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As Sebastian laid on a thin blanket in a kennel and tried to sleep despite the roar of fighters taking off nearby and the cold of the concrete floor made worse by a drafty window of the other end of the barracks, he couldn’t bring himself to conclude that the recruiter had lied.
No, the man in that recruiting office hadn’t lied at all when he’d been sitting in one of its hard plastic chairs and flipping between the weight of needing to sign up and the sense of drive and courage that wanted him to sign up. If he could believe what he’d heard while standing a few feet below those in other units, his “silver-tongued asshole” had been remarkably honest by Army standards. Everything he’d been told about what would happen was, in the big picture, true, both the good and the bad. He hadn’t been drawn in by some promise that was fulfilled only on a technicality or that had been conveniently left out of the paperwork. He’d even gotten a fairly realistic description of what his job and daily life would be like.
Sebastian had known, as much as anyone could know from a pair of conversations, a brochure, and a thick stack of contracts, what he was being asked to do for his country, and he’d put his name on the line to protect his family and the country. Mostly. The complexities came back to him as he used a front paw that remembered being a hand to scratch an itch in his government-issue fur.
Fundamentally, while the war was over, the smart mines were not.
They weren’t mines, exactly, but it’s what everyone called them. Many parts of the country were host to a brutal twist on a minefield. Sebastian had learned the technical intricacies of the system during the second phase of his training, but this wasn’t the hour to think of that. Fundamentally, these were a cloud of detectors and weapons that built up to a harsh conclusion: anything close enough to human that steps over that glowing circle and ignores the beeps dies unless the disarming code’s been sent in. Any robots you try to send in instead get jammed and die.
That was how they’d lost many circles of good land that they’d officially regained in the treaty. Sebastian was clearing them away, one mine at a time, along with his squadmates. He quite liked them, though he hadn’t had too many chances to get to know them and he wished Janek wouldn’t snore so much.
These smart mines were programmed not to waste ammo on wildlife, though. The Army had spent some time trying to train animals to deal with these things, but there was too much complexity involved in pulling apart the system and getting everything safe. Remote-controlled robots and autonomous drones had all been big wastes of money.
So, some scientists, in the face of mounting calls to do something, anything, had come up with the plan that had put Sebastian here and left him with the taste of his specialized rations lingering in his mouth despite all the water he’d drank earlier.
One needed human-level intelligence to disarm these mines, but nothing human could get close. On top of that, many parts of the system were buried and had to be detected by something other than looking for them. Smell, perhaps, they reasoned.
The solution was to take the humans who signed up for this and grow them a new body. Something that, as far as the sensors could tell, was just another animal passing through. You’d take your soldier and give them four legs, four paws, fur, a keen nose, and all the other kit they’d need, along with a section in the uniform regulations just for them. Then, you’d spend many months teaching these specialized mine-clearers how to use the body they’d been transplanted into. Another half a year taught them how to do the job they’d volunteered to do.
Sebastian had made it through the surgeries and the training, and now worked in his team of ten, sniffing out the sensors and traces that scarred his homeland, that had rendered the forest he’d known as a child into a death trap, and dug them up or bit through them. It was hard work, it was dangerous work (he’d seen someone from one of the other teams missing a leg), but it was important work. He’d put his life on the line to save the country from a war the paperwork said was already over, and he mostly knew what it would cost him.
Sebastian knew that the Army was making a serious effort to deal with what they’d created. He had ways to “talk” (howling Morse code, with plenty of shorthand, for talking to other dogs and those who worked closely with them, and books of words, letters, and symbols to point at for everyone else), now that he had neither a voice or hands. The officers above him even did their best to take complaints seriously (he remembered when they’d gotten new vests once someone had pointed out that the zippers were tricky to open in the field).
On top of that, he, like all those like him, had handlers assigned to them to see to all the minutia of daily life that had become more difficult. Sure, he could get his own food with a scoop held in his mouth, but it worked better for everyone (and didn’t cause chaos in or require redesigns of the mess hall) if someone else got it for him.
However, the nature of his new form was also the source of the problems he faced, the ones no one could have warned him about because they believed they wouldn’t be problems.
For one thing, even though there was a formal designation for what he’d become, everyone called Sebastian and his unit dogs.
Sebastian had seen himself in a mirror, and he could see why he’d gotten that name. He even thought of himself as a dog, these days.
Both he and the proper humans around him were still mostly trying to use the term de-mining squads instead of de-mining packs. For now.
The problem was that the people around Sebastian didn’t always think of him and the others on the dog squads as human. They tried their best, they had policies and frameworks, but it didn’t overcome the fact that, even to Sebastian’s own mind, he didn’t look like a person anymore.
For instance, his medical care was through the Army veterinarians, and they had a habit of forgetting that these particular dogs could understand them, wanted to know what would be happening to them, and could be asked what hurt before the needles and X-rays came out. He’d had officers asking his handler why he wasn’t on a leash at least once a month, despite the vest that clearly indicated his nature. His food was probably made by a dog food company that had been the lowest bidder … he remembered his handler trying it once and saying he hoped Sebastian’s tastebuds were different because that stuff was way worse than normal army slop.
It was all those little things. He was being treated with roughly the balance of respect for his humanity and acknowledgement of his new status that he’d been promised two years ago … so long as everyone was thinking or planning. When they weren’t, it led to his barracks (or kennels, depending) being right next to the runways despite his enhanced hearing, or any number of “Hey, drop it! … Oh, sorry, Specialist. Carry on.” That he’d developed a habit of wagging his tail.
It was times like these, especially when his mission that day hadn’t gone well so he didn’t have satisfaction of a job well done to cushion the blows to his pride, that Sebastian remembered the other reason he’d signed up to clear mines.
The death benefit.
See, becoming an engineered mine-clearer — a mine dog — was so dramatic a change in what Sebastian could do with his life that the Army paid out death benefits to his family the moment he went under the knife. And if he were to die out here, there’d be a second benefit.
Fundamentally, while the war was over, the economic damage was not.
Sebastian’s family had needed money to rebuild after everything they had had been destroyed. They needed to build a home where a pile of cracked stone now stood, they needed to replace the tools of their trades that had been blown up or melted down for metal, they needed a lot, and didn’t need Sebastian being one more person to worry about.
No one had directly told him to go be a mine dog. They’d made sure to ask about that when he was volunteering for this job, and he’d honestly said no one had tried to push him into this role, let alone made promises or threats … but it was clear that everyone would prefer if he’d disappear and be replaced by a substantial monthly check.
So he had. He’d honestly meant to be a hero, but he’d just as honestly meant to get out of the way, to stop the sighs and implications that he should make something of himself.
Now he was looking back and wondering if he’d do it again, knowing all the things that they couldn’t fit in the contract. Knowing not only about having to re-learn to walk and drink out of a bowl but about all the times people would forget he was a fellow soldier and not a tool.
Sebastian yawned and shifted around. He always got like this when the first cold hit, he knew, and there wasn’t much for it but to try to sleep and let tomorrow be a new day instead of dwelling on if he’d been tricked or swayed into this place and its lingering whiff of “unscented” cleaner.
Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t. But he’d chosen anyway — and he had to conclude, as he drifted out of the waking world, that no one had lied.
As Sebastian laid on the grass near a busy city street and tried to doze off despite the near-deafening roar of cars driving by and the cold of the winter rain on his fur, made worse by the sting of winds from the north, he couldn’t bring himself to conclude that the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs had lied.
The Ministry was, as far as he could tell, honestly trying to set him and the other brave people who’d given up their bodies to finish liberating their country the best life they could have under the circumstances. He’d been told that when they’d given him and his pack their medals. Sebastian was proud of that medal; they’d accomplished their mission, and all before his contract ran out.
Unfortunately, there were many practical issues that arose when trying to give around 150 veterans who looked like dogs some semblance of a civilian life. Neither Sebastian nor the Army had put much thought into what would happen after all the land was reclaimed. He’d had some hope he could be put back in his old body, or something more human-shaped, and he had the sense everyone else did too, but it turned out it was much too risky to do this sort of transplant twice.
So, Sebastian had been found a job that he could do without hands and without one of his eyes (he’d lost it to an explosion near the end of his service): sniffing for bombs and drugs at an airport. It was alright work, and being inside with the heat on was certainly an improvement over freezing his paws off in the snow.
He could do without being told he was a “good boy!” when he found something and his coworkers forgot he wasn’t a true dog, though. That mistake only happened once every week or two these days. Sebastian idly wondered if it would become less frequent if he could just give some of his more forgetful coworkers a gentle nip.
Sebastian’s job was mainly something to do so he wouldn’t go crazy, though the money had helped him get a few nice things. The government was already supplying his food, his medical care, and enough money to pitch in for housing, but he’d used the earnings from work to help get a TV with a remote he could use made, for instance. That and a better bed. Or a nice steak sometimes — he’d more than earned that, he’d concluded.
While all this was well and good, there were still a lot of little things about Sebastian’s life that sucked. He wasn’t sure if the aggravations and slights of not looking like a person were better or worse now that he wasn’t a soldier, but they were different.
One such little problem was that his commute could be tricky. He needed to take two buses to get from where he was living to the airport on the other side of town. While many of the drivers knew him by now, he still sat and waved a front paw around when he heard a bus coming. He’d missed too many buses because their drivers hadn’t realized he was someone who wanted to get on. Sebastian stared down the road, wondering where his bus was and annoyed that no one had invented a comfortable way to put a watch on his front legs. It was a shame the bus home came so rarely on Sundays.
As he waited around, Sebastian gave the ground near his feet a sniff, just in case there was a trail of explosive or metallic scent under the ground. There wasn’t, but it was hard to shake the habit, especially when passing trucks sometimes reminded him of his old work.
Another source of annoyance was people. Looking like a dog led to a lot of people trying to pet him as he walked down the street, and the average man on the street was even worse than the average private at reading the vest he was wearing. Him often being alone during the day didn’t help. Back in the Army, he’d gotten quite used to his pack and the other mine dogs. They’d gotten to know each other well despite their trouble forming words, and, when they were in groups, had gotten pretty good at replacing the hands they no longer had with a tangle of snouts and paws.
Now, everyone had scattered, and the only one of his packmates he saw regularly was Janek. Fortunately, the man’s snoring didn’t carry down the hall as much as it did in the kennels back on base. Most nights, Sebastian didn’t even notice it. And while there were other de-miners around in the city, he didn’t know them all that well, and not all of them lived close by.
Sebastian shook in a futile attempt to get the rain out of his fur as he reminisced on being in places that smelled of nature and his friend and not gasoline, and dwelled in the memory of being back in the barracks, for better or worse.
That was the biggest problem, really: where a soldier who looked like a dog could live.
He’d tried moving in with his family, now that they’d gotten the house fixed, but that hadn’t lasted long. It turned out they liked Sebastian as an abstract source of pension checks, and while they didn’t mind visiting the creature that had the mind of their son or brother, all the logistics of caring for him were too much.
His handler didn’t want him around either. He was trying to move on from those years of his life, and Sebastian couldn’t be upset about that. Not when he himself still found himself checking for tripwires some days. He was working on it, even though it was tricky to get therapy as a dog.
Most apartments wouldn’t work for him — they were designed for humans, and the Ministry was opposed to paying for individual carers in any case. They were still looking for people who’d be willing to take in a strange fusion of human mind and animal body, but even with the tax breaks there weren’t many takers. Too much disruption to their lives, it was, or too much cost. Or just too many memories.
So, Sebastian had spent over a year in rather permanent temporary quarters: some cleaned-out space at a city animal shelter.
The army wing of the shelter, as it had come to be known, was a place that Sebastian, Janek, and the other de-mining dogs who didn’t have anywhere else to go could live. Just like the handlers back in the Army had, the shelter staff helped out with all those parts of daily life that required hands and did a decent job not being condescending about it, and they’d never tried to take him on a walk like he was back in basic training.
The area had been spruced up with some fraction of the money the Veterans’ Affairs people had sent over for that purpose. He and the other dogs could just walk out to get to work or appointments or whatever they needed, and still had their word-books. Some of the shelter staff were even picking up Morse code to make communicating with the dogs easier. A lot of creative work had been done to give him and his fellows ways to entertain themselves that didn’t involve tearing the place apart or violence. Some dogs from another pack had started up a poker night, for instance.
On one hand, this was a more pleasant place to live than the concrete shed the Army had thrown together once it had become clear that transforming people into therioform mine-clearance specialists was a viable plan. On the other hand … it was the animal shelter. Even though a chorus of barking dogs and meowing cats wasn’t as bad as fighter jets, it was still hard to sleep.
When Sebastian had been signing all the paperwork, when the recruiter had been explaining the risks, when he’d had his long nights ruminating on if it was all worth as he laid in the cold, and even when he’d been told what the plan was for after, he hadn’t pictured this. He didn’t think anyone had anticipated where he’d be living. The Minister, with her crisp blazer and enough perfume on to nearly knock him out, hadn’t even lied when she’d said they were building a specialized facility for everyone who couldn’t find another home after having had the courage to abandon their body and then clear mines for years.
It had just happened to be that an animal shelter in the capital was the best place for that. Fundamentally, though the war was truly over, the consequences of government procurement weren’t.
Sebastian heard the bus coming and stood up, trying once again to get the rain off of him, before sitting to flag down the driver. He got on and took up his customary spot under some seats.
As he listened out for his stop, Sebastian considered if he would still have gone into the Army, knowing that he’d end up as a mass of wet fur on a bus back to the animal shelter where he made his bed and got his mail.
He knew he always got like this in the cold. He’d been like that in the Army too. Just like then, he knew he’d needed to do it (his family needed the money and the zones of death needed to go away) and that he’d wanted to make that sacrifice, to make something of himself. And had he been tricked or too naive when he’d given up the rest of his life all those years ago? Not really. None of his troubles had been foreseen, after all.
But had it all been worth it? Sebastian never could decide when he came to the topic. So he let his pride and regret swirl around while he listened for his stop, knowing that he’d feel better once he’d gotten some warmth and sleep.
He always had, after all.