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Infinity Smashed: Brain Hacks (exapnded)
Brain Hacks (expanded)
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: ~3300
Summary: Raige is too stressed out to sleep, so Bobcat decides to give him something else to think about and teach him about the chip that makes Bobcat Bobcat. He also breaks inter-dimensional intellectual property law.
Notes: Squishes together “Brain Hacks” and “Use Industrial and Military”. Reposting for simplicity, due to edits.
The moment Bobcat closed his eyes, he was bombarded with messages: //WARNING! Prolonged disconnection from the Sky leads to system instability! Please see a service technician immediately!// and //WARNING! You have chosen to force-reduce your levels of stress response! Continued use of this can lead to permanent damage!// and //WARNING! You have not downloaded patches or updates in 84 hours!// Bobcat dismissed the troubleshooting offers and kept the force-reduce on, so that his anxiety would be mild and easily manageable.
Even so, he knew that the messages were just the start. By design, the implant that supplied his higher functions needed constant Sky contact; he had maybe a week before data corruption started reducing his mental resources noticeably. Eventually, he’d be nothing but a brain-damaged minus-cat… if he didn’t starve first.
Dinner had been unappetizing. Bobcat was used to a mix of synthetic meat, bone, eggs, and vitamins, grown and printed specifically for his nutritional needs. Rawlins—M.D., she’d asked he call her M.D.—had beef jerky. Cheap beef jerky. And not much of it.
Bobcat had commanded his implant to slow his metabolism, force-reduced his hunger signals, and eaten as best he could. But he knew the supplies would be gone quickly. They needed to leave this forest.
Bobcat’s emergency transport was at least somewhat functional. After all, it’d gotten them here, and at least some of its safety features remained intact. But even if it could still be activated, there was no way of knowing where it’d send them next—and chance favored hard vacuum. So first, they needed to know where they were. Once he knew that, he could calculate the transport’s level of distortion, and from there predict where it would send them next, or how best to correct for it.
The first thing on that list was to plug in every scrap of data he and his transponder had accumulated and cross-reference it against the overlap directories to try and narrow down their location. But that would have to wait for morning; it was too high-level a task to run this late at night.
Bobcat had to sleep like any other cat, but the implant stayed awake even if his body didn’t, leaving him quietly cognizant and running routine self-maintenance. Since the implant forbade a natural REM cycle, it provided instead a sort of mental screen saver that recycled and rehashed recent events as it processed them for better long-term storage.
He’d never missed dreaming. His implantation had taken place so early in his kitten-hood that he felt no sense of loss, and anyway, having such linear narrative “dreams” sometimes helped jog his memory. So he rested, watching his memory unspool and replay.
First, more recent memories—his transponder’s unfortunate (though unsurprising) report of no broadcasting societies within range, the boy’s meltdown, the accident, the client’s lack of reaction. Not a good sign for her ability to reintegrate into normal society, but Bobcat could be opportunistic if he had to be, and in the current crisis, he’d take her artificial calm.
The memories moved further back. Nothing new there; he’d already processed these memories the night before, but Bobcat let them scroll anyway, hoping it’d trigger an idea. Tracking her at the hospital, coming down to this society, receiving the job, M.D.’s nickname…
(Bobcat. He liked that nickname—a common human name, combined with the domestic feline name, creating the name for a dangerous wildcat! It was clever, a hint of feline edge under a veneer of human civility. Perhaps he’d keep it.)
//NOTIFICATION: You have unprocessed black box memories. Process?//
Oh! Bobcat had deleted that memory trace. //Y//
In a society constantly connected by wireless, Bobcat’s people had to keep some information private somehow. “Black box” memories were the answer, kept separate, locked down, and offline to prevent hacking. Normally, they couldn’t be processed except in the extreme privacy of a dead room, specifically built to block the omnipresent Sky, but this forest’s electromagnetic barbarism gave Bobcat a chance.
After a moment for the memories to load, Bobcat found himself back at the dead-room workshop of his friend and fellow cat++, Fluji B1AC. They’d been implanted together as kittens and remained friends through adulthood, though she had descended to underbelly hack-and-cracking while he had ascended to middle-class respectability through social work.
B1AC’s implant was not rigged for human-sounding communication like his. Her stream was raw discomfort and aggravation, cluttered with spiderwebs of multimedia ephemera, associations, and feelings. Dislike, friend/brother. DISLIKE. She meant the Rawlins case, which at the time Bobcat had only just received.Construct, like/unlike us [array of construct identifiers, with “other” highlighted], small child/kitten thing (WORST), and DELLAN? [Link cloud, all broken] Unpleasant associations, this job.
Nuzzle, grooming—an attempt to mimic their natural, original behavior. Her scent, familiar and sharp with metal and soldering.
If it’s a construct, better it be with me, Bobcat said. The League’s construct union is imperfect—
B1AC responded with a sarcastic cluster web of angry textual arguments that had been posted within the past week on the group union bulletin… which was supposed to be inaccessible to her. Bobcat dismissed it without reading.
I know how you feel about them… and me. I will do my best.
B1AC paced. Dislike our people [link cloud: news feed], but Dellans HATE. [Archived now-dead links: bioelectromagnetism awards and patents] A wire and plug extended from the base of her skull. [File transfer request: private work files.] I find for you, friend/brother. Black box.
Bobcat had taken the files and black-boxed them, along with the surrounding memories. Now they scrolled down the inside of his eyelids, walls and walls of diagrams and text—not Universal Standard either, but one of the Dellan dialects. Dreadful. After a moment, B1AC’s translation module automatically kicked in—it was buggy, clearly gotten through underhanded means, but better than nothing.
Bobcat knew precious little about Della, except what everyone knew. Dozens of warring factions and social-corps, constantly dead-locked in a bio-patents race that ended up annihilating half of them. Not a group Bobcat wanted much to do with, but he and every other cat++ owed them an ambivalent debt of sorts for the bioelectromagnetic research responsible for their implants.
Bobcat didn’t understand the scientific details—not his field, certainly not in a foreign language. But even with the impenetrable, poorly translated jargon, B1AC’s files seemed to imply new high-level biowork, involving organic humanoid constructs and “bioelectromagnetic manipulation/creation for application/use industrial and military [ERROR].”
Well. That wasn’t a huge surprise. Knowing the Dellan fetish for bioelectromagnetism and how M.D. had survived a lightning strike, it’d seemed a natural presumption. She seemed a little… incompetent, though. He could only thank the League for their high-quality English download; his transceiver could barely read M.D., due to the cloud of signal-dampening static that engulfed her, and his broadcast to her had to be boosted to teeth-rattling levels for her to even hear it. Judging by the shouting she’d had to do over the phone and the way the airport monitors had failed in her presence, she was so accustomed to such inconvenience that she hardly noticed. Dellan social-corps had highly ranging norms, but none of them had high regard for that level of failure.
Then he caught the authors of the papers. Even with the glitchy translation and poor file quality, one thing was clear: a coalition of three Dellan factions were responsible for these experiments. A quick cross-reference proved that none of them existed now—they’d all fallen in the patents catastrophe.
Well, whatever M.D. was, and whatever she was intended to do, it was obviously important enough for the respective parties to want her a decade after all the relevant investor-governments had fallen. And it certainly explained the confusion around her ownership.
Suddenly he woke. M.D. was coming back into the lean-to; she must’ve woken and left earlier without him noticing. Raige was also missing.
Is everything all right? Bobcat asked.
“Fine,” she said, rearranging the bedroll. “Go back to sleep; that’s what I’m doing.”
…
Bobcat came out from under the tarp and joined Raige, sitting outside. Still can’t sleep?
Raige shook his head, sending drizzle down the back of his neck. His mental broadcast was pulsing with anxiety and sadness, but at least it was stable. “I’m okay. I just need to think about something else for a while.”
Bobcat came and sat next to him. Well, if you like, I can tell you about myself, and where I come from. I’m a cat++; I doubt you’ve ever met anyone like me before.
“That’s true. Yeah, I’d like that, if it’s okay.” A ray of honest curiosity, shadowed by careful concern—Raige hadn’t wanted to badger Bobcat with questions, but now that he’d been granted permission… “So… there are humans, on your world? You’re… you’re not from a cat planet?”
Bobcat purred with amusement, imagining said cat planet and what B1AC would think of it. Oh, you dear boy. No, I don’t come from a cat planet; I doubt I’d like that very much. Humans are the dominant species in my homeland, just as in yours. You don’t think my people are able to build things like my pack without thumbs, do you?
“Well…” Bobcat felt Raige’s anxious etiquette again, that uncertainty as to what to ask. He also caught a rare, fully formed mental image: Bobcat, hiding retractable fingers and thumbs to keep up a disguise as an Earthling cat.
If Bobcat had to be trapped in alien, black-box territory with atrocious food and strangers, he was glad it was with an endearing boy like this. He held up his paws and flexed his toes, showing that they hid no fingers, only claws. As you can see, none of that! I am not wearing a disguise; this is how I truly look.
“But you look so…” he felt Raige almost say “normal,” then discard it, “you look like the cats at home.”
I was specifically chosen for my ability to be unnoticed. And while our cultural evolution is different, our worlds aren’t far out of step, biologically. Dogs aren’t as popular in my culture, but they exist. So do birds, fish, humans…
“But you can talk.”
That is not from biology. My sapience, my math skills, even a good bit of my personality is encoded on a little computer implanted in my brain, which also allows me to control my pack and my telepathy.
“Whoa. So you’re…” Raige’s eyes lit up. “A cyborg kitty?”
Bobcat wasn’t familiar with the word cyborg, but Raige’s mind supplied it… along with amusing images of large, strapping human men wearing tinfoil.
I suppose that would be fairly accurate.
“That is so cool! She didn’t tell me you were a cyborg!”
It didn’t come up; she didn’t know. You’re free to tell her, if you like.
Raige clearly enjoyed the thought. “What’s it like? How long have you been a cyborg? Did it… hurt?” Anxiety: was it bad to ask that?
Bobcat had answered these questions many times, but he didn’t mind. Answering questions from children was invariably easier than those from adults; children had less to unlearn and less defensiveness. And Raige’s ignorance was refreshing in its straightforward honesty. I was so young when it happened that I don’t remember it. But it didn’t hurt; my implant built itself inside of me, using the chemical building blocks of my own body, growing as I did. It’s quite convenient, most of the time. As long as I back up my system regularly, I have little to fear from brain damage or decay. It’s also easier for me to reprogram maladaptive behaviors—you may notice I don’t have trouble sleeping.
Bobcat immediately regretted the last statement; as the adult of the party, he wanted to appear innately calm and in control, for Raige’s peace of mind (and thus pliability) if nothing else. But Raige didn’t seem to notice.
“That does sound nice. I wish I could do that. Is it weird, having everything on the… the implant?”
I’ve never been any other way. And a great deal of my less-used skills and memories aren’t on my implant at all, but backed up elsewhere, along with every piece of media I’ve consumed that’s worth remembering. Right now, you’re interacting with me at minimum capacity. At home, I would have access to much more. And oh, how he felt the diminishing!
“Wait, so… you can read a book, then put the memory somewhere else, and then you can’t remember the book until you get it back?”
Bobcat hadn’t read a book, the way Raige would’ve understood it, in a very long time. Normally he downloaded text straight into his mind and the information was immediately accessible to him—though he needed to properly go over it and process it if he wanted higher analysis or emotional investment. In his culture, “cliffhangers” required careful formatting and embedded glitches to be carried off well. But that seemed more complexity than Raige needed. If I wanted to, yes, I could.
“So you could reread a book a million times, but have it be like the first time every time?”
This boy was darling. I suppose so, yes! But if it made a big impact on me, enough to inspire me to change my behavior, it would be quite difficult to remove all traces of the story from my mind. So it would work best on works that made little impact on me, and in that situation I doubt I’d want to read them again. Besides, I have little need to reread things, seeing as I have what you would consider an entire library’s worth of books in my mind. With all the choice open to me, why reread?
Raige’s eyes lit up with delight. “Wow, really? You have an inner library?”
I do. And one day, I might have even read half of it!
“Do you have music in your head the same way?”
Music, film, games, forms of media that your society doesn’t have yet. I try not to clutter my implant, but I keep it on external storage.
“VR?”
A little buggy and geared for humans. Not worthwhile, in my opinion, but some enjoy it as an acquired taste. Hugely data-consuming; if I kept such things, I’d keep that on the Sky.
“Is the Sky like the Internet?”
More or less. Only it requires no wires, and it is everywhere.
Raige drummed his fists on his thighs. “That is so cool!” Then a thought seemed to occur to him. “But… does that mean someone could hack you?”
Oh goodness yes! It’s why I keep off-Sky back ups. And that doesn’t cover the adware, snoopware, and general bloatware the implants come with. You have to be very careful with what you get, and mine was originally quite cheap. Would you like an example of what I was like originally?
“If that’s okay…”
Normally, Bobcat wouldn’t have offered. Among people of his own society, it was degrading, humiliating… expected. But Raige didn’t have that cultural context. To him, there would be nothing normal about it, and Bobcat was curious to see his reaction.
Bobcat paused and accessed the kernel of his original programming, normally safely sealed behind its partition. B1AC had defanged it years ago, and was repulsed that he had kept it. Bobcat, though, preferred to remember what he had been.
//0E-11-1A 275 demo.go//
It had been a long time since Bobcat had run his test demo, and the shift was uncomfortable, even though he’d chosen it. He felt his eyes dilate, his mental voice change from an adult’s to a small, adorable child’s, his inner dictionary and grammar changing to the infantile limits that humans found so charming in his society. His body language shifted to kittenish, nonthreatening; he resisted the urge to roll onto his back and bare his belly.
Hewwo! I’m Bobcat, youw pewsonal Petcawe Companion! [Error file not found] [Error]
Raige startled. His expression was aghast.
Bobcat ended the demo, hiding his satisfaction. Repulsive, isn’t it?
Yes, Raige’s mind said. “It’s… it’s different.”
The chemical effects on my eyes and mood have since been connected with epilepsy; they don’t allow that anymore. And it’s still not the full experience; normally that would’ve been accompanied by full sensory ads tailored to your demographic information, if not your personal profile supplied by your implant. But I had that software excised years ago, thank goodness.
It had been the first thing B1AC had ever done for him—she had cracked her own chip not long prior, and he had trusted her enough to open his mind and soul to her, knowing she would not hijack it for her own ends. He would never forget his vulnerability… and that she had been so deserving of it. Other chip-crackers would’ve been unable to resist the power to change his very being, to do things such as take away his demo because why would he need a reminder of his own subjugation?
“By who? Your…” Raige almost said “owner,” but then kindly rethought it, “human? Do you even have a human?”
Not anymore, no. My chip was changed by other cats++ like myself. We reprogram our minds to suit ourselves. That I speak the way I do, and without adware, is a bold statement at home; it says that I have taken my life and ownership into my own hands.
“I have to be honest, I like the way you talk and act now way better. I mean, you’re a grown-up kitty, right? It’d be weird for you to talk like a little kid—I mean, kitten.”
I agree, but a lot of people on my world find a cat speaking like this very threatening—they like talking to us, but not so much when we talk back. And it can be an ambivalent experience, knowing that the only reason I can speak this way is because of a computer that was originally implanted in me without my understanding or consent. Still, I am pleased with the person I have tailored myself to be.
“Me too.” Raige reached forward, then froze with his hand in midair. “Oh Jeez. Does that mean, petting you is…?”
Bobcat laughed. In my home world, yes. But we are not there, and there’s no way you could have known proper cat++ etiquette. I appreciate your thoughtfulness; perhaps you can pet me some other time.
Raige took his hand back. “Sorry.”
It’s fine. Now, as it happens, I do still have a few media files onhand—airport reading, you know—and I can broadcast the experience mentally to you, if you like. There’ll be a bit of a lag and fidelity loss, but—
“Oh yeah! Please!”
And Bobcat broadcast Raige a vid feed of some dreadful radical cat++ motion performance that B1AC had given him. She loved the stuff; Bobcat personally found it heavy-handed and propagandistic, but had intended to watch it because he knew it would please her. Music played while cats leaped, pounced, and tumbled, with packs and without, a feline deconstructualist dance devoted to the overthrow of the human oppressor—quite literally, the Man. It followed the story of a cat++ family, torn apart by human perfidy, a mother seeking her lost kittens, and while Raige didn’t seem to understand many of the subtleties, he certainly seemed fascinated enough. Through his eyes, even the most hackneyed of radical ideology seemed fresh, new, and wondrous.
When the last bombastic chord faded away with the picture, Raige was radiating sleepiness, but also gentle contentment. Bobcat had succeeded in distracting him, as well as himself. They may have been in an alien forest, like and unlike what they knew. But they had video, and they had conversation, and that was comforting.
“Thanks,” Raige said. “I think I can sleep now.”
Any time.
And they crawled back under the tarp and went to bed. M.D. didn’t rouse.
Series: Infinity Smashed
Word Count: ~3300
Summary: Raige is too stressed out to sleep, so Bobcat decides to give him something else to think about and teach him about the chip that makes Bobcat Bobcat. He also breaks inter-dimensional intellectual property law.
Notes: Squishes together “Brain Hacks” and “Use Industrial and Military”. Reposting for simplicity, due to edits.
The moment Bobcat closed his eyes, he was bombarded with messages: //WARNING! Prolonged disconnection from the Sky leads to system instability! Please see a service technician immediately!// and //WARNING! You have chosen to force-reduce your levels of stress response! Continued use of this can lead to permanent damage!// and //WARNING! You have not downloaded patches or updates in 84 hours!// Bobcat dismissed the troubleshooting offers and kept the force-reduce on, so that his anxiety would be mild and easily manageable.
Even so, he knew that the messages were just the start. By design, the implant that supplied his higher functions needed constant Sky contact; he had maybe a week before data corruption started reducing his mental resources noticeably. Eventually, he’d be nothing but a brain-damaged minus-cat… if he didn’t starve first.
Dinner had been unappetizing. Bobcat was used to a mix of synthetic meat, bone, eggs, and vitamins, grown and printed specifically for his nutritional needs. Rawlins—M.D., she’d asked he call her M.D.—had beef jerky. Cheap beef jerky. And not much of it.
Bobcat had commanded his implant to slow his metabolism, force-reduced his hunger signals, and eaten as best he could. But he knew the supplies would be gone quickly. They needed to leave this forest.
Bobcat’s emergency transport was at least somewhat functional. After all, it’d gotten them here, and at least some of its safety features remained intact. But even if it could still be activated, there was no way of knowing where it’d send them next—and chance favored hard vacuum. So first, they needed to know where they were. Once he knew that, he could calculate the transport’s level of distortion, and from there predict where it would send them next, or how best to correct for it.
The first thing on that list was to plug in every scrap of data he and his transponder had accumulated and cross-reference it against the overlap directories to try and narrow down their location. But that would have to wait for morning; it was too high-level a task to run this late at night.
Bobcat had to sleep like any other cat, but the implant stayed awake even if his body didn’t, leaving him quietly cognizant and running routine self-maintenance. Since the implant forbade a natural REM cycle, it provided instead a sort of mental screen saver that recycled and rehashed recent events as it processed them for better long-term storage.
He’d never missed dreaming. His implantation had taken place so early in his kitten-hood that he felt no sense of loss, and anyway, having such linear narrative “dreams” sometimes helped jog his memory. So he rested, watching his memory unspool and replay.
First, more recent memories—his transponder’s unfortunate (though unsurprising) report of no broadcasting societies within range, the boy’s meltdown, the accident, the client’s lack of reaction. Not a good sign for her ability to reintegrate into normal society, but Bobcat could be opportunistic if he had to be, and in the current crisis, he’d take her artificial calm.
The memories moved further back. Nothing new there; he’d already processed these memories the night before, but Bobcat let them scroll anyway, hoping it’d trigger an idea. Tracking her at the hospital, coming down to this society, receiving the job, M.D.’s nickname…
(Bobcat. He liked that nickname—a common human name, combined with the domestic feline name, creating the name for a dangerous wildcat! It was clever, a hint of feline edge under a veneer of human civility. Perhaps he’d keep it.)
//NOTIFICATION: You have unprocessed black box memories. Process?//
Oh! Bobcat had deleted that memory trace. //Y//
In a society constantly connected by wireless, Bobcat’s people had to keep some information private somehow. “Black box” memories were the answer, kept separate, locked down, and offline to prevent hacking. Normally, they couldn’t be processed except in the extreme privacy of a dead room, specifically built to block the omnipresent Sky, but this forest’s electromagnetic barbarism gave Bobcat a chance.
After a moment for the memories to load, Bobcat found himself back at the dead-room workshop of his friend and fellow cat++, Fluji B1AC. They’d been implanted together as kittens and remained friends through adulthood, though she had descended to underbelly hack-and-cracking while he had ascended to middle-class respectability through social work.
B1AC’s implant was not rigged for human-sounding communication like his. Her stream was raw discomfort and aggravation, cluttered with spiderwebs of multimedia ephemera, associations, and feelings. Dislike, friend/brother. DISLIKE. She meant the Rawlins case, which at the time Bobcat had only just received.Construct, like/unlike us [array of construct identifiers, with “other” highlighted], small child/kitten thing (WORST), and DELLAN? [Link cloud, all broken] Unpleasant associations, this job.
Nuzzle, grooming—an attempt to mimic their natural, original behavior. Her scent, familiar and sharp with metal and soldering.
If it’s a construct, better it be with me, Bobcat said. The League’s construct union is imperfect—
B1AC responded with a sarcastic cluster web of angry textual arguments that had been posted within the past week on the group union bulletin… which was supposed to be inaccessible to her. Bobcat dismissed it without reading.
I know how you feel about them… and me. I will do my best.
B1AC paced. Dislike our people [link cloud: news feed], but Dellans HATE. [Archived now-dead links: bioelectromagnetism awards and patents] A wire and plug extended from the base of her skull. [File transfer request: private work files.] I find for you, friend/brother. Black box.
Bobcat had taken the files and black-boxed them, along with the surrounding memories. Now they scrolled down the inside of his eyelids, walls and walls of diagrams and text—not Universal Standard either, but one of the Dellan dialects. Dreadful. After a moment, B1AC’s translation module automatically kicked in—it was buggy, clearly gotten through underhanded means, but better than nothing.
Bobcat knew precious little about Della, except what everyone knew. Dozens of warring factions and social-corps, constantly dead-locked in a bio-patents race that ended up annihilating half of them. Not a group Bobcat wanted much to do with, but he and every other cat++ owed them an ambivalent debt of sorts for the bioelectromagnetic research responsible for their implants.
Bobcat didn’t understand the scientific details—not his field, certainly not in a foreign language. But even with the impenetrable, poorly translated jargon, B1AC’s files seemed to imply new high-level biowork, involving organic humanoid constructs and “bioelectromagnetic manipulation/creation for application/use industrial and military [ERROR].”
Well. That wasn’t a huge surprise. Knowing the Dellan fetish for bioelectromagnetism and how M.D. had survived a lightning strike, it’d seemed a natural presumption. She seemed a little… incompetent, though. He could only thank the League for their high-quality English download; his transceiver could barely read M.D., due to the cloud of signal-dampening static that engulfed her, and his broadcast to her had to be boosted to teeth-rattling levels for her to even hear it. Judging by the shouting she’d had to do over the phone and the way the airport monitors had failed in her presence, she was so accustomed to such inconvenience that she hardly noticed. Dellan social-corps had highly ranging norms, but none of them had high regard for that level of failure.
Then he caught the authors of the papers. Even with the glitchy translation and poor file quality, one thing was clear: a coalition of three Dellan factions were responsible for these experiments. A quick cross-reference proved that none of them existed now—they’d all fallen in the patents catastrophe.
Well, whatever M.D. was, and whatever she was intended to do, it was obviously important enough for the respective parties to want her a decade after all the relevant investor-governments had fallen. And it certainly explained the confusion around her ownership.
Suddenly he woke. M.D. was coming back into the lean-to; she must’ve woken and left earlier without him noticing. Raige was also missing.
Is everything all right? Bobcat asked.
“Fine,” she said, rearranging the bedroll. “Go back to sleep; that’s what I’m doing.”
…
Bobcat came out from under the tarp and joined Raige, sitting outside. Still can’t sleep?
Raige shook his head, sending drizzle down the back of his neck. His mental broadcast was pulsing with anxiety and sadness, but at least it was stable. “I’m okay. I just need to think about something else for a while.”
Bobcat came and sat next to him. Well, if you like, I can tell you about myself, and where I come from. I’m a cat++; I doubt you’ve ever met anyone like me before.
“That’s true. Yeah, I’d like that, if it’s okay.” A ray of honest curiosity, shadowed by careful concern—Raige hadn’t wanted to badger Bobcat with questions, but now that he’d been granted permission… “So… there are humans, on your world? You’re… you’re not from a cat planet?”
Bobcat purred with amusement, imagining said cat planet and what B1AC would think of it. Oh, you dear boy. No, I don’t come from a cat planet; I doubt I’d like that very much. Humans are the dominant species in my homeland, just as in yours. You don’t think my people are able to build things like my pack without thumbs, do you?
“Well…” Bobcat felt Raige’s anxious etiquette again, that uncertainty as to what to ask. He also caught a rare, fully formed mental image: Bobcat, hiding retractable fingers and thumbs to keep up a disguise as an Earthling cat.
If Bobcat had to be trapped in alien, black-box territory with atrocious food and strangers, he was glad it was with an endearing boy like this. He held up his paws and flexed his toes, showing that they hid no fingers, only claws. As you can see, none of that! I am not wearing a disguise; this is how I truly look.
“But you look so…” he felt Raige almost say “normal,” then discard it, “you look like the cats at home.”
I was specifically chosen for my ability to be unnoticed. And while our cultural evolution is different, our worlds aren’t far out of step, biologically. Dogs aren’t as popular in my culture, but they exist. So do birds, fish, humans…
“But you can talk.”
That is not from biology. My sapience, my math skills, even a good bit of my personality is encoded on a little computer implanted in my brain, which also allows me to control my pack and my telepathy.
“Whoa. So you’re…” Raige’s eyes lit up. “A cyborg kitty?”
Bobcat wasn’t familiar with the word cyborg, but Raige’s mind supplied it… along with amusing images of large, strapping human men wearing tinfoil.
I suppose that would be fairly accurate.
“That is so cool! She didn’t tell me you were a cyborg!”
It didn’t come up; she didn’t know. You’re free to tell her, if you like.
Raige clearly enjoyed the thought. “What’s it like? How long have you been a cyborg? Did it… hurt?” Anxiety: was it bad to ask that?
Bobcat had answered these questions many times, but he didn’t mind. Answering questions from children was invariably easier than those from adults; children had less to unlearn and less defensiveness. And Raige’s ignorance was refreshing in its straightforward honesty. I was so young when it happened that I don’t remember it. But it didn’t hurt; my implant built itself inside of me, using the chemical building blocks of my own body, growing as I did. It’s quite convenient, most of the time. As long as I back up my system regularly, I have little to fear from brain damage or decay. It’s also easier for me to reprogram maladaptive behaviors—you may notice I don’t have trouble sleeping.
Bobcat immediately regretted the last statement; as the adult of the party, he wanted to appear innately calm and in control, for Raige’s peace of mind (and thus pliability) if nothing else. But Raige didn’t seem to notice.
“That does sound nice. I wish I could do that. Is it weird, having everything on the… the implant?”
I’ve never been any other way. And a great deal of my less-used skills and memories aren’t on my implant at all, but backed up elsewhere, along with every piece of media I’ve consumed that’s worth remembering. Right now, you’re interacting with me at minimum capacity. At home, I would have access to much more. And oh, how he felt the diminishing!
“Wait, so… you can read a book, then put the memory somewhere else, and then you can’t remember the book until you get it back?”
Bobcat hadn’t read a book, the way Raige would’ve understood it, in a very long time. Normally he downloaded text straight into his mind and the information was immediately accessible to him—though he needed to properly go over it and process it if he wanted higher analysis or emotional investment. In his culture, “cliffhangers” required careful formatting and embedded glitches to be carried off well. But that seemed more complexity than Raige needed. If I wanted to, yes, I could.
“So you could reread a book a million times, but have it be like the first time every time?”
This boy was darling. I suppose so, yes! But if it made a big impact on me, enough to inspire me to change my behavior, it would be quite difficult to remove all traces of the story from my mind. So it would work best on works that made little impact on me, and in that situation I doubt I’d want to read them again. Besides, I have little need to reread things, seeing as I have what you would consider an entire library’s worth of books in my mind. With all the choice open to me, why reread?
Raige’s eyes lit up with delight. “Wow, really? You have an inner library?”
I do. And one day, I might have even read half of it!
“Do you have music in your head the same way?”
Music, film, games, forms of media that your society doesn’t have yet. I try not to clutter my implant, but I keep it on external storage.
“VR?”
A little buggy and geared for humans. Not worthwhile, in my opinion, but some enjoy it as an acquired taste. Hugely data-consuming; if I kept such things, I’d keep that on the Sky.
“Is the Sky like the Internet?”
More or less. Only it requires no wires, and it is everywhere.
Raige drummed his fists on his thighs. “That is so cool!” Then a thought seemed to occur to him. “But… does that mean someone could hack you?”
Oh goodness yes! It’s why I keep off-Sky back ups. And that doesn’t cover the adware, snoopware, and general bloatware the implants come with. You have to be very careful with what you get, and mine was originally quite cheap. Would you like an example of what I was like originally?
“If that’s okay…”
Normally, Bobcat wouldn’t have offered. Among people of his own society, it was degrading, humiliating… expected. But Raige didn’t have that cultural context. To him, there would be nothing normal about it, and Bobcat was curious to see his reaction.
Bobcat paused and accessed the kernel of his original programming, normally safely sealed behind its partition. B1AC had defanged it years ago, and was repulsed that he had kept it. Bobcat, though, preferred to remember what he had been.
//0E-11-1A 275 demo.go//
It had been a long time since Bobcat had run his test demo, and the shift was uncomfortable, even though he’d chosen it. He felt his eyes dilate, his mental voice change from an adult’s to a small, adorable child’s, his inner dictionary and grammar changing to the infantile limits that humans found so charming in his society. His body language shifted to kittenish, nonthreatening; he resisted the urge to roll onto his back and bare his belly.
Hewwo! I’m Bobcat, youw pewsonal Petcawe Companion! [Error file not found] [Error]
Raige startled. His expression was aghast.
Bobcat ended the demo, hiding his satisfaction. Repulsive, isn’t it?
Yes, Raige’s mind said. “It’s… it’s different.”
The chemical effects on my eyes and mood have since been connected with epilepsy; they don’t allow that anymore. And it’s still not the full experience; normally that would’ve been accompanied by full sensory ads tailored to your demographic information, if not your personal profile supplied by your implant. But I had that software excised years ago, thank goodness.
It had been the first thing B1AC had ever done for him—she had cracked her own chip not long prior, and he had trusted her enough to open his mind and soul to her, knowing she would not hijack it for her own ends. He would never forget his vulnerability… and that she had been so deserving of it. Other chip-crackers would’ve been unable to resist the power to change his very being, to do things such as take away his demo because why would he need a reminder of his own subjugation?
“By who? Your…” Raige almost said “owner,” but then kindly rethought it, “human? Do you even have a human?”
Not anymore, no. My chip was changed by other cats++ like myself. We reprogram our minds to suit ourselves. That I speak the way I do, and without adware, is a bold statement at home; it says that I have taken my life and ownership into my own hands.
“I have to be honest, I like the way you talk and act now way better. I mean, you’re a grown-up kitty, right? It’d be weird for you to talk like a little kid—I mean, kitten.”
I agree, but a lot of people on my world find a cat speaking like this very threatening—they like talking to us, but not so much when we talk back. And it can be an ambivalent experience, knowing that the only reason I can speak this way is because of a computer that was originally implanted in me without my understanding or consent. Still, I am pleased with the person I have tailored myself to be.
“Me too.” Raige reached forward, then froze with his hand in midair. “Oh Jeez. Does that mean, petting you is…?”
Bobcat laughed. In my home world, yes. But we are not there, and there’s no way you could have known proper cat++ etiquette. I appreciate your thoughtfulness; perhaps you can pet me some other time.
Raige took his hand back. “Sorry.”
It’s fine. Now, as it happens, I do still have a few media files onhand—airport reading, you know—and I can broadcast the experience mentally to you, if you like. There’ll be a bit of a lag and fidelity loss, but—
“Oh yeah! Please!”
And Bobcat broadcast Raige a vid feed of some dreadful radical cat++ motion performance that B1AC had given him. She loved the stuff; Bobcat personally found it heavy-handed and propagandistic, but had intended to watch it because he knew it would please her. Music played while cats leaped, pounced, and tumbled, with packs and without, a feline deconstructualist dance devoted to the overthrow of the human oppressor—quite literally, the Man. It followed the story of a cat++ family, torn apart by human perfidy, a mother seeking her lost kittens, and while Raige didn’t seem to understand many of the subtleties, he certainly seemed fascinated enough. Through his eyes, even the most hackneyed of radical ideology seemed fresh, new, and wondrous.
When the last bombastic chord faded away with the picture, Raige was radiating sleepiness, but also gentle contentment. Bobcat had succeeded in distracting him, as well as himself. They may have been in an alien forest, like and unlike what they knew. But they had video, and they had conversation, and that was comforting.
“Thanks,” Raige said. “I think I can sleep now.”
Any time.
And they crawled back under the tarp and went to bed. M.D. didn’t rouse.