FROM: FrrrryFX@howard.theduck.panox.com (Edward Fletcher)
Message Sent 161254ZAUG99 00-7
SUBJECT: Answer your damn mail! Bob. I gotta chat with you right now. This is serious. I'll stay online as long as I can. Please. Ed. Yeah, right. Ed and I have been collaborating on a round robin story for eight months now, and a lot of messages back and forth have been jokes to keep both authors interested. Still, I'll play ball. TO: FrrrryFX@howard.theduck.panox.com (Edward Fletcher)FROM: gryph23@state.col.edu (Bob Graff)
Message Sent 1> Message Sent 161520ZAUG99 00-7
SUBJECT: RE:Answer your damn mail! Whazzup, Ed. Still there? Three minutes later, as I finish reading, and laughing at, a 'TF moments' posting, Ed replies: TO: gryph23@state.col.edu (Bob Graff)FROM: FrrrryFX@howard.theduck.panox.com (Edward Fletcher)
Message Sent 161521ZAUG99 00-7
SUBJECT: RE:RE:Answer your damn mail! Bob. This isn't a joke, I've turned into a dog. Not a Furry dog, just a dog. I'm serious, I need some help. I'm locked in my apartment and I don't want to break a window to get out. Call me on the phone, if you don't believe me. I'll have to go offline to pick it up. I'll email you again after we 'talk'. Please Help. Ed. I laughed. Still, it's a local call, so I look up and dial his number. He picks up on the first ring. "Ed?" "Woof! Whine. Howl." "Nice dog. Put Ed on the phone. That's a good dog." He proceeded to bark the entire first verse of the dogs doing "jingle bells," howled and hung up. Strange, but I decided to play along. When I got logged back in another message was already waiting. TO: gryph23@state.col.edu (Bob Graff)FROM: FrrrryFX@howard.theduck.panox.com (Edward Fletcher)
Message Sent 161527ZAUG99 00-7
SUBJECT: I told you I'm a dog! Please Bob. I really needease Bob. I really need some help here. I can't talk at all. And it's hard typing with paws. Come on over to my apartment before my landlord hears the barking and hauls me off to the pound. Ed. >Ed no doubt had some practical joke planned, but I was hooked at this point. I also wanted to meet whoever trained that dog to bark tunes. Since I had a light class load tomorrow, I got in my jeep and drove across town to Ed's place. I had been there once before, to pick him up on the way to a 'con. He was some kind of junior engineer in real life, and his apartment was in a four-plex with a separate ground floor entrance. Much nicer than my own fifth floor studio apartment near campus. I walked up to the door and knocked."Open up, Ed, It's me." Two barks, then some scrabbling of claws on the inside of the door. The deadbolt clicked, then silence. A whine. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. Sitting in the entryway was a beautiful chocolate Labrador. He looked me straight in then eyes, (something I had never seen a dog do before), then barked softly and jerked his head to motion me inside. I stepped in and closed the door."Ed?" I looked around the room. "This is a great gag. Ha! Ha! You can come out now." The dog walked up to me and put up his paw to shake. I took it more in bemused habit, than anything else. Then he barked once and ran over to Ed's workstation.ion.He pressed f1 on the keyboard. The screen typed: [Look down here! At the dog! I'm really Ed. This isn't a trick.]"Cute, Ed. Let's see the dog actually type something. Hitting a macro key doesn't count." I continued to look around the apartment.He barked excitedly in place, tail wagging wildly, as labs will, and recaptured my hand in his mouth. When he had my attention again, he hit f2. [I knew you would say that. I'll bet I have at least a dozed more canned responses already saved. Now say something you want me to type.] "OK, type: The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog, smartass." He hit f12 and it appeared. Then he typed, slowly: [Gotcha! Look at how my paws are hitting the keys. They are too big to type individual letters, so I wrote a keyboard mapping that assigns areas of four adjacent keys all the same value. I still can only type ten words a minute. But not too bad for a dog!] He wagged his tail again.I decided to believe him. Ed would rather die than code. "All right, tell me what happened. Do you know what caused this?"He hit f3. [I have no idea. No werelabradors, Martian flu, or guys in bathrobes at the mall. Didn't even feel the transformation. First thing I knew was when I woke up yesterday and walked into the bathroom to pee. Oh, watch your step in there, by the way. It took me about six hours to figure out I could still send email, so I sent one to you.]"What do you want me to do? I'm just a sophomore, going to school full time. Shouldn't you be calling your family, or the government, or somebody?"f7. I'm too predictable, I guess. [You're on the List. I knew I could get you to at least listen. I don't have any surviving family, and I broke up with my girlfriend last month. Heck, I was betting she probably put a spell on me, or something. But I doubt it, since she's allergic to dogs. Government? No way! I've seen too many X-files episodes.]"But what do you want me to do?" He looked classic 'puppy dog eyes' at me.f4. [Take me home. I'm a dog. I don't want to be picked up as a stray, so I need to belong to somebody. Let's see if this wears off with time, or maybe we can think of something.]"I can't afford a dog! Like I said, I'm going to school, earning minimum wage as a lumber store stockman. Ed, you're a good friend, but I can't afford you." Ed jumped up and ran into the bedroom. I followed, wondering what was going on. He met me at the door and shook a pair of jeans till his wallet fell out. He dropped them and stuck his nose into the closet, digging shoes and junk out with his forepaws. "Ed there are only forty-two bucks in this wallet! That will help, but it's barely enough to get you a dog license..." He came out of the closet with a sock in his mouth and dropped it at my feet. Inside was a roll of cash. He licked my hand, then typed, [There is five hundred in the sock. I can probably milk my ATM card for another two thousand before they decide it's stolen. Sell my workstation, but leave me the laptop as a translator. I bet a dog can live pretty well on that kind of money!]"OK, you made your point. Let's get out of here. I'm driving, though."[Shotgun.] I laughed.Between classes and my evening job, it took the rest of the week to get Ed settled into my apartment. Since we didn't know if he was susceptible to canine diseases, I took him to the vet for his rabies, parvo, distemper and kennel cough vaccinations. We drew as much money out of his bank account as possible. After the fifth attempt, the ATM ate his card and I drove away fast. I wonder what they made of the five Labrador nose prints on the camera lens. I bought him a collar and dog food. We started out eating my cooking together, but he asked for the dry food since, as he put it, [I can't taste any difference, and what you cook is too greasy.] We waited for something to happen, but he stayed a dog all that semester."Ed?"[Yeah?]"You took calculus, right?"[Yeah. What is it this time?]My grades were improving, thanks to having a live-in tutor who had already graduated. My social life was on the upswing as well. The old story about dogs, big dogs especially, being 'babe magnets' was entirely true. We took frequent walks across campus together, and never failed to have someone who would never have approached me without the dog, come over and start a conversation. Before winter weather drove us inside, I had become comfortable enough with a girl named Julie that we began dating. Ed helped my confidence, as a dog is said to do.[Anybody can tell she likes you. Just ask her.] So I did, and she agreed.{Oh, and Bob?]"What, Ed?"[Leave the door ajar when you go out tonight. I'll lock up when I leave, then sleep on the porch till morning.]He had taken to roaming loose late at night, but always returned by dawn, and seldom (but still occasionally) came back smelling like something dead and disgusting. He said it was a dog thing. He was spending more and more time behaving like a dog, and less time acting human. I asked why, and he replied, [It's too hard to do human stuff. I built to be a dog, and I do it well. Besides, It's fun to be a dog.]By spring, I had a solid 3.5 GPA and a steady girlfriend. Ed occasionally complained of being bored locked up in the house all day (American doorknobs were defeating him), but he still could use the computer and read library books I checked out for him. We wrapped up our round robin, to great congratulations on the List for me as an excellent writer, especially as some said, Ed had left me to finish alone.I was making plans for Julie and I to go on spring break together when Ed interrupted me with his current favorite trick: Bouncing a rubber chew toy off my head. I grabbed his lower jaw to roughhouse it while we talked."What's up, Ed? You want to go to the beach with us over spring break?"He had entered another macro: [Actually, I was hoping you would take me somewhere else this year. I've reached a decision. I don't think I'm going to change back on my own, and if I lay on your rug for another year, I'll lose all interest in acting human. I'm ready to go the laboratory experiment route, so I've decided to give myself up to the authorities.]"This better be someplace Julie's gonna like."[I want to do this where so many people will see me that there will be no chance of being locked up and 'just disappearing'. Someplace public, but high class. I want a civilian agency, not the military or the intelligence services. Someplace where you and her won't be caught and locked up with me.]And he did. We drove down to Gulf Shores, Alabama for spring break that year. The night before we got there, I took the name plate off his collar and turned him loose at our motel outside Huntsville. I cried while I told Julie and the motel manager he had run away. The manager promised to look for him and I said we would stop by to check on our drive back north. It took him nearly a week to set things up, and we saw it while we were sitting in a beachfront restaurant having supper: Even bigger than the baby in the well story, the nationwide news coverage of the amazing dog who rescued the 11 year old genius blind girl who was trapped inside the simulated space station at the Huntsville Alabama Space Camp; the one who signaled her location by typing a message on the camp's computer, which was relayed through the shuttle astronauts in orbit.And my only question is: Since she was blind, how did he convince her using a keyboard interface?