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There was a thing like a mind.
There were a dozen million trillion things like a mind, buzzing and squelching and creeping and pulsing around the bright little flicker of reality, a glowing ember stark up against the black void, all of them pushed in close like noses against the window of a sweet shop, trying very hard to imagine what warmth might feel like.
The thing like a mind could almost, almost, almost feel the real minds, inside the fragile little sphere of reality. Mostly, near this particular weak spot in the reality bubble, it felt lobsters.
Lobsters, as they were nearly all reluctantly mobile creatures dreaming listlessly on ancient ocean beds, presented a very indifferent kind of change from the existence the mind was currently failing to enjoy.
The mind that was thinking about the mind could smell - not smell, but what passed for smelling, here where it was cold and dark and thick with the ash of dead stars, and where nothing was ever going to be real enough develop something as organic as a scent - something like a fresh breeze, stirring the long dead space. There was a crack. A crack almost big enough to squeeze through. If that other mind, the old mind that was more than a little lobsterish itself, would just stop thinking about the idea, which had in fact been the thing that made the tiny hole, and was also attempting to shove its way through, there would be a moment-
-yes! there!-
-and so many other minds, suddenly, crushing and pushing and slithering and croaking and croaking for a chance in the real, through the little hole in the sand of reality - but the mind thinking about all those minds was just a little faster, and a little more agile, and-
-there!
It was through.
And now the mind had a new problem. Outside the little bubble of reality, the mind had felt big and tough and capable of snapping everything inside down like the colored syrup inside of one of those little wax bottles with the colored syrup in.
But now that it was actually here, it was like-
Well.
It was a lot like being a raw nerve swimming through a pit of acid while someone played rock music on the kind of sound system that ought to be on a concert stage but has instead gotten crammed into someone's living room and is now seriously testing the integrity of the windows.
But there were minds here, too. Cozy minds. Minds so chewed and softened up by the idea that anyone could just drill right in and make a home.
Given the mind could like something- given that the very idea of 'liking wasn't so unfamiliar to what passed for the thought processes of an eldritch reality-sucking parasite that the very comparison wasn't laughable - there would have been a mind it liked. A mind it was drawn to like iron shavings to a lodestone. A hot little mind, simple, and so eager to please that it would grant eternal allegiance to anyone or anything for even the faint prospect of a belly rub, attached to a hungry little body with four legs and one flopped over ear and a mouthful of teeth that had once been designed to rend and tear, some persistent fleas and an empty stomach. Hungry. Just like the other mind, the mind thinking about the first mind. They were both hungry for something warm and hot and real.
Something better than a lobster.
The intrusive mind burrowed in, and snuggled up metaphorically in a pocket of comfortable pinkish-gray folds with synapses flickering in and out like fireflies. The mind inside the mind liked these so much that it tweaked them a little, to make the lights go even faster. Then, just to see if it could, it made a few new ones, and hung those around its nest, too.
Outside the nest in the wide, loud world, a scruffy brown and grey terrier began, reluctantly, to think.
That, the parasitic mind would have admitted later, when its host's erratic heroism had somehow helped get the idea ejected right back out into the vacuum outside reality, had possibly been an error on its part.
When the idea went, the mind's - colleagues? siblings? enemies? - that had also somehow wormed through the crack in reality and into small, accommodating minds in service of it, got pulled back to, kicking and screeching, and the mind within a mind should have gone with them but-
-but it had been so much fun. It hadn't known what fun was, before now, but that seemed to be the right word. And the doggy brain was so comfortable and so accommodating, and somehow the mind within a mind knew that if it hooked a strange limb here and burrowed in here, nothing would pull it out, ever again, it would be part of the mind forever, and then-
And then there was just (mostly just) Gaspode the Wonder Dog, who occasionally had dreams he tried very hard to forget.
Sometimes a sausage would fall off a counter, and sometimes a mind would flicker onto some slightly different pathway and a little dog wouldn't get kicked or chased off or have a bucket of water thrown at him.
Once, just once, reality warped in such a way that there was howling, and long graceful limbs, and a long chase over the moonlit snow with hot blood in its teeth, and in the morning there was a wolf with ice-wet fur and cold sore paws that wanted so hard to be a terrierish dog curled into a box behind the butcher's that he went back to being one.
Gaspode never grew any older, or any mangier, and no injury or piece of bad luck was ever quite enough to kill him
Occasionally, without even really noticing, he would shed some spare bits of wild idea that clung to him like dandruff, and something on the flat Disc would change, for better or worse.
But if the only people likely to notice, who were the monks on some far off mountain tracking the sweeping tides of history, ever did notice the same patchy terrier getting caught up in a surprising number of currents and eddies, they never let on
A dog, no matter how Wonderful, was still only a dog.