One Small Step for Man's Best Friend

I was having some students do a simple writing exercise today, as is the procedure for Fridays, and I spent much of the class reading over and helping them correct their writing. The assignment was to write a short (incredibly brief) story using a list of characters (robot, dog, student, etc) and settings (moon, forest, shopping mall, etc) that I'd given them.

I read over the girls' stories, which were cute and adorned with little pictures, and then checked to see if Jack had finished his tale. Jack is the only boy in the class and he usually seems generally unimpressed and uninteresting in anything I have to say. I asked him if he had finished the story and he held up his sheet of paper drowsily. Here is his entire story, verbatim:

"One day a small dog the moon play. Leg hurt. So died."

I think you can agree that it is a moving piece of writing. It brings up many questions. What was this dog doing on the moon? How did it hurt its leg? Is that what resulted in its unfortunate death?

And what does 'So died' really mean? Is it like "and so, as a result, the dog died", or does 'so' mean 'extremely', as in "The dog so totally died right then".

I like to imagine that this story takes place in a future where travel to the moon is commonplace, and humans have begun living and working there in small communities. Perhaps animals, with the aid of technology, are now more like humans. They've acquired a human like consciousness, an intelligence that is controlled by a small chip implanted in the animals' body.

But this technology is frowned on my many people. Is it ethical? Is it playing God? Perhaps the whole process had been outlawed on earth, so the only place to turn was our moon. Yeah, that's it! The moon had become home to rogue scientists who tamper with animal brains and cover monkeys with make-up by the thousands.

Then one day, a small semi-intelligent dog who longs for freedom, escapes his tiny lab cage and escapes the facility. Making his way into a large domed area of the moon's surface, the dog begins to run about, enjoying the simple pleasure of playing outdoors.

Sadly, he runs too fast and too hard, damaging the intelligence chip that had been implanted in his hind leg. The shattered remnants of the chip enter his bloodstream and it's already too late. The final thoughts to pass through his brain are broken and incomplete: Leg hurt.

Then the dog sooo totally died.