Dear Chloë ,
Not all creatures dream the same way. I learned this late in life. Or late-er, I guess. Humans don’t always dream of this world at all. Maybe that’s why are they always destined to reach for a new one. Or to destroy this one. Or both.
Me, I dream the same cat dreams all cats dream. We don’t dream of this world either. Cats dream of the before-world. It is a world of shadows, inasmuch as a shadow is to itself a shadow. Sorry, as a dream, its hard to explain. An old philosopher from three millennia ago explained it well, with a cave. I’ll get back to the dreams.
In many ways, my story starts the day I died the first time. But a part of me would prefer to tell it from the time I feared death most.
I was born in an abandoned warehouse in New Orleans. I had many brothers and sisters, and we didn’t always have much to eat, but we did we would play. My favorite brother was Jayo, and he would always challenge me to climb. When we were very small, we climbed the cinderblocks just outside the building. Then we climbed the brick fences.
Eventually, we crawled through the barbs of wire at the tops of fences, and through the legs of fortune tellers, the uneven terracotta rooftops of cathedrals. These are my earliest memories; mostly of Jayo. He was always patient, always pushing me.
Then one day it started raining, and it never stopped. Jayo and I were fine. We could climb. But the others, they weren’t as quick. Jayo went back down for them, and he left me all on my own - I was too afraid to go back down.
I think that for this to make sense, I must tell you of the cat dream. This is the fundamental dream of the cat that I shared with my mother, the father I never met, and all of my brothers and sisters.
The Cat dream
In the old world, the Prince of Darkness courted the daughter of Light. It was their destiny to rule the universe, to keep it in in balance. But he went to far. He tried to catch the sun so that he could give it to his bride, but the sun was a great hawk that always eluded his reach. So he cursed and spat at the hawk, ruffling his robes and his hair, and looking less like a prince. Such is the ugliness of the world and of power. And the hawk of the sun cursed and spat back. He schemed and schemed and he stole the wings from the crow, and he used them to fly up into the sky to steal the sun for his princess.
He grabbed the Hawk of the sun roughly by the neck, and he killed her. The world was plunged into total darkness, but the daughter of light knew she could not light a world so beyond repair.
The shadows rose like a tide, and the daughter of light fought with all her strength to fight them back, but the great serpents of this world bit at her with jaws of darkness, and crows of the night bit hungrily at her.
So she stole the cloak of the prince of darkness and with a swish of this robe, she fell through a crack in the universe and into the next world. She became the daughter of darkness, and she left everything she knew behind. She left her family behind, and her children, in order to save herself.
This is the dream of the cat. There are some that believe this is the weakness of the cat. But in the cult of the cat, it is more often upheld as our strength. I believe this once. I found out on the day when it began raining and never stopped that Jayo did not - he went back to bring our brothers and sisters up into the ventilation room of an apartment that we sought for shelter, but the wind was too strong and blew him off the roof.
I slept for so long in that room, curling myself into a tight ball so that I could stay warm on my own, cursing Jayo leaving me all on my own. I stayed there for eight days, and when the storm cleared I was alone.
The years that followed were, in many ways, the majority of my life. I ate rats from the street, from dumpsters, the lunches of street performers, although there weren’t many performances for a long time. I was hungry and alone in a city of the hungry and alone.
One day I met a woman who was not hungry or alone. She was dressed in clean and colorful fabrics, and she was very dry, and very happy with her man. They were walking the Levy, even while there were many men in the orange construction hats walking around it.
She made like she was offering me food but had none, like a stupid joke, and I was pissed, so I bit her as hard as a could. I didn’t even let go very quickly.
This made her very aggressive and unhappy, and she kicked me, which, all things considered, was understandable.
Okay. She wasn’t the only person I bit. I basically bit anyone who looked well fed, because I was pissed that they would play this joke where they hold out their hand as if they had food when they didn’t. I could find food, but I couldn’t find as much as I’d have liked, so I didn’t like it when people taunted me.
Some point around then, the men from the trucks would sometimes follow me, whistling, and making clicking noises, and often times with long nets. I was not interested in this at all.
But one day I was stupid. There wasn’t much food at all, and I’d caught all of the rats on my block and considered moving over to another street, but I was too hungry to make the trip. So when the slow man with the handful of small good fish smells stood invitingly I thought, maybe this time it won’t be a joke. And it wasn’t - he offered me the fish and I looked up at him and that was the second time in my life I thought, maybe I have found a friend!
But once I finished the fish, he inserted what I am sure now was a tranquilizer, in my neck, and I became sleepy as he put me in his truck. I hissed and tried to bite, but thinking back now, he was a friend in a way. He was not trying to hurt me.
I spend a long time in the place with the cages and the other cats. I learned a lot there, but I was shipped around a lot, and I don’t want to talk about it now. Something I learned later; there are many stray animals in more temperate areas, and it is lucrative to ship them to animal shelters in the north, where it is harder to simply find an animal on the street, because those animals die during the winter instead of finding a home.
I ended up at Cally’s home. She lived in a small apartment in Massachusetts. She had two other cats, a fat white cat named Rosie and a younger tabby named Pico. Neither ever went outside. To them, it was as if they did not know the cat dream, and thought of it as an error in their psyche. They did not know all that they had would one day be taken if they did not take. They watched the birds chattered, but never say outside.
I sat on Cally’s keyboard when she worked and she would pretend to be mad, but she liked it.
“Echo,” she would Chide, “I need to get my work done,” but then she would scratch me behind the ears.
I beat Pico up once, and he hid from me for a months, which was all for the best. Soft ass house cat.
But then he attacked me again, I pinned him, but I didn’t beat him up. He earned my respect. He still fought like a bitch though. I taught him how to fight better. And I taught him to go outside.
It was special, to see the light in Pico’s eyes on the outside. Cally would lock the doors, keep us in. She knew. But she couldn’t stop us.
I was happy. I thought I was so tough. But I had a friend again. I had two friends. And I had, though I didn’t entirely trust it still, safety,
The road by Cally’s small townhouse was quiet. Pico and I crossed it every other day to make it to the woods behind the townhouses on the other side of the street.
One day, as I crossed the street, I saw something I had never seen. I smelled it first. A softy, woody smell, but powerful and familiar.
It was a cat, but much bigger. And so quiet, the way it hopped down from a fallen try, then froze, to look at me. Pico was still crossing the street.
Next to the large, snowy-looking cat was a yellow diamond-shaped piece of metal atop a worn pole. On it was an image of a creature with long, squiggly legs. Echo wondered if the sign was to describe this large cat creature, whose legs were not large and wavy but perhaps could transform into something that did have long a wavy legs.
Then a truck came careening out of the parking lot, and I was a moment off - I darted the wrong way, right under its tires, and I heard the crunch of my own skull in my own ears.
The world knew Helios as a tech company. It was founded in California in 1994 Dr. Sophia Estelle. She had originally been the third member of Hewlitt Packard. Originally the company was going to be named Chiro, short for Chiroptera, the latin name for Bat. Estelle was a huge fan of bats, and had been a biologist before she’d become an electrical engineer. In order to pioneer studies on the ways that bats used echolocation, she needed to create specialized microphones that could be used in the field.
In an electrical engineering program, David was her professor, and realized her work on power-sources was beyond the quality of installation him and Bill Hewlitt were using in their burgeoning personal computer business. They brought her on and there was instant chemistry.
Estelle’s desire to learn was insatiable. She became famous for staying up all night creating tests for more efficient power sources, sleeping just a couple hours and doing it again, sometimes for a full week. It was as if physiological limitations were no match for her hunger to create devices that would help her understand the world - and that seemed to be what drove her. Estelle dreamed of a future where scientists would have the computational power to analyze the world beyond the feeble limitations of human senses and processing.
And she got her wish, though it was a rocky road to get there. Not only did Dr. Estelle rapidly improve the personal computers HP was building, but she also proved to be a public relations juggernaut, a public face for the company that made it exciting, fun, and cool.
Famously, during a huge break for Hewlitt Packar, and in the middle of the rebranding to Chiro, Estelle very publically left the company. She said she had been offered by Bill and David 20% to their 40% each. She had considered her a partner, if not an outsized contributer. Bill and David claimed the conversation was still ongoing, and Estelle exploded.
She went on to found Helios, named after the greek god of the sun. Unlike many tech companies, it was based in Alexandria, Virginia, and pulled talent that was largely international. It called it’s most prominent lab for innovation “The Lighthouse of Alexandria”, and in its headquarters built a pedestrian bridge across the Potamac, a tower from which the DC skyline could be admired by the public on Sundays, and a famous campus built undeerground and partially underwater, the murky water of the Potomac visible through the windows of offices and cafes stretched underneath the water of the river.
“Before europeans arrived, these waters were clear thanks to the healthy ecosystem of algae, fish and root systems that filtered sediment and once, even toxins,” Dr. Estelle once said during a Ted Talk titled “How to steer a Kayak: Funding Architecture reaching towards a healed world”. She provided the analogy that, when paddling a kayak, the paddler will go where they are looking. As such, she argued, our architecture and designs she been built on the assumption that humanity would combat ecologically destructive patterns they set into motion like global warming. “By building a campus with windows facing the murk of our own creation through city runoff, untreated sewage and industrial toxins from far upriver, we can create a center of innovation in which our engineers, designers, students, and everyone who works at Helios can constantly look out into the true murkiness of our world and be motivated to fix it.”
It struggled to create a competing computer at first, but eventually found founding, and rode the DotCom bubble to create some of the largest distributed scientific paper and data networks, and build in utilities. By the 2010s, thanks to the huge amount of talent it drained from other computer and cloud infrastructure companies, it had begun designing some of the most popular personal computing devices ever seen, like the Compass, a watch that outshone the recent innovation of the smartphone.
The hiring process at Helios was famously intense, and Dr. Estelle was not known to always be kind, or even fair. She was a woman of formidable temper at times, and deep understanding at others.
“As far as I’m concerned, every fortune 500 company is a nucleus of greed and exploitation,” Rabine Echter-Smith, a writer at the Chesapeake Chronicle wrote of Helios and its iconoclast founder.
But others defended Estelle.
After a series of devastating viral outbreaks around the world that changed the world, Helios doubled down on its ecological and burgeoning social causes. Some said that, as the only Tech Giant with a sole female founder, it was also by far the most progressive - the one with the most soul, even.
Already comparably principled in many areas, Helios made an enormous shift during this time of global upheaval. Manufacturing was radically reformed to provide precedented offshore working conditions, and plans were set in motion to move many manufacturing centers for Helios devices west.
Completely novel recycling and counseling programs were created in which Helios users were provided guides that helped them reconcile their relationship with technology, and understand in what ways it may be unhealthy, financially destructive to them, and socially or ecologically harmful. In fact, Helios scientists discovered alternative battery manufacturing techniques that didn’t require the extraction of rare earth minerals like Cobalt and Lithium from poor African and South American countries. And where these rare earth minerals were extracted, workers were compensated, seemingly at rates that truly seemed to value their contributions fairly.
Of course journalists circled like vultures, sure they would find hypocrisy in each of these initiatives close to the surface. But each turned away either empty handed, or about how Helios truly seemed to be walking the walk. Helios products became more expensive, but more reliable, and their public image soared.
In Addition, Helios unveiled a new product; the retinal contacts, dubbed haloes.
Helios claimed that these Halo devices worked like normal contacts, but were durable and could be worn indefinitely if cleaned and maintained properly. They were able to superimpose a high resolution image on the vision, nearly quality enough to live up to human vision.
And Helios claimed this was only the beginning. Even greater things were coming.
“What do you think?” Dr. Estelle asked the woman standing next to her. In front of here was a floor to ceiling tank of tiny jellyfish, expanding and contracting their bodies as if to some unseeable dance.
The woman, who was named Maribel, twenty years Dr. Estelle’s junior, took a moment to respond. Her heart raced a bit faster than normal by the side of such an icon, but at the same time the moment was too real, too altogether present, to feel entirely out of the ordinary.
“I think they don’t care,” said Maribel. “About us. Or the world. They don’t have eyes to see it.”
Estelle looked over at her, deep brown eyes arrestingly deep. Maribel started, pushed back a sudden urge to say something she thought might be impressive, like guess at the origin of the Jellyfish in the tank.
“It’s calming”, Dr. Estelle said.
In front of Echo there were two options. The surface of the walls and ceiling was white, and slick. Echo extended his claws in a subconscious attempt to gain some purchase, but they slipped on the surface.
The sign on the left was an image that resembled a fish, with details for fins. This was one of the glowing ones, but subtle light grew lines. It reminded Echo of all sorts of the flat images that adorned human creations. Echo had always thought of them as small, frozen worlds stuck on the sides of things. They’d always made Echo uneasy.
The sign on the right was an image of a simple circle, in that same neutral-looking grey.
Echo took the path with the fish sign over it. A small flap opened into a room with a small bucket full of sardines, which Echo consumed hungrily.
Days passed like this. There were many of the choices, between two signs. Sometimes the same ones. As time went on, they seemed to grow increasingly complex. They began to feature drawings that resembled nothing familiar, just arbitrary arrangements of lines and squiggles.
The strange thing was, the lines and squiggles looked familiar. There is a particular type of arranged squiggles that appeared on human things that Echo had long ago learned to recognize as a sign of human-created objects.
But the patterns of these echos began to form.
Once, the shadow cat was placed in front of Echo. Echo had seen this cat before - the kind that could imitate all of Echos movements as if it was inside of Echo’s head, reading his mind. It was for this reason that the shadow cat filled Echo with fear, and before, in the world that was not tunnels and well-lit compartments with no sunshine and no real colors, and all the same food, Echo would always run from the shadow cat even though it was also in the same places of the house. Echo would avoid these places - the hallway of the house that Cally lived in, the spooky unused room upstairs room that Echo never went into because there was a great deal of the strange shimmery space there, possibly a portal to another dimension, from which the shadow cat could emerge at any moment.
The shadow cat was even there at night! Always waiting. But echo eventually learned she was safe because the shadow cat never followed from out of it’s dimension. That’s why it’s important to never get too close - that way the shadow cat can’t extend her shadow claws and pull you back into her world!
I couldn’t hide from the shadow cat in the afterlife, which is where I was sure I was. I tried to learn new things about this world, but what I really thought during that time was that I was stuck in between worlds.
There were strange reflective cylinders of glass that looked a bit like the kind that Cally would sometimes hold with both hands especially when her nephews came over, and which she directed at those little human beans.
I liked those human beans. The boys with the blonde hair were funny, but a bit rough and I often ran from them like I ran from the shadow cat from the other world, but perhaps with less urgency since their legs were very short and they were easy to outrun.
But then the quiet girl who spoke to me quietly and stroked my fur even though I never showed her how to do it right by strategically hissing or biting her when she did it wrong.
Anyways. Cally would point these glass cylinders at them when they visited, almost every time. So this in between world, where I could sometimes hear unfamiliar voices, muffled, coming out of the walls and through a variety of small grates too high up on the walls for me to reach. This in between world, perhaps the point of it was to love me like Cally did with her cylinder? The cylinder, in the presence of her little human beans nephews always seemed to make her smile, and she would hold it back and look at the back of the cylinder and then back at the nephews, in a way that she never did alone, and so maybe Cally was there, taking pictures of me. Maybe in some unknown way, I had become her nephew. Maybe I would be reborn as a human! I certainly felt different. When a creature dies, does it come back as another creature?
The cats I met on the street told me that housecats believed in nine lives, and they were wrong - it was actually all the other creatures that got nine lives but that cats had been cheated, and only got one, but they were able to live all of their 9 lives at once in order to compensate for it.
I don’t think I understand this really. I wish I could talk to those street cats again. They were the ones who taught me how to hop the train out of the flooded city and towards the colder lands.
One other idea I had, because of the pain I had in the left side of head sometimes, was that I was stick in between worlds. That my body was stuck somewhere, and my mind was floating in an alleyway somewhere between dimensions.
Anyway. I was able to pretty much dismiss most of these ideas during the first day of the shadow cat, when it was brought to me.
The gloves descended from holes in the wall, big white arms that were made of the room itself, a similar material like the walls had appendages, they pulled me out, and then fabric was put over my eyes, and then I was deposited in a similar room.
But there was the shadow cat, right in front of me. Desperately, I looked behind me, ready to run for my life! But there was nowhere to go. I was trapped with the shadow cat, who looked so much like the color of my fur I could see on my paws, but snarled and hissed.
I stood perfectly still so as to not show my hand. The shadow cat stilled itself as well, looking deep, deep in my eyes. I stood frozen like that for what felt like an entire day. And the pupils of the shadow cat were deep, like a tunnel that went back, and back, and I looked into them for so long that I eventually calmed down, in some sort of meditative trance.
I lifted my right paw, acting on some sort of strange intuition. And there was a dawning comprehension that this was me, but I didn’t trust this conclusion because I didn’t see how it was possible. But I also didn’t how it wasn’t possible. I approached the shadow cat for the first time in my life.
And it was a wall as well. This whole time, the shadow cat was a wall! Where my paw scraped it, the shadowcat’s paw scraped mine as well, but I felt nothing but the cold surface of glass, like the surface of a frozen lake I’d walked on once.
There were many other strange rooms. There was one with colored rings on sticks. Another was colored cubes in tracks, that I could push. Usually, when I did things in a certain way, I was rewarded with food. Increasingly, I found that shapes, the human squiggles, and colors often represented greater sequences, and if I made the sequences come to be with the objects or conditions they represented, I was presented with food.
At first, afraid, I did this diligently. But when I got the food too quickly, I sometimes heard voices, many human voices mumbled, excited. It made me uneasy. Not much time had passed, maybe a week since realizing that the Shadowcat was really a wall. So I started to experiment, hoping this would give me a clue about where I was.
I would do things wrong, not follow the sequences, and the muffled voices sounded different. I found that the muffled voices sometimes even would correspond to the same colors and shapes I saw. One word was like “sqaw”, or another clearly for a color, “red.” I learned that the shapes and colors had names, both graphic and audio, and it was as if I had woken up.
These sounds, so strange, so random-seeming and diverse, that the humans had been emitting with their mouthholes in the last world, they perhaps all corresponded to shapes and colors I hadn’t seen yet. Animals and ideas could be shapes too, and perhaps feelings to. Maybe pain was a shape, like the kind I experienced when I rammed myself against the shadowcat over and over again until I felt dizzy, and I saw the red blood trickle out of my left ear.
There was something strange at that left ear, almost as if another small mirrorcat lived just my left ear, but now in this case I was smeared with blood.
I walked around with the blood, creating shapes of my own, and recreating some of the symbols I had seen. I like it. It felt nice to create things, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever really done that before. It hadn’t really occured to me.
After doing this, I awake clean, with no pain, and in a very different place. Yet another between world. Many of the smells and the low frequency sounds, like the intermittent rumblings I had come to associate with this world, were similar enough I knew I had probably not gone far.
But this alleyway in between the worlds was very much a nicer place to be. For one, there were more colors. Green, as in plants. A lot of them. And insects to play with and bat around. Even though there was no one around, I began to purr to myself to see this place, this bigger space, and non of the awful, tacky symbols.
There were a lot of cylinders in this place, though the walls were high, and so they went up a long ways. I began to realize that the cylinders, too, were a sort of shadow cat, but more like an eye. They allowed me to be turned into a shadowcat for some other cats, perhaps, who could see me. I wanted to find the cats behind this, but also knew they were probably peoplecats.
I started having dreams. Not the cat dreams. Other dreams. I dreamt of Jayo, and what he would do now, if he was still alive.
I noticed that with each passing day, sounds did not necessarily become louder, but they became more distinct. All of them. I could hear the symbols being spoken. I started to understand certain things about my situation based on what I heard.
There were, basically, gods of the inbetween world.
A lot of time went by. I was deposited between worlds. I was given increasingly challenging mazes. Eventually was a given blocks of text.
“You are Cat 14. Identify who who 14 is out of the following cats.”
There were many symbols of cats, but I only say there were symbols because one of them was me, and it was in image of me looking at the shadowcat. Well, my shadowcat. Which I knew, at this point, to essentialyl be me (even if I didn’t totally trust it the same way). Yet this was from, I think, the first time I looked intently at the shadowcat without fear.
I thought of the shadowworld in the stories, and wondered what it would mean to escape the world. I wondered if I even wanted to. I felt as if I could escape if I wanted to. But I was fed, which was better than much of my life before. Being a new world, what if escape meant I went to an even worse world? If this was the afterlife, could I even go back to the before life? I dreamed even more vividly, but perhaps this was because I was having a bit of trouble sleeping sometimes, especially when the walls grew hands again and moved me.
“A small subset of organisms have begun to exhibit wildly aberrant behavior in repsonse to the Gen8 implants,” Maribel started. “Cat 14 has been exhibiting some aberrant behavior.”
The scientist selected a set of video files, including a twenty minute video that was scrubbed through it, showing a small black cat drawing shapes on the ground in its own blood.
“Oh, god,” Dr. Marcy said. “Thank you for monitoring this. This actually happened before, it seemed to be due to issues with the brain computer interfacing methods. The theory we ended up validating was that schizophrenia-like symptoms were emerging from a lack of correct sensory mapping, and we had to terminate those animals as they were becoming increasingly violent and non-cooperative.”
“Oh,” Maribel said. “Well, I don’t think that’s necessary. Actually, I’m presenting this because the symbols being drawn by this individual, actually —”
“Please, we have an experimental schedule we can”t deviate from.” Dr. Marcy replied.
I have made an important realization. As my hearing has improved, I’ve noticed a lull in human voices from mouse 0 to mouse 1326. Sorry, that might not make much sense. At this point, I didn’t know about seconds and hours, even if I was familiar with the slow ticking of a clock on a wall.
What I did know about was the length of time it took a mouse in Cally’s kitchen to run from the secret food-room (pantry) to the hole in the wall by the big beast room (garage), where I could follow it through through the flap in the door, and pursue it out into the bushes. It was at around this point, if I could get ahead of the mouse, where was a good chance it would have a spontaneous heart attack.
Let me backslink a moment - I noticed a long period of time where there were no human voices. I also noticed other intervals that subconsciously seemed to pop up in the alleyworld.
The experiments I’ve come to know as the rightpaw leftpaw, where I have a choice between two alleys, I noticed that between the time I was given some sort of information and the time that the doors would open was often about as long as the amount of time it took from a mouse to run from the pantry at Cally’s to the Garage. But more importantly, it was the same amount of time, every time. Which I don’t think I could confirm in the previous world, but in this world, I am able to compare times. I can look in my memory, and see how long things match. It’s very strange, but I’ve tested it, and I have extended my claws when I think the doors will open, just as a way to prove I am predicting something, and I’m right everytime.
Sorry I went down a big sewer grate hole. Or a rabbit hole. I like this expression, although I have never been down a rabbit hole.
That was long-tailed of me, but the point of all this is just to say that I had become a clock. And also, clocks are powerful, because clocks help predict when the voices disappear. And, hypothesis, the voices are god, and god stops paying attention from mouse 0 to mouse 1326, where mouse is the amount of time it takes for a mouse to run to the bushes at Cally’s house. To help this make sense (or multiple senses, really, if you are a creature who happens to be using them all) maybe I should say that there are 2448 mice in a day.
So I thought about it, and I wanted to test my experiment. I noticed that when I did certain aberrant things like draw shapes with my own blood for example, the two shadowjars high on the wall would follow me, just like Cassy did, but with no people’s hands even holding them.
My plan was to create shapes out of my food. To prevent random chance, I would do this four times between mouse 144 (I just like the way this number of mice feels, it is a nice feeling to imagine a path of 144 mice in particular, but maybe not as titillating to imagine 143 or 145). I would also do it 4 times between the times of 1326 and 2346 (102 mice before 0mouse, just to be safe). To be clear, my theory was that this is when the godvoices were not present, not even the pretty, steady voice I heard the most, frequently, the earliest and the latest.
Originally my plan was to make a circle out of 14 units of food, but then I realized that if I was correct and I was being observed by the god voices, of which I had almost no doubt, perhaps they did not know I could hear them or understand them. Perhaps using the number 14, which i really had just chanced upon but increasingly had become fascinated with quantities, a thing that had never particularly interested me before as birds or mice. I occurred to me that if I used a quantity of 14 food pellets to make a circle, perhaps this would show the godvoices that I understood my name was 14. They had shared that information with me, and I had another theory, which was that they did not realize I knew the 102 mouse interval patterns, nor the name they referred to me as.
I imagined I was a small furry mortal locked in an alleyworld, and there were other furry mortals, probably also felines. But maybe even the big cat was here. Maybe the big cat was a messiah that ferried me from one world to the next! I was angry and confused when I thought about this, and remembered with a shudder the feeling and sound of my skull crunching under the enormous beast on the big black path.
But I apologize, there was a lot going on in my head at this point (and really, for a long time afterwards) and I am getting distracted from my storytelling.
I made the circle of pellets, but out of random numbers of pellets, even though that was less satisfying. I made a geometrically perfect circle and I put it inside of a geometrically perfect square, but I arranged the square so that it was perfectly at odds with the square walls of the room, so that it was like a square with a diamond with a circle, with a cat inside of it! I would wait like this for about 2 mice, and then started to eat my food because I was pretty hungry still after all after the work of making this big mandal thing out of food.
A strange thing happened - I found that I really enjoyed making the shapes. I felt confident I could recreate them perfectly every time, but again, I felt this might betray a bit too much of my inner…how do I say this.
There is a human expression about card games have heard once, “didn’t show my hand”, maybe from the godvoices, maybe later, and cats have no hands and if they did they mostly don’t have cards either. If there was a cat version of this expression I think it would be something like, “don’t let them count your teeth”, because on the streets of the flooded city there were many cats whose teeth were falling out because of disease yet they still looked strong. These cats didn’t show their teeth and reveal they could not bite. By not showing their teeth one could guess their teeth were no good, but then again, some very evil cats would intentionally hide very healthy, very sharp teeth, and this way they could lure you in and eat you. Which was pretty fucked up and it happened to my friend once. The happily ever after here is these these evil cats, by definition, would become pariahs and either would eventually be forced into the river or would be disassembled by the general cat community, in general.
Anyways! I just wanted to run the experiment and not show my hand. My experiment was conclusive. The voices peaked in intensity according to, and predictably according to the shapes. I did the shapes during the quiet hours first, with no effect, as expected. I only had to do two during godvoice hours, and I actually heard intensity of sounds I had never expected, like laughter, and perhaps some shouting. Another plus was that the sounds I received were so human sounding I became more convinced of something strange - these were not god voices but certainly human voices of some kind, and probably belonged to human bodies, though nothing was certain. Another small meow of a thought - perhaps I was in fact not in an alleyworld. Perhaps, somehow, was in the same world.
But very, very importantly, and I shudder to think what would have happened had I not received this additional bonus information from my experiment, I found a correlation between the the quiet hours when I made shapes and the decibel of voices in the noisy hours that followed. It seemed, strangely, that the shadowjars had memory, and had language, and could tell the godvoices what happened even when they were gone. But they were gone.
I felt it important to list the process of the beginning of my experiments. I performed many more, and got better at hiding my teeth, or my hand. Unfortunately, I revealed a lot of teeth is this initial experiment, and things may have been easier had I not.
So here’s what I learned:
- The quiet hours are only supervised by shadowars
- shadowjars tell the godvoices about things I’ve done during the non-quiet hours
- making shapes out of food pellets is very fun
- it also seems to satisfy the definition of aberrant behavior in that it influences the godvoices to be excited, whenever they learn of it, by delay or immediately.
The next step was not so hard. I just attacked the shadowjar. it was not made of strong things. I wished it no real ill-will, but I decided that if the shadowjar was able to talk to the godvoices, maybe it had a way out. I moved my food dish onto its side so I could climb up and reach the shadow jar, and then I bit through a covering that was painted to be the same color as the rest of the room but appeared to be a different material. With my claws and teeth, I moved it away enough that I could cram my head into it.
For a moment I panicked, because I was trapped with my head in the vice of this shadowjar covering that pressed me against the wall, and I could not breathe. But I was heartened because, from this vantage point, I could see cool delicious darkness for probably the first time. With all of the strength I had, I crammed my right paw up into the space and used that to wiggle upwards and into the darkspace. I slid and fell what felt like an impossibly long ways, for it was a greater distance than the entire height of the word I’d been in for hundreds of thousands of mice. I had another time measurement for this actually - I decided that about 2448 mice is a rat. My estimate was that it had been about 2 rats in the chambers with the shadowcats, i.e. my reflection, and the various strange scenarios under these bright, bright lights that hurt my head.
But out here. It was cool, dark, blue. It took me a while to understand what I was seeing, which was okay, because I had about 900 mice to explore before the supervisors would be back. Although yes, at this point, I was worried that the shadowjar would tell of my absence, and prevent it in the future. What if I was trapped in the alleyworld the rest of my life? Maybe even for multiple lives? Well, they’d have to catch me first I reasoned. Looking around, I could already tell this other place had a million places to hide. I wasn’t going to go back.