Transhuman Singularity

Science Fiction © Michael Blade 2010 webmac.com, "Transhuman Singularity"

Muffy the Time Traveling Chihuahua

Muffy was a loyal pack dog on the locally collapsed time-day of his death, which varied in fractal quantum probability across a multitude of bifurcated futures or space-time universes.

It was quite normal for the retired dog walker to take more than one dog on the same walk with Muffy, in the crisp morning through a rich urban San Francisco neighborhood. Ahead a truck-crane was lifting a piano up into the open hole of a second story floor of a beautifully restored Victorian, in the normal path of the walking dogs.

Miles a German Sheppard and the lead dog in the pack, stopped to sniff a fire hydrant, lifting his left hind leg to pee. How the workmen were going to get that piano into the house was still unclear, but red cones block the sidewalk ahead as a warning. The dog walker naturally decided to cross the street and continue up hill from there towards the city park.

Who could know that just as the crane motor would jam, an unchecked stressed cable would snap, the piano falling and crushing Muffy flat as a pancake. His little dog brain and skull lucky pressed into a somewhat deep softball size depression of the grassy ground, unharmed by the deadly impact of the murderously white baby grand.

Muffy's owner loved him dearly and had already arranged for a cryogenic preservation procedure with the expected coming old age of the little dog. In fact his collar held the contact information for the AfterLife Pet Division already.

A cat named Picasso unexpectedly came out of the bushes in the distance beyond the truck-crane, just in the sights of the head turn of Miles. Instinct came into play, Miles lurched at his leash. The dog walker had just begun his body reorientation to eventually cross the street, when Miles lurched, his foot caught in a raised crack of the sidewalk.

San Francisco being earthquake country, the crack was larger than most and highly uneven. Crashing painfully to his knees on the sidewalk, the dog walker released all the dogs in the process. The dogs ran wildly ahead, Muffy loyally being no exception.

The other dogs avoided the falling piano. The dog walker and the piano moving business had some explaining to do. AfterLife was contacted and Muffy was cryogenically suspended for future reanimation in liquid nitrogen. Picasso got away.