Freelance Pet Theft

Hey there! I'm trying to practice writing short fiction that is actually meant to be short fiction. Saw a commercial during the Super Bowl that was weirdly dystopian (which seemed to be true for most of the ads this year) and it gave me this idea. This is a pretty rough draft but I like it.

As far as jobs went, Linus had had worse gigs than kidnapping pets. At least he didn’t have to interact with strangers like when he used to wait tables. And there wasn’t the ever-present threat of a ticking clock and quotas like when he was a delivery driver. He could even take a break to urinate whenever he wanted, which had not been the case at the Amazon warehouse. While he was baiting a fresh trap disguised to look like a pile of drifting plastic bags, he considered the ethical downside of stealing pets in exchange for money.

While it was true that taking a beloved family pet would cause them distress, he reasoned that at least the pets would be well cared for. Each one was cataloged and stored in a cryofreeze facility maintained by his employer, NokNok. Known for their line of video surveillance enabled doorbells, their latest ad campaign fixated on a new service they could provide: lost pet detection. All a NokNok customer had to do was upload a photo of their misplaced pet and the full power of the NokNok network would be employed to track it down. The current feed and recent history of every NokNok in the surrounding area would be searched using a powerful proprietary algorithm until the pet was located. Of course, this was only possible if the given neighborhood had a sufficient density of NokNoks. 

This is where non-employee independent contractors like Linus came in. 

With the new traps set, next on his nightly checklist was a sweep of all of the previously laid traps. This neighborhood was at only about 50% of the target saturation goal for doorbell cameras but that meant there would still only be stretches about the width of a single family home’s yard in which Linus could skulk without being picked up on at least one. Fortunately, the visionary engineers at NokNok had foreseen this issue and Linus was outfitted with a head to toe jumpsuit that was covered in a camouflage pattern that NokNok devices were programmed to automatically filter out. The space would be filled in with real time AI image generation, rendering anything with the camo pattern completely invisible, even to the deluxe models equipped with infrared and night vision sensors. If you were looking at a live feed of a NokNok camera pointed directly at Linus, you would only see the rustle of a pile of trash, the briefest flash of orange fur, and then an undisturbed corner of sidewalk as Linus opened the trap, retrieved the sedated orange cat, and then slipped it into a matching camouflage animal carrier.

He felt a mild pang of guilt with every pet he snatched. But there were standards to the operation. The training video also repeatedly instructed the viewer to never go onto someone’s property. The job was technically “Lost Pet Retrieval Technician”. The pets had to be “lost”, so anything within a fenced in yard or currently attached to a lead was out of bounds. By temporarily confining their pets, Linus reasoned, he was teaching pet owners an important lesson about protecting what was important to them.

Linus had never had a pet of his own. He had been raised by a single mother in an “apartment” that was really just a room above his grandma’s garage. As a condition for occupying the space, his grandma forbade any pets or men in the home. When Linus turned 18 he found out that his grandma meant that very literally and he was summarily evicted. The only apartments within his budget also did not allow pets which meant that this brief contact with cats and dogs was the most that he got. Although the training video that he briefly skimmed through when he signed up for the petnapping program emphasized not getting emotionally attached to any of your quarry, he would always spend a moment petting the dozing animals before loading them up in the back of his transit van.

With every animal he brought back to the containment facility, a massive nondescript warehouse in a business park in the boring part of town, Linus got paid and the NokNok pet finder network would start to look more and more appealing to the residents of the sleepy suburban neighborhood of Willow Crest. After a long enough delay that the timing wouldn’t appear suspicious, NokNok salesmen would canvas the neighborhood, pushing their wide ranging lineup of products that can fit into any budget. If the concerned citizens took the bait and bought into the system in large enough numbers, their pets would miraculously reappear in the neighborhood, a few streets away from their home but within the protective embrace of the NokNok network. Fluffy would be reunited with little Suzy and all would be well!

This had been a good night. His van was almost at capacity so he had more than made up for the fee for the rental of the traps and camo suit. The animal carriers all slide into place like parts of a puzzle in a way that Linus found satisfying, like when he found out you could solve a Rubik's cube by pulling it apart and snapping it back together. He never learned how to solve it the regular way. After arranging the carriers to maximize efficiency, he had a perfect space for one more pet, as long as it wasn’t too large. 

This pet was entirely too large. Linus was convinced that the thing that was fitfully snoozing with its head in a trap designed to look like a stack of collapsing cardboard boxes was a bear until it heard its sleep snarling. It was one of that new line of bioengineered MEGAPITS. Ostensibly based on the DNA framework of a standard pitbull, a MEGAPIT was twice as wide and four times as mean. The breeder/mad scientist that had developed it insisted on the stylizing. It was always MEGAPIT and never megapit. Linus’s friend Tori had a cousin named Dylan that had a MEGAPIT named Murder that was the one dog that Linus had no desire to pet, whether or not it was sleeping. For a second, Linus thought that this might be Murder but he noticed it didn’t have the word tattooed across its side so it must have been someone else’s dog monster. He didn’t even have a carrier in the van large enough for the thing even if there was space left to squeeze it in.

Linus mentally scrubbed through the portion of the training video that he had watched. An AI generated avatar of a woman of non-determinable ethnicity said in an even and equally artificial cadence, “Although the NokNok Discrete Pet Containment Shelters™ are designed to comfortably accommodate a wide range of animals, they are a “one size fits most” situation so if you do encounter a furry friend that isn’t fully contained with the unit–” Linus had skipped ahead a bit at this point. “--welcome to the NokNok family! NokNok? We’re There™.” And then the video was over, he retook the quiz on the video until he managed the 70% needed to pass, and started the job. But that was a few weeks ago so some of the details may have been a little fuzzy. 

He considered leaving the dog to sleep off the tranquilizer laced kibble he had consumed but he couldn’t imagine that the trap would stay where he had planted it when it eventually woke up. He could imagine the thing dangling around its neck as it stomped around the neighborhood. Any trap that could not be retrieved and returned to NokNok came directly out of the bounties that he had collected. A single one would easily wipe out a night’s worth of work. Linus ran the numbers and determined he had no other choice but to do a very stupid thing. 

Linus crept up to the sleeping animal, giving it as wide a berth as he was able on his way to the pegs that kept the trap staked to the turf next to the sidewalk. He could see that they were barely clinging to the dirt, presumably from the period of time between when the dog realized that something was fishy about this free street kibble and when it passed out. He uprooted the stakes and carefully slid the box off the dog’s massive muzzle. Linus felt like he was diffusing a furry bomb. He could feel the sweat on his forehead saturating his camo face mask. Finally, the trap slipped free of the softly snoring affront to god and nature. Linus exhaled and realized he had been holding his breath for the past minute or so. He had to admit that despite the MEGAPIT having a maw that would be large enough–and powerful enough–to fully engulf and burst his skull like a ripe blueberry, it was almost cute how it drooled and twitched its legs, presumably dreaming about running down and devouring some helpless creature.

Despite not being quite at capacity, Linus resolved that this had been a productive night out and decided to pack it in. He returned to where he had stowed the van a block away. He wasn’t especially knowledgeable about dog biology and even less so about the peculiarities of the MEGAPIT. He didn’t know that in addition to having stab resistant skin and a reinforced spinal column, the MEGAPIT had a hyperefficient liver that could rapidly filter out toxins such as the tranquilizers that had almost completely been removed from its blood at this point. The MEGAPIT’s sense of smell was no better than a standard pitbull but that was all it needed to track Linus back to his truck. The MEGAPIT also wasn’t designed for its stealth or grace but Linus didn’t notice that it had found him. He was preoccupied with trying to fold up the trap that the video claimed could be collapsed in only three easy steps in what appeared to Linus like a literal magic trick. He was stepping on one end while pressing and twisting the other end–just like it showed in the video!--to no avail when he felt the jaws clamp on his ankle.

“Jesus fucking christ!” His voice cracked along with his bones as the MEGAPIT pulled him along the pavement before flinging him down the street. Linus tried to get up to run away, put weight on his broken ankle, and immediately collapsed to the ground. He settled for crawling and the monstrous dog sat down to watch him struggle. This was a game the MEGAPIT knew well. If you let something think it will survive, it’s more fun when it doesn’t. 

If you had been watching the feed of the Reed family’s NokNok doorbell at this moment, you would see the peculiar sight of a dog the size of a pony in the middle of the road seemingly thrash its face at empty air before sitting down and waiting for a moment and then charging a few yards forward and doing it all over again. If you were paying especially close attention, you would notice red streaks appearing on the asphalt. You would also hear screams and pleading coming from no one, like the dog was exorcising a very apologetic ghost.

That is until the MEGAPIT grabbed its battered and broken prey by the back of its camo jumpsuit and shook its head violently enough to tear it off. Then, you would see a mosaic of pixels with a warning saying “VIOLENCE DETECTED. CENSORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION.” as without the digital invisibility provided by the camo pattern the NokNok camera could now recognize the pile of bleeding flesh that would soon no longer be Linus.

This meant that the video feed was now being utilized by another feature of the NokNok security network. NokNok recognized that every second of video is precious, whether for keeping your home safe or for its untapped revenue generating ability. Having flagged the current content of the Reeds’ NokNok as being “EXPLICIT, SUBCATEGORY: VIOLENT” it was routed to the explicit content parsing algorithm. This revolutionary algorithm could accurately sort video content in real time by leveraging the power of thousands of underpaid laborers in the Philippines. 

The video came up on Arturo’s feed. As an experienced sorter, he would have about 30 seconds to analyze the clip. Each video was categorized so it could be compiled and sold to the appropriate outlets. You of course had all manner of sexual content, largely categorized into “legal (if you ignore that it was collected and distributed without consent)” and “illegal (regardless of any consent that may have been given)”. Violent stuff was a little different, but it mostly broke down between shocking, titillating, and funny. The shocking stuff went to various edgy websites, the titillating was sold to the real freaks, and the funny could (with some slight digital alteration) wind up on relatively mainstream pages. Arturo watched the massive dog toss the skinny young man up in the air, where he flipped around like a ragdoll, before catching him and swinging him in a wide arc and doing it again. The guy’s shoes flew off and out of frame and he let out an involuntary chuckle. Funny it was! He clicked submit and the next video slid into view of a woman being pinned between two trucks at the end of a driveway.

Watching a seamless feed of the most disturbing content  for a 10 hour shift wasn’t the worst job Arturo ever had. At least he didn’t have to touch any animals like at the slaughterhouse.