Argus
patreon
Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 9
🕑 Added 2021-09-20 04:44:16 +0000 UTCStory mildly late due to depression. Not that I have a schedule for this anyway.
_____
Mouth throat lips lungs tongue
sentence syllables silent
Paws scrawl laser words
_____
Once, a long time ago, I had a plan. And in my opinion, it was a pretty damn good plan, too. Didn’t work, but that was only partially my fault. Most of my plans are like that.
To explain this plan, we’re going to need to go on a tangent. “Wait,” you say, no longer so foolish that you think you can talk to me, but still reflexively talking to yourself, “Lily, you just started. Is it really time for a tangent?”
You fool. You lack *vision*. It is *always* time for tangents.
The history of the Sol System, and Earth specifically, is kind of spotty. I can tell you, with reasonable accuracy, what years things happened in, up until about the mid 1900’s. Or at least, I can tell you what year historians decided things happened, and kept writing down. After that, things get iffy, and it’s mostly because humans suck, but also partially for other, worse reasons. And what I can tell you about even recent history right before my birth is more or less a guessing game.
I can tell you that around the year 2130, there was either a religious or social movement to reject the concept of truth, which took off, and led to the purposeful obfuscation of a lot of records. I can tell you that in the mid 50s, a mutating strain of loose code deleted several online libraries, causing further problems. I can also tell you that by the turn of the century, at least one nation was actively trying to suppress knowledge of what year it was, either for political reasons, or because it was a prank that went way too far.
I was born in, if I remember properly, year twenty eight, of circumstance four. I do not know how long after stable history this momentous event happened, and I don’t remember where my home was. Or rather, I don’t think I was ever told. Different cultures, cities, even households, use different ways of tracking the number of the year.
Add to that the fact that at least one emergence event brought in an invasive species that instinctually zeros in on high concentrations of organized information and then explodes, and the picture of the chaos starts to come into scale.
And if you think this is confusing now, bear in mind I’m telling you this after I’ve spent centuries trying to recreate a timeline of events.
I cannot. I just fucking can’t. I can tell you that the Worshiper Wars happened, but I don’t know if they occurred before, or after, my own home station was launched. I know at one point humans were building spaceships, but I don’t know the ebb and flow of development, or when it stopped. And I can tell you the population of Earth is at about a billion and a half sophonts, but I have no idea if that is a historic high or a dangerous low.
Now. The surface of the planet is hospitable for humanity and the few other sophont races they share the ball of dirt with. But depending on what region you’re in, your lifestyle is going to shift dramatically, and a large part of that is the lack of any kind of central information repository like the internet or the overlink used to be. They just don’t exist anymore.
But a lot of technology was built to *last*. And last it has, especially when communities have sprung up around still functional factories or hospitals, turning golden age miracles into modern centers of commerce and culture. This is how you end up with farming village where only one person knows how to make nails, but everyone has a holophone.
Now. This station comes from one of those golden ages, and I suspect part of the reason so many different polities occupied it over the years was because they were hoping it had complete copies of old archives. No such luck, sadly, but the station does have some pretty massive databanks that are largely empty. And the added pieces accumulated over the last half milinnium have only made that capacity greater. So while it doesn’t have the easy answers, it *does* have the scanner power, and *occasional* acceptance of automating systems, to let me start to rebuild that archive. Either by making records of oral histories as they are spoken, digitizing books when they’re read slowly, outside, and at the right angle, or just tracking statistics and trying to extrapolate backward.
Then it’s up to me to filter out the lies, inaccuracies, half-truths, and bedtime stories from what’s real. And let me tell you, that is harder than you might think. I’m not omnipresent, and the bedtime story part alone is a massive headache. What if there *is* some eight legged black furred child eating cow thing nearby? I’m *positive* I’ve bombed an emergence that spawned those once; it’s not impossible that one survived, made it halfway across the planet, and set up outside this village!
Took me three weeks of stationary orbit to find it, turn it into charcoal, and mark that bedtime story as “inaccurate”.
You know, I could almost smell it cooking when I hit it with the void beam? After all the fur got torched off, I bet it would have been *so* delicious for a half second before it burned.
I’m getting off track. Even farther, somehow.
Earth. I wanted to talk about how people live.
I don’t know how we got here, exactly, but I do know that most people don’t live in cities. There *are* cities, but aside from the one sleeping automaton in the rainforest, and Melbourne, there aren’t a lot of high tech cities with things like integrated utilities.
Governments tend to be confined to regional lordships, and the average population center is a few hundred people, either centered around good farmland or other natural resources, or around a golden age artifact that they still know how to use, and hopefully not break. The modern idea of a ‘city’ is ‘what if we put ten thousand people in the same place’. There’s a surviving luxury lifestyle tower in the southern part of India that has a population higher than a lot of cities.
And this is, you know, not great. I spend a lot of time and ammunition protecting the residents of the world from things they can’t stand up against, and trying to provide a safer life for them. So it feels a bit bad when the average quality of life often looks worse than *mine*, and *I* have to eat the *same fucking tasteless nutrition bar*. Every. Single. Day.
I’m not crying. You’re crying.
So I hatched a plan. What if, using my phenomenal cosmic power, I just… shared?
Yes, there weren’t exactly a whole lot of spots I could initiate an actual data transfer to. In fact, there were *three*, and they were all isolated, unmanned, and possibly insane. But I had *all these railguns*. Hell, just a week before my big plan, I’d used a cargo railgun to intercept a small meteor that would have survived atmospheric entry. It was called a *cargo* railgun. Surely, it could move cargo.
You know how I’ve mentioned that I could hyperfocus on things? I’m not sure if this is a cat thing, or a me thing, but I can really let time get away from me. I just am not as temporally bound as a standard human is. Or, in fact, any other of the uplifted or artificial species on Earth.
I spent weeks on my most recent project. And that time? Nothing. A blink of an eye. I am immortal, and easily amused, and I spent *years* on this one.
And the number of roadblocks were *comical*. I had to recalibrate the cargo railgun at least twelve different times, always for different reasons too. I had to figure out how to safeguard whatever I was sending down, which took a number of tests and almost accidentally bootstrapped a bunch of things that were coming through an emergence event when I tried to double up on testing and fighting. I had to then figure out how to actually make whatever I was sending *useful*. The station isn’t devoid of recorded information, and there were quite a few sources on things like psychology, sociology, political science, language, and the engineering of data storage devices. I made use of a lot of them. Devised materials that could teach, that I could adapt to my different target regions with ease. Designed robust tools that would be usable by the various hands and skill levels of the residents of the planet, even if they were useless to me. Ended up using up an entire stockpile of a paracausal material supply so I could build ‘cargo containers’ that would survive reentry, open themselves, not melt either what was inside or anyone who came to investigate, and still worked with the station’s “cargo” railgun.
I tell you all this because I need you to understand, I am *very smart*, and this is still a problem that outlasted my focus.
Every single step of the way, there was something that kept me from perfectly attaining my goal. Always, *always*, something would go wrong. The tools wouldn’t survive reentry, the shots would go off course, the people would just never discover the impact site, the books would start *wars* over their contents.
The wars never lasted long. “Stop fighting you assholes” is one of the few sentences I can effectively communicate from orbit.
I learned a lot from that period of my life. How to understand people, how to operate a wide array of the machinery on the station, how to calibrate and rapid fire a railgun in precise ways I hadn’t ever needed to before. And I learned how hard it was to *build* something. How it often felt like the world conspired to slap my paws away from even trying.
Maybe it was a sign, or an omen. I can’t say for sure if those are real or not; I’ve seen too much to think the universe makes sense. It certainly sent me into a depressive spiral afterward. And, just like I can lose a lot of time to my obsessions, I can lose time to despair as well. Sometimes, not being quite so immersed in the flow of time is a downside.
And yet, I miss those quiet days. Just a checklist of problems, and all the time and resources at my disposal turned toward slashing through the boxes. I wasn’t *so* bent to my task that I’d abandoned some basic chores, but the majority of my time was put toward the simple things. Research, adaptation, and the satisfaction of one more hurdle cleared.
I never finished my project because the final hurdle to manifest itself was a surface based cargo yard, that decided I had become an activated recipient, and had fired its own cargo railgun back at me. It wasn’t malicious, but I lost my *safe* orbit to ground capability. And I could have tried to replace it, or tuned another gun, or any number of solutions. But, well, that was just the last frustration I could take at the moment.
I had recovered, obviously. I mean, look at me now; I’m the picture of stable mental health. But I hadn’t gone back to that kind of focused state. And I hadn’t really gotten any quiet days to enjoy - I’d done a good job keeping myself busy.
And then, I’d gotten those quiet days I wanted. Just a taste, of what a bit of peace would be like.
The quiet days are gone again.
I gently nudge the command tool slightly forward, watch the reticle move across the projection of the map cross section that I’ve selected, depress my rear paw onto the button that locks a target into place, and stabilize my movements as best I can before I confirm the firing sequence.
The third category two groundstriker railgun projectile thunders away below me. For the third time today, the residents of this particular chunk of the north Asian continent will see a white and orange contrail cleave through the sky. Hear the roaring impact as kinetic energy and high explosives turn a patch of dirt and the problem occupying it into burning rubble. If I could move faster, or queue up targets like I could with the void beams and their path targeting, they could have seen all three of the shots coming down at once; an organized bombardment as I go about cleaning house.
The first hit took out a cave that an engineered apex predator had been living in. The second one killed an automated mining facility that had recently decided to shift locations and was heading straight for a town. The third just hit a spot that had all the signs of an upcoming emergence event, turning the portal to disrupted static before it could fully open and cause problems for the locals.
All of these were things I would have had a hard time spotting on my own. Which is why I hadn’t.
A feathermorph kid on the ground had either stolen, or been gifted, a good luck trinket from a passing merchant. And again, I say ‘merchant’, and you may be thinking of a guy with a wooden wagon. Stop that. Think a mobile corporation. Someone, usually a family or tight group of friends, who once made the journey to one of the ancient factory or hospital sites, and took the spoils of their trip home. Leveraged it into wealth beyond their imaginations. Started picking up artifacts to use, not just to sell. And mapped out trade routes for hundreds of miles. The merchant would have two or three transport hovertrucks, trade permits for multiple lordships and cities, a dozen people working for them, and a few dozen weird quirks they’d picked up interacting with old and erratic technology.
Anyway. The kid had gotten this old good luck charm. I had already written in my head an expansive fanfic of this interaction. And then, he’d done what the merchant had said; held it close and told it his problems.
His main problem was that there was a monster that lived outside the town. His main good luck was that his home was at the very top of an old residential skyscraper, higher up than the merchant had ever taken his little charm. And the random chance that set off today’s bombardment was that the charm itself was an Oceanic Anarchy emergency call beacon.
Hell, maybe the height didn’t matter. Maybe it was just that I happened to be overhead when he hit the button. But the young bird *had* hit the button, and I *had* heard about this beast that was tormenting their town.
And, naturally, I had scanned the area, found it, confirmed what it was, and blew it up.
The next two calls were from adults. The good luck charm was now a little more than a child’s good luck. Two more problems were identified, and handled. The kid was now a hero, the one who’d found the magical device that had saved more people than he’d ever met.
But my orbit wasn’t going to keep me here. I wouldn’t always be around. Which was why I’d told the station to hold us here as long as was safe from the mess of debris around us, and taken the time to load into my armored suit.
It made it a lot easier to draw with the laser cannons.
Before I floated on, I put to use a lot of that knowledge of societies, mythologies, and languages that I’d picked up all those years ago. I had a hard time forgetting anything, but I might have been out of practice. So, what they got was a cliff face near them, etched with a four panel comic, written in high intensity light.
“I won’t always be here.” Was the meaning I put into it. “But I’ll listen if I can.”
The whole village had, in the last hours before I shifted position, turned out to see what I’d made for them. And through the emergency broadcast link, a few hundred avian voices had in unison thanked me, whatever kind of god I might be.
Even if I had to get the translator to help me understand their language, it still almost made me cry.
*Wait*. Did they say god?
I double checked the translation. Then checked to see when I’d next be in range to doodle a correction to their new religion on a different available rock. Three weeks, with my current off-kilter orbit, assuming no distractions. That would be fine, right? There wasn’t too much trouble that could happen in…
Mmh. Not gonna finish that thought.
I disengaged the laser batteries and mewed a sigh into my suit’s helmet. I was still armored, and I needed to get out of this and get back to my chores. I had a dozen maintenance bots to activate within the next three hours, before we passed by an old UCRS war cruiser that still showed signs of having live point defense weapons. And I was sure I was going to either shoot it, or grab it and weld the guns to the outside of my home. If I was very lucky, the power source would be live, and long term usable too. And then, later, Haze management. And then a check in with something weird going on on the primary moon. And then another local scan for any operational satellites. And then…. ugh, so much to do. I’d wasted too much time. There was barely any moment scheduled for sun naps.
But as long as I was headed for the drone bay, and had better paw control…
Maybe a short divergence to send a letter to Glitter. Tell them how my day was going. I had an amused suspicion that they’d have some choice words to say about my newfound divinity.
The quiet days were gone.
Maybe I missed them.
But the quiet days had never had *friends*.
So maybe I didn’t miss them too much.
Armored drone servos whined to life as I kicked off a bulkhead, and rocketed at normally lethal speeds down a service corridor, trusting the suit’s reflexes to safely turn me down the corner at the end. And when the absolutely unsurprising station proximity alarm blared to life, this time, I sung along with it.
The quiet days were boring anyway.
Comments
Dylan
I concur with Nathan. You’re one of my favorites. I love this story. I hope you feel better!
Nathan Emerson
You are a really good writer and I'm always excited to see a new chapter of either story. You have one heck of an imagination.
