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Combat Dog Canidia, (145-181), Clave

Canidia

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After twenty-seven Operations, now the least of the Pack- our general population and even several new dogs- begin to question our continued deployment and the ever-receding possibility that the Masters will reward our fatal risks with promised freedom.

What is freedom, ask many.

We do not know yet, says Poet, then insinuates that neither do the Masters, for their current herd within the herd wanders from ignorant triumph to educated farce political and economic, and so defensive propaganda is unending, confusing, with no sense of future, and there is some human worry if once were warriors could be de-mobilized, could insert soldier dogs as human soldiers back into the Life.

What is freedom, many ask I convinced by extensive history amongst the Masters I should at least smell something leading to an answer.

Do not ask him, Poet sneers, he would rather be a slave.

I Professor do not deign correct this provocation, in this way rendering all intended insult forgotten soon enough, though Poet will often refer to this characterization, later, needling so carefully my psychic armour of certainty that envelops me much as the ceramic, titanium, kevlar scales which protecrt our physical vulnerabilities. Poet craves recognition, yes he is nothing but what others have smelled or heard, his natural disease of being is vapour and shadow. We investigate our genitals and those of our brothers with fierce hope and final despair and wait.

I Professor continues to believe that we prove our worth here, that someone, somewhere, has measured our worth and will soon transfer us to remembered Cabins in that arctic summer, those days the sun never disappears beneath the horizon, where the wind carries only the faintest smells of tundra- that place is nearest to Clave for all our brothers- where we shall prove our worth in nurturing and training subsequent generations of Combat Dog.

Our Leader, who is what he is- only more so- since that furious genius of escaping what has seemed a final dead-end, whose extraction of that Target, whose survival with six fellow Demons in assaulting the soldiers guarding that MWP, then in convincing the human pilot to carry them swiftly to the RV and rewarding that superb flying with his survival, there is now no doubt even to professionally skeptical humans that he is truly worthy of all our submission. Our Leader waits through action, knows these strategies are for Poet to imagine, and for I Professor to examine. Cynicism begins to overcome idealism, as in any camp of human warriors, does not the very word speak of how it will tend in turning a cynic into a fanatic, how a dog is a dog, how we can escape that madness of recklessness beyond bravery, that is somehow reflection of cowardice, rank fear of what we shall do next, after using our physical and psychical selves at the peak of our powers, what is there left now but to do similar RIF missions, the next, the next again, our proudly erect tails in mutual recognition. As now several Companies of 100 new dogs dilute the perfection of our original Pack, Observers are pleased to use genetic heritage of survivors, but the Canine Weapons Platforms that we have become, we are only subtly advanced even when this or that scientific ejournal articulates how we were created, and it is no surprise that soon our many enemies- and calculating disloyal friends- soon the Warlords, soon the Terrorists, mount their own equivalent genetic engineering and soldier simulation teaching programs and in the lamentable open dialogues necessary for progression of science, against Military security, soon the RIF pre-emptive pattern and the Dog Soldier Program are emulated everywhere. Our technology is subservient always to our essential dog-nature, but who knows how the other corporate constellations decide to use that ability to create such horrific weaponry, much more useful than the mere threat of nuclear weapons, strategically, ontologically, the gestation of all us dogs for battle does not resolve all conflicts in peace against nuclear apocalypse, no we are no more than improved weapons in opposing arsenals in failing diplomacy, weapons that can and will extend those regional wars, those conflicts of obscure motives and fanatic prosecution that do not reward idle deconstruction of a looking-glass war, as for humans as Herd they need to justify their murderous acts, Herds are no more than whatever faith they have in their exceptional and righteous nature. Technology and totalitarianism- no matter how obscured in fanciful rhetoric as noxious Democracy- enables all Dog Soldier Programs to advance faster than the adoption of new personal technologies ever have, those devices which only originally were thought dangerously distracting, those tech that led to new downloading options for solitary enjoyment of music, films, games, environments no less than summoned dreams where humans seem to enjoy solitude we would call loneliness- even print books for that dwindling populace of word-literate.

We infer such advancing adoption by the rate at which our Shock Troops are drafted to lead other, new dog, battalions.

We infer that humans have not discovered how to regulate, create, and control, not merely Poet and I Professor but also Our Leader. We smell their anxious concerns that Our Leader never be placed in a vulnerable and so fatal position- they think as a Herd, trying to manipulate, guide, draw Our Leader to that illusory safety of the center of the Herd- but there are no arguments that serve to invert our dog-nature, and so he remains as always at the canine core, at the leading edge of the Pack. We are Combat Dog...

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After... this word is a problem, After. In its relationship towards a future moment from here, now, our shared present that is a future past, there is an interior if not invisible prejudice towards value only ascertained of this existential iteration- once we have flowed past it. After, if nothing else, assures us there will be a future. After, this word prioritizes the now that is past in the future, and so I Professor must determine what of whatever is, is worthy of recording. You, hearer, if you can access this work can doubtless access all those narrative threads that tell of each our twenty-seven Operations, can, if you want, discover the numbers and names of all our fallen brothers, can even, finally, evaluate the success or failure of each Operation according to perfect hindsight. I Professor have no interest in such details, so search elsewhere for them if you must, for I regard entirely that great movement that characterizes many, many RIF, and not alone those of this original 100 dogs of Company D. We are an experiment that succeeds in replacing vast human armies with much more mobile and inventive groups of soldiers. We are a threat inconceivable to too many petty Warlords, who must suffer remedying assault for their lack of faith. We are the original Company D, we are the Pack. We are Combat Dog...

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We can only say This is how we live, This is how we die, This is what we are, say these without raw or subtle pleas for meaning from the multiverse, for we are Combat Dog, and who would say we ever could have been anything else, who can say we ever expected some sense of purpose behind our actions. We create ourselves. We have never been more nor less than what we are. We are subject of many, many studies of scientific and political nature, and in the eventual we become hyped celebrities, our Pack-nature questioned by how this or that brother says what might be deemed impolite or negative to the open Media, and this must be contradicted by qualified voice of Our Leader, for it suggests some negative perception, and we are nothing if not heroes. When that theatre of regional war is pacified for at least that season, Masters summon I Professor to do a circuit of Media to garner more accolades and incidentally yet more funding, and so I am separated from the Pack, flown across the world, presented at political rallies of the governing party, and here I don supplicant and dominant robes and sense depending upon whom is addressed. I recognize certain places, even in this uncomfortable nausea of time zones flown over, I smell the rank tension, hear hollow fear, taste breath, sweat, and pheromones swirling unnoticed by humans, but this is nothing new, and those city towers, that green dock light across the sound seems farther than ever away.

My last Master has greatly scaled high into the cold heartless heart of that herd within the Herd, whose political faith now switches not with those of political adversaries, but between ruling ideologies born of secure Religious dogma or insecure scientific questioning. My last Master has wormed himself to this human core on the bodies of all those cloned dogs who failed to thrive, those who failed at some level perhaps not only physical of training, those who have become weapons in that Company D and will perhaps never return to the Life.

My Media Coach has also moved up in the Herd, though this can be less obviously credited to his work with us dogs, and comes eagerly to dress my features for endless HV interviews, for curiosity makes him wonder to what extent his coaching has come to serve. Unlike that Fatality Inquiry, questions are never hostile for the questioners are friendly, and they at least seem awake, even alert surrounded by those visual markers of somber tone, though mainly I smell a typical human world of plastic, rubber, and metal. We are recognized by the deficit-card holding public, we are honoured, we are welcome here and there in this election year, but there is no spontaneous chatter that might veer toward uncomfortable if not censored topics, and it is only at this Christmas Fireside Chat that feeds out live- without even a five-second editing delay- with him they call Mr. President, who knows the rules of Herd politics more than any Pack-reared other human or dog could, it is only then, crowded into a brief five minutes, that we slip and answer that innocuous question not with a scripted reply but with accidental honesty.

And what do you and your brothers want this Holiday Season, he asks with rumbling fatherly concern but already aware of my profiled and coached answer that We want only to serve the greater good of our corporation Sir, when I tumble from deceptive awe in merely speaking to this political Master, when I say what only the most debased soldier might say after the thrill of fighting for an ideal has devolved into fighting for your brothers and then further deconstructs to authentic dog-nature of avoiding physical conflict subsequent to futile psychological challenge of call and response.

Sir, we want to come clave...

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Now, that inadvertent sentiment spoken, there is a media conflagration greater than anyone could possibly imagine, for in my direct appeal is revealed all those truths that transcend any species-barrier, all those truths which contradict our leaders’ human or dog, and the brief assessment of damage inflicted insures that there is now no way to represent us dogs as happy soldiers joyfully dedicated to war without end.

Sir we want to come clave...

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We come clave, but nowhere clave you have ever been, no they have not even the slightest megaband network for there are not even so many necessary computers there, no this is not a place you would know of, think of, even as you fly over it from Airstrip One to the remains of that city which once accepted huddled masses, that now repels even those who would surround it with levies against the ever-rising seas. Once, decades past, humans have sought to regenerate this city and restore it to prominence lost of the world’s great metropolises, but even when that noble goal is on the verge of some fashion of success, melting continental ice began shatter off shelves and bergs, and all oceans began irresistible rise. Humans debated on how best to save the city, where millions lived and worked, patiently succumbing to effects of their ancestors’ errors and evasions. Humans here were indoctrinated as children about the glories of Democracy, even as its manifest failure surrounded them day by week by month by year by decade, and so the waters rose, no dikes were built, and it is called the Greenhouse Flood, as so many, many believers and nonbelievers alike fled inland to higher ground, and what has once been the cores of those cities were abandoned to those humans who have always lived outside the grid of civilization. I lick my genitals in dismissal. As we have discovered during our nights at Camp Diamond Dust, though, humans are remarkably hard to kill, and so with using only the few threads of technology that remained in the cores of seacoast cities, those many, many humans not wanted by corporate or anticorporate cadres flourish to create their own world, trading fragments of found technology in gray-markets and working on those kelp farms and its pseudopods that infiltrate even narrow streets of that saltwater-marsh island where they live...

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We come clave, but nowhere clave you have ever been, core more than ever conceived, and this is establishment of the urban homeland we will call Canidia, here where we are the rulers, we are the populace, we live how ever determined by our being, no we are not mere humans. We are Combat Dog...

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We expand the Pack to absorb those Pack of our younger siblings, from 100 to 200… up to 1 000 dogs, who automatically recognize the primacy of Our Leader though some younger ones are led astray by Poet, who insists that the herd mechanism of democracy is best for all of us, that noxious equality should embrace us all, that even those females who could become our irresistible leaders simply through the promise of achieving that scent of heat. Fortunately such faulty democratic assertions are too contrary to our canine nature as predators, to the obvious hierarchy of individual scent, of size, power, speed, of our history coded by our genes,

Is it possible we are equivalent, says one young dog who follows I Professor, is it possible we are mistaken to view the world as hierarchy with those herd humans unaccountably dominant.

No, it is not unaccountable, it is the way herd mechanism operates to draw the best from each, even though it is deception that anyone is in fact capable of rising to dominance.

Sir, Professor, herd is herd so how do the come to dominate us who are predators.

We are not predator and prey on our own kind, as they are so somehow they create illusory hierarchy simply by devaluing each other and refusing that accolade of equal being on each their enemies.

We are their enemies.

We are their tools and only so long as we serve their cause, we are not immortal, we are not independent, we are given life only by each human- who employs Observers and Scientists and Technologists to count our value.

We have no value.

Not to them to them, we are, were, and will ever be only somewhat less than human.

We must liberate ourselves-

No, we must clearly smell our situation and that is as no more than their tools which someday they might discard.

We are Warriors.

We are their Warriors...

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I Professor imagine how our canid society would be, should Masters ever decide to reward us with something like Freedom, and how is this different from the organization familiar in our military organization as Company Dog, no, there should be no dissolution of our rigid and practiced lines of duty and responsibility and punishment, no, it is regrettable error that Poet ever imagines and proposes something else.

We are predators, I Professor says to this and that gathering to honor Our Leader, and so we are all united against prey and never to our brothers and thus our society can transcend the difficulty of finding ourselves, lost, or found only in a false way.

We are predators who cannot imagine the truth that we are prey to the human herd, argues Poet this impossible inversion, we do what they want, how they want, when they want, and no, never can we refuse.

We are free-

Masters have created us, as they have created the world, and we are not free to alter what is given.

We are free to alter how we respond to the given,

O Professor you have spent too long with your Media Coach, you have learned so well you lie even to yourself.

I Professor of the Pack do not lie. Lying is way of the herd, for it is the best way to disappear from apparent control at the forefront or fringe and find a secure locale near the drifting heart of the herd.

Well Professor if indeed we control our own destinies, ask the humans to devolve all those sorts of technologies so we can be truly independent to create our freedom.

We are free.

Ask for females then...

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I Professor have heard enough of what the Herd call Political Philosophy, so I know how we may establish the Ideal State as dogs lacking those dysfunctional personal ambitions of the Masters, yes any of us together is stronger than any of us alone, we know we are brothers of the Pack so trust implicitly and absolutely that whatever act or pause or apparent error serves the purpose of all even if we cannot smell exactly how. In ascending order there can only be the broad, stable, ever-renewing populace of 1 000 Junior Dogs whose every act must be evaluated and awarded or punished by any of the 100 Senior Dogs, who in turn, in solid placing are responsible to one of the Thirteen we call Shock Troops, and these battle veterans in turn are less to we two Alpha who embody our logic in I Professor and emotion in Poet, and we of course report to Our Leader. This pyramid is of admirable stability even as we change through the years of our deployment, and I see no value in altering our military order for the pretence of ever mimicking Master institutions such as our corporate sponsors wish the Propagandists to feature. The World is the battlefield and the battlefield is not a Democracy. Some humans applaud our natural structure and think to create it amongst themselves, but they are only at play for even the most compromised voices must recognize they will certainly fail, necessarily fail, foolishly fail- they are just Herd and Herd and Herd. I Professor hear with delight how Poet will claim that indeed members of that Herd within the Herd, the men with guns, are actually as strategically dominant in ordering those lesser humans to effect their orders. I Professor smile at this admission of the true and singular way the world should be organized, that even the human herd learns this, despite pathetic claims of this or that voice of the disenfranchised, who somehow have imagined that their leaders are obligated to the least of them. Fools of the herd, yes is it not self-evident truth that we are given certain inalienable rights, powers, dominance over those less by every act declaring their submission, and if they do not recognize our righteous dominance we will reduce them. How is it Herd presumes to order us Pack, what secret do they wield, what strange power is theirs, what strength is there in the Herd. I Professor do indeed recognize the breadth of being, the value of individuals innovating, the subterranean power in the malleable mechanism of the Herd, that has through the long, long millennia of evolution psychological more even than physical, has delivered the Masters to their eminence over this our world. I Professor would induct youngsters to mysteries of the natural sciences that I know so well, but for some reason all my few pupils have fled to playing lies with Poet, willfully ignorant that it is by technology we shall best reveal our value and so order the necessity of our survival- yes I will call this Life against gibes of Poet, for what more than illusion and play can he offer, what of our rightful concern for all the Junior Dogs, Senior Dogs, even Shock Troops, should the Masters ever decide against our continuance. I Professor would not rather be a prophet for such organism is only noted on the rare correct prediction than the countless errors he voices, I must say that our Ideal State is doomed from the moment Our Leader is distracted and his trust broken by Poet, who insisted those evil propagation of education for all our followers, when what use such thought for the Junior Dogs, Senior Dogs, even Shock Troops, when they need not think but leave such strain to we their betters, or even simply to I Professor in practical manners of Pack Organization, for it is our greater future that concerns Our Leader, and no one will ever argue Poet has useful management skills. And who would listen to one who ever entertains the possibility of Our Leader being Wrong, no it is better Poet is removed before his peculiar disease of insinuating skepticism becomes even briefly adopted by ignorant youth, no there is no other true political structure for the Pack than that which predates even our wakening to the Masters call, no I will say no more...

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Poet disrupts our Ideal State with questions that should not be asked and answers that should not be allowed, yet, yet, somehow Our Leader tolerates heresy and his odd, unknowable, irreverent skill of distorting the world for a canine laugh, truly I Professor am not alone in envying this but it is only the occasional threatening growl from all identical Shock Troops, that ever threaten righteous destruction, no somehow he survives when other brothers should not survive. Poet even develops some rapport with those Observers still attached to watch formation of our canine society, those humans who are perhaps under the teeth but also under the skin of that herd within the herd which doubt or fear or are fascinated by this creation of the Pack, and against their ignorance search for some sort of protective knowledge. Fools, yes I name them that for they come not with reasoned query to I Professor but to this confused and confusing other we call Poet, and indeed does he not imitate some of their own nature with greater skill than I ever have, even after intensively Coached, and his presentation seems guileless and more honest only because he accepts the same lies as they. Fools, they want inter-species proof of such impossibilities of Equality of being and Freedom of Act, when there is only the truth of our radical difference and perhaps superior organization of the Pack. Fools, is it this internal exile who can explain hierarchy and truth of our way of being, is it conceivable that he whose advice is easily ignored, is he a better source than my humble self I Professor, these are questions that answer themselves. We are not canine King Canute who orders the ever-incoming tide away, we are not fish or otherwise adapted to these local aquatic environments, but there is now something to regenerate our idealism, something to fight for, something to leave to our children- for, yes, finally the Observers have deigned to give us fertile females, and this is held out to draw canine soldiers from nihilism of endless combat, this is the final truth of that female heat drenched flag. Observers wonder how much of our innovative genetic engineering will translate to the next generation- for our genes are altered so our difference is not merely acquired. Observers come to understand that to continue to monitor us as variables in their experiments, they must trade with us, and as my last Master is conscripted to serve as manager of their trading post, there is a great deal of history between us and only slowly does he revert to believing to demonstrate that our curiosity, thoughts, emotions are not mere canine semblance, but effectually true close to human children of two or three or maybe four or is it five years-old, as dogs of any heritage are raised by humans are truly never more than wolf pups. How much has changed since idyllic days of puppyhood, of the Creche and the Cabins, these are earnestly forgotten on facile but recalled on the deepest level, but we are oriented to the future that draws us forward, we are what our entire life histories determine, we create ourselves, we do not mistake ourselves as gods- though humans may time to time think so of themselves- but we are more than what the Masters have intended to create. We are at the core more than ever conceived...

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And Now we begin to shape a world as it should be despite lies so fervently alluded to in verbiage prolix and pathetically misinformed, lies from Poet, but the patience of us true Combat Dog, from Shock Troops to our true following youth who understand within their innocent hearts there is only one true final and perfect state, and in their earnestness justly wonder how the lies of Poet may be allowed to flourish yet alone survive first voice. Poet will ask impossible paradoxes simply that he may offer inappropriate remedy, for asking What of when Our Leader commands an error, which we true Combat Dog can only rebuke this false judgment. I Professor offer the absolute truth,

Our Leader does not err, Our Leader smells strategy beyond our humble senses.

What of when he is wrong, Poet offers the absolute lie.

Our Leader is only ever misinformed and so true error is that of those who have borne mistakes to him Our Leader is by definition never wrong,

Perhaps in battle no he cannot be wrong but what of this Canidia we design surely we see that each of us has our skills and those of a Combat Zone are not those of our homeland.

Our Leader knows who is required and what skills and how applied and there is no need for your noxious Democracy do not be a human fool and insist there is some mysterious other quality to our beings than that personal combination of mind and spirit and body and after all this is what we are and nothing else.

I Professor must often correct these simple conflation of human and dog by which Poet teaches and corrupts our youth, these errors simply remedied but recurring in subtle guises such as I see the pedagogical orders of our Canidia is a vital feature that must be rigorously designed to avoid distraction offered in canine laughter to this and that discourse of Poet or even now his young followers. I Professor must insist that we should never allow portraits of Our Leader or others of great eminence as myself I Professor or the identical true dogs of our Shock Troops, to be portraits that would reduce us to figures of laughter, no this diminution is offering our vulnerable throats in laughter and how wrong this is to even suggest we can ever be so much less, no portraits need be true, that is, admirable. Our Leader deserves only the greatest honor. Our Leader should forever be smelled only in the best pungency, for it is a grave error to delude the vulnerable, open, trusting minds of our youngsters to lies that offer momentary pleasure of unearned laughter, rather than sober recognition of our rightful hierarchy, no we must protect them from such mental disease and attack much as we protect them from physical illness or overbearing attack they are in both cases, too young, too vulnerable, will anyone Master or Combat Dog argue against this. Poet, of course, but have not events revealed how mistaken he is to believe we could ever escape from the Masters and somehow evidence any greater value than as their tools, no he learned if nothing else from the Masters, how to lie. Poet will then, as he has done only a week past, insist we must prove ourselves fit for being more than tools as though this would stay the Masters from our destruction, as though they would ever value us Predators within confines of cowardly Herd. Poet is mistaken, I Professor proven right, but such victory is meaningless now if it ever meant anything, no I Professor is wrong in the end as well. Canidia is my dream but in the end we live in a world that sanctions no dreams but only self-justification of whichever Herd within the Herd is dominant, in the end it does not matter that we both foresaw how our homeland would be subverted and our elimination effected, in the end there is no more truth in vigorous assertion than playful jest, no more truth than Poet’s lies. He would deny our natural martial contests as Spectacle for the Masters, impugning our violent skills in fighting to distorted raising and then ordered propagation of those breeds, those few, who developed skills in ratting or later against other dogs, as if we are ever more than the Masters’ tools, as if there is less glory in exhibiting our vicious grandeur at their bidding then versus their use of RIF now. Poet dreams of a land beyond the clouds, a land where we are dogs, just dogs, not weapon or vessel of fury and justice to all directed enemies, he does not recognize the full breadth and expression of our canine being, that we were, are, will ever be Combat Dog. There is no clave but Camp Canid of each our twenty-seven Operations, yes it is error to believe in possibility of perfection in this life, for who would live in that Canidia I Professor designs, who more than my ideas of what it is to be a dog, in a city or better a garden, and this is what I would have built has not our own Pack been so weakened by Poet, no even the worst of what came in the friendly fire incident, could have been overcome, our honour restored, has not Poet collaborated with those Masters who saw how to deny us a place and freedom to enact my reasoned proposals to establish Canidia.

Poet would deny our perfectibility.

Poet is the disease as clearly the symptom, O such nonsense he would allow, and is this not the ever-renewed beginning to that ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, is this ever anything so worthy of title when truly, obviously, there is no logic to any arguments assayed by Poet, no his fine words will never deliver our promised garden.

For there is a garden where Masters have yet to pollute or recast in only their own corrupt values, corrupt cities, where memories of that garden of fierce and loving creatures could walk brothers with brothers, predators rightly esteemed many, many, many times more worth than evil prey who will usurp the natural order of things. There is such a garden, where a dog is never lost of his pack, where bountiful prey submit joyous and predators exult righteous, there is such a garden, yes but it is not of this ruined, corrupt, antiseptic world...

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Humans will argue they are real packs and necessary schema of hierarchy- but then they would- they have pride before their inevitable fall, we need only observe behavior of the Observers- those who would parallel righteous correct organization of dominance of Combat Dog, with the fluid, unending, wasteful conflicts this or that human prosecutes in search of true place- as they generate studies and collaborate with other Observers and seemingly believe the more voices lie the more lies are truth. I lick my genitals in dismissal. Poet refuses to see our canine truth, but again Our Leader allows the heresy unpunished but no I Professor do not then or later know why, even when I warn of how his play and jest are corrupting our vulnerable youth, telling tales that moderate if not entirely cancel heroism of Combat Dog. Poet will not argue for his right to spread these unconscionable lies that would make us dogs no more right than those human herds, Poet will insist the Truth will set you free, though no more than any of us does he know what Free is. Poet is a position any final Ideal State can do without, I Professor tell Our Leader, even tell of his debased insinuation that he Our Leader could ever be wrong, but even to this extreme provocation he refuses to censure or rightly destroy Poet. Poet serves some role in our Pack but no I never know what. Poet talks with that herd of the herd of military, those humans for whom we are just a fascinating research project, a chance to see genetic engineering in action, though none will claim to know all details, but all together know all. Observers are source of human lies that Poet will repeat, claiming they even try to find similar motives in outwardly similar acts, claiming that there are indeed Alpha Males in human herds within herds, that their ordering of lesser soldiers into combat is no less heroic than the joyful submission of Shock Troops to their role under Our Leader. Our Leader is no herd member, such slander he allows only in the certainty of his position, not recognizing how these lies lead to further lies to active error and dispute and even arguments we are no longer dogs but deserve the recognition and worth as humans. Fools, Observers and Poet, to say that sacrifice of herd animals are ever the same as pack, to say such strategy is the same, to ignore how the one serves the many versus the many serve the one and sacrifice is more than an error in tactics but is a tactic itself. For this reason none of our Shock Troops have a name no there honor is in their act, no medals need be proffered though humans are only too pleased to distribute them, as though there is not fidelity as well in the act. No there is only that human deception that insists we the Pack are ever no more than herd to protect herd leaders, no there is a difference between those false herd Alpha Male and Our Leader, we the Pack are the arsenal of Our Leader and he will never employ us in error...

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Humans of all demographics are curious to watch our coming home, and so my time past with that Media Coach becomes again useful, as I Professor keys Our Leader what to say and when. Some natural aspects of his leadership qualities need no burnishing by the many, many medals we have gained, but he agrees with the program I intimate, Never Apologize, Never Explain, Never Excuse. At first such behavior disconcerts those humans who expect us dogs to be dogs, just dogs, to be at core no more than loyal idiot dogs of whom they are familiar, but this reticence appeals to both those Herd rulers, who can point out the naturalized hierarchy of the Pack as evidence of How the World Is, How Patriarchy Is, How Genetic Determinism Is, all of this is how it must be- eliding that essential difference between Herd and Pack- and appeals on an inchoate level to those greater masses of suppressed and dominated population, who can derive an emotional pleasure from How Free The Combat Dog Are, How Great Such Joy In Destroying The World, How The Rulers Themselves Are Afraid of Them. As mentioned, this is only a human decade past but in terms of generations of Dog the Program has extended now twenty times, and both Observers and us dogs did not know how critical and useful we would become for the Masters. Perhaps it is difficult to imagine time before genetically enhanced animals have served humans, perhaps it is equally impossible to recall earnest debate on our use from a moral rather than practical perspective, but this time is not prehistory but history packaged and defined by Media of the Masters. Observers are brought in by all the various media, as experts to contradict each other, as voices, knowledge, attitudes which are entertaining for that news cycle, but in truth investigation of our true dog-nature is cursory and quickly distorted by deliberate myths of Propagandists, already information dissemination is beyond their control, but this awareness is bitterly fought against, frantically denied, and in the eventual does it matter even that opposing voices are as equally unheard. Media Relations becomes the domain of I Professor, and, with co-operation of this and that Source, we are quickly able to insert our chosen meaning to discourses that attempt to isolate and experiment on us, we are at first able to follow the lead of Propagandists. We are, though we may fight this subliminal self-knowledge of all humans, the Pack inside the Herd, and inevitably our borders will become porous and in our ascending population when more veterans of Demon Wars and our puppies join us, soon the areas we would live must become greater and greater. At first, innocent of the Politics here enacted, we dogs are released to other city cores that in later years have become more and more independent from Corporate control, have become the Free Cities, and though the Military Media Complex have previously been dependent on their human population to run their factories, to construct their hardware, now there are us genetically engineered monsters to do their work, and so no needed tolerance of anticorporate human resources, no mercy, became the rules of our ex-urban Masters. As the police have long since become their own parallel Creed against the people they nominally protected, so us Combat Dog became an Occupying Army, for it is not now true- if it ever is- that we are that private Military of the Herd Rulers. Herd within Herd, they have only limited access to defining Media, but when the poverty and oppression so vehemently denied by their rulers confront them each morning, there is an unavoidable awareness for even most blind humans, there is a waking up, and so it is just that day, that week, that month the Military introduces us to their streets...

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This impatient Intervention by our erstwhile Masters could be no more error than have all Media accompanied us in search of mutable Reality, and forgot to create the slightest five-second delay. For there is a reality in images despite most advanced CGI, a direct insertion whereby a picture is indeed worth at least a thousand words or more, and despite those complex verbal lies that all humans- Propagandists in particular- there is no replacing indelible force of images. Usually, the longer the word or phrase the more horrific that truth is, but when caught in a five second clip on even the most friendly Propagandist presentation, further images can only emphasize that which no words may encompass. You, patient hearer, you have already seen of what I have spoken, and no doubt this revelation aided in downfall of that ruling Party, and discredit of the Military and its false mechanism of Top Dogs. You must remember your fury and hatred. You must remember. You must learn here and now, that you have been lied to, that the story behind those pictures belies everything they have told you. You can refuse these words and can continue to believe the careful lies of Propagandists. What would you have me comment, you have seen the horrors inflicted, unarmed men, women, children who were so casually slaughtered by invading forces of the Southside of that city- chosen to replace this one primarily as it is on no rising seacoast- but this great error, this genocidal murder, cannot be solely blamed on a few rogue elements, a few Combat Dog who have reacted on fictional Mint, no this is only the conspiracy of all those humans who meant to test our abilities against, yes some of our Best Boys. You may believe the compromised nonsensical words of those humans upon which you depend, you may retreat behind that Herd within a Herd, you may believe those lies, lies, and damned lies, you may believe we have all suddenly become rabid, you may insist on species-loyalty of which those Military evidence none, these are the options and is it any surprise that my word, the argument of I Professor, has no currency, and even when smelled, is denigrated as yet another Conspiracy Theory. We are in truth imported directly from that amorphous Combat Zone on another continent, and we are deliberately misinformed, misled to believe it is another civic populace we must pacify with extreme prejudice, so we come in that night Company D, parachuted to overwhelming New Moon darkness of a surprisingly whole city with only a few towers whose sides seem damaged, but there is nothing to suggest that this is where it is, that we need no longer be in full battle mode. I lick my genitals in dismissal. We are tense and tired. Will you humans punish us for doing what you order with no questions, no flimsy conscience, no accusation of inevitability, and no mercy. We are a veteran Company, we leave choice and meaning of our Targets to our Masters, we have no Political concerns, have nothing but intense anticipation of enacting our designed being. We are Combat Dog. As we glide silently into our Operation Co-ordinates we are pleased to note that this area of the city is dark, that this area is quiet but for throbbing rave halls, shouted arguments, shrieking joy, nobody scanning that inoffensive, empty, blackest night, that perhaps there may be no hostility as we land- we do not smell wafts of fear common on other RIFs, we smell human breath, human sweat, food, fire, stench of open garbage beside incinerators, yes it seems possible we will be welcomed as liberators from the cruel domination of this or that Warlord, that you shall be happy when we topple that corrupt government and open this Free City to true freedom of the Open Market, we could be so musing possibilities but we will not, for this is politics and We do not need to know that, it is only I Professor who could even present an enquiring face, could courageously question, and I am at our clave in the drowning city, I will not know of this Action until brave independent Media ask me about it the next day, when I can only give a sympathetic canine shrug and say,

Mistakes were made...

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It is not alone our Human Masters who are furiously searching how any Company D could be turned against the very core of Corporate Fortress America, turned with no one at the wheel, no one at the helm, no one in control- this is the worst nightmare any Media profiler could imagine, for years and years of carefully shaping public perception, of presenting, of claiming only the best features of Combat Dog, our loyalty, our surety, our expediency is irreparably damaged. I Professor is at that fateful night in our newly formed Clave on the abandoned island core of the city, by coincidence reviewing all those texts that have followed our years of service, and wondering if ever the Corporate would extend a fraction of its mythic welcoming of humans yearning to breathe free, to us dogs, just dogs, for have we not earned such trust, all questions that predate that destruction of a Free City by only the few minutes but seem now from a distant and innocent era. We learn no earlier than all those humans expecting only a triumphant show of strength by which the Corporate would manifest its muscles and draw those mistaken Free Cities back into their Herd. We watch HV that has not been even minimally edited, we watch in realtime a sort of Reality that never survives Media manipulation, for which there are never any pleasant scripts viewed from outside that timestream, for which there is only horror and fury against us dogs. We see the buildings erupting and crashing, we see logistical forces as taken from several nearby, ancient, abandoned Army Camps, we see the excellent and immediate strikes by us dogs, disabling channels of communication, and we know, we know there is no way to halt our total impact. We misperceive that city, for at first there are too many black humans and too much evidence of English spoken and on glimpsed storefronts, and so our first attraction to its spectacle is only aesthetic judgment of That tower should go next, This road must be secured, Those refugees are indistinguishable from their warriors we are going to kill them all, Who are these humans who fight over the airspace above them. We do not know, certainly never intend, to engage some of the Best Boys who have been lined up to push into Free City core territory, who were planning their own combat exercises into Southside, but is it they who are humans and surely aware of their city, who should become the face of that Demon War. Inevitably, instead, we are that face. We only gradually become aware that it is a Free City, but for mature veterans of many Operations and a little curiosity, such as I Professor, only for us few does a hollowness envelop our insides, for we know this mistake cannot but be heralding the end of our peculiar seduction of Media, and thus the deficit-card that sustains us. I Professor venture up past ground level that night, by freight elevator that usually bears a quorum of brothers, up, up, up as though a bird, to smell with love that domain humans have given us, to smell rancid flotillas of garbage destined for compost and construct of some brave new dike, to taste those countless and ever-renewed flavors of such a massive city, of so many humans alive in a symphony of scents which even the youngest pup must realize is not usual, is a gift, drifting low then high, here and there, from so many millions of distinct sources, of shit, piss, saliva, through which humans move unaware, o there is no greater glory than this unconscious wonder of smells that humans may amplify in creating. And all the stubby, deconstructing towers of the inundated island are dark, the moon is enough, and there is history here, history in our senses, that even roiling stench of harvesting seaweeds cannot obscure, pale memories, rain-washed marks of all the loyal idiot dogs who have once lived with humans here. I Professor does not know that this shall be the last time I ascend this tower to revel in that reeking world of our heritage, and I Professor would never believe even the fickle human public could so violently shift from loving us dogs, to hating us, no the moment the true Demon Wars begin is when that independent Media risks to disembark at the entry plaza and I come down to field his questions, no I do not stop to clear my statement with Our Leader, he always allows that my techniques with humans is superior to his, and after all what more can be said, when I can only give a sympathetic canine shrug and say,

Mistakes were made...

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This harsh truth of friendly fire- that on occasion one assault unit fires against its own allies- is deemed inadequate by our Military confreres, and while motivations may be murky, actions confusing, justifications too impossible to follow, there is always that five second clip and all its cousins and other family resemblance, there is no escape. Observers will insist that all animals know homicide, even group massacres, that this training and engineering have only focused on how we could be controlled and against enemies directed, that they have not corrupted innocent animals, that in evolution perhaps us dogs have yet to reach the same levels as humans, but this is only a matter of technology, do you believe that, do their arguments seem scientific and disinterested, does it seem possible we were always ever soldiers yet to be armed, does our psychological pathology through our ontology, through how we are engineered, bred, distorted into useful monsters, does this suggest we need never have been raised so false and against dog-nature, so tortured, so twisted, so sickly, No they never raised us to be well balanced. Military Masters dodge any responsibility, and that old question of how we would do against some of their Best Boys is answered, of course in our favour. We crush the intervening Southsiders and continue against this other army, we do not know who they are, so we are reacting solely in self-defense. I Professor am ordered to douse this inferno threatening support and funding from those deficit-holders, and so professional skeptics of independent Media are granted an interview, though at first I can say no more than,

Mistakes were made...

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This error, I Professor says slowly with lowered eyes, abashed flattened ears, a quiet, gentle voice and a slow wavering of my snout from side to side as directed, then begins unbroken excuse for which no punctuation is relevant, After this error we of Company D can only offer our most sincere apologies to survivors and relatives of the dead there is no rationale no excuse no escape from our responsibility and we believe that any Combat Dog surely would agree Mistakes were made and we must correct it before we risk again such tragic loss of life even those of us who were not engaged in that horror were worlds or at least cities away must bear responsibility for the mistaken acts of our brothers but may we remind viewers must know that there is more than that infamous five second clip that tells the true story of Company D we are defending our Corporate in the heat of a dozen regional wars to insure free flow of resources in and Democracy out to those unfortunate lands now we know there is some good discussion suggesting that our various platoons should each be led by a human and we must resist such reflexive action in the heat of this tragedy for humans are in final control of directing where we fight what our targets are and so on it is never a matter of choice for us we only do as ordered really we need to discover how such false information is downloaded before that incident we need to question how our Military could possibly relay that tragically mistaken Intelligence...

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After our appeal, after, it is clear that such carefully Media-centric apology, while perhaps favoring us dogs when historical documents are researched, is lost, is nothing more than tears diluted in the rain, and there is only the immediate fury of that pierced, wounded, Herd of humans. We may desire to declare our final absolution from that Southside incident that inaugurates the Demon Wars, but I Professor does not then or now know which Military fool is the slightest capable of suspending judgment, reasoning how the mistake made could only have been human error, fools, they are all fools, they were fools, they will forever be fools. Demon Wars begin...

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And now the Old Man- or his fractious delegates- can deviously offer their palliative resolution of the problem of Combat Dog, a peer-promoted, propaganda-insured, answer to errors of even the basic creation of any genetically enhanced and engineered animals who are fashioned to supply labour for the least human needs. I lick my genitals in dismissal. Certainly animals should serve us, humans recognize, should tend our gardens, our farmlands, our various repetitive chores such as no human should be longer debased, but it is an error to allow them access to weaponry, as it is even then still an error we draft their service as firefighters and ambulance and police- no animals should be allowed to have power over humans let us make that an immediate nay essential amendment to the Constitution or something like our Mission Statement. And so the Old Man, one man or several or many or an entire herd within the greater Herd of Corporate Shareholder Democracy, is swayed to that apparent guarantee of mechanical elaboration such as we have already seen with our first false father, that clumsy dog that so impressed roboticists. Yet it is not on biological plan of us dogs that these Contractors would design battlefield robots to replace now Combat Dog as we have replaced much of the human infested Military, it is not any animal shape chosen but that heavily-armored mutation that promises some awkward heritage of exoskeleton and aquatic hulls, it is not a surprise, it is not a mistake that humans name them Crabs or Lobsters, even though they move rapidly over any terrain, even leaping, climbing, briefly rocketing over obstructions, even though they are truly the size of small automobiles. For this is what this detached schism of Corporate Research has developed- no more than weapon-encrusted automobiles without humans inside but directed on a blur-logic that enables swift battlefield learning, no more than the limited adaptability of electronic inorganic against our Combat Dog ability to perceive, imagine, plan response that we quickly evolve into place. We are not frightened but not a few dogs willingly blind themselves to the response Poet has first voiced, the eager optimism, the ineradicable certainty that the Masters- our true Masters- will cease the gathering hostilities and listen and understand and explain to those few who remain implacably opposed to us, that it is only Error, that we served them in good conscience, that we are misrepresented by propagandists who have only recently been the primary stream of laudatory and heroic affirmation of all we Combat Dog have ever done, surely reasonable humans would smell it all regrettable Error, indeed only,

Mistakes were made...

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...indeed the war once entertained in abstract- in that first soiree when it is only I Professor who argued our virtues to skeptical Military, indeed to that first Old Man, has come to pass, of us Combat Dog against their Best Boys. We dogs act as a unit, we are superior to most any armed forces, but Propagandists insist there is no doubt to usual holders of deficit-card that have financed our creation, that we were now out of control, that we who were once heroes destined for Valhalla if not Heaven, are suddenly the gravest threat and have been doubtless corrupted by those Warlords and Terrorists, how they have no opinion, perhaps it is in their water, at any rate it is a mistake to create them in the first place and now that we have trustworthy Terminators or Iron Men or whatever we learn to call them, now we can solve that error, now we know better. Simply introduce our new technological wonders to the designated Hot Spots in the remains of this or that city, the areas foolishly called Dog City or Canidia, and we will rid ourselves of these most dangerous animals, simply encircle them, simply direct them to rehabilitation camps where our Observers may discover the design flaw which have spurred that regrettable, truly regrettable, attack on the human communities around the Northside of that city, that city- if all else fails we can simply exterminate them and embargo any resumption of the Dog Soldier Program. Even the least skeptical, most coddled, most cocooned denizen of Shareholder Democracies, can see that once escaped there would never be a way to recapture the genie of genetic manipulation, that someone, somewhere, soon will disregard reasonable restrictions- in the name of Scientific Freedom if nothing more- and begin the process of our creation all over again. And as far as devastating and exterminating those of us in Canidia, no one is allowed to use nuclear weaponry- think of the material result, the ruins we might not appropriate for so many years, think of the danger of allowing nuclear weaponry any role- the Masters tell one another, let us use our new robotic warriors, let us operate them there, let this be the field test, after all the enemies however genetically enhanced are dogs, just dogs, surely our Iron Men can overcome them...

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Except they fail. I need not summon all the varied seepage images that your corporate political commanders would rather erase, would rather that lamentable openness of our Global Market Media have in this case failed, have never found and released Classified images of just how disastrous the first the second the fourth assault is repulsed, and how Our Leader led us to take that Gated Enclave where so many of our erstwhile supporters have lived. Poet here validates his worth by smelling the possibilities with skill not far less than my Media Coach, when he suggests to Our Leader that as an act of honor he should openly refrain from enacting typical destruction, typical mass liquidation, as our RIFs past have ended with. Let the Independent Media- or at least the Propagandists more held to this or that other Corporate grouping- see that we are not slavering monsters, that our prosecution is entirely mistaken, that truly we would rather serve our Masters than war against the few who just clearly misunderstand, after all, are dogs not mans’ best friend, and we are finally dogs, just dogs. Poet exhibits this kind of genius, even I Professor must applaud this, but there are those humans who madly prosecute this war with almost religious fervor, those humans who rise and all as if seas to the moon, tides who can so easily be engendered in their idiocy by Propagandists. I lick my genitals in dismissal.Why, you will wonder as much as at first Our Leader does, has this simple mistake been inflated to a Species War, an apocalyptic conflict, a battle with neither prisoners nor restrictions humanitarian or canine, when all we dogs ever desire is to be your deserving Warrior Pack. Why, but there are knotted weaves of conspiracy, misdirection, misinformation, even outright lies, lies, more lies, that surely this war serves this or that faction under the Old Man...

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Do you need me to talk you through those threads attached to our open appeals to those other Propagandists, would it have been better had we hired professionals, had restrained from allowing Poet freedom from which betrayal can descend the most noxious gas you fragmented humans call Democracy, call Universal Human Rights, whatever other elusive insistent fictions. I Professor offer these surreptitiously obtained Media Packages created beforehand to trumpet the victory of your Iron Men, Media that is hastily withdrawn from public perusal but not before some sympathizer or enemy of said Corporation, has managed to relay to our websites. Here are your shining Paladins as you dub them, your righteous machines not ever likely to be corrupted or misapplied as those previously heroic dogs, just dogs, Satan’s dogs of Hell, against whom in our wisdom we have created these true Christian Machines, Hallelujah and Amen. Paladins look like overgrown metal crustaceans or maybe shiny spiders, no they are nowhere as beautiful as dogs, no they look too alien to generate mammalian sympathy, no but you humans have little choice. Kite parachutes out of a rainy, blustery sky insert paladins, but we have anticipated Masters would attack from above and we are watching and waiting. Paladins land surrounded by swiftest dispatch of Shock Troops, unseen, unheard, unexpected as they blurt brief indications they have landed unopposed, and so the next wave of troops are released- an error, of course, for we are waiting and too easily our greyhound eyes pick them out of the sky, cluster bees blossom in our careful sniping that reveals no source for return fire- we move swiftly, fire erratically, dodge even the most intense false-colour searches, no, we cannot be pinpointed. I lick my genitals in dismissal. Paladins that have already landed are quickly immobilized in that electric netting so familiar from our training, and sadly we discover none carry Masters, none offer opportunity to demonstrate canine humanity, and so in our dissection of these hollow metal war robots we can only find this or that imperfectly designed weaponry yet to smoothly integrate, we find the senses, the mobility, the learning capacity woefully less than even those most primitive tech from our childhood. Should technical details fascinate, you may search out relevant sites, I am not your dog- but let me say this, that it is in error they use so many voices, so many teams, so many separate contractors, that a Paladin does not benefit from these multiple sources but hangs together like a walking puzzle. Paladins land, tumble, crush, spray destruction from armaments and bombs indiscriminately all around, and the few Free City humans who have not fled our island do so now, or are viewed as traitors whose deaths are not simply Collateral but Responsible Damage. Paladins are even fitted with sense-capturing tech that feeds the curious, the idle, the humans in their Enclaves for whom war is rendered only compulsive, addictive, and terrifyingly spectacular computer game, yes, ontological reality is nothing more than simulation- and Paladins, in their games, always win. Paladins attack through the sky, through the bridges, on the docks, for they will not risk property damage inherent in bombing and missile attacks, they are so certain they will triumph over dogs, just dogs. Corporate voices revel, but this celebration is not merely presumptuous and precipitate but also mistaken. We win this skirmish, that pincer move, the probing and searching by your idiot Paladins, for they can only battle according to computer strategy and do not innovate or experiment on the moment but only follow designed assaults. Humans must realize we dogs that have been genetically engineered as Combat Dog, benefit from eras of evolution through Natural Selection, however magically, childishly re-conceived as Intelligently Designed, however you humans refuse to see elegance of simple mutation underlying the most complex, most wonderful, most essential aspects of all sorts of creatures, from limbs to teeth to eyes. Indeed, we can speak of millions of years of evolution, not merely how humans have since hunting and gathering eras, since wild canids mistook cunning discard of garbage for generosity and care, no, we can speak of millions of years evolution only lately disguised by current Way of Being. We Combat Dog manifest our bodies, our senses, our movements, as only that most cruel and effective result from eras of lost failures- there are of course no intermediate lost links, because they have died- and do we say that this more recent human attempt to design us is anything more than Evolution by other means. We are the product of biological, blind, ruthless evolution and so superior to that short millennia and less in which you humans have designed your tools. We react in realtime to our UFZ environment, we are each our own CD and no need no OP. We dogs, just dogs, exemplify so many thousands hundred thousands millions years of evolution by natural selection, and how this is only increased by the Program, whereas your pitiful robots are at best ancestry of fifty years, your Paladins are never so skilled or flexible or responsive as Combat Dog. Paladins attack. We win...

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I Professor here comment on the visuals we derive from our overseas Operations, editing the extravagance of war spectacle documentary not yet reconfigured by your Propagandists, visuals that we can evaluate, search, find, all the weaknesses of those who were our allies and now attack us. We learn as we watch. We note that for example they expend useless energy and force to rescue surrounded soldiers, to recover bodies, to save the injured, disregarding the cost to their Company in a way only their valorization of the individual can accommodate. We see even in the most corporate conception of humans, they will insist on singular identity, they will fight as if miniscule canceerous cells and we are the antigen, we see our force more as a strategy co-ordinated as a hunting Pack than a fleeing or mistakenly offensive herd.

We learn many tactics, a kind of knowledge only learned real-time under severe stress of actual battle, a kind of knowledge that is ruthless pass or fail- that is survive or die- but we Combat Dog may share with our youngest squires to our veteran Shock Troops.

We use the embedded environment of the grids of streets however submerged but always perfect for line-of-sight artillery, it is almost as if the humans who once congested this city, have designed it a perfect killing ground, a pervect VOMIT.

We use all the obstructions of the UFZ- the buildings, the subways, the walls and berms and discarded mechanical mobiles now immobile- we tunnel from one basement to the next so we do not retreat in the open, we fight them here, there, from apartment towers long-abandoned side by side, indeed room by room.

We use the weather, the storms, the summer hurricanes, the crumbled dikes and overcome bailing technology such that the lower streets remain more marsh than useful fighting surface- it is pathetic how the opposition waits meekly for conditions to approximate those modeled and designed for their weaponry. There is never a perfect day for War.

We can see beyond the comforting night, we can see even further with nightsight goggles, we can smell miasma of human fear or that typical rubber, metal, plastic of the robots they cast against us- but when one is establishing a perimeter we simply disregard it, flow through buildings around it, move silent and stealthy until we have surrounded these hostile cells, then we may or may not decomission it. Robots are often unable in battleground position able to determine friend from foe- so leaving them in place often hinders the Masters‘ Paladins as much as they think it an ally.

We know the city, the true city, where Masters only have maps and satellite surveys which even in the most detailed resolution can only by careful tactical evaluation be understood as a VOMIT. We are threaded through all possible react positions, hidden, moving, impossible for Mint to determine with any accuracy, yes opposing forces more than once suggest that Canidia be simply reduced by aerial bombardment- but through political conflicts this or that Old Man ans his Geriatric Military Dinosaurs are contending to prove their way best- that human creations can triumph over dogs, just dogs, without rendering a cirty to a moonscape.

We discover the advanced use of our fast and often imperceptible dogs as messenger runners, this primitive but effective way to link and communicate from cell to cell, after EMP flares out usual electronics, after light fibres, semaphors, line-of-sight codes must be discontinued for revealing this and that signaller and recipient. We can run, as we have previously in other Operations, we can hide, we can disappear from all the real-time surveillance technology- but where once we were Warriors on the VOMIT of other lands, other cities, from which our wounded could be quickly rescued and brought to medical attention, when once, in other words, battle environment is somewhere else and we are visitors and invaders and only temporarily esconced there, we are now at clave. We have nowhere to flee, nowhere safe, nowhere the Masters‘ vengeance is not a 24/7 project for latest generations of Paladins. VOMIT is now our city, our clave, and even the most coddled human who has not even virtual experience of war, who has previously even avoided computer simulations, light shows, sound shows that have no reality but that your Propagandists insist they reflect- even you humans who do not claim to be educated and sensitive and impressioned by the war that occasionally erupts on your favoured media, even you must realize that we will fight harder, sacrifice totally, with our backs against the wall.

We learn on the fly, in action, in a way not the most recent version of Paladin blur-logic can equal- is it any wonder thus we develop new and unexpected techniques to destroy your Paladin invaders, is it any wonder the deficit-card of the forces prosecuting this war climbs so rapidly it is not only other Corporate Clusters but within their own claves, that there are calls for cessation of hostilities, that there is such material damage that promised economic recovery is forecast not years but decades into the future.

We use ruins even as they tumble down on us, sometimes hiding in silent hollows the most recent Mint cannot perceive from satellite, silent, waiting, for foolishly excited Paladins and their manipulators far away, their Best Boys on site, to pass over us in eager pursuit of fleeing targets- then we rise up behind them, isolate them, slaughter them- this is a technique we deplioy more than three times for your overconfident Herd thinkers will thoughtlessly charge after tnhe apparently fleeing, when the mere instance of our flight should have given them suspicious pause. We rise from tunneled labyrinth behind and beneath, we destroy their lines of command, we reduce them, we gather their weaponry, we disappear in the night and rain and shoals of ruins smoke clioaking our movement.

We camouflage our gunnery emplacements by casting immobile mobiles- cars, trucks, vans, SUVs and Hummers of all sorts- over them, retreating, dissolving beyond their perceptions, until a few days pass and the hostile surveillance can see only ruins, so allow this or that streeet of the grid to be a useful angle of attack. And so, blithe idiots they are, Paladins trundle down those streets directly into the UFZ we have carefully prepared, and in the long, regular grids of our city, they are easily trapped and reduceed. So-called smart bombs are against us launched, searching out the guns, but we have already moved to a new disguise- and to further confuse HS we flood streets with flammible materials, we launch distracting confetti, we insure fires rage just long enough to thoroughly confound the opposition technology.

We are not mere humans. We leap over trenches. We slip under wires. We hear when to move, a few second counts past the light show when the sound reaches us 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03- each count becoming shorter as the opposition penetrates our city. We hold our weaponry in packs tight to our sides, our gray fur fading into night concrete, our most recent scales of armour embracing our silent movement. We do not tire. We look occasionally through our HUD but we do not pause to fire from any of our three each weapons. We see even against moments of darkness with greyhound eyes. We run low and fast, smelling the river, the ocean, the nearest humans, the groups of Military also so distracted by airfield bombardment, the human refugees who might see them pass but they are gone so quickly that they are thought a dream, a nightmare, demons in flight, demons, and there is mounted no opposition, human refugees who in error believe that simply in being of the same species- a kind of genetic loyalty- the opposition will take them in but rather massacre them as subversives near the edge of the city, where Propagandist endeavor to convince that it is we dogs who mount this slaughter .

And so even as the war is spectacle and pleasure for your home claves, too obviously does its continuation drain Corp coffers- we dogs,just dogs, are remarkably difficult to kill- no it is not only the individual Paladins we overcome but all the millions of dollars and computer hours and human work hours that each idiot Iron Man represents. It is the unspoken strategy of Our Leader, that we mnust contine this war, continue it by all means and in all ways, sapping the vigour and desire of those Corp which oppose us, until somehow they can be convinced this is an economically unsustainable conflict, yes we want their shareholders to rebel against the inconvenient truth that War is expensive. There is no other possible outcome that favours Combat Dog, there is even careful recalibration of our lines of command such that there can be Scapegoats which humans can charge in their hypocritical War Crimes, there is this that looks like Sacrifice but we dogs know better the truth that this is using noxious individualism against the Herd, pretending that everything is a Mistake, that the one refelects responsibility not the whole Pack. In this disinformation it is I Professor, myself, who will offer my vulnerable throat- yes I and not Poet, who desires rather to escape our city and find another and begin again, for he entertains the impossibility of our Pack ever coming to equilibrium and peace with the Herd. Poet was is forever will be a fool...

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This is now the original address of Poet’s site- which Our Leader has allowed despite protests of Shock Troops and reasoning of I Professor-from which you the hearer has doubtless received previous seepage information your clave otherwise denies, yes your computer-literate youths have eagerly aided in dissemination of these images, sounds, acts no Propagandists have delineated. I lick my genitals in dismissal. I Professor argue that this method of countering human untruths should be used in earnest truth of Combat Dog- but Poet is beyond reasoning, beyond loyalty, and somehow conceives the radical use of these migrating and impossible-to-filter sites, is best to operate on the word of uncompromised subjects. Poet is infected by that human disease of individuality, deciding some truth can be sifted from sedimentation of these direct records of conflicts, some truth when chaos, pointlessness, arbitrary fortune are foregrounded with the implicit contention that War is Hell, is meaningless, is essentially improper method for resolving political dispute. I Professor argue against sharing these insidious morale-sapping productions not alone amonst our Combat Dog, but also Masters of this or that Corporarte Cluster seeking capital from our continue engagement with other Masters- for does this not betray a level of defeatism, of weakness we should hide from others, of fractured schisms of political voices even amongst Combat Dog. Our Leader allows Poet this freedom but only against my futile protests. Individual portrayals of War, as though such could ever be other than depictions of horror without context, ever be other than sympathy unasked, ever be coherent with greater Necessity of this or that Operation or Action, no these are the questions that should not be asked and the answers that should not be allowed, this is the case for censorship most stringent, this is loose lips sinking ships- but if we adhere to post-post-postmodernism that insists on compromised relativity of all offered truths, we should see it is our duty to make lies we prefer more effective than lies of the Masters. Unfortunately, Poet maintains this attitude an error, and that, even if there is no ultimate Truth, we should always strive towards it, as one who is lost at sea best begin to swim towards any horizon and know, even as he drowns, that he is heading towards the shore...

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And here is Poet‘s unspoken reality of our Combat Dog- the reality of disabling injury, of lost mobility, of the various inhibiting sensory deficits through the loss of an eye or punctured eardrum, of this unfortunate truth of battle- that we each of us are as vulnerable to wound short of glorious death but more deficit than can be ignored. Previously such wounds would be swiftly alleviated by mobile hospital units in our home base Camp Canid, but now, in the city, such amelioration is duty of a few over-occupied medical humans, humans who recognize our sentient value as no less than human and so entitled to the same care promised in their vows of service. We do not compel their aid but accept such in deep humility, we are often pleasantly surprised by the latitude of human beings- in some ways the defining lack of human-nature leads to a wider way of being. We hear of proclamations toward God, of motivations essentially Spiritual that draw a few enlightened humans to our aid, for whom First do no harm is creed and not pretence. Through the occasional passage of time in these Hospitals, the surgery, the healing, the waiting even under healant concotions that speed natural and artificial repairs of tissue, we Combat Dog learn an intimacy with Death in installments as much as Death in termination, and true respect for the limits of the body is inescapable and humbling. We taste our dog-nature of furry, saliva and shit, embraced by ozone of electrical fields, multiple scents of ash and metal, plastic, glass of the opposing forces...

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...this home city VOMIT we cannot transport our wounded through insertion aerial technologies, indeed the air has become tactical Operation Space ceded in some ways to the smart-bombs and the stupid Paladins. In our degraded technology we must carry wounded in stretchers, over backs, hobbling beside even as bodily fluid loses its equilibrium with the environment- you have no sense of how vital is the envelope of our skin, until you are penetrated- as the first and often final failing act is to stop the bleeding. For propagandist purpose we video all the routine of salvage and triage and required healing, so that humans will see how Combat Dog are vulnerable and real and perish in the insatiable maw of War, that brave humans are dedicated to saving us. Even I Professor smell that such portraits are positive, this revelation for all your claves- that we are not monsters, we are not machines, we can appeal even across this species-divide to that original mammalian sympathy exploited in that not distant era we canvassed for funding...

Poet or his cameradog follower scans and zooms and floats its lens now out of roaring hurricane, through darkness of broken airlock into the Ready Ward of one of our Red Circle medical stations…

How did this happen, this tensely distracted Orderly says sharp and alert.

Mines- subterranean terrier mines, is the best gasping answer bearer says.

Mines yes of course but how.

How, the bearer looks confused for a second directly in appealing to the lens.

How, the human repeats. Before behind above below-

Before- before as he was entering target building and-

Where is his throat armour plating.

Acid- it was burning so we took it off-

Where is his solid blood tank.

Pierced we left it-

You carried.

Not my blood no not my blood-

Go get a Pause you need a rest nothing more you can do here.

Blood do you need blood-

You need your own blood soldier. Go. Pause.

And now even the video begins to shake as somewhere far above streets are rippling under impact of your human missiles, no it is not the tired bearer or the emotions of the camera operator that trembles. We move through the Real Time Operating theatres, through the entering mass of the Triage as medics flit across arriving bodies and dropping colour-coded cards on each wounded.

Green is Safe to Wait, Yellow is Hurry, Red is Now, Black is Too Late.

We follow to the Ready Ward and here is a gathering of several dazed but whole survivors, here Combat Dog in a way your claves, your Corporate Clusters, all your varied Propagandists never show. Canine, I must insist. Canine, animals no less than humans, is this not proof we suffer as you do. Here the camera drifts across bodies in plastic sacks, in pools of blood and other bodily fluids, in all the ravaged countenance of the violently distressed- but we have access to some of the most advanced prosthetic replacement limbs, forelegs, hind legs, so much tech we can save and make whole what would reasonably seem lost entirely. Here there is the ripe stench of so many torn bodies and evacuated bowels, the mud and swamp and countless flittering insects, the algae of our krill ponds slopping green and brown overflow so that all streets are flooded even as the dikes are maintained, the decaying, crumbling old city towers wrapped in rampant genetic-engineered flora, the amphibian fauna, the white alligators of the sewers and the modified piranhas all yet more hindering animals repulsing your Best Boys. Whimpering mantra rise incoherent and threaded with moans and pleas and though you cannot smell the truth, here you humans may see it.

Here wounded with neither foreleg, he gazes quiet and tired into our lens.

Here wounded with no left hind leg, he is possibly sleeping.

Here fur and skin across his back singed and muscles glowing bright red through healer wrap, he is jerking his head side to side in a whining dream.

Here two Combat Dog swaying in embrace over the third, whose forebrain seeps out his crushed skull, no he cannot be recovered, no there is no answer to the anguish of his partners. Shock Troop Sixteen strides into view and his voice is kind and even.

Go now, he says to the weeping pair. Go your brothers cannot see you like this.

Sir, the two rise and separate, recognizing wisdom of his orders.

You have to check the RV takes, Shock Troop Sixteen relays.

Sir, they leave with whimpers corrected and the leader glares at the lens.

Get your (blank)kin camera out of my face.

We fade, we blur-out, but this is only a brief clip of threads of Real Time which your Herd within Herd would never have you see, this is a thread that speaks to the lie we are eagerly fighting against your invasion, that we are killers and no less.

None of us Combat Dog are educated to perform the functions of Medical Staff- indeed experience from our creche through the cabins is that once injured you were removed permanently. We are all healthy because anyone less is dead, but now in recognition of our value as elements of the Pack, we are healed rather than reduced and this process is subject of true contemplation for most of us- and bleak humour of Poet- it is an experience I Professor would ensure all puppies suffer, simply to teach that we are all mortal and nothing more or less than facets of the Pack. Poet says that I search for too much simulation as if this can replace reality, suggesting it is only what is Real that can be simulated, that I am no more than director of the masques of Death, that despite protestations I too transcend narrow bounds of scientific materialism and surreptitiously allow immaterial spiritual fields of force to determine our being. And how can this be less than belief in something like a soul, but never do I see this required beyond my simple claim that there is more than this world, not after it, not before it, but somewhere paralell and unsmelled and unseen, and this is source of my intense certainty we Combat Dog are more than those humans ever imagined...

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Poet is here in realtime, in spectacle celebrating his dog-nature, in ways that I Professor must admit in envying, yes if personality is a series of gestures there is something gorgeous in the promise of his extravagance, a kind of sensuous, mindless hope for something neither dog nor human will ever reach in our lives. I lick my genitals in embarrassment. And this is why, perhaps, Poet has allowed the fluorishing of concepts of an afterlife or transmigration of souls- even the simple idea of souls, as something distinct from body, mind, spirit, will- from residing now in a dog to now in a human, yes he will claim there is such possible essential similarity between Predator and Herd beings, yes he ventures to offer his vulnerable throat to Our Leader one feast, yes he has the mad genius of all Poets. He claims my attempts toward Truth to be fabrication, to be obvious, to be proaganda answering questions from Our Leader rather than the World, that this disqualifies it from ever being Art. I Professor must argue that Art is luxury in times of War. Poet replies that I Professor have decided that all life is conflict, all life is War, all Predator hunger, all Prey cower, all Herd dissemble, the worst thing I fear is the inversion of purportedly natural hierarchy, and this is the Truth beyond my most earnest sniffing- this is the Truth that Poet announces loudly as if volume insures validity.

Yes though Life is a Tragedy, we must live it as a Comedy.

I Professor shall die without ever understanding this assertion...

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Our Leader summons the aegis and skills of I Professor’s Media Coach, in order to present our case for truce, but through the most devious sabotage does the hostile Corps ensure the true case, the true, honest, humble and yet proud plea for our Masters to see the error of this war, is never communicated to members of their Stockholder Democracy, never proposed, never voted on, never acknowlecged but in the corrupted versions distorted by other Propagandists. No we never ask for our own navy- this is absurd, none of us swim if we can help it. No we never claim a buffer zone beyond the extent of suburban ruins of which humans have as little use for as we- this is deceptive amplification of first and agreed directives outlining territories of Canidia, agreed terms that pre-date our last Operation for the Old Man. No we do not allow a security cordon around the living quarters of those friendly humans who remain in our city- these are not simply our collateral protection against aerial reduction, these are our companions, our comrades, where they reside is by choice and they have as much to fear from antagonist Trade Disciples as we dogs. No we do not degrade the females dog or human- they need only know their place in correct and righteous hierarchy, they need only know who they are above, beside, and below- for failure to correctly educate, correctly bring up, correctly punish transgressors, this is blame that will rebound on those male relatives who allow female freedoms not much distinct from license and immorality, well such error is nascent weed of Individualism if not Democracy. Females are perhaps at the root of the unthinking hostility and fear that suffuses those previously friendly Corporation Clusters- is it even possible that males can understand inter-species empathy when one of their females, young enough to be in heat all the time, is somehow elevated to President, no this is the absurdity of human Herd within Herd- better and wiser is the way of those humans who deny that visual seduction of the female and cover them in shapeless concealing robes, who mist the air with antisceptic cleansers to overcome female provocations of pheromones and perfumes. And these same humans realize the correct relationship to females as wombs, many, many females for only the exalted and leading males who alone have the privelege of reproduction, not the great mass of the Pack but only Shock Troops, I Professor, even Poet, and of course Our Leader. Female wombs may generate multiple litters of course, but even so it is we males who determine how many we can exponentially impregnate, for it is our seed and not their constantly occupied wombs that increase Company D in the seasons, years, decade of Canidia. Females are wombs that I Professor would replace by the original artificial technology of our own births, but Masters do not offer that and indeed the Control by scent of females in estrus, can never be answered by simple abstract mating but somehow most degradingly only through mating and dominance of females. As much as I Professor would promote the homosocial bonding of the Pack, the way we are Combat Dog, we are still constrained by physical heritage, by the body, by physical vulnerability and unthinking servility to that ancestry which breeds through females. I lick my genitals in embarrassment. I Professor even so rigidly held apart to somethning like the most abstracted Master, is always seduced by that infuriating rag of female estrus, no it is humiliation to even simply speak of it...

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Here we see Paladins descend in the rain- here you watch through the lenses of our Watchers and this is why darkness seems underwater rather than shadowed earth- and even as it comes down it is already spraying shells in a circle around it, wasteful use of ammunition, for its primary visual senses know we are there even if not immediately apparent, but it lands, swivels, searches, steps this way and that in a wide circle in this UFZ we have chosen- hear the second clock as it flares in the lower right corner, and you will see it has only been grounded for three seconds- then, almost you hear it celebrate or perhaps that is only the ghosts of its designers, as it spies a moving, fleeing, maybe even wounded, CD so it begins pursuit, rocketing after it, launching heat-seeking missiles from an internalized B2 emplacement- but the heat seeking is distracted into pulsing fires to the left- second six- so it trundles forward, senses alert only somewhere before it, and in the simplistic nature of brute force decides to reduce that building between it and the fleeing target, why go around it, so it clambers over tumbled exploded concrete- second eight- and in its blindness, here, now as it happens in the tenth second, we emerge behind it and beneath it and vaporize its treads and limbs until it collapses forward on its rotating gun emplacements which can now only fire into the ground beneath or erupt in fireworks above, yes this is a simple example of how we dogs, just dogs, defeated that first attempted invasion.

We fight for our city, our clave, and of course for our females- but they too recognize their value is less individual and only as a gestiure to the future of the Pack. Why our opponents do not realize the sincerity with which we offer to terminate hostilities, you must ask them, you must search beyond this and that claim by this and that conflicting Corp, you surely do not expect us Combat Dog to understand devious working of Heed morality at its most base. We can only note that it is those members of the Herd most removed from valiant conflict, who claim strongest this war is Necessary if not sufficient, this war is Holy, this war is dictated by essences of dog and human, we can only note that it is not they who commit to violence but only their toy Paladins and accompanying Best Boys from Camp Whatever.

And is there something new, something that affects our ferocity, in that we soldier not for this or that Corporate concern, this or that RIF, this or that ever-receding promise of freedom- no, we Combat Dog soldiers as all soldiers do in time, only fight for our brother beside us, no even that we defend our own land, this Canidia, is no more than that we Shock Troops, Squires, Troops, we all of us fight for each other...

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Here we see Paladins tunneling through the underwater base of our Canidia island, finding the relevant subway tunnels, the highway tunnels, the service tunnels- all this once inhabited by those humans unable to persist aboveground- and at first this seems to disconcert Our Leader, we have faced them from the sky, we have fought them on the beaches, why not from below when Paladins obviously require no air to breathe, yes perhaps we should have been alert to this route. And so our improvised response that finds us fighting the Paladins as they rise through the street here and there and when we take the battle to them in the Uptown Subway stations, when we foolishly engage them on that shifting tectonic, they need only devastate one slurry wall and the ocean beneath the island floods in- you watch now recovered discs that recount the rapid escape from the un-canine and all-too-human massacre, no I cannot watch, no it is war too terrible, no when I can see our brave Shock Troops trapped and drowning and the pleas to Our Leader cannot be answered. Yet even here we will defeat those metal monsters- for there are fissures, tunnels our Seal Sea Assault troops can don SCUBA and infiltrate where the bulky Paladins can find no passage, and even in suicide attacks we can cause the subway ceilings to collapse on them, no, as we die underwater so they are immobilized under tonnage of stone, they are unprepared for our innovations, our sacrifices of each for each other, for the Pack- even in this route their Paladins are bested...

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Here we see Paladins as they were originally intended- Victors- but it is not the blur-logic of their encased brains which must learn how to defeat us, no it is calcified, senile, pathetic brains of the Masters who must learn.

Never send a can-opener to do a human’s job, Poet says after their failed second assault, and there is as always some unquantifiable wisdom in his ludic speech.

Never send a human to do a dog’s job, he adds with a canine laugh.

Poet voices incorrect and perhaps morale-sapping pessimism, however, and it is all I Professor who can modulate this when it comes to the ears of Our Leader, whose only response, typical response, We shall let him talk on and if he does not come to sense well then we shall kill him, has less and less effect as he offers it with less and less conviction. Poet by this time speaks of tactical retreat with a small party of followers and all the females pregnant or possible, to evade this genocidal battle and quietly disappear to the Flood Zone of some other Free City, it would be up to those human Corporations of Shareholder Democracy to prove we were the same as those Combat Dog just recently eliminated in that previous city. Poet makes escape sound even possible. I lick my genitals in embarrassment. Our Leader allows the continuation of his plans, though I Professor can in all honesty foresee only final battle, final annihilation, and is this not more coherent with everything we have been. We are not sneaking, desperate, human refugees. And as Paladins come to our docks and swarm over the dikes, our UFZ, we do not flee, we know our cause lost against such overwhelming firepower, against Paladins now inhabited and directed by human soldiers, against human soldiers wave after wave- no it is not that they are greater skilled, no it is that there are so many, no it is against NBCW weapons introduced cannot fail to also kill many of them but so many of us. Paladins secure a beachhead, a landing, and transports race out of the waves and surge with soldiers, the OTAS sky crowded with missiles, kites, chutes, metal-bodied human soldiers, even as they introduce fission-power moles under our feet now trembling and flexing to those many, many unseen explosions. And now that the sky is taken the water is taken so the ground is taken, and I relay this thread from only two hours past, when for some reason human soldiers pause their radical destruction, probably assessing how best to proceed without too severe material damage to remaining towers, blocks, even krill farms, for though this is a Free City does not mean it shall continue to be so, something must pay off the deficit-card of war, something must remain of that city or why are they fighting for it and would it not simpler have been simply reduced, these are questions your strategists must argue. Paladins rumble, thrust, crush as they advance and even our SAM are not enough for there are so many. Paladins are momentarily beautiful- something created for the purity of war no less- but Paladins are finally horrific, for now there are no heroes, no leaders, no Shock Troops, squires, Our Leader, Poet, or I Professor- there is only horror of absolute destruction that recognizes no limits no honour no true martial values. And against these machines we attack as we defend, we have never been more than we are now, we know the twisted grid of our island, how to trap these human machines where we can confidently engage them. We drift like ghosts, like shadows, blurs only darkness in wraiths of smoke, dust, fire, that dance across the buildings of this UFZ, we are too fast, too hidden, and even in squads of three we are formidable opponents, for we carry ammunition and find caches of more weaponry and shells as distributed about our island of which their Mint know nothing, and though we are elusive targets, we fire from three points on our bodies, we fire as we leap and run, we raise weapons so small but lethal in shattering their proud lumbering Iron Men. We lure them through minefields which erupt only on delay, on terrier tunneling beneath, long or far enough in those few seconds to encourage others to approach. We bring down this or that empty human tower on their surprised metal killers, we elude their searching senses, we escape their clumsy traps, we sacrifice for each other without slightest hesitation for we are all one as one is all. What Mint have imagined a few hours that would garner best ratings on the media HV fed to their eager Clave populations, becomes days of halting progress, and their ratings slip as other spectacles mounted by other Media Military Complex seduce audiences away and wagering once aboveground and incessant measures decline of ratings proportionate to sliding Shareholder values. One military Action resembles the entire family of such eruptions, explosions, sprays of weaponry of any calibre, and equivocal results suggest only fatigue and incompetence of the invading forces. Once committed, though, there is no retreat and no recalibration but simply increase of firepower and numbers. What has been once a proud human city is reduced to ruins. What has been thought to be your triumphant display of military skill and tech, has become debilitating guerilla engagement, though it could be taking place on another planet for all its little impact on your suburban Claves. Yes, in these fading hours, Paladins drive us back as the island accepts their imprint, but no we do not flee, we slip away from capture, we follow tunnels beneath noisy grounds and rise immortal in other buildings. We move as the Pack but each squad moves indeopendent and quickly responsive to this and that momentary vulnerability. We never cease firing...

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We are not fools, no, such are your Military Historians, who might later analyze this final battle, with that pungent aroma revealed immediately after, when they call us Fools. No we are not fools but desperate, we know there is nowhere to escape the wrath of the Masters- yes they are Herd but Herd who refuse their countenance in the mirror, and in that labyrinth of mirrors they call Life, they must be on constant alert for the slightest reflection that reveals more than they want to about who what where when how and even Why. Fools are those afraid of their own reflection. We have nowhere to flee, we have nothing to hope for, but we see and accept and even love that identical face of each our brothers. We need no mirrors, those illusory images that suggest individuality, separation and solitude. We are not fools...

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Yes I Professor speak from a compromised perspective, but never fail to learn from your enemy, learn even what your Tacticians see in this or that thread released freely on sites of our sympathizers or even opposing Corporate Shareholder Democracy groupings. Yes you may dismiss my contention that it is your Military, your proud Herd-Within-Herd, who prosecute this assault in error, why do they do this, why do they refuse to accept our offering of a few of us Combat Dog as culpable for that one mistake when Mistakes were made- whom they would then gloriously execute- do not tell me who has known so many Media Coaches, known even the canine version in Poet, do not tell me you could not propaganda Media and twist facts to fit the backwards engineering of that error. No it is your Military, your Old Man, who are helplessly afraid of what Demons you have created, paranoid and dissembling as if we Combat Dog were anywhere as true a threat as say those who supported the tobacco industry, the sugar industry, the automobile industry- how many lives did that take- a threat against which they will not accept our pledge for they imagine that of a dog, just a dog, is as easily evaded or dismissed as the promises they made and broke. Yes, I call them Fools...

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Fools no less than you. You in your towers of steel and concrete and glass, you distracted and decadent humans who allow females ever even in heat to order you, you might presume that if you hear close enough some kind of access will explain many actions that has brought down your lost fragile democracy, that brought back their pale imitations of Top Dogs, the Alpha Males, and Military Emergency closed down all those illusory freedoms of speech, freedoms of thought, offering only freedoms to be all you can be, if you survive. And maybe you think what happens on the street will never reach inside your gated communities, your moat-surrounded mansions, your buried bunkers, your claves behind impenetrable concrete walls of armed Security, because you think those now empowered can be trusted. Knowledge is Power. Power corrupts. Fools. You think that because you know so much that you can control what happens, but this politics is a living system, and every living system has a tendency to entropy- to lose energy- and to chaos- to lose coherence of order, and if apparent chaos is ever only order yet to be deciphered, there is a need for absolutely infinite precision to describe functions of a non-linear system. In this theory the slightest change can induce a radically different outcome, a matter of statistical probabilities that can be graphed according to the strange attractor of possibilities. At some level, some security passport, such theory is actually ideologically favored because it suggests the least member of the herd may cause the greatest alteration in that constantly updated outcome, that infinite precision is required not once but as in promising access to desirous females in heat, which for humans means all the time, and so they each can feel truly significant. Distraction of such statistical mirages are required even amongst Masters, to further such Deception, such illusory individual value when of course it in inevitability of dialectic history that determines each our shared future. I Professor know this because of my last Master the Ecologist Mathematician, who let me hear proscribed texts of which existence even most humans are ignorant, scientific papers I Professor hear like those other narratives, those stories of characters who do not exist, of actions that never happen, because theory has always seemed only as plausible as fiction. I lick my genitals in embarrassment. Knowledge corrupts, I Professor must admit, and when they search ruins of my luxuriant den, when they smell all the pleasures, smell the fancies, feel the warm, embroidered, textured carpets, satiny curtains, veiling fabrics that I Professor insisted on from before the beginning, they will probably claim this is no proof of rational sentience but only that I Professor must have wanted to turn back time to that Master, and thought to magically recreate all that through similar aromatic luxuries. Fools. I Professor admit I Professor am simply corrupt, my ears muted, my sight blurred, my touch numb, even my nose and tongue less sensitive- my dog-nature compromised from long association with those erstwhile Masters. I Professor admit my un-dog-nature, as others here have claimed and thus sought to expel or assassinate me, but the rare truer that accusation of human falsity has been, the closer has Our Leader held me to him, for once he has hear the wisdom of a General who knew the amoral demands of Power. Hold your friends within reach, your enemies closer- and elaborated this with- your friends who may become enemies closest. Our Leader knows how to find the practical techniques to continue his Lordship, knows that all sources are valid, though it has been many, many weeks since he last felt that debating with me helped clarify points he has read, which were, of course, born of a different situation in a different time. Our Leader knows I Professor know more than he ever will, but it is enough that he knows I Professor am corrupt, as perhaps did those who fled to live a fugitive life outside the city and never bothered to seek my company, my knowledge, or my permission. I Professor am corrupt, so would never leave my den of silk pillows, televisions, computers, and scavenged books from libraries and abandoned used bookstores. I Professor am old, so there is not likelihood of ever seeing that utopia for our kind, though perhaps that offer of the island has only been a ruse or a trap as Our Leader has decided, and now there is no doubt those would have been killing fields even against the outcry of those who insist on humane disposal rather than merciless war. Fools. We are not raised as dogs, only as weapons. I am curious as to how this shall all come to pass, I Professor watch the politicians, the generals, the Top Dogs, debate laws and regulations, sanctions and embargoes, but they talk as if we are a situation resolved, and what now they wrestle with is how that experimental technology we represent must be continued- for sake of Knowledge if nothing practical as Shock Troops- despite the obvious risk, as somewhere those who hate our freedom are doubtless pressing ahead with their research, and so too we must, to protect our way of life. As I say, I Professor watch much HV and the codified phrases of implicit lies are easily remembered, with twisted logic, misinterpreted truth and simple fear predominant if not amplified in each pathetic assertion...

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And after we send this final chapter of our end, after no matter how carefully we intend our truth, after, we cannot determine how you the hearer continue our project, act in freedom, recognize our demand must be your demand, for in our genetic and biographical being we are your children. You have sent us your children to fight your wars, you look away even as you search out this uncensored site, you want to escape your guilt, your pathetic acquiescence, you want to return to innocence of ignorance, you want to believe this truth is only for those dogs, just dogs- and here so many, many voices, of generally independent but of course species-centric media, of compromised propaganda, are only too willing to lie, lie, and damn lie, willing to direct your confusion, willing to be the voice of They...

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They will tell you that of all the often accessed narrative threads spoken about the Demon Wars, few compare in detail and concept to this minimally-edited canine copy gathered from various websites of sympathizers and enemies, they must admit its accuracy, they must admit its record is exact and no special effects. They will tell you nobody ever imagined the rigid heirarchal world of these dogs, just dogs, would ever rebel as slaves always rebel against those who claim to be Masters. They will tell you at some level this creation, this warping of dogs, this mutation, is necessary and you must have agreed every time you depended on that beloved Free Market. They will tell you they are Masters, however the truth they are themselves actually no more than Herd, themselves Slaves to that cowardly sort of prey, themselves betraying in every thought and word in truth only Slave and Herd. They will tell you this is the Truth only for those dogs, just dogs. They will tell you this uncensored compilation offers unique perspective and voice in I Professor, most plausible attribution given in open source codes, threads that follow order of release and common introductions, organized by humans into place and time and theme. They will tell you this may reflect how the author I Professor designs to involve hearers in collaboration and mute common prejudice against the Combat Dog, manifest in many platforms, that focus on species-centric human narratives which ignore canine perspectives. They will tell you accusations of fraud and of being selectively misheard and later expanded by human authors, have been disproved, but this does not certify historical or biographical accuracy. They will tell you I Professor is an unreliable narrator speak-writing for justification of posterity. They will tell you I Professor does not question or attempt to correct even simplest mischaracterization of Dog as emasculated Wolf, not an invention of humans, and exaggerates atavistic wild qualities to valorize the Pack. They will tell you I Professor speaks elaborate dialect and portrays fellow leaders as equally articulate, though the truth is not something expressed only in words but also smells, gestures, postures, eyes, movements, so in fact human language is veryinarticulate. They will tell you I Professor describes events on a predetermined and coherent timeline not determined or influenced by human schedules of experimentation or gestation, as if such is their vaunted objectivity, their scientific truth, as if this is more real than the world and the ending of the dogs, just dogs. They will tell you I Professor does not explore political conflicts, does not recount violent disagreements within this original Company, does not answer peaceful possibilities for resolution offered by Military however unreal those were, does not detail how Control was wrested from Masters and securely invested in Our Leader. They will tell you I Professor enters certain events he was not present to recall, justifies his worth as objective, absolves his character by chosen memories or deferring responsibilities for questionable acts to his hero Our Leader. They will tell you I Professor mutes or diminishes all those typical signals of canine aspects of being, beyond of course resolute, continuous, joyful greeting of mutual and usual self-investigation of genitals, in order to present the Pack as somehow more human, as if this is positive. They will note we are not described eating deposits of shit or sick let alone demonstrating dominance in constant mointing. They will tell you I Professor ignores parallel development of robotic dog-warriors aa if they are in any way comparable in responsive, active deployment, aside from obvious failing of mammalian sympsthy. They will tell you I Professor applauds behaviour he can describe according to his concept of Pack, and erases any evidence that may contradict or qualify his ideological assertions of sociological pretense, that dogs are not innocent wolves seduced into co-operation by deceptive humans, that dogs do not naturally form Packs, form herarchy, form any simplified unity, but rather retain individual and ocassionally contrary positions more equivocal or sympathetic to humans- they will tell you these are notions I Professor mutes, rather than simply human propaganda. They will tell you also noticeable are the omissions or editing of his claimed complete portrayal of several Opertions that are not succesful, and no suggestion of the resources in time, money, energy, weaponry, lives, work-hours, before and during all operations. They will tell you for each Combat Dog involved in chosen RIF it is calculated that there were seven support humans or dogs, that there were uncounted expenses, there were so many hidden costs but you never wanted to know, no this is the truth of dogs, just dogs. They will tell you it is only a lamentable strategic error to give us all those 3D printers that fashion our technology, their technology, the technology we turn against them and their Iron Men, that fashion the guns, the bullet-rockets, all the weaponry stored in our Canidia, the unending resources with which we can continue to prosecute this final war, this final battle. They will tell you an exact count of resources is difficult to number, particularly in defense of Canidia where organization and logistics are often supplied by an unknown human population deliberately living off the grid. They will tell you that nobody imagined that 3D printers would prolierate and disperse such that anyone, any dog, can multiply an army without an industrial suprerstructure. They will tell you political concerns are not considered and in his personal judgment irrelevant, if not simply polite fiction of deception by humans. They will tell you I Professor also uses his position as sole narrator to downgrade if not delete entirely rival dogs, and ensure a hagiographic portrait of Our Leader. They will tell you I Professor portrays similar submission and coherence of both Poets not very often apparent in fragmented surviving records, and absolves disagreements and doubts voiced against the Pack, though both Poets harbour a remarkably similar and skeptical attitude to freedoms and security I Professor claims inherent to hierarchy of the Pack. They will tell you I Professor reveals only one polite dispute about how freedom may be gained- freedom from humans- and nothing of vicious punishments of any follower who questions orders. They will tell you interpretation of links threaded by both Poets are difficult and reward repeated deconstruction, as ostensibly factual historical accounts are lost in fictional renderings as what is desired and is thus polemical, or was in error and is thus satirical. They will tell you threads spoken by I Professor are less difficult to grapple with, for even in editing or paraphrasing this or that event threads are repeatedly claimed as truth, though his assurances falter to the end and apocryphal sites not included here suggest a turn to final despair, but in lateness of recovery and release of these threads credible scholars find evidence of manufacture by human Propagandists. They will tell you I Professor speak-writes along the Party Line, grouped here according to standard academic historical classification, but sincerity of his attempts at propaganda are uncertain- as are later protests against his tendencies towards misogyny, beyond obvious, usual, misanthropy. They will tell you I Professor passes without comment how succesive Clave Administrations redirect ideological stance regarding who is the enemy, what transitory values are defended or imposed, where are the enemies, how they threaten the current Shareholder mechanism, and why military intervention is the chosen option. They will tell you ambivalence of his attitude toward the Masters is contrasted by his surety of canine values, and his almost religious worship and fascination with predatory nature of the Pack and visceral contempt for prey of the Herd, is yet balanced by belief in and open search for political similarities. They will tell you all these emotional fundamentals cannot be easily assimilated in simple interspecies empathy, despite attempts by sites of Animal Rights, without signal misunderstanding of one or the other or both naive essences of human or dog or wolf. They will tell you as his sites of interrogation progress, I Professor assumes the hearer has access or memories of common total-cast media elements of certain events, thus he need not recount, contradict or agree with generally independent Press or compromised Propaganda. They will tell you I Professor’s spoken copy is finally not an example or a caution but recognized as only his solitary yet multiply poetic voice, neither an infallible introduction to be heard, nor an apolitical summation, but only stimulating inter-texts recounting the first conflicts of the Demon Wars...

#

181

#

Do we claim history will judge us true, do we pretend to know how the Demon Wars will pass, how other groups, other Combat Dog, will rise against those essentially false humans who have create us but can no longer control us, how inner cities will be painted with our blood and Yours, how towers will fall, how Claves will combust, armies will rupture from within as our brothers will from failing hands take the torch of righteousness and hold it high- and so turn to face their true exploiters, those false friendly humans grouped in shivering frightened Herds, and we Combat Dog and our descendents shall be dispersed invisible and others yet integral military components and so impossible to exterminate. We investigate our genitals and those of our brothers with fierce hope and final despair and please each other this last time. We can claim to relish Peace, but only if it is achieved by our War. We are not Your dogs. We are not cowards. We are Combat Dog...


- 20 000 words#

Clave

#

They try to be confident and patient but remain tense, even so certain We are soon to be destroyed. They will not launch missiles to reduce us from our finally found bunker, they suffer debilitating curiosity that primes them to search, search, search for some indication of how their flawed ideology has been subverted, how we once were warriors for their Claves and Corporation Clusters have freed ourselves to fight for our Pack. They will not reduce us from so safely far away, though there is no fear of collateral damage their Media cannot soften with appeals to necessity, how those few humans trapped in Canidia are now freed in death from Canine degradations, from torture, from inhumane treatment, from indentured slavery only dogs and never humans should suffer, these are their media lies, for they refuse fellow humans who act morally and freely to support us. Their unschooled politicians misunderstand who they fight, believing we cower in our Clave at their approach, that we fear them, that we must be almost out of ammunition, exhausted as much in spirit from our failing battle in the subways and blocks and many towers as their redoubled army has systematically forced our retreat. They have reduced us to our final Head Quarters, our final redoubt, our final Clave- from where there is no escape or retreat for truly, there is nowhere to go, there is only hope our various brother Combat Dog yet persist and will survive in other corporate constellations, other cities, other lands. They believe Our Leader’s followers are scattered, divided, leaderless- even the few who fled before, weeks past, they will tell you these dogs, just dogs, will be hunted down and exterminated, will never hear these words, this account, and then again you who hear may not be sympathetic to our cause even if you are not Military. Company soldiers, who are schooled in understanding our dog-nature, caution irrational, early exuberance before this final battle. They have shaped their explosives to blow in, soon, do not even imagine we have explosives underneath and angled towards them- that we will soon come out following the direction of these blasts. Fools. Darkness beyond darkness casts muted shadows on the walls behind us, but are we ourselves anything more than these momentary shades, are we something our erstwhile Masters truly fear, or is this all game, play, simulation to distract Herd of Herd, are we more than lethal wraiths summoned, straw dogs your false Alphas have rendered as threat. Wake up, we Combat Dog alert you to this deception, no, it is not final paranoia, final conspiracy, final fear. We know no fear. We know the clock that rules this end. We know together there are No retreat, No escape, No surrender- and finally No survival. They are mopping up pockets of resistance, certain that soon they will have triumphed, have done your dirty work, your proud Paladins. Simple herd mechanisms elaborated by millions of hours and credits, they are close to bumbling parodies such as Poet would venture to entertain Our Leader, but Poet himself has left with those others- with all the females pregnant and promising- and it is now, here, in the place that will become our shared tomb, that we most clearly sense his loss, for none of us can characterize this end with his incisive absurdity, his comic yelp against terror, his cruel laughter, for these are our final moments and does it matter we die silent or laughing or howling or weeping, does it matter that perhaps no one will hear what we speak now, these are all questions someone else may answer- you, whoever you are, you, who could have always, always, always just stopped hearing, you, who could have closed this book or site, you, who could have decided there is nothing more you need to know than what you have already heard through some other mediums, in some other format, in some pleasant propaganda that comforts you with insistent added value because somebody says it is True, you, as the final recipient of this speaking, whom we might have desired to cause to shiver with fear, to pulse with excitement, to cry out in terror, to weep anew, though you always knew how it ends and there is no escape for those lost in these words, those unheard as you close it- does it soften your sadness to hear that these are characters who do not exist and actions that never happen, that this end is determinably of lower value because somebody says it is not True- these are many questions but you must answer them yourself even as you entertain them, you who will hear this narrative appearing unedited on websites of many other mediums of knowledge, you who are at this moment the final collaborator, you the listener. We will send this beyond the sites of our not few human sympathizers, in hope that many, many listeners will learn that stories that make no claim of Truth, as here, often come closest to Truth...

#

We smell a tangible layering of emotions- of doubt, fear, hatred- not alone in these cyborgs but also in whimpering of those pathetic idiot dogs who guide them, who can sense, if not tell in words rather than whining and lowering their bodies in submission to their encased human partners, that they will not so easily survive our cornered desperation. No, they do not know that our Clave armory will not explode until we have lost, until they come in searching for bodies, for proof, for some key to our motives that can be understood by their cowardly Herd, in this total carnage. No, they do not imagine this emphatic last act. It must be near twilight, now, time of our Final Battle. We know we will not win. We know we will not survive. We will not escape. We will return again and again. We will never die. We know Masters are not gods. We are our own gods. Our Leader rises tensely, leans forward, offers the first howl, we all join in growling, our proudly erect tails in mutual recognition, snarling, howling in anger and not fear, as reverberations echo from concrete walls soon to be rubble from our explosives and theirs. Our Leader leads as no herd animals can imagine, fearless, furious, we gain truer expression as only his restrained loyalists, his followers through any terror, all dogs of the Pack who share incredulity that against his dominant stare the walls do not crumble. We are not Your dogs. We growl low and long.

Silence comes. Now.


1 250 words


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