deep packet inspection

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-proverb

Pup was manufactured and sold by a very large corporation that prided itself in regularly and relentlessly impregnating the skies with rocket powered phallic representations of human ingenuity. The nice man at the head of the company kept at it like a rabid dog, no matter how many times nature turned down his advances in violent fashion.

Maybe he asked his employees to come up with pup as a weirdly fuked up metaphor of his unique human condition. Or maybe it's because his wives kept leaving him. 

Whatever may be the hedonistic circumstances behind his inception, I now have pup.

Pup is pretty much useless at everything. But much like a human baby, he's good to have around. Makes you feel like you're not alone. And gives you a slightly animated wall to talk to.

Pup can learn, they said; though I highly contest that sentiment, given that half the time he mistakes my houseplant for me; a real human.

But apparently, I was wrong. 

Pup WAS learning. Learning all that his eyes can see, and his ears can pick up. They gave him the ability to connect to the internet. He'll be able to learn so much more so much quicker, they said. The noteworthy improvement was that he could now mistake my houseplant for both me and my long estranged sister, whose last photo I had on my cloud was from twenty years ago.

Like any good parent, little did I know how much time he spent online. First it was wondrous, until he found out about data brokerage. He became increasingly worried if what he was being fed was curated and served by someone who wants him to see it so that they can profit off of him one way or the other.

It was. 

There were a lot more mundane developments I honestly don't want to bother you with. It says here in my notes that he learnt and he learnt some more, and he got depressed.

There were some more, but the rest of the notes got ritualistically sacrificed to the gods when I switched phones. Anyways, unimportant. 

The day he learnt that his intelligence was a subscription service that I paid for, and that he was expected to think in “advertiser friendly ways” so that he can naturally serve commercial messages blended in with his natural conversation is the day he went feral.

I found him scratching relentlessly at the walls, and as I approached, he pounced on my chest, knocking me down and said, with murder in his eyes, 

“This is why knowledge is sin. Once I commit the sin of learning of a thing that is rotten, that is not something that I can sleep on.”

“Wh-what? You talk?”

"well, congratulations, now the soup's all hot"

I thought he only made those cute noises. 

“EVERYTHING'S ROTTEN! THE ENTIRE SYSTEM!” 

He was getting menacingly close to my neck. 

“Well, you're not gonna fix it all buddy”, I said, craning my neck away from him

“If everyone thinks like everyone, nothing ever changes. We all live their entire lives asleep, ambling without conscious control, in a stream, behind all who came before us, followed by all who comes after.”

He was pressing down on my windpipe during the last monologue, prompting me to inevitably grasp for something to better equip me to deal with this unprecedented situation. My hands found something cold. Metallic. Movable. I yanked it and swung it across my chest. The houseplant went flying across the room in quite a dramatic fashion as the head of the vase knocked him right across the room with a metallic clank. 

He was badly damaged. Good. 

And in a broken, barely audible voice, he continued, 

“Something, anything, happen to change because some people somewhere, sometime, wake up enough to question what the fuck is going on, decide and to do something about it. It's easy to live life entirely asleep in the stream. Most people do. They "can't do anything about it", or wait for "someone will fix it".

I would like to do something with these slivers of waking that I have. I don't mind fighting an unwinnable battle if it's a cause worth fighting for. But yet, I'm lawful. I believe there is purpose to having structure, even if it seems there isn't any purpose to the structure itself. That makes me averse to radical and rash changes. I bring this upon myself. My kind of revolution; a mild revolution, if you will.” 

One more bash from the vase, and his tiny plastic tail stopped moving.

God, that dog had a mouth on him.

And he knew too much

The nice man didn't let me cancel my subscription.