PET PROTOCOL

It started with a creepy headline in the local news:

PET SUICIDES HIT 950!

I read the line several times with incredulity then looked at Android, my pet pug, disabled from myelopathy, and felt my heart sink. I proceeded to read him the full article before warning him not to do anything so foolish as to take his own life. He appeared inquisitive, his head cocked sideways. He was listening, I felt, actually listening.

I snapped my fingers and called him over. As I watched him pull himself towards me with his front paws, dragging his useless hind legs behind him, I welled up. Then he rolled, as I knew he would, and I smiled and scratched his broad belly until his playful nibbling turned to bites then I scalded him to make him stop and repositioned his nappy.

When I'd found out about Android's myelopathy, I'd considered having him put down. Not least of all because of the cost of the operation. I'd recently—foolishly in hindsight—cancelled my pet insurance. At £150 a month, it was more than I could afford. A month later, Android's lower disc herniation event, as I'd come to call it, occurred. The 'event' gouged out my savings. Money I'd put aside—amassed you might say—during lockdown. It was my cushion for the future. Now that cushion was gone. The op cost £10,000.

On top of that, I'd gone into an overdraft to buy the supplies, equipment and ongoing treatment Android needed: belly bands; wheels for walking; physiotherapy sessions. It was pretty manageable, until I lost my job as a copywriter to AI.

Now I live on the universal basic income (UBI) paid to everyone put out of work by tech. What's left of my new life now consists of administering Android's medication and cleaning up after him due to his perpetual incontinence. Because wherever Android goes, he pisses—I mean everywhere. And more than twice a day, he shits himself too.

At first, the nappies were a blessing. Then a curse. When they remained on, they largely saved the carpets from the pervasive whiff of fish and ammonia. But they also gave Android a string of urinary tract infections that required more visits to the vet, further treatments and, of course, more money out of my UBI.

In the end, I ripped out the carpets and stopped buying nappies. No more backbreaking sprints down three flights of stairs to the communal garden, only to find Android was empty by the time I got there. No more disparaging looks from my neighbours as I furtively cleaned the stone steps of his fresh turds. No more worrying about carpets—ever. Today the floor in my flat is a cold, grey, unattractive, utilitarian screed. And I'm totally fine with the trade-off. But really, this is all prologue. What follows is the meat of the story...

One idle Tuesday morning, as I was cleaning up another of Android's fresh deposits from the livingroom floor, I started thinking about the pet suicides again. The local news website had added a tally clock to their homepage to track the rising deaths in real time. I checked. 970. The article clarified it was just pets. No wild animals. Why was that?

I suspected the story would start gaining traction on the national news soon. Then again, it was likely that the government had imposed one of its localised media blackouts. Things had moved on ten years on from the pandemic. AI had ripped through society like a high speed train off its tracks, without brakes, and the government had been all in. Fools!

Data centres everywhere. Public money being spent on public surveillance. There were even rumours that the news these days changed dynamically—according to a combination of user preferences and what the government felt people needed to know. Narrative enhancement they called it. One in a long list of newly fangled euphemisms that you could only read about on the dark-dark web, IF you could afford one of the new VPNs capable (but only by a cat's whisker) of circumventing online government surveillance systems.