fido1.JPG (22854 bytes)            "In a Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchise on the outskirts of Phoenix, Rat Thing number B-782 comes awake. Fido is waking up because all the dogs are barking tonight. There is always barking. Much of the barking is very far away. Fido knows that faraway barks are not as important as close barks, and so he often sleeps through these.

            "But sometimes a faraway bark will carry a special sound that makes Fido excited, and he can't help waking up. He is hearing one of those barks right now...Fido listens to the bark. He gets excited, too. Some strangers have just been very close to a nice doggie's yard. They were in a flying thing. They had lots of guns. Fido doesn't like guns very much. A stranger with a gun shot him once and made him hurt. Then the nice girl came and helped him.

            "These are extremely bad strangers. Any nice doggie in his right mind would want to hurt them and make them go away...he sees what they look like and hears the way they sound...Then Fido notices that the bad strangers are chasing someone...The bad strangers are hurting the nice girl who loves him! Fido gets more angry than he has ever been, even more angry than when a bad man shot him long ago.

            "His job is to keep bad strangers out of his yard...But it's even more important to protect the nice girl who loves him. That is more important than anything. And nothing can stop him... Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him, and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is not capable of jumping over it...Fido sees the place in his mind. It is big and wide and flat and open, like a nice field for chasing Frisbees...Far away.

            "But you can get there by streets. Fido knows a whole lot of different streets. He just runs down streets, and he knows where he is and where he's going. At first, the only trace that B-782 leaves of his passage is a dancing trail of sparks down the center of the franchise ghetto. But once he makes his way out onto a long straight piece of highway, he begins to leave further evidence: a spume of shattered blue safety glass spraying outward in parallel vanes from all four lanes of traffic as the windows and the winshields of the cars blow out of their frames, spraying into the air like rooster tails behind a speedboat.

            "As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise."

 

To see Fido bring Da Funk to L. Bob Rife, please continue.

You could also follow Hiro, suddenly in the custody of a half-dozen wireheads.

Hmmm, I wonder what Y.T. is up to?

To skip ahead to the final battle between Raven and Uncle Enzo, cut to the chase.