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Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 4
🕑 Added 2021-08-28 17:16:40 +0000 UTCThere’s an alarm going off again.
I am aware of the alarm going off, because for safety reasons, I am not allowed to disable alarms. If you’re thinking something along the lines of “But you shouldn’t disable alarms? That seems unsafe.” Then you’re correct. But I’m over four hundred years old, and you don’t really make it that far without building up at least a few reckless habits. And a hatred of alarms.
See, it’s entirely possible that I *could* turn off the alarms? Like I’ve said, there isn’t actually documentation for a lot of the operations of this station. It’s quite likely that half the alarms spit out by maintenance issues are things that should never be coming up, because I’m missing maintenance check-ins that I just don’t know exist.
Now, you might be thinking something else at this point. Something about how four hundred years is kind of a long time, and maybe I should know more about the station I live on. And I’m not gonna lie, you’re probably right. Though to be fair, I did spend something like... what, seventy years?... as a perfectly ordinary immortal housecat with an unreasonably good memory. I’ve also spent a combined total of maybe a decade or two in vivification pods, for reasons I do *not* care to explain, thank you!
And yeah, that leaves kind of a long time. I get that. I’ve got *priorities* though! And I mean, seriously, priorities beyond just napping. Although I actually do need to sleep. I’m immortal, not invincible, or immune to biological requirements. Just because telomere decay can’t touch me doesn’t mean that I’m wasting time when I kick back on my favorite nap couch and catch a few hours of rest.
Most of my priorities have been learning various things, and teaching the station to understand me. Learning was a massive hurdle to cross, though again, even before my uplift I was still able to learn. You know how a cat can figure out how to open a door in a month or so if properly taught? Yeah, given a few decades all alone, it’s possible for a totally normal cat to learn how to open an AR window. How to access some basic controls. How to read. That kind of thing.
Okay, I said that, and then instantly realized just how much that makes it sound like I’m lying about the perfectly normal thing. We’ll come back to that later, when I have more emotional processing power.
The biggest problem really was the amount of time it took to create a translation database from Meow to English. I can actually read several languages at this point, but the station can’t exactly understand me without some really, *really* confusing software doing work that doesn’t always actually translate things properly into what I want. I’ve got a lot of basic stuff, like ‘yes’ and ‘no’, down pretty well. But there’s a lot of times, especially any time I tell you that I’ve made an information request from one of the AR windows, where what I’m really doing is screaming something that approximates a ‘number code’, that just hits a specific virtual button, which I took a long time to set up previously.
Imagine having to operate a computer without a mouse. Do you need to click on something? You can kind of do that. The screen is split into sectors; you can pick one, then it divides that section, and you pick one of those new sectors. And so on, until you’ve narrowed it down enough, that a click can happen. It’s *that*, but I have to do it by meowing. Clearly enough for the audio nanos, too. Which, for all that they are basically magic, is still a *lot* cleaner than I had gotten used to ‘speaking’ over the course of my life.
I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a reason that long stretches of my daily hours are devoted to writing new code. It can be tedious. But at least it motivates me to do it right the first time.
And also it’s a convenient excuse for why I haven’t explored more of the station.
There are a lot of doors that require specific commands to access. Commands I technically have the authority to give, but lack the documentation to know. And the station doesn’t care that I’m allowed, only if I know the passcode, which makes me feel a little like a wizard sometimes. Casting a hundred spells of repair or unlock a day.
I mentioned an alarm. That was a thing that was happening. In the intervening time that it has taken me to complain about being unable to directly interface my brain with a compiler, and also complain about how the alarms have no off switch, I have switched off the alarm.
Well, okay, I acknowledged it, and removed the reason for the alarm. It was a low-risk emergence event happening just over the surface of what used to be the Pacific Ocean. I took care of what came out of it with void beam fire, and then basically just held down the button on the ion array until the hole in reality went away. Not my favorite way to handle these things, but you can’t exactly make a hot enough crater to kill an emergence when you’re firing orbital weaponry into the water. It doesn’t have enough initial energy discharge.
If I made the experience of cleaning up extradimensional monsters sound like a chore, or like it was easy, then that is correct. Good job.
The thing is, access to weapons designed to kill armies, biomechs, cities, and spaceships is *kind of* an unfair advantage against creatures that fundamentally lack the ability to shoot back. I am *in orbit*. I say that a lot, but I don’t think a lot of minds inherently comprehend just how far away ‘orbit’ is from where *they* are.
A decent shape human jumping straight up from a standing position can, on average, make about two feet of lift. Assume that you don’t fall back down after doing that. You would need to do that jump roughly a hundred and twenty thousand times to make it to the *edge* of space around Earth.
I am not perched on the edge. You will need to keep jumping. You will not make it.
Orbital bombardment makes the solution of a lot of problems pretty easy, if we’re being honest. It really highlights *why* humanity put so many guns up here over the years. Though the application of mutually assured destruction does go a long way to explaining why Earth isn’t a burning series of crater by now, it also doesn’t account for the fact that we’ve ended up in a situation where I am the last one left.
There’s no mutual balance to be had. Just me, my drifting home, a stockpile of ammo, and a series of targets ranging from ‘yup!’ to ‘eugh…’ on the sliding scale of morally acceptable.
Really, the only thing that I *can’t* do with a railgun and the auspices of gravity is diplomacy. I am so bad at diplomacy.
Normally this is where I would blame the lack of thumbs, but it’s really a lot worse than that. I lack the ability to vocalize most terrestrial languages. And owing to a series of political decisions from several past owners of this station, there is no actual way for me to translate my voice, or even have words spoken aloud.
The past owners of this station were, in several cases, absolute assholes. Racist, xenophobic, anthropocentric assholes.
In a lot of ways, I love humanity. They built my home. They created the science that led to my immortality, *and* my intelligence. They’ve built a lot of impressive things, and through my spying… through my *businesslike scanning* of the surface, I’ve seen a thousand thousand gestures of love, compassion, and heroism from them and the uplifts under the human banner.
But yikes, some of them suck.
*Fortunately*, I have a railgun, and the high ground. And *yes*, my lack of ability to speak properly does severely limit any kind of diplomacy with the surface. It can feel weird, to have that thought that if only I could *speak*, I could maybe change the course of lives.
But other humans try to speak too, sometimes. And they all die the same on the conquerer’s blade, falling to those who were never interested in listening. So maybe unexpected bombardment masquerading as divine judgement is a kind of diplomacy on its own. A message to stop fucking around, and go back to being human. And also petty revenge, against the ideological strains that led to me being voiceless in the first place.
I continue through my daily routine with a little more of a morose mood than normal. Though I still catapult myself through the hallways as fast as I can. If I’m gonna be morose about the failings of those below me, then I’m going to be asleep for it, and if I move fast enough, my chores will be done just in time for the station to be on the right side of the planet for a sunbeam nap.
Captains log. Update. Critical information. Lunch still awful.
Not even awful. Just empty. Bland. Every iota of flavor, missing. It’s like the void of space in my mouth, only with nutritional content.
Update number two. My communication package to the lunar weapons platform is ready.
I’m proud of this one. It took a lot of time to compile, but the computer did most of that. My work was in learning three forms of Chinese over the last week, and writing the basic code to get the station to actually do the work of creating a series of different contact attempts using our various comms systems. I didn’t do the work, but I did figure out how to tell the computer to do the work, and that feels *so* much nicer.
Hopefully, in twelve hours, I can say hi.
Update part three. I have been lying to you. I do not keep captain’s logs.
I close the command window, and check what needs doing next. Nothing serious, just a review of the local scanner data. Maybe, if I’m lucky, a rogue spacebound garden will have wandered within grabbing range, and I can fuse it to my home. For… professional use.
Regardless, this can be done while laying down comfortably anywhere. So I leave the comms station, and head for my nap zone.
I’ve been working in a secondary comms station, so I take a weird circuitous route back to where I want to be. The AR projects a map for me, but it keeps saying to go through a door that literally does not exist.
This happens sometimes. I swear the station isn’t haunted. It just thinks there should be a room or hallway that never got built, and is still on the schematics. It’s not either me, or the station AI, being in alarmingly specific denial about anything.
As I move, slightly slower than normal as I go through hallways I don’t normally use, I notice something.
There *is* a door here. Not the one that isn’t real, just a door that I haven’t ever been through.
It’s not like I’ve never seen this door before. I’ve been here for a long time, I’ve been down all these halls and tunnels. Mostly. Maybe not all the maintenance shafts. But I haven’t been through every door, and it always frustrates me when there’s a part of what I think of as my territory locked off from me.
The thing that stands out here is that there’s an AR projection on it. A pictographic glyph that I’ve seen before, in the long ago archives of my memory, back when I was a normal pet. It was the symbol that was projected on my mom’s door, whenever she had company over, and kicked me out.
Room in use, my brain fills in the information. Come back later.
My body ripples as my muscles tense up involuntarily. I find my back arching as I hiss at the door on reflex, the ancient reminder of what I’ve lost glowing red and blue over the bulkhead.
And then, the AR flickers out. Like it was never there. Just a normal locked door to a crew cabin that I don’t know the right command to open.
I orient myself, and run the rest of the way to my nap zone. To sit in the sunlight, where the ghosts can’t get me. Not, I remind myself, and everyone else, that the station is haunted.
It’s just a hiccup in an overly complex system, manifesting in an unexpected way. The place is centuries old. It’s earned a few quirks. I just wish they weren’t ones that startle me like that.
I fall asleep reviewing scanner data, and tagging dead satellites for recovery and conversion into material stockpiles later. The sun is warm, the couch is soft, and my heart has long since calmed down from my scare earlier. Now that I might be able to talk to the weapons platform, I need a new project, so before dozing off, I allocate some of my time tomorrow to digging through the station code again, looking for the unlock commands. Just for my own amusement, obviously.
I roll my belly into the sun, and must be dreaming, as I feel the sensation of fingers in my fur.
