A lot of other neighborhood dogs have asked me: Why’d you do it? Dogs are supposed to be cautious. Bark twice, bite once. That’s what Ma always used to say. So why did I jump into the big flashing rectangle without a second thought? The answer is simple: He fell in first. So, naturally, I followed.

If you don’t know Commander Zideo, you wouldn’t get it. Some even know him and they still don’t get it. But they don’t know him like I know him. I’ve known him for decades, and I don’t mind telling you that he is the greatest human man to have ever lived. If you knew him like I know him, you’d have jumped into the glowing, flashing, thundering rectangle too, even though it gave you all the Bad signs.

You know what? Let’s just get right into it. Here’s everything you need to know.

I’d had a busy day. That morning I had woken up early after having a dream—roused by a premonition, I like to think. I’d been pursuing a fat squirrel across the dunes of the Sahara, not a tree in sight, when the squirrel grew ears and was actually a rabbit. That’s fine, I thought. I can work with that. I chased him—so plump, so juicy—until he skidded to a stop, kicking up sand in great waves. He faced me, and his face was a face I knew. A man’s face. With pink and aqua hair, a sort of handsomely crooked nose and two different colored eyes. It is a face you can never forget, even if you’re a forgetful human. It is the face of the most honorable and upright and incredible amazing human to ever walk the face of Airy Zone, which is what my humans call the “realm” that I live in.

Well, I wasn’t going to eat a rabbit squirrel with the face of the greatest man of all time on it! So I hit the brakes and jumped out of my dream and out of my bed. Unsettled and awake, I paced around the house before anyone else was up.

Lisa got up soon after. I heard ceiling creaking gently as she got up to flush the toilet, just like every day. I listened to the water in the walls. I waited patiently as she came downstairs in the first light of morning. She smelled like sleep, and she rubbed my ears and my back which is something that I must admit I cannot resist. Sometimes I feel sad for humans, knowing that they will never know the pleasure of an ear rub. She allowed me to transfer a great deal of dog saliva to her face, which both gives her great joy and also disgust at the same time. Humans are complicated beasts, even when they have just woken up.

I went outside and peed a warning to any dogs that might even think about thinking about coming to our yard and luring my human away from me with their own canine siren’s song: a beautiful coat and loving “puppy dog eyes” (such an easy trick that literally any of us can pull off—at any age, mind you) and sloppy face-licks. One whiff of this puddle, and they would take off running. This human is claimed. This realm of Airy Zone belongs to me, Cormac McBarky. And I am a dog who does not share.

Lisa acted like any normal Saturday. (Yes, dogs know what day of the week it is. We can’t read your convoluted calendars, but we can count and we’re quite good at context clues.) Suddenly a vibration from her phone caught her attention, and she looked very surprised for a moment. Pleasantly surprised, I’d say. When humans like Lisa are the other kind of surprised, they make a sound that’s like a snarl, but not as good: “Uchghgh.” It’s not very intimidating. Another human thing to pity.

The energy was different for the rest of the morning and afternoon. She went back upstairs and started moving things into and out of That One Room. The empty room. The room where the Ultimate Human used to sleep and stare at the glowing rectangle and talk to it and click on its control devices and laugh and scream and make funny faces into the glowing rectangle.

I gnawed my chew bone, which is what I do when I need to get deep in thought. It passed the time a bit, but I could not stop wagging my tail in anticipation.

Later in the day I was out making sure my pee puddle had warded off anybody thinking about stealing my human from me. The smell was faint now, but you could probably still smell it from the road. I peed again to reinforce the territory signal, a little closer to the fence. Now, if any doubt were left in intruders’ minds, they would have no choice but to turn and run. I may not be the most well read creature in existence, but I can produce a powerful pee smell with the best of them. I mean, credit where credit is due, right?

I knew when it was happening. I heard the high pitched whine a mile off, above the normal grunts and rumbles of the normal cars. The most unbelievably radical human of all time drives a car that makes this kind of sound, which he calls a “Honda Micro-Commuter EV.” It can fit me in the passenger’s side, and nobody else, so it’s the perfect car, really. Actually, there is no “passenger’s side” per se in the traditional sense, more like a little space I can sort of squeeze into. I actually do not think you are supposed to have a dog in there. But if I am, I know that no other dog is in there with him.

During the time he was gone—about five or six dog years—I had heard this high pitched sound in the distance from time to time. Not every day. I logged it in my brain, exactly one hundred and twelve entries of hearing the high pitched whine of a Honda Micro-Commuter EV. I assume others drive this vehicle around town, and that’s what I was hearing—after all, why wouldn’t he have come to see me if he was out and about? It didn’t make any sense!

I heard the door close, and felt the vibration through the ground. The front door has those windows that obscure sight, and the person who approached was carrying enormous black bags of stuff. They were the Mystery Bags like they always pile in a bin on Wednesdays and put bin out on the road. (I know some of my readers are human, so I will just say that this is the dog equivalent of having a disco ball and foam rave at every house. Sensory overload. It is like a wall of smells that I both cannot walk through and cannot walk away from.)

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Rotten bananas, raw chicken fat, wet paper, a squeaky toy I eviscerated, chemical cleaners that hurt my entire face even to think about, fast food with several perfectly good french fry fragments that caught in the crumpled folds… it’s just a lot for a stroll down the street. In your terms, this is like if every house put containers full of blaring ambulances, screaming babies, doorbells, alarm clocks, death rattles and people talking through movie trailers and fireworks every few steps along your walk.) The door didn’t open for a minute—the shape just sort of leaned around and patted itself, trying to find keys. Then, it did open. And it was him.

The smells of the greatest human to ever live wafted into the room, even though his face was behind a big Mystery Bag. He smelled awake, but sad. That was okay, because I had enough happiness for the two of us. And any second now he would put that huge bag of hard, sharp-cornered, heavy things down and—well, who knew what else would happen? He’d probably notice me sitting very pretty and not barking at all and give me the most brain-liquefying ear rub of all time.

I could not believe my luck. He was back. After all this time. I knew he couldn’t stay gone!

I wanted to run around in circles and go full Zoomy but I contained myself. It was very difficult, but I did it. I was vibrating with joy now, but since he went straight up the stairs where I am not allowed to go, I waited patiently for even longer. I vented as much of that energy as possible through my tail, which slapped the wall, so I moved and gave it room to swish.

He came back down from the stairs and said, “Hi buddy.” And get this. He reached out his hand while walking past me. It grazed my head. It was so close to my ears. Oh man. Goosebumps shot out from that epicenter, a shiver going across my whole spine and back again. Oh-ho-ho-ho, HE was BACK. “Ow! Watch out dude,” he said. I guess I had whipped his leg with my tail in my excitement. He went back out the door.

Usually, when one of my humans goes out the door, I am confronted with the possibility that they will never return and I now live alone. Although this is distressing, I get through it by gnawing chewy bones and a therapeutic session of sleeping real hard. Sometimes I will watch the road out front through the window or the door. I will eye the creatures I see there—cars, deer, other wanderers, and send them a warning with my eyes.

Lisa always comes back. With Commander Zideo, you never know. It just adds to his mystique. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” they say. And boy, did it ever!

But, you probably want to know about the part where I jumped into the big flashing rectangle.

There isn’t much to tell. The most excellentest dude who ever was got right to work setting up his glowing rectangle in his sleep office. I stood by, in case he needed anything. He doesn’t usually need much help from me when he is tinkering with machine bits and plugging things into other things. But sometimes humans like to pet somebody when they’re doing something that taxes them mentally. He said something like, “Stay back bud,” and “You’re gonna cause a static shock” and “Ow” at one point when I was in so much joy that I crawled across the carpeted sleep office and nudged him with my nose, causing some kind of invisible wasp to sting us both with a loud snap. He didn’t get mad—it’s hard to make him really mad—but he did make me wait on the bedcouch.

That’s where I go when he “streams,” you know. I wait in the background. That’s what he calls it when he turns on the rectangle and shouts and laughs and screams at it, and sometimes says my name.

So anyway, he was doing one of those and here’s what happened. It was storming outside. It doesn’t do that here in Airy Zone often, but when it does it really goes for it. The thunder hurt my ears, and the wind was knocking things over and making all this noise. I knew the storm was coming head of time because the other folks on the Howl Network (that’s when one dog starts howling and barking and then every other one within earshot is obliged to join in) mentioned it before I even felt it. But pretty soon I felt the upcoming storm in my shoulders and my joints, on the back of my neck, and in the pressure in my nose. Woof, so to speak. I knew it’d be a doozy—and it sure was.

But when my human is set on something, he is set on it. He has what is called “indomitable will.” Nothing is going to stop him from “doing a stream,” I think is the right way to say it. He was very excited that night and he kept saying something about “soloing the new event boss.” That means nothing to me—obviously I speak a little Human English, but the intricacies of it are lost on me sometimes. Really I’m just listening for the most important words, like “Good,” and “Cormac,” and “Treat,” or if it’s a really great day, “walk.”

I’m no stranger to lightning. I saw it on the horizon, felt it buzzing in my fur. I saw the flashes through the window. I knew it was going to be a noisy one. What I did not expect was for the lightning to start coming out of Commander Zideo’s glowing rectangle that he stares at. Not the little glowing rectangle from his pocket, but the big stationary one on top of his desk. That one started shooting electricity out all over the room, and it swirled and flashed and Commander Zideo fell into it.

Now, as a dog, that presents a big challenge to my admittedly limited worldview. Usually people only fall downwards, and they almost never disappear in a flash of noise and light when they fall. I could feel it too, the pull towards the glowing rectangle, like it had become the new down.

The greatest human in all of time and history had been sucked into the rectangle of light. So I did the only sensible thing and jumped into it after him.

Being a dog, it’s difficult to find the exact human English words to describe what happened next. I get a little fuzzy on abstract concepts. Heck, I forget my chewy bone exists if I can’t see it. For example: I’m not looking at it this very moment, and you couldn’t possibly convince me it’s not just a really good dream I had. So, that said, I’m going to use a few of the words I know and some that I don’t, and see if I can give you an idea of what happened next:

* Falling through night

* Fast stars

* Whoosh past Zideo

* Big clumps in the night

* Also whoosh

* Almost hit one

* BIG whoosh

* Falling toward a flat plate surrounded by floating mountains

* Trees

* Something went “Ba-doop!”

And then I was standing on something that was a guy, but not an important one. He was sort of a round pancake with shoes at that point. I was looking at another human, and he was wearing a crown and a purple hood thrown back, and he smelled like cologne and blood and pixels (whatever that is?) and he looked like he was not happy that I squashed his unimportant friend. I was kind of afraid he was going to tell me that I’m a b*d d*g when the most unbelievably wonderful human man of all existences (Commander Zideo) fell straight on top of him and squashed him into a similar little pancake, and he “ba-dooped,” too.

(I know what pancakes are because I stole one one time.)