Ever read George Orwell’s 1984?

I have.

The concept of a Big Brother watching over all our actions scares me. The concept sleep learning -- of a machine instilling different values into us as we sleep so we wake up as different individuals terrifies me.

If that is dystopian, then it is a dystopian kiddie pool compared to the vast ocean that was the Other Earther society.

They brainwashed kids for god’s sake!

The moment you were born, or even in your mother’s womb, the memories loaded into your genes by the ruling authorities would imprint themselves into your mind. Other Earthers were born with a full command over language, basic science and whatever moral paradigm was in vogue at that point of time.

Considering that they also had superpowers… they were true blue superbabies. Or, in the case of the Hounds of Hel: superpups.

That was how Ria ended up as a canine supremacist within moments of her awakening.

While I can't bring myself to support the practice, I can see why it became so popular.

Consider for a moment how much time is wasted drilling basic knowledge into the heads of children in our current education system.

Years.

Decades!

And we aren’t even learning anything new. The alphabet, the number system, the four basic operations of arithmetic… that is what a grade schooler spends a year learning. In Other Earth, it took an instant.

You might argue that human interaction is sacrificed in this process… there is no time to form their own world view. But, in fact, there is more time for social interaction when you don’t have to waste valuable years cooped up in a classroom. Time made even more precious by the fact that a dog’s lifespan is much shorter than a human’s.

Sacrificing a large chunk of freedom for increased efficiency… I cannot claim to be qualified to pass judgement on an entire society but, despite the blistering rate of progress resulting from the practice, I wouldn’t want to be born on Other Earth.

.

.

Reluctantly, drawing myself out of the catatonic state inspired by my ponderance of an entirely new society, I decide to entertain myself otherwise.

Luckily for me, I have a live show to watch.

Conjuring up some popcorn and cola, I sink back into the most comfortable chair I can imagine and turn on the giant screen.

Ria was still in that alley, stretching herself to get used to her new body. Apparently, the mutation had made her stronger and she had grown a bit larger too. She was testing her now retractable claws and elongated fingers. No opposable thumbs sadly.

Her fur seemed a dark grey… a far cry from the beige it had been. Well, I was seeing stuff in black and white so it could have been anything from brown to a dark shade of hot pink.

Finishing her warm up, she retreated back to the end of the narrow alley to get space for a running start.

I am curious… what does she want to do?

Her muscles bunched and she pushed off the ground, the surroundings blurring on the screen as she reached the trashcan she had placed in the middle.

She jumped on it and then kicked off again, aiming for the metallic fire escape staircase that ended a floor and a half from the ground.

*splat*

She slammed face first into the wall above the staircase and slid down until her hind legs touched the staircase, then she fell back, her head hanging backwards off the staircase with her tongue lolling out and her forelegs curled up into the air.

*canned laughter.mp3*

She had underestimated her power up from the mutation.

[Jump] proficiency: 95.71 percentile

This was the function of the ROOT.

At its core, it was a learning aid. Based on the proficiency of an individual in a certain skill, they were awarded a percentile score telling them how good they were at it compared to the rest of the population of their race.

Going by the number of digits after the decimal on the score, I estimated that at least a thousand dogs had already awakened their powers and joined the ROOT and Ria was in the top five percent by jumping prowess.

Ria quickly struggled up from her disgraceful belly-up posture and shook her head to clear the dizziness from the impact.

This was the tallest apartment in the block with five whole floors and as such had a fire escape stairway on the outside. To prevent burglary, the stairs stopped a floor and a half above the ground and a foldable ladder was placed there for someone to get the rest of the way down. The house beside this one had four floors, beyond which was my four-storeyed apartment complex. The fourth floor of which was mine.

Ria quickly climbed to the roof using the stairs and then began to take a run up stance. My eyes widened as I realised what she wanted to do.

She wanted to enter my room from the roof. I immediately morphed my astral projection into the form corresponding to our canine body and turned on the 7d setting. And suddenly, I was in our body… sight, sound, touch… everything.

Just, I wasn’t in control of the body.

I could feel the muscles bunch, the racing heartbeat, the feel of the air against the tongue, taking away the excess heat away from our body… then we were off. Our body stretched out with the forepaws braced for impact with the ground.

Front right, front left, bunch up the body, back right, back left, kick off with the hind legs… repeat.

I could feel the fluid grace with which my whole body contorted to eke out the maximum speed until we reached the edge of the roof and then suddenly, we were in mid-air.

Geronimo!

*skitter**skitter**crash*

We landed onto the roof of the next house and using our claws, bled off the momentum, only stopping after crashing into a flowerpot and knocking it over.

[Sprint] proficiency: 77.51 percentile [Jump] proficiency: 99.82 percentile

We lay there for a moment, belly-up, savouring the feeling of the jump and panting to cool down our overheated body. Dogs don’t have sweat glands so they have to make do with their saliva evaporating on their tongue, cooling them off.

ROOT had ranked us for our sprinting and our jump proficiency rating had improved. A trickle of information entered our minds. Which muscles to flex when we were taking a run-up, which ones to use when we were pushing off, the optimal breathing pattern… we suddenly knew these things as though they had always been there at the back of our mind and we were just remembering them again.

This was our reward for improving our rating. The ROOT, true to its name of the root of all knowledge, rewarded an eagerness to explore. It analysed and compiled the skill data of every individual connected to it and used it to form a model of the most optimal way to perform that skill. Whenever an individual, through their hard work, improved themselves, their findings were added to the database of the ROOT and used to perfect the model further.

The individual was remunerated by knowledge about the optimal model. The amount of knowledge granted was based upon their initial ranking and the degree of improvement.

After a brief rest, we got up and prepared to jump again.

This time was much more dangerous…

This building and our apartment building had the same number of floors, but due to the difference in construction standards over the years, this one was pretty old and ours was built recently, the height of this roof was higher.

Still, the height difference was less than that of the previous jump so we needed to put much more power into the jump to be safe. Fortunately, the reward from ROOT had come just in time.

Ready… run up and JUMP!

*Aaaah**slam*

Oh, shit oh shit ohshit…

We were hanging off the edge of the roof with our forepaws while our hind legs were scrabbling for purchase against the wall.

Finally, one of our hind claws got stuck in a crack in the masonry and we had enough leverage to send the other leg over the wall. We then somehow crawled over and fell onto the roof where we panted for breath.

Too exciting…

God knows how spider-man does this for a living… Hey wait… maybe there really is a real-life Peter Parker by now who has been bitten by a mutated spider and gained superpowers…

Or more plausibly, died.

[Jump] proficiency: 100 percentile

Oh yeah! It’s official. We are the top bitch, dawgs.

A stream of information flows into us, much greater in volume than the previous time. It seems like reaching the top of the rankings has a large bonus reward. The information this time consists of the current version of the perfect model for canine leaping as well as a lot of disorderly data about how different species do their jumping. A cursory glance nets me an impression about how a rabbit makes those multi-body-length hops.

I get the distinct impression that the ROOT wants us to explore and help it improve its model.

I’m glad Ria thought to experiment with roof-hopping now rather than later. It has only been a few days since the mutation started and there are already a thousand dogs in the system. The more time that passes, the more members there will be and the more time they will have to experiment with their skills. Getting this reward will be much tougher in the future.