The Future Has Fiction: “Inside of a Dog, It’s Too Dark to Read” by David Ebenbach

1.

Vulcan whimpered a little and then she let out a tentative yap.

It was starting to get pretty warm in the lander.

2.

There had been no good reason to send a dog to Venus, but that’s one of the interesting things about humans: we invented reasons in the first place, but, upon doing so, decided that they would generally be optional, going forward. Also we made the bar pretty low for what could count as a reason. As in, saying, We’re going to send a dog to the least hospitable planet in the solar system because we want to, counts.

3.

Unlike Laika, the famous first dog to have ever been sent to space, this particular dog had not been pulled off the street. This particular dog had in fact been the pet of the very billionaire who conceived of, financed, and directed this endeavor. “If I can’t be the first Earthling to set foot on the surface of Venus,” he said at the press conference, with a row of lab-coated and uncomfortable looking scientists lined up behind him, “the honor should go to someone I love.” At which point he whistled. His dog, a gold and white Welsh Corgi who had until that day been named Winnie, scrambled onto the stage—all ears and stumpy legs—with a new tag on her collar that read Vulcan.

“In the myths,” the billionaire said in his difficult-to-place accent, “Venus and Vulcan are estranged from one another. This mission will reunite them.”

Most of the reporters in the audience saw little of the God of the Forge in this squat, fuzzy cutie-pup, and many were furthermore aware that, in the myths, the estrangement in question had come about because Venus had a thing for Mars, which would seem to muddy this whole mission, conceptually, but they didn’t bring any of this up at the press conference; these seemed minor points when compared to the massive expense being contemplated and the enormous logistical challenges and overall perilousness and pointlessness of the mission. They raised their hands to discuss not old stories but this strange new one.

As the questions accumulated, the row of scientists shifted awkwardly in their places.

4.

It had taken four Earth months for the rocket to get from Earth to Venus, months Vulcan spent floating back and forth through the living space, quickly seeming to fall into boredom as the terrifying liftoff receded in memory.

There was a wall-mounted feeder and a wall-mounted water dispenser, and the engineers had fitted the dog with a mechanical diaper that connected to a wall-mounted waste disposal system. After all those months, the mechanical diaper did seem to chafe a little, but it did its job. Other than those features, there wasn’t much to interest a dog for months on end.

Aside from the messages, anyway. Many people wondered what Vulcan was thinking about as she floated around. They wanted to connect to her, connect to her experience. They wanted to relate to her. And so in fact anybody could pay to have an audio message, question or otherwise, delivered to the rocket and played aloud over the speakers. People sent music, for example, which seemed to interest Vulcan a little, and they sent dog sounds from their own pets, which seemed to alarm and confuse Vulcan, and they also sent deep philosophical questions. For instance, Do you consider yourself part of the human endeavor? and Should there be a planet just for dogs? and Does this experience make an interested God seem less plausible, or more? Of course there were personal questions, too. Are you happy? Do you hate the man who put you in this rocket?

An astonishing number of people paid to send their queries and thoughts; even some of the scientists staffing this mission, feeling a building regret over what they were participating in, sent words of encouragement. We’re with you, they said, adding, in spirit.

For the most part, honestly, the dog had little visible reaction to these messages, aside from twitches of her big, bat-like ears. But the social media accounts created on her behalf did have reactions. Bow-WOW, this is exciting! and so on. But the physical dog herself was fairly impassive. That said, there was one kind of message that always elicited a positive reaction:

Who’s a good girl?

Who’s a good girl?

These words produced a yip every time. And it was a yip that seemed to listeners undeniably replete with pleasure.

It was a yip that reassured people.

5.

It was Groucho Marx who originally said it: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

6.

The interior lander was gases-balanced such that the lander and Vulcan had not immediately been crushed by the absolutely tremendous air pressure on the Venusian planetary surface. The interior presumably felt, in that sense at least, more or less like Earth. And the gravity was similar to Earth’s, for the first time in months. Still, the dog did not take the opportunity to scamper around; she mainly just lay there on the lander floor. She had lost considerable muscle mass during the weightless journey. Muscle mass and also psychological get-up-and-go. Floating loose for four months does that to a creature.

The horrible roaring and shaking of the descent probably hadn’t helped.

And, as the temperature-controlled interior steadily lost ground to the broiling environment all around the lander, Vulcan felt even less motivation to get moving. It was, out on the surface of Venus, an inconceivably extreme version of what some humans called a “dog day.”

All days on that planet are inconceivably extreme versions of dog days.

The exterior cameras filmed the stark, flat, brutal, cracked-stone planetary surface, and the interior cameras filmed a sulking dog.

The diaper, which also contained diagnostic tools, recorded the dog’s blood pressure, heartrate, hormone levels, and so on. The results were consistent with expectations.

7.

Before that, before the lander had been sent to the surface of the planet, the rocket had first put itself in orbit around Venus and held itself there for another Earth month. The scientists wanted to take some readings, and the billionaire wanted to check all the boxes: first dog to reach another planet, first dog to land on another planet, first dog to orbit another planet. When you’re after firsts, you don’t want to leave any on the table.

For Vulcan, life in orbit had been very similar to life on the journey. The state of freefall created by the circling gave the sensation of living without gravity, and there wasn’t much other change in the interior of the rocket. Well, there were some screens, and they showed images of the cloud layer of the planet below, but scientists have never been sure whether dogs can really meaningfully watch television. Throughout this month, Vulcan gave them no reason to develop a clearer stance on the issue.

8.

It didn’t take very long—a little over ninety Earth minutes—for the lander to start groaning from the pressure. It was made of lead, and very thick, but the air pressure on the surface of Venus is equivalent to being at the bottom of the oceans of Earth. Which is a lot. Not to mention the added stress of a temperature that is nearly five hundred degrees Celsius. Which is an awful lot. And so the lander groaned.

Vulcan whined in rough harmony.

The scientists back home triggered a loop that played some of the best Who’s a good girl? messages in the lander, in an effort to soothe her. Some of those scientists, watching this mournful-eyed dog planted on the steel floor, were weeping in the control room. Their own mournful eyes hidden behind their hands.

Hidden because of course the billionaire was there in the control room, in a very Star Trek Captain Flight Deck kind of chair, and the chair rotated, so he could easily turn to anyone else in the room at any time and look at them in judgment. Though he didn’t. He instead stared at the main viewing screen with flaming eyes and called out his questions and ideas and thoughts in a ringing voice and people responded to him, as necessary, in less-ringing voices.

“This is an unprecedented day!” he said repeatedly.

Of course it wasn’t the first time that a dog would die for science; that’s a human tradition that predates even Laika. But it certainly had never happened on Venus before.

9.

Vulcan—then known as Winnie—had been raised in comfort. She’d slept on expensive pillows whose cases had very high thread counts. She ate food prepared by chefs, not scooped from a can. She was groomed meticulously. And so she was perhaps in some senses poorly-prepared for a journey this free of creature comforts.

But had Laika been much better prepared? The Soviets had chosen a stray dog for their spaceflight in 1957. A dog that knew what it was to grab meals from trashcans and sleep on the cold sidewalks of Moscow. Still—that street toughness didn’t keep Laika alive when the capsule overheated around her.

And Winnie, anyway, was tougher than her pampered life would predict. She was, as the billionaire knew, tougher than she looked.

10.

As conditions worsened for Vulcan, the billionaire consulted the person next to him. In a soft voice, meant only for his ears, the producer said, “We’d better not push this much further.”

They were streaming this event live, of course, and nobody was going to want to watch—or even hear—a dog die, live. They already had enough noise from animal rights protestors as it was. And so the plan was to cut away, when the end was near, from the interior to the external visuals and sounds being captured by the lander’s outward-pointed camera and microphones. “This is what Vulcan is seeing,” the billionaire would say as a voiceover, in his very hard-to-place accent. “She is in a place that none of us have ever been, seeing what none of us have ever gotten to see before. She is a bold adventurer, a pioneer—” And the speech would soar on from there.

Never mind that Vulcan’s experience of Venus would in fact mostly be mediated in the same way as it was for everyone on Earth—heard through a microphone, witnessed through a camera. By the time they were doing that voiceover, the dog would be no more. She would have contributed her last readings to the mechanical diaper and she would be in another world altogether.

A world which, to be sure, no living creature had ever seen.

There was a sharp cracking sound from the lander. Vulcan’s eyes, which she had kept closed for a while, snapped open.

The producer leaned over to the billionaire. “It’s time,” she whispered.

The billionaire nodded. He almost said Make it so, but at the last moment decided not to. He was suddenly a little too emotional to speak. And the nod was enough.

11.

Vulcan, back when she had been Winnie, had in fact been quite an adventurous dog. Pampered, but adventurous. She was known for getting into closets to nose through shoes and for digging in the gardens and the lawn more generally. Floor-level kitchen cabinets needed to have catches installed in order to keep her out. And she liked excursions—trots throughout the property and trips in the car. The funniest thing, however, was that Winnie liked jumping into the pool when nobody else was around, and paddling until she got tired—and then she would get herself back out again. Soaked through but ready for whatever came next.

Before the cabinet catches, Winnie had once gotten into a box of dishwasher detergent pods and eaten quite a few, with no obvious negative effects.

The billionaire had watched this dog—his favorite—and thought, She is restless. Like me, she always wants more.

12.

The voiceover finished just in time; right afterward, the cameras went black. Our eyes were closed to Venus again.

13.

There was a moment, at the very end, when the billionaire realized something. He realized that he wished he could trade places with his dog. And you could argue that this was cynical; after all, he couldn’t trade places. So it was an easy wish to wish. A safe wish.

But it was also an actual wish.

13.

Apart from the people in the control room, nobody ever heard Winnie/Vulcan’s final sounds, and nobody else saw her at the very end, either. And so it may not be particularly surprising that rumors soon started. After all, isn’t that the rule for stories? If you don’t see a character die, that character isn’t dead?

And, for all of us who watched, wasn’t it a story?

Indeed, in many conversations around the world, people speculated about ways that the cameras and microphones could go out while the passenger survived. People pontificated about the deep intelligence of dogs.

And of course rogue social media accounts emerged, claiming to be our hero communicating from the surface of Venus, even as the official ones quietly closed down. The billionaire didn’t even shut these unauthorized accounts down unless they became obscene or otherwise problematic. In fact, he himself he enjoyed them. In fact, he himself teared up unexpectedly when one of those accounts, six months after the lander had gone quiet, posted the words, Woof! I’m enjoying my new home, but I do get lonely sometimes. Woof! When are you coming to play with me?

David Ebenbach is the author of nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including his recent novel How to Mars. He lives with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches and supports graduate student and faculty teaching at Georgetown University. You can find out more at davidebenbach.com.

Image: cdn.britannica.com

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