In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise1 on the outskirts2 of Phoenix3, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake.
Fido is waking up because the dogs are barking tonight.
There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these.
But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can't help waking up.
He is hearing one of those barks right now. It comes from far away but it is urgent. Some nice doggie somewhere is very upset. He is so upset that his barking has spread to all the other doggies in the pack.
Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some bad strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns.
Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.
These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away. As Fido listens to the bark, he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound. If any of these very bad strangers ever come into his yard, he will be extremely upset.
Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone. He can tell they are hurting her by the way her voice sounds and the way she moves.
The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him!
Fido gets more angry than he has ever been, even more angry than when a bad man shot him long ago.
His job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard. He does not do anything else. But it's even more important to protect the nice girl who loves him. That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him. Not even the fence.
The fence is very tall. But he can remember a long time ago when he used to jump over things that were taller than his head.
Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him, and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though; as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points.
The bark is spreading to another place far away. All the nice doggies who live in this faraway place are being warned to look out for the very bad strangers and the girl who loves Fido, because they are going to that place. Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and fiat4 and open, like a nice field for chasing Frisbees. It has lots of big flying things. Around the edges are a couple of yards where nice doggies live.
Fido can hear those nice doggies barking in reply. He knows where they are. Far away. But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole lot of different streets. He just runs down streets, and he knows where he is and where he's going.
At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto5. But once he makes his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the windshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat.
As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack6 the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
1 franchise | |
n.特许,特权,专营权,特许权 | |
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2 outskirts | |
n.郊外,郊区 | |
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3 phoenix | |
n.凤凰,长生(不死)鸟;引申为重生 | |
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4 fiat | |
n.命令,法令,批准;vt.批准,颁布 | |
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5 ghetto | |
n.少数民族聚居区,贫民区 | |
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6 jack | |
n.插座,千斤顶,男人;v.抬起,提醒,扛举;n.(Jake)杰克 | |
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