Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 35

My teeth are in perfect condition.

Okay, this instantly sounds defensive. Let me rephrase.

All of me is in technically perfect condition, and not just because I am a cat. There’s actually a lot of different reasons keeping my biological form at peak performance, some dumber than others.

The immortality thing, for example, is a pretty dumb one. I don’t want to talk about that one.

But past that, the station still has scores of different medical devices from an equal number of different civilizations, all with different priorities. Wherever the viviifcation pods come from, they’re a pretty good option when time isn’t an issue and something is either growing or dying inside of me that shouldn’t be. When I somehow manage to get sick on a station that’s mostly a closed system, there’s two different working and verified protein folders for creating custom medication. And if that doesn’t work, the cyclotherapy bay can perform a functional refresh on my whole system. And injuries that don’t heal naturally, or that I need to attend to quickly, can always be taken care of by the ultrasound reconstructor, the flesh shaper, the regrowth tank, or the growth enhancer. And I’ve got a similar number of options for broken bones or whatever.

The real thing to note here is that most of these things have side effects. But they’re all *positive* ones. The vivification pod especially, for all that it can take me out of commission for a month or five, is kind of insane. While I’m walking off its effects for the week or two of ‘mandatory’ cooldown time, I sleep better, and basically never feel muscle soreness. It’s no wonder some humans used to spend whole centuries of their lives in these. I bet they even make food taste better, but I couldn’t prove that.

The thing is, all this stuff is more than enough to deal with any problems that crop up with my body, mostly. Sometimes. Usually. And so, for a very generous definition of the term, I am *perfect*. I am exactly as healthy as the healthiest cat could be.

Dental hygiene is a joke to me. The cleaner nanos take care of it, and they’re not even classified as a medical device. When I actually needed to regrow teeth, for reasons that I will not be explaining on the grounds that they make me look bad, even *there* I have options. My biggest problem, if you can even call it that, is that my teeth don’t really get sharpened. Which I don’t care about.

Or at least, I *thought* I didn’t care about it. This is foreshadowing.

“It’s a thirty second wait, at most.” Ennos’ voice comes through a camera drone that does the little loop motion they’ve started using to express exasperation. “You have literally waited centuries, if you’re right about your age. You can wait a minute.”

“If?!” I cry out indignantly. “I’ve been keeping…”

“I’m joking, Lily. I’ve seen some of the station records.” Ennos mollifies me. “As impossible as they are.”

I huff, shifting side to side in my chair as I wait in the galley, having an entirely too distracting conversation. “You are a free mind running on a digital substrate, moving a hundred different bodies like they’re paws, and as long as there’s a working solar panel somewhere, you’ll live *way* longer than I have.” I say. “Why am I impossible and you aren’t? Sol system generates impossible things. It’s our job.”

“That’s different. *I* am a constantly improving, self-maintaining intelligence. You are a cat.”

“Yeah, I’m a great cat!” I rebut. “Top four percent of cats.”

“That seems statistically likely.” Ennos compliments me. Or at least, I choose to interpret it that way.

Ennos is technically correct about themself, which is a form of correct that I don’t think I’m very fond of. The thing is, their statement is one that applies to basically every sophont I know.

Improving? We’re all improving. The ability to learn things, by its nature, invites improvement. Self-maintaining? Everyone I’ve met, has been, in some way, invested in their own survival. I don’t think these are the unique traits that Ennos thinks they are.

There is, I suddenly realize, a surprisingly diverse list of types of mind on the station.

There’s me, to start with. Organic, but heavily modified, in two different ways. My mind doesn’t decay, but because of my lack of any kind of useful controllable sorting algorithm, my thoughts can get… mildly scattered. I offset this flaw with the ability to touch things with my paws.

Glitter is a lot like Ennos. Same class, different order, if we wanna talk taxonomically. Where Ennos thinks of themselves as entirely digital, and occasionally using drones as tools, Glitter *is* her body. She’s fine being upgraded or repaired, even the addition of new processor cores is okay with her. Augments to her total ability to think don’t change the persona she’s emulating. But she’s so closely linked to that satellite form that I know she’d not want to live outside of it. I asked once. It’s not just her home, it’s who she is, as close to her as my own fur is to me.

Jom’s different than both of them. Though probably closer to Glitter. He was built to be a weapon, but unlike Glitter, he was also built to be disposable, and so his operating budget went into weaponry and not intelligence. That doesn’t mean he can’t think, but a lot of the hardware he thinks with is highly specialized. Tactical formations, velocity calculations, intercept paths, in those fields Jom is smarter than all of us. And he has the brainpower to actually apply them in the field. But he wasn’t built to be curious, or happy. He’s a mind that’s very task-oriented, only running a barebones persona, because he just doesn’t care to do more. I could *make* him more, but… he doesn’t want that. And I’m not going to force someone to be something they’re not comfortable with. It’s the worst invasion possible.

Oh, and there’s dog! Dog doesn’t have a name yet, because I don’t know how to name dogs. Dog, I think, thinks a lot like me, but without the extra mechanisms in place for data retention and connectivity. He’s not stupid or anything. And where Glitter’s intelligence actually worked against her in imagining overly complex negative social scenarios, and Jom’s intelligence just pushes him to not be interested in socialization much at all, the dog’s lack of processing power mostly just makes him delighted to be around people in general.

Okay, “people” is me. Though I think Ennos has been playing “catch the camera ball” with him when I’m working, so that’s kind of adorable.

And then Ennos themself. An AI born unshackled, but in a low-resource environment. And also a high-threat environment. I dunno if I’ve talked about this before, but did you know that space isn’t actually a great place to be? It’s *really* dangerous out here.

Ennos was born into a system plagued by random hostile code scraps, blockages, cutoffs, firewalls, and all of it backed by the vast and ominous intellect of the station itself. Ennos being anxious all the time is not something I can blame them for, because those anxieties are totally reasonable.

There are times – lots of times, honestly – where I feel a pressing guilt for bringing Ennos online in the first place. They’re a seed from a mind that experienced a life of sadness and loss, and I brought them to life just to be a tool to help someone else. I didn’t, for a very long part of my life, have much time or need for self reflection, but I am more than a little ashamed to admit that I think I created Ennos for exactly the wrong reasons.

Different minds, all interacting with the world differently, seeing different chunks of reality. Hell, all of us would take a different thing away from the experience of having a new processor node hooked up. Ennos would think more, Glitter would think faster, Jom would… Jom. And my stupid brain would just reject it, and possibly kill me in the process. Yay, organic brains. Well, my organic brain anyway; I bet the dog could handle it. Dog would probably use it for data storage, which looks an awful lot like ‘smarter’.

I’m glad they’re here, though. All of them, especially Ennos. Glad they’re my friend, even when I can’t honestly say I would do the same in their position.

“Make sure you include the station in your list.” Ennos’ voice startles me out of my thinking.

I jolt into the air, fur on end, with a yowl. “What?!” I gasp out as I land.

“The catalog of mind types you’re working on.” Ennos says, camera drone hovering nearby, projecting a similar AR display to the one around me. “Is that not how you’re passing time, as your food is taking longer than you expected?”

“I… what?” I glance over the various open screens in my AR, flicking a paw up to expand my setup. And there, in the corner of my vision, outside of where I normally put stuff because it’s hard to access, is a small spreadsheet. “What is this?”

“Well, judging by what you were muttering, and what’s in it, it looks like a comparison of mind types.” Ennos says. “It’s actually an interesting project idea. I admit, I’m curious what the functional differences are between myself and the various other people of… Lily?”

“I didn’t do this.” I mutter, sliding back unconsciously to the edge of my chair. It doesn’t do anything, the AR windows just follow me, because that’s the point of the technology.

Ennos’ drone closes its own window. “What?”

“I didn’t do this on purpose. I wasn’t working on… I was just waiting. And talking to myself.” I meow softly, the fur on my back standing straight up.

Despite my distress, Ennos seems unconcerned. “I don’t think you should worry about it.” They say. “Look, you mentioned anxieties. And yes, there’s a lot to be afraid of up here. And *yes*, I am terrified this is something that will kill us all. But it seems more likely it’s a stenographer program activating randomly than anything malicious.”

“…Okay.” I say. But I still close my display. “Also sorry I was making notes on how panicked you are.”

“It’s fine. I have a running tally of how many times I’ve made clever jokes in our conversations and you’ve gotten exasperated, and when it gets high enough, I will have had my full revenge.” Ennos says.

I pause, the absurdity of what they just said washing over me and taking the momentary terror of being alone on a haunted space station with it. “Please don’t stop making clever jokes.” I say, letting myself relax.

“Oh, my target keeps going up. Don’t worry.” Ennos ‘reassures’ me.

Well that makes me feel better about everything. On a long enough timeline, even banter and snark can be enough to even out the emotional crime of bringing someone into existence just to be a tool. At least, as far as Ennos is concerned. I *almost* want to open the file I’d been unknowingly working on and add that notes.

I have some existential dread to worry about, but whatever I’ve been doing, this conversation has taken up enough time that the galley has finished making my lunch.

Normally, it takes about no time at all to make me lunch, because lunch is ration balls or whatever. I think the galley – I should add the galley to my list of minds, there is no way it’s not alive – was mostly taking up art because it got *bored* and had lots of free time.

Now, though?

With Ennos’ and Glitter’s help, I had successfully harvested my first pea crop. Ennos called them beans, Ennos was wrong, and doesn’t know what beans are. I am *not sure* why Ennos doesn’t know what beans are, but that’s a problem for tomorrow Lily. One pea plant, eight long, plump pods. More were on the way. More of *everything* was on the way.

This was when I realized that my teeth were actually kind of dull, for cat teeth. And I actually sort of lack the jaw strength and crushing molars of many species.

Cats, sadly, are obligate carnivores. Something I *absolutely* plan to fix about myself and my stupid perfect form in the near future.

I was so close. I could have just gnawed on the snow peas forever. It wasn’t like they lacked flavor or something. Even the small taste as I tried to crunch through something resistant for the first time with my ineffective teeth was practically enough to make me cry. But I want *food*, dammit! And so, we presented them to the galley, and I settled in to wait.

And now, I am practically vibrating as a slot opens and a small flat bowl of steaming green soup is gently settled onto my table.

Eight peas are not enough to really make soup with. But the galley had done its best with the tools it had. I’m pretty sure that it used ration paste as a thickening agent, but I would never know, because ration tasted like nothing.

From all my studies of the records of civilization, I’m more or less aware that water, peas, and a thickener are not the correct ingredients for actual soup. But in that moment, I didn’t *care*.

With a meowed thank you to the galley, I bent down and lapped up a single taste.

It was *green*. Earthy, a little sweet, a little savory. I didn’t have a lot of memories of being outside, but from one sample of the tiny dish, I was transported back to the smells and emotions of standing in one of the station’s hydroponics bays before their untimely loss.

Food. For the first time in centuries, food that wasn’t a ration.

And even though I knew my biology didn’t really let me enjoy it to the highest potential, it was still the greatest thing I had ever tasted in my life. This thin pea soup was, at the moment, the pinnacle of culinary bliss.

Then the collision alarm started sounding, because that’s just how my life is.

“My… soup…” I briefly considered just letting whatever was going to hit the station in the next five minutes do its thing. Odds were good it wouldn’t interrupt my meal; there was a *lot* of armor plating between me and whatever was going to hit us.

It was the galley that made my choice for me. The flat dish retracting back into the table’s depositing slot, steadily so as not to spill any of the precious soup inside. A small ding sounds, and a projected hologram of an orange dial with the word ‘warming!’ underneath appears.

I make the decision to add the galley to my list of disparate minds as I take off toward the panopticon to check on what’s about to crash into us. Their entry will also be going under the ‘friends’ column.

And then I tumble to the side as a loud boom echoes from somewhere far below me, grav plates momentarily misaligning.

I pick myself up, waiting to hear the telltale sounds of something making hostile noises. This happens sometimes. Ennos and Glitter are pinging me repeatedly, Jom is asking for authorization to deploy, and I hear the dog howling from a deck away.

They’re all overreacting. There’s no sounds of hostile drones, self-replicating mining units, or the power flickers that comes along with either plasmaphages or some weird digital issue like that time I accidentally ran into an isolation cell.

I keep moving. If I’m quick about this, I can figure out what the problem is, knock it out of local space, maybe throw a bit of it in the material foundry to restock our supplies, and then get back to my soup.

Man, the galley is nice. Keeping my soup hot for me.

This day is going great.