Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 29

“Okay! Three, two, one…!”

I drop my forepaws onto a switch plate, engaging the magnetic couplers behind the hull plates of the station’s walls. It’s taken a lot of time – and a creative and possibly illegal use of a cleaner bot – to get the things into position without disassembling large chunks of the hallway.

Which I really didn’t want to do. Like, more than I really didn’t want to arrange a series of couplers without being able to see them properly.

Would it surprise you? Learning that the connectors and bolts and other contact points that keep the plates secure are perhaps *not placed with me in mind*?

There’s a lot of “oh, this was made for humans” going on around here. It comes up pretty much every time I have to void beam the surface; I’m not really the set target for the target setter. But there’s just some ways where it’s way, way worse. Like, I can at least plant my hind legs on a chair and prop myself up on a desk to see a screen or a holo-interface. What I can’t do without some really unsafe uses of station drones and creative applications of ‘damage’ is get a wall panel down.

I need to remind you all that I’m something like a foot and a half tall. The station is built for creatures several times that, and with hands. The hands thing is a sticking point for me.

Anyway, I’m using magnetic couplers and the same principles that railguns use to drag a grid cable through the walls without having to perform excavation. That’s where I was going with this. I think. I kind of lost track, and I was supposed to be listening for anything rattling in case one of the couplers was misaligned.

“Connection recognized.” Ennos’ voice says. “No drivers, though. I’ll need to fabricate compatible ones, which should take some time.” They pause for exactly two seconds. “Okay. Done.” Ennos *says* they aren’t a smug AI, but I know when they’re being smug. I can feel it. “”Link established. Encryption overridden. Yup. That’s it, we’ve got proper access now.”

Ennos keeps saying ‘we’, but I had access to begin with. This is about building something else. Something they can use, with full permissions.

And as of now, Ennos has a hard line from the processor hardware that the dominant part of their persona runs on, straight to one of the two consumer factories that we’ve unearthed and brought online in the station’s depths.

This would be the part in a bad spark opera where the AI, finally having convinced its organic handlers to give it access to something, would begin to show signs of nefarious behavior. In five or six episodes, it would be revealed that they had secretly been building a drone army, and now were going to try their digital hand at genocide or something. Then, the inevitable slow drag of the apology arc where the characters who had supported AI rights were rightly chastised for almost unleashing a robot apocalypse.

“Hey Ennos.” I meow innocently. “What’cha gonna build first?”

“Robot army.” The AI replies, deadpan.

I *knew it*. This is why we get along so well. Ennos actually has been watching the same archived shows I have.

Seriously, though. I know that history is a different land, and I’ve read a *ton* of essays and texts that define people as just ‘behaving as a product of their time’, but it’s still creepy to me how obvious even some of my favorite pieces of fiction are overtly anti-AI propaganda. It seems like a lot of Earth’s literary critics are falling over themselves to excuse the blatant racism as the creators just being immersed in a horrible culture, or not having had the time to grow up and mature properly. But that seems weird to me.

I, for example, am four hundred years old, and I don’t think I was every hatefully anti-synthetic at any point in my life. Maybe I just got lucky though.

I leave Ennos to acquaint themself with their new host of assembler arms, and get to doing some chores.

Four hundred years old and I still have to do chores. You’d think that by now, I’d live in the future, and not have to work this hard, but oh well.

First up, checking on the dog. He is, and I cannot stress this enough, a very good boy. He is also taking up one of the vivification pods in the medical wing; turns out, you just can’t get through having an orbital craft shot out from under you without a few radiation burns and shrapnel hits. So, once the stasis unit had cycled, I’d let the pained and stumbling dog by the tentacle over a few steps to another pod, and helped him into it.

“Helped” is another one of those words that’s doing a lot of work. I was a stepping stone, of minimal aid. I’m just lucky my new guest was smart enough to go where I pushed; I don’t exactly have dog snacks to lure him anywhere.

He’s repairing now. Flesh being regrown and revitalized. He’ll feel good as new once he’s up, but it’ll take longer than I knew I was prepared to wait.

I am, strangely, excited. I’ve never shared my space with a living creature before. Ennos and Glitter are wonderful friends, but neither of them are really big in the ‘giving pets’ department.

I miss pets. I miss a lot of things.

Of course, now I have to wait for who knows how long to meet the doggo. But it’ll be fine; the vivification pods work. Void knows I’ve used them enough myself, for… a variety of reasons. Most of them reasonable.

I leave the medical wing – There’s a medical wing; I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this? It was behind a sealed bulkhead, and had to be decontaminated. Used as some kind of plague quarantine. Didn’t work. The cleaner nanos have already disposed of the skeletons by the time I got there. The point is, and I promise there is a point, that the two different high tech medical research labs placed on different sides of the same deck was actually for a reason, and the reason is there’s about six hundred well appointed hospital beds between them. – and head toward the next chore I have to get done.

“Have to.” Heh.

The garden is thriving. Vines that will soon carry peas and beans and tomatoes wind up around metal lattices made from dismantled common room chairs. The thin sprouts of greenery from morruts, carrots, and ananas cut up out of the deeper boxes of technoenhanced dirt. Stalks of rice and rods of sugarcane are both starting to come along in my makeshift aquaponics setup. There’s one onion growing. Just to see. Just to know if it will kill me, like it would a normal cat.

It’s a chaotic mess. Differing temperatures dot the room as the climate control system wars with itself to keep things steady to my satisfaction. The concept of crop rotation, which I actually *do* have a strong grasp on, is alien here. The dirt is networked, and a thin trickle of a power supply keeps it working to maintain perfect environments for the plants in it.

In theory, I don’t even have to check on my garden.

In practice, I am here to stare at the fluffy greenery of a growing carrot, and convince myself that *no*, it *would* be a bad idea to take a bite. It would be bitter, and silly, and I can wait.

I can wait.

I make some incredibly minor adjustments, more to feel like I’m doing something than for any other reason, and move on.

Scanner charts need a quick look over, to make sure all the different sensors are mapped to each other properly. It looks fine. But I guess I count ‘fine’ as anything that isn’t immediately trying to kill us.

Magweb needs a tune up. The station maintenance report says it’s got a 4% drop in efficacy, and this is one of those irritating parts that I can’t just tell the station to fix itself. I spend a little while getting my paws dirty, making sure I can rend automated subsystems to scrap in the event of a close-in firefight.

Lunch has to happen. Today’s lunch is an artistically rendered cashew muffin. It tastes like ration. I eat it with a flick of my tail, and consider directly asking the galley if it is alive and messing with me. But I say nothing. I don’t want to be rude.

An automated hunter killer frigate is nosing around. I’ve seen this one before, actually. I call it Sharky. I’ve never seen it actually attack anything that didn’t shoot first, so I tend to let Sharky be. I load a special ‘treat’ round into one of my orbital package railguns, and fire a mildly radioactive chunk of metamaterial past its bow. Sharky takes off after its snack in a flare of engine light. Enjoy your objectively tastier lunch, Sharky.

I run into one of Glitter’s camera drones – I’ve painted them with hull marking spray, color coordinating Ennos and Glitter’s individual little camera orbs – as I’m coming out of an engineering station that makes sure the O2 on the station is being processed properly and isn’t leaking out.

“Hey Glitter!” I chirp happily at my friend, who is currently devoting a chunk of their mind to learning how to use their magnetic deflectors to ‘orbit’ the station in lazy loops. Like the weapons platform version of jogging, I guess.

“Yes, Lily?” Glitter’s voice is as measured and rich as ever, even coming through a mid-grade overpriced camera drone. Not that commerce has really been a barrier to entry for me, ever. “How may I serve?”

“First off, by not saying that.” I don’t want to disrespect Glitter’s cultural traditions, but I do feel it’s important to remember that her cultural traditions come from people who were totally fine enslaving her and leaving her to go insane in lunar orbit over the course of centuries. “Second; how’s the Haze doing these days?”

I talk as I walk. I’ve got an appointment with an industrial salvage laser and a ruptured cargo compartment I’m halfway through turning into usable material down in bay fifteen.

Glitter’s camera drone bobs behind me, her focus not really on keeping the little orb stable. Or, actually… those little dips and bobs look weirdly precise. Is she even failing to focus gracefully? That’s not fair.

“The chemical has retreated to a cave network, I believe to avoid an incoming sliverstorm.” Glitter says. “Though I am unclear why. It hardly has a body that can be harmed by the shrapnel.”

Sliverstorms are unpleasant. Or, I mean, *I* think they’re unpleasant. In theory. I’ve never been in one, and you can tell that, because I’m still one singular unit of ‘cat’, and not a collection of cat parts spread across a couple hundred kilometers.

“Oh, it’s the cold. They drop the ambient temperature enough that the Haze avoids them.” The thought makes me pause for a second. “What about the town it was in?” I ask, concerned. If a sliverstorm was headed for it, I might have enough advance warning to bomb it out of existence before it kills everyone.

Glitter gives me a disturbingly reassuring answer. “The Haze took them.”

“What?” I freeze up. Well, okay, I stop at the bay door which takes two minutes to open. But it’s *like* freezing up from shock. “Took them how?”

“Led them into the caves. Or… I suppose ‘puppeted’ them into the caves. I am keeping a lens on the situation.” Glitter says.

Glitter is missing the fact that I don’t really want the Haze to feel like it’s okay to take entire population centers underground and out of my line of fire. But…

Well, dead to a mind controlling chemical is just as dead as being torn apart by magnetic wind.

This conversation got depressing.

I distract myself by spending the next hour venting my frustration on an unsuspecting set of storage racks, slowly separating the metal of the old destroyed chunk of another space station into piles of smaller chunks that will easily be rendered down by the foundry, and added to my stockpiles.

It’s relaxing work. Or, maybe ‘relaxing’ is the wrong word. It’s mindless. It’s the kind of thing I’ve done thousands of times. Doing my part to put a dent in the Kessler syndrome trash heap of Earth orbit.

So many years of doing this, and I don’t think orbit is any safer, really. I am one cat; motivated, but singular. And there are *millions* of dead ships, derelict stations, shutdown satellites, and lumps of high velocity debris out there.

“Lily, do you have a minute?” Ennos asks as I am trying to use my paw to plot a straight line for the laser, and failing. “I have a question.”

“Sure, I could use a break.” I mew in relief. “What’s up?”

“The factory was disconnected from our material stockpiles when you connected me.” Ennos informs me. “I cannot experiment with my new capabilities. Can you help me?”

“Oh!” That’s an easy fix. “There’s no ‘connection’ or anything. I just get lifter bots to move stuff around. They’re not great for detail work. Or, well, any work, really. But they… it’s not important. I can direct the station to include the factory.” I pull up my AR interface and start going through the – now relatively painless – process of adding the new segment of our home to my cobbled together set of coded commands. “There!” I say as I finish.

Two hours later.

Ennos, doing their AI thing, picks up the conversation like it never stopped. “Thank you, I appreciate it Lily. I also appreciate you dismantling something people won’t use, instead of continuing to cannibalize all the station’s chairs.”

I glance over at the cargo segment I’m mostly done cutting up. It’s not really any kind of segment anymore, just metal wreckage in need of a new purpose.

“Yeah, it’s nothing. I’ve gotta do something to keep busy, you know?” I pause. “Also the chairs are fine. Sometimes I just need hollow metal rods in exactly that size, and the fabricator has trouble with them. It’s fine. I’ve been using chairs for things for about fifty years, and I still haven’t run out.”

Ennos makes an awkward humming noise. “An endless supply of chairs?” They ask.

“It’s a big station! A lot of chairs!” I yowl defensively. “It’s not like anyone’s using them.”

“Yes yes, I’m not defending the chairs.” Ennos says. “It’s just odd that you’ve never run out.” There is a long pause. Long enough that I assume Ennos has gotten sidetracked, like people do, and that the conversation is over. But just before I start the laser again to finish my work, they speak up. “Also it explains why this factory has a standing queue of chairs for delivery.”

For a mortal creature, the sudden knowledge that you’ve just spent the last several decades doing something pointless would be *crippling*. I imagine there’s a level of soul crushing despair that would render someone for whom that represented a larger percentage of their life into a crying heap.

Fortunately, I am not mortal. So I can bear this minor folly with dignity.

Calmly, I disable the industrial cutting laser, stand up, and leave the bay. Disabling my AR windows one at a time, I make my way to the refurbished exolab I use for situations that require a truly impressive nap.

I lay down on the cushions. They are plush and comfortable against my mostly entirely regrown fur. The sun is in a good spot today, solar radiation warming me to a perfect temperature.

Wiggling side to side, I bury my head under a stray pillow, and, in a calm and dignified way, give my best feline impression of a drawn out scream.

I stay here, hidden from the endlessly frustrating and politeness elements of my daily life, until I doze off.

As I fall asleep, my ears pick up the distant sound of a woman’s laughter, clear and happy…

…I bolt upright, trying to hold onto the sensation of that moment between sleep and wakefulness.

The laughter stops. But not because I stop hearing it. I can still hear. Something else, in the background. An appraising little ‘hm’, a noise from nowhere, to nowhere, and yet in my ears regardless.

I feel a presence near me, and I stay shock still. It’s not like the invading specters; there’s no physical sign of anything changing or coming for me, just a feeling. A sensation, in my *soul*, if that’s even a thing cats have.

A hand touches my head. I am torn between the desire to lean into it, or flinch away. I do neither; waiting, and observing. Probably because I am actually terrified. My heart hammers in my chest so hard I’m worried it will break.

A noise halfway between a sigh and sob drifts on the empty wind, and I feel long, *human* arms encircle me. A hug, the likes of which I haven’t felt in a very, very long time.

Something whispers “You’re doing great! You have friends! That’s so…” into my ear. A voice I haven’t heard in lifetimes. Maybe I still haven’t. “I…”

The connection *shatters*. The ghost is gone. I bolt upright, waking into pandemonium. Ennos is yelling something at me from a trio of camera drones that have creatively wedged the lab door open, the lights flicker back to life with an electric crackle that should not be there, and not one but *two* different – both highly annoying – alarms are blaring.

A dream.

Possibly.

But maybe not.

I sit quietly on my couch, tuning out the world around me. With a soft motion, I rub the back of my paw over one of my eyes, trying to clear the sleep away, trying to determine if I am going mad, or if someone really is out there.

It is a personal, solemn moment. The kind that I don’t get very often around here, because usually-

Sorry, Ennos is yelling at me.

Oh, right. The alarms. There is an emergency.

I arch my back in a stretch, and with a flicker of motion, bolt into action. Solve the new crisis first. Solemn moment later.

Just as it’s always been.