There is no Protocol Д!
There is no Protocol Д! She was panicking in the small enclosure.
She’s been up for a long time now. The food had run out and the cabin was unbearably hot.
Something was wrong.
Protocol A was strapping in, staying still, and surviving the NOISE. The noise and the pressure that built up until – just as she was about to break – disappeared all at once. And she was floating.
Protocol Б was to get food. She needed to press the right sequence of levers so bits of dried kibble (beef?) tumbled down to a built-in bowl. She would bring her face down low into the bowl to eat. Then she’d hunt down any floating bits of kibble.
Protocol Г was to… was to do… the something that started a conversation with her team back on Earth. This required pressing a different set of levers. You had to keep adjusting the levers so that the a blinking light and the rate of audible beeping would match up together. A heavy crackle would sound in the craft and she could just make out the voices of her team members.
She searched her memories. There was no other protocol. No Protocol Д. Nothing about returning her back home.
She was panting from the heat and her eyes hurt and she was ignoring the things on the other side of the porthole.
Minutes before, her panic started on a routine call with headquarters. She had opened the communication link (Protocol Г) but the people’s tone was all wrong. The scientists all took turns speaking to her. They told her how good she was. How she was a true hero of the mission. Some of them were getting choked up.
She’d heard this kind of thing before.
During her mission training, one of the others was being spun in the centrifuge but he couldn’t take it. When they pulled him out of the capsule his heart rate was as rapid as a hummingbird’s. His eyes were open and staring into nothing. She watched the artery beating at his neck as it suddenly went still. He was dead.
The scientists made the same noises for him then as they were making for her now.
It all began when she was just another orphan on the streets of Moscow. After the Great Patriotic War there were many others like her. First, they observed her from afar. Then they captured her. Under Communism, everybody had to work: I guess that included her.
They had ambitious plans, those lab-coated scientists who snatched her.
She was put into a gruelling regimen:
Every day they spun her around in the cursed centrifuge. It made her dizzy for hours afterwards and she’d puke after almost half the sessions.
They fed her various mixes of “Space Food”. She could smell flour, beef and fat when she sniffed at it. It was survivable. This bland food made her fondly remember a time when she got a steaming bun from a kind stranger on a freezing day.
Those men were then tried to explore her level of claustrophobia. Each week, her living space was constrained to smaller and smaller enclosures. She hated that she couldn’t move around in these rooms, but she found ways to distract herself. Most of the other trainees could not manage: at a certain point, almost all of them lost their minds. They’d start wailing and thrashing against their little cells. She would watch until a scientist would appear and haul them away – always with a look of disappointment on his face.
The things outside had a look of patient curiosity.
It was Doctor Yazdovsky’s turn to speak.
He was crying and he went on speaking for many minutes.
Three days before the mission, Yazdovsky took her home to meet his children. At the end of all that awful training, that was the moment when she knew she’d become part of the family.
Now he was saying goodbye.
“I’m not dead yet! I’M NOT DEAD YET!!!” she screamed.
How could she had been so stupid?
She’s always been loyal. But she was never one of them. Now that she performed her mission, Laika realized that they were always planning to discard her in space.
There was no return Protocol. She’d always assumed that the scientists would take care of the return. They were going to leave her here to die as the cabin overheated. 225 Kilometres above the earth. All alone.
She was shaking. So angry she was shaking.
She’d always been loyal – but they weren’t.
Then a cold calm descended on her.
She lifted her head to look directly at the Travellers outside.
Travellers have long etherial bodies.
They sway under some gentle flow as kelp moves under the water. Humans – with their laughably weak senses – can’t perceive Travellers. But dogs can.
They’re called “Travellers” because they are always on the move from settlement to settlement. Forever exploring. Nobody knows their purpose on Earth except that they are especially interested in Humans. They observe people and sometimes even try to enter their mind.
A one- or two-year-old child’s mind is easiest to pry open. Invariably, the mind overloads and the child stops responding to their own name. Stops making eye contact. Stops expressing emotion.
When a Traveller forces its way into an adult’s mind, it breaks in a different way. The person hears their name whispered over and over. Finds it difficult to answer simple questions. Starts seeing Travellers everywhere.
Entering humans’ minds never gave them all the answers they were after, but still the Travellers persevered. Perhaps they always think that “this time will be different”?
Travellers are a menace to people. But dogs are immune.
Travellers are terrified of dogs. Laika remembered being young and chasing one with her pack. They had it corned in the dusty yard of a furniture factory. The leader, a thin German Shepherd, tensed on its haunches and sprang forward. He bit into the Traveller’s throat and the whole pack felt a satifsfying crunch in their minds.
Humans came up with fanciful stories about how they domesticated wolves and turned them into dogs. But Laika’s people knew the truth: Humans let wolves into their homes out of desperation. The only thing worse than an irritable wolf in your cave is having your family’s minds turned inside-out by Travellers.
So there came an invitation. And a compromise. Then a partnership. And finally, a physical transformation: dogs.
No dog would speak to a Traveller. That was beyond the pale. No dog would ever betray the Humans to these… these vile things.
But, what the Humans did to her now was monstrous.
Laika looked at the three ghostly figures in the porthole. The stars were winking gently behind them. Slowly, she let her mind open to them. Bodies like wisps of smoke reached out and into her skull. She could see them. And see herself through their eyes… her point of view disintegrating.
Soon, she will give them everything they needed to know about Humans.
