Traveling Plastic Puppy Posse

“Mike, is that receiver plate ready?”

“Yup. Just waiting on you.”

“Almost there. I just have to tweak the magnetic field…”

In the wee hours of the night, Mike and Dave were hunched over their dorm room desk, which was dimly lit by the university issued lamps. Their beds were unmade, dirty clothes were piled in corners, and a half-eaten sandwich on the nightstand was growing penicillin. The room reeked of unwashed bodies and solder fumes.

The desk was covered in electronics, calculations, tools, and candy wrappers. Two metal plates were isolated like islands on the desk amid the sea of clutter. Dave turned some knobs on his plate, studied the digital readout, and then let out the breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“This is it,” whispered Dave. “Tonight we make history.”

“People have been dreaming of a teleportation device for decades,” said Mike. “Tonight, dreams become a reality.” He paused, and then broke the reverent moment by adding, “If it works.”

“Present: the puppy!” said Dave.

Mike handed Dave a cheap plastic puppy wearing flight goggles. The two had spent all semester designing a teleporter for their senior project. They'd given themselves headaches trying to work out the math. They'd begged, borrowed, and tried not to steal the materials and tools needed to build their design. Yet as challenging as this project this was, the choice of who or what to teleport first was just as difficult.

They'd spent two weeks arguing over which one of them would get to be the test subject, until they agreed that sending an inanimate object first would be safer. They finally settled on a plastic dog that belonged to Dave’s little sister. Neither wanted to risk his own possessions. To justify their choice, Dave told Mike how thrilled his sister would be when she found out that her idol from the Puppy Posse TV show was the pioneer of teleportation. Neither of them discussed the possibility that the treasured toy could be destroyed.

Dave placed the pilot dog, Flight, on the transmitter plate in front of him.

“T minus 10, 9, 8…” the two counted down together, “…3, 2, 1, Teleport!”

Dave pressed the big red button.

Nothing happened.

Dave frowned, and pressed the button again. Still nothing. The puppy was supposed to teleport from his plate to Mike’s. Disappear here, reappear there. Simple.

“Maybe it’s the atomizer,” offered Mike. They tinkered and tried again, with underwhelming results. After a few more adjustments, Mike said, “I saw a flicker! The puppy flickered! I think.”

Hours later, the two were still stuck. They reviewed calculations, tweaked settings, and prayed to the gods they didn’t believe in, but nothing worked. They even started swapping out puppies.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be sending Flight first,” mused Dave. “She’s intrepid, but I think Sheriff is more likely to keep a level head. Let’s try him.”

Then later, “Perhaps Smokey? His excitement and sense of adventure could make the difference.”

“Hey Dave, are you sure these are your sister’s toys? You seem to know a lot about them. How come you have them, anyway?”

“Of course they’re hers,” Dave said, just a little too quickly. “She, um, came to visit a few weeks ago. With my parents.”

“She did? I don’t remember that,” Mike said suspiciously.

“Wait a minute!” said Dave, stabbing at the top page of calculations.

“Wha- oh man. A sign error? Negative instead of positive? How could we have missed this?!”

The sun was just rising, light peeking in between the drab curtains. They hurried through the calculations as quickly as they dared, fixing the sign mistake as they went. They had to be at class in two hours with a working project, or else they would flunk the class. Dave entered the final coordinates and then, crossing their fingers, the partners pressed the red button together.

“Woah!” said Mike.

“Did you see that?” asked Dave.

Then the two were jumping up and down, slapping each other on the back, and yelling in triumph. “We did it! We did it!”

A loud thud, like that of a bowling ball striking the floor, sounded from above and shook the ceiling. “Be quiet, you creeps! Some of us are trying to sleep!”

“Just because he’s majoring in sports and doesn’t have any real work to do…,” muttered Dave.

“Forget him,” said Mike. “This is it! The first working teleporter!”

They stared at their handiwork again with goofy grins plastered on their faces. Flight (they had decided to try sending her again), was standing proudly upon the receiving plate. But she was also on the transmitting plate. Was she in two places at once? Half here and half there?

Recklessly, Mike put his hand into the electromagnetic field of the transmission plate and swiped out the dog. Dave, noting that Mike appeared unscathed, grabbed the puppy from the receiver. Both were solid, whole, and identical.

“Wow,” breathed Dave. “We didn’t just make a teleporter. We made a replicator too!” They stared in awe.

“But wait,” Mike said. “If it was a sign error all this time, and we just had the wrong coordinates, does that mean the device was working the whole time? Just sending the puppies somewhere else?”

“Hey yeah, you’re right! We couldn’t tell because Flight stayed here the whole time. She wasn’t traveling, she was replicating. But her copies were being sent to the wrong coordinates!”

The two looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Can you imagine the look on someone’s face if puppies just popped out of the air in front of them?”

Sleep deprived and giddy with success, the two were still chuckling when they made their way to class.

******

When Steph’s alarm clock went off for the fifth time, she groaned and finally dragged herself out of bed. She stumbled to her closet to grab some clothes, but when she opened the door, she just blinked, uncomprehending, as she looked inside. Something was different. She flipped on the light switch and then shrieked!

“What’s wrong?” asked her father from downstairs, although he wasn’t overly concerned. In his opinion, his teenage daughter was given to hysterics. She had probably just discovered a zit on her forehead.

However, Steph’s little sister, Molly, ran to investigate. She was fascinated by her mysterious big sister and looked forward having another story to tell her friends at school. They’d all laugh together about silly older sisters. But when Molly entered the room and saw the closet, she shrieked too.

Their mother came running. “Are you girls ok? What is going on here?!” Her eyes were drawn to the open closet. Molly was hugging a pile of some thirty plastic Puppy Posse figures and shrieking in delight.

“You girls,” their mother said, shaking her head and smiling. “Stephanie, that’s really thoughtful of you, giving your sister Puppy Posse toys for her birthday! I had no idea you were doing this. But maybe next time you can do it without screams of bloody murder.”

“But… but…,” Steph stammered.

Molly hauled the toys off to her room and their mother went back to her coffee cup in the kitchen. Steph simply stood still, stupefied. She definitely had not filled her closet with toys.

She hadn’t even remembered it was Molly’s birthday.