15 for 15 Contest --- Closed

Joseph McAllister pushed open the front door on his house and looked out into the empty carport. He sighed, putting his hands behind his head, and muttered, “I cannot believe I’m going to have to chain up my car.”

He walked to the edge of the driveway and looked down to the left, and then the right. He shouted down the street. “Polly! Get back here, girl! Now! Heel!”

The middle-aged man backed away from the curb as a two-seater electric car squealed down the street and up onto the sidewalk. It honked twice and nudged up against him, flashing its lights. The rear window wiper on the hatchback moved back and forth, stopped, and then moved back and forth a couple more times. Curiously, there was no one in the driver’s seat.

“Were you chasing cars again?” he asked the electric vehicle.

The car did not respond.

“You can’t do that anymore,” he scolded, wagging his finger at the windshield. He then realized what he was doing, and turned around, throwing his hands up in the air. He muttered, “Why am I talking to a dog?”

The car moved back a few feet and then lunged forward again. The man pointed at the car. “Sit. Sit!” The car stopped moving. He approached the tiny curved hood of the car and unlatched it, lifting it up. Inside was all sorts of complex scientific apparatus surrounding see-through cylinder filled with a bubbling blue fluid. Immersed in the fluid was a small, narrow brain. Its olfactory bulb was clearly visible and the stem in the back was grafted to fiber optics data cables that that flickered continuously. Joseph checked all the straps holding the equipment in place, and then the electrical connections. Everything was in perfect working order.

He shut the hood as a neighbor came up behind him carrying a beach ball-size giant rubber ball. He threw it into the yard and the car chased after it, nearly knocking Joseph down to get at it. The car honked and flashed its lights at the ball as it knocked it around the yard, spinning its wheels, kicking up grass, spinning donuts.

“So I see the operation was a success, doc,” the neighbor said.

“Yeah,” he responded, watching the car tear up his yards bouncing the ball around. “She was such a good dog and it was unfair that her heart had a genetic defect. She was young and hadn’t lived life yet. But with this old 2018 electric car and my knowledge of the mind-brain cybernetics, I was pleased to be able let her live a little longer. It would never work with a human, as we discovered. But the simpler dog brain could interface with the equipment I had been developing for the military before they cancelled the project.”

“Quite the accomplishment,” the neighbor said, as a car zipped down the road behind him.

Polly saw it, and spun her wheels, chasing the other car down the street, honking and flashing her lights.

“Polly, get back here!” the cyberneticist shouted. “You can’t chase cars anymore! You’re scaring people!” There weren’t any cats left in the neighborhood, either.