The Supremacy

Two young boys aged 9 and 10 disappeared earlier today from their backyard. They were last seen with a human pet, walking toward the Old Fort.

The evening news took everyone in the Kennel County by a storm. Everyone was talking about it. It was one of the safest counties in the state of the North Labrador.

The county police extensively searched every inch of the Old Fort, and the areas around it with their detection humans—but found no clues.

“Holy shit!” the inspector Kobe shouted as he got off the phone conversation with his supervisor. “There are reports pouring from across the country.” He said to his staff, “So far we’ve a confirmed report of over six hundred children missing.”

The staff looked at him in disbelief and shock.

“That’s so awful. What are we gonna do?” One of the subordinates asked.

“We’ll continue our search until further instructions from the control room. At this point, it appears to be a highly synchronized crime. The FBI is already involved. I will share more as I learn more.”

***

Max would give anything to pet a human baby.

"You're only seven. If we get a human in this house, only mamma and papa will end up taking care of her." His parents would say. This always broke Max’s heart, but he hadn’t lost hope.

Then one day, when Max was playing in his backyard with his neighbor Charlie, he found his dream human baby pet wandering around. It seemed she just appeared from nowhere to melt Max’s heart.

"Where did she get in here from?" Charlie wondered.

"Doesn't matter. A gift must be accepted with both hands." Max laughed. He was already thinking of a name as he gently lifted and cuddled the human baby.

"We will call her Maya." He shouted with joy.

Max simply loved humans. Most of his friends had them as pets: Indians, Asians, Hispanic, Islander, or White--irrespective of their breeds, he thought, they were all beautiful! He sincerely wished the humans could speak and understand dogs’ language—so that he could talk to these beautiful creatures and fully enjoy their company.

"Max," his mom called from inside the house, "lunch time."

"Coming," he shouted back.

He had been asking his parents for a human pet for years without any luck. His mother was allergic to humans—proximity with a human made her real sick—it made her cough and wheeze. Sometimes she even developed rashes on her face. A rare condition for us dogs--their family doctor had told her.

"So we let her go?" asked Charlie, shaking Max by the shoulders to get him out of his deep thoughts.

"We can't leave her like this. Besides, I can't lose her."

“Well, look she is wearing a red locket. She must be someone’s pet already. We must return her to the owner.”

“Well, we know every single pet in our small county, don’t we?” Max laughed, “At least in our neighborhood.”

“Maybe she ran away from her bad owner and it’s not a good idea to send her back home.” Charlie added.

“True. I think we should find a temporary place to hide her for now. That way we will have more time to think about it.”

"I have an idea." Charlie said and ran, gesturing Max to run after him.

Max lifted Maya and followed.

***

Max woke up with a fit when a cat poured a bucket full of water on him.

“Who are you? Where am I?” He yelled, flailing his legs, trying to push the cat away from him. The cat did not respond and walked out of the room he was in.

His head was heavy, and it pained when he tried to remember the exact sequence of the events before he had lost his consciousness. He could only remember walking toward the Old Fort with Charlie and Maya. He wondered if Charlie was undergoing similar experience as his and hoped he was fine. He then looked around to see if Maya was in the room. She was not.

It was a dimly lit room with walls made of rusted iron. There was nothing on the four walls except for a wooden door that the cat had closed behind her. He was sitting on the floor in one of the four corners of the room with his hands & feet cuffed. He couldn’t stand up or walk, he could only crawl. He was a brave kid, as his friends and relatives often told his parents, but now he was shivering with fear. It seemed only few minutes ago he was playing in his backyard. He remembered his cozy bedroom and how protected he felt with his parents around him—things that he only realized now facing a grim situation.

His thoughts were broken by a loud pounding on the door.

“It’s open.” He gathered all his courage to answer.

His response only made the thumping go heavier. He crawled to the door but couldn’t gather courage to open it immediately. He couldn’t help but imagine a huge creature outside the door--with a most distorted face and holding a Falchion sword. The thumping was getting louder and louder. With handcuffs on, he tried to cover his ears with his shoulders by raising them next to his ears as much as possible. But he couldn’t stand the deafening sound any longer. So he gathered all his courage and opened the door. To his surprise, no one was at the door. The outside looked like a pitch-dark universe—he couldn’t see any objects. It seemed to him that his room was just floating alone in the space. He was ready to believe by now that the knocking on the door was just his imagination.

But then, as he was looking outside the door, suddenly someone pushed him from behind. He grabbed on to the door handle and pulled himself back. The very next moment, before allowing him time to turn to see who pushed him, he got a much stronger kick from behind him. This time his grip on the door loosened and he fell into the dark abyss.

***

When Max regained his consciousness, he found himself in a cage barely big enough to allow a body movement. He was in one of the many cages placed in a huge arena surrounded by stands filled with a huge crowd of cats. He noticed that each of these cages had a dog kid like him. Many of these dog kids were crying desperately. The cats in the stands were having a good time—chatting and laughing. This mix of desperate crying and hearty chattering brought about a very depressing feeling to him. It tore his heart and made him throw up two times already. His eyes started rummaging through the cages around him—trying to spot his friend Charlie. He couldn’t find him, but he instead spotted a section in the stands occupied by human babies. He noticed a big screen over one of the stands—it displayed a close-up view of the action going on in the stands. From the screen he noticed that each of the human babies wore a big heart-shaped locket—exactly like the one Maya was wearing. He also noticed a huge band of aerosols between the arena and the stands. He wondered what those were about.

“Greetings from the future,” a male voice emerged from large speakers that stood up across the stands. It was so loud that the other sounds had just ceased to exist.

“The time has come for us cats to take our place in the world as the supreme race.” The voice announced. “We’ve worked very hard, for years, on planning this. Everyone gathered here today has played a significant role in getting us to this point in our journey—including our enticing agents--the human baby robots we have made in labs. Even though they don’t have emotions yet to understand our gratitude toward them, their contribution to our purpose is nothing less than phenomenal.”

Max turned his head toward the big screen that now showed the enticing agents in the stand. They surely are robots, he thought, they absolutely had no reaction to the appreciation.

“Also,” the voice continued after a pause, “our sincere gratitude to those too who were involved in the invention of the red lockets! These lockets have been flawless in collecting millions of data points in real-time and feeding them to the artificial intelligence engines installed inside our enticing agents. It’s because of these lockets we’re able to identify the offerings, or the good-natured-dog-kids. These red lockets also make the offerings fall for our enticing agents—thus easily leading them to the execution events like this.”

Max was losing all his hope. He desperately turned his head again to locate the speaker but wasn’t successful. He looked at the big screen—it was still covering the closeups form the stands.

“It’s sad that these offerings in the cages here wouldn’t see tomorrow. Our sorrow is only as unfathomable as the size of our universe—it truly is—but we’re just doing what the ancestors of these offerings did to human kids. In their pursuit of supremacy, dogs detected all the good-natured human beings early on—when they were still young kids—to terminate them at an early stage of their lives. So that only bad-natured humans ever lived through their full lives. As one can imagine, these bad-natured humans did plenty of things against the nature. So the nature made them continuously shrink in intelligence as well as in physical strength—and thus there came a point where dogs gained supremacy of the world. So you see, we’re only treating dogs how they treated humans. Cheating a cheater isn’t a sin after all.”

There was a big round of applause. The offerings continued crying—many continued to throw up. This was worse than their worst nightmare.

“Thanks! We all deserve that round of applause.” The voice said. “Now I would like to discuss some logistics with you. This is the first batch of offerings we are executing. Hereafter we are going to be on a weekly cadence. Underground events like this are happening simultaneously across the world. Every week offerings are going to be sourced by the enticing agents to hundreds of events like this across the world. Then with the help of underground revolutionaries like each one of you, we will execute them.”

Max had never missed his parents as much as he did now. The only thing he wished right now was to see his parents once before dying.

“As one can imagine,” the voice continues, “the dog police is working hard to find us. And they will only go crazier with every week as we continue to execute more offerings. All of you have been trained on the process of executing the offerings and have been through multiple simulation exercises. Each one of you will need to execute the process to perfection. Even a single cat failing will be a fall for all of us. With that, let’s start the process. Each one of you has a buzzer. When it rings, just stand up and walk to the arena, and pick up one calming aerosol on the way. Then proceed to the cage number that’s pre-assigned to you and follow the rest of the execution process.”

The cats started to walk to the cages in small batches. They sprayed the calming aerosols on the offerings assigned to them. The spray immediately made the offerings fall unconscious. It was easier to execute them while they were unconscious—because they posed no resistance and got ready to die silently instead of creating ghastly noises.

A song played on loop as cats executed the offerings.

“Sometimes we need to kill to save…

We need to punish the innocent to reward the deserving…

We need to harden ourselves to soften our offspring…”