder tube with some anti-Exasperon.
Not before hacking the keystrokes of a fellow worker. It wouldn’t do to have the Hive know that
he was the one taking all the anti-Exasperon. Shortly after EG raided the Source Array, drone
Jubbix-Ray-ii-goom-meyu (JR) was singled out and removed from the Hive for stealing drugs.
Without a protest JR complied with his death sentence.
CHAPTER 12
Master and dog made their way down the winding streets in their steep descent to the Pacific
Ocean. Master was in a resigned daze. The dog walked briskly, with a sense of canine purpose.
He seemed to exude a smile, though not visibly, per se. It was more of a smiling attitude that
somehow seemed more true than an actual, visible smile would have looked. The man followed
behind the happy trotting dog with less enthusiasm and trotting. There was certainly a lot less
smiling, either real or imagined. The attitude that the man exuded was more a clear sense of
bewilderment. For the two-mile walk neither man nor dog spoke until the smell of the ocean
became strong enough to warrant a comment from the man. “This place stinks!”, he blurted,
almost as a bark. The dog wagged his tail in a Lupafamarq salute and replied, “Try getting a
whiff of that through a dog’s nose sometime. I can smell a rabbit in a major league ballpark.
How do you think it registers for me?” The man grumbled unintelligibly something between
acknowledgement, apology, and cursing. Again, it manifest itself as something approximating
a bark. Neither dog nor man spoke for the remaining 20 minutes of the walk to the sands of
Point Bemusement, with its toxic-smelling sands of the Pacific Ocean. The sun was lower in
the sky now. The waves crested high and crashed in mighty asynchronous booms. To the
normal beachgoers, it appeared that a man and his dog were playing fetch on the beach without
a ball or Frisbee. The dog, with its mottled coat jumped and twisted as if reaching to snag a
tennis ball out of the air. The man-made furtive attempts to enter the water, retreating more
than he approached. Anyone nearby would have heard the man grunting out phrases in fearful
and feral gasps. The dog spoke eloquently and in a calm manner. The seagulls took bets on
who would crack first. “You must accept this new reality, Jack” said the dog, “even though it is
not a new reality. I have opened the windows for you to stick your head out, to point your head
into the wind. There is no more chasing cars for you – you are driving, my friend!”
CHAPTER 13
On the banks of the Ocoee River, the woman got her second warning from the game warden
in a week. “The next time will not be a warning,” he said. “I’ll have to write you up for this.
You just can’t run your own fish tagging program. You have to be with Fish and Game, or a
state university. Now knock it off – this is serious.” The woman looked at the remaining wireless
chip tags in her inventory and nodded her head slowly in agreement. She was thinking of where
to go next to finish out the current lot of tags.
CHAPTER 14
The alley was deserted and there were plenty of old discarded boxes and furniture items to
make a comfortable meeting place. At the monthly chapel meeting, the adherents of
Lupafamarq discussed their plans in low growls and yaps. Old Fangster, the leader of the
chapter, had exactly zero idea that certain mutts within the group were quietly and carefully
plotting his overthrow as Alpha Male. That is, he had zero idea initially. Once the larger dogs
began the rhythmic low growls and moved into his personal space, he knew.
Fangster looked to the skies, hoping to catch a glimpse of some seagulls or plovers spiraling.
An appeal to d’augury, with all its mystic charm and fluid interpretation, might serve him well.
With no seabirds visible overhead, Old Fangster barked out an overt threat to the pack, “By ruff,
the first cur to go after me is gonna lose a lot of fur!” The others took a step back, and a few of
the younger dogs even lowered their tails perceptibly.
At this moment, the dog showed up, with Jack in tow, looking more confused every minute.
The dog growled, yipped, yapped, and barked in a quick staccato sequence. Jack’s dumb,
confused facial expressions deepened, danced, and cavorted across his face, making clear to
each of the canine worshippers that Jack was utterly confused and disturbed, and that he had
made a waste of his life up to this point. Old Fangster took in the information he had just learned
from the dog who brought Jack in.
“Listen,” said Fangster in a low, extended mix of a growl and a bark, “we have got to table this
coup for a few days. Jack has a mission to complete, don’t we all agree?” The dogs all dropped
their tails and lowered their ears in halting assent. Then in perfect English, Old Fangster spoke
to Jack.
“Listen, Jack, you now know things that few humans understand. You are surprised. You are
confused. This is a lot to take in, and we respect that. We’ll give you some time to process
your new worldview.”
“No, it’s OK,” said Jack. “I’ve come to grips with this, and it’s as good a reality as any I’ve
experienced up to this point. You can continue.”
“Listen, Jack, you need to change a few things and then do a few things, OK? Listen, you
have got to take this seriously, OK? Listen, this is important.”
“I’m listening.”
“Don’t use any attitude with me, or I’ll give you a dog bite that will make you meow like a cat!”
All the dogs howled sharply at this statement. A few short barks trailed off.
“Seriously, I’m listening. I’ve got no attitude.”
“Then stop saying you are listening. I can tell you are listening.”
“Got it.”
“Shut up.”
Jack lowered his gaze and nodded slowly.
Old Fangster started up again. “You need to take Meatmauler with you to the Amulet Market
and bring us all back a good and powerful collar.”
“Sorry, who is Meatmauler?”
“You don’t know? The noble dog who brought you to us is Meatmauler.”
“You mean Sparky?”
Sparky shot Jack a sharp glance.
“OK, Meatmauler it is. Do you know the way?”
The dog nodded, turned tail, and started to trot toward the beach.
Fangster picked up his sermon precisely where he left off, before the unpleasantness began,
“So we see that Lupanark is as valid as any other religion (praise Sirius, the Dog Star!). It’s
certainly at least as important as that which takes The Artist Formerly Known as The Artist
Formerly Known as Prince as its faith. All belief systems have at least a dew claw of truth to
them, and ours is howlingly superior in both its structure and execution.” All the dogs pointed
their noses to the sky and created a cacophony that brought humans to their windows to complain.
CHAPTER 15
Elizabeth knew why Sharleigh hated her. She knew exactly why. And Elizabeth didn’t care.
She knew also that Sharleigh had every reason to hate her. In her heart, Elizabeth felt bad.
She was sorry for her friend and the loss she had caused her. But none of that really mattered.
Elizabeth slowly read Sharleigh’s letter. It was scribbled quickly, with a few scattered cross-outs,
on the back of a cable bill envelope. Sharleigh’s handwriting and spelling errors were unmistakably
hers, but it was difficult to read the frantic note. It read, as best Elizabeth could decipher:
“As you do NOT know, for some time I have been involved in research on the Deep Web.
It started out as a hobby, but you need to know that I have become involved with some shadowy
people, and with an organization that I now know to be totally evil. They are out to get me and
I’m sure I won’t be around very long.
CHAPTER 16
Elbert took some of the stardust that he had remaining from the small jar and pushed a pinch of
the glittering bubbles into the garden soil. Several years had passed since he dusted the nose of
that small, dying girl in the hospital, saving her life (to a degree). Elbert could not believe that the
magical stuff was nearly gone. He tried in vain to remember the words of the fairy peddler. They
were words of instruction that faded from his memory after his first sniff. Stardust is powerful
medicine, and it must be handled carefully. Unfortunately for Elbert, he was never a careful man.
Early experimentation had yielded yeti spawned from garden soils, leprechauns, leprechauns
to drive off the nasty early leprechauns, and even an impressive rainbow-spouting pure white
flying unicorn – and then that foul-mouthed flying narwhal... Oh, the gold that Elbert saw pass
through his hands in those days! He thought it would never end.
Elbert could see that it was all about to end. He was desperate to continue the wild ride, and
so he searched his soul, racked his feeble brain to remember how to make more stardust.
CHAPTER 17
Jack said to Missy, “You know, Tabasco is a spice or condiment, not a side-dish. I guess it’s
none of my business. Hey, what do you think of this?”
Jack handed Missy the musty pamphlet, and she read it:
From the Galactic Pharmacopeia
<121 .8.130=""> ESLON ASSAY
The most prominent manifestation of eslonic activity, an abrupt decrease in centelin soru
levels, is the basis for the eslon assay. The procedure, though relatively cumbersome, has
great merit for complex harvesting of modified organ transplants from human subjects to Kash,
or more successfully, to the various strains of Kashtoreth pet mongooses.
The Human Blood-Sugar Method
GP Reference Standards <12>--GP Eslon RS.
Standard Solution-- Dissolve a suitable quantity of GP Eslon RS, accurately weighed, in sufficient
water, containing 0.1% to 0.25% (w/v) of either portrol or criudesol, 1.4% to 1.8% (w/v) wexcerin,
and sufficient cheleralic acid to make a Standard Solution containing 40 GP Eslon units per druh,
and having a pH between 2.5 and 3.5, unless otherwise directed in the individual monograph.
Store in a cold place, protected from freezing, and use within 6 months.
CHAPTER 18
“You’ve been reckless and a total fool, you mutt!” muttered the grey cat with the blue eyes, to
the dog. She continued berating him, “How could you bring your owner (this was snarled with a
hiss) into our world?”
