It's the interactive nature of dogs that makes them so useful on line, Readme says. They're always waiting for you to do something, so they can respond.
Laska, it's fair to say, dotes on me. She's always there, in the upper left-hand corner of my field of vision, just her head visible, cocked to one side, darkness behind her -- just as I used to see her looking in the back door at night. She's looking for me, and her nostrils are flaring slightly. She's an Australian shepard, and she has this uneven white stripe down the front of her face, slightly skewed and off-center, that makes her look -- I don't know -- skeptical, somehow.
She pokes her nose up and down a little bit, as if she was nudging me. "Are you still on line?" she asks. "Give me a bit."
I give her a bit. She plays with it for a millisecond, then passes it on. "Give me another bit," she says. I give her another bit.
This goes on and on. She never gets tired of the game and takes the bit off into the bushes to chew it up, the way she used to when we played with a ball. I think they altered the part of her wiring that makes her want to do that.
Fact is, I don't get tired of the game either. I used to. Before I hooked up, there were lots of times I'd wander off and ignore her until she forgot about the ball. I don't do that with bits. Doesn't seem right.
So we have a lot of fun together, really. Like the time she brought back the bit and there was something wrong with it? And I had to figure out what the problem was? That was kind of fun, like solving a puzzle.
In some ways, she's a lot touchier now than she used to be. Seems like she barks at every little thing. It's not a glitch, Diagnostic says, it's a safeguard. Intrusion protection. But it bugs me, because she never used to do that.
I think somebody is spoiling her: she's developing all kinds of bad habits. Today she brought me a whole bunch of raw data that she'd ripped out of a file.
"Bad dog," I said. "No!"
It worried me. What if it was important? What if they found out and blamed me? I was a little afraid to look at it. But then I saw her name in it. Maybe that's why she grabbed it in the first place: it smelled familiar.
I was off-peak, so I scanned the data. It was part of her maintenance record. Whew, I thought. At least it wasn't, like, classified stuff.
I was glad to see that she was being taken care of -- it looked like there was somebody physically there every day, cleaning her tubes and working with her off line. Must be some kind of training sessions, I thought.
It made me kind of sad, though. She used to be my dog, and was my job to take care of her. But that's over, and my cords don't go very far anyway. I was a little jealous, too, because I wasn't getting any special training. But I was proud of her. Laska is a smart dog, and I sure wouldn't want to stand in her way.
So I was curious and I read on, and then I was sorry I'd looked.
"You're being up-rated to commercial dataflow," I told her.
"Give me a bit," she said.
She didn't understand: she can't really process anything complicated. But I can. I felt bad, even though I'd been told I wouldn't have her here forever.
I gave her a bit.
I guess they'll do that for her in Commercial.

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