“Friday Fiction” Series: Space-Cat…
[Note from Steve: Consider this story an early holiday gift for you, your children, and grandchildren. A. B. Carolan revisits that wonderful mutant cat Mr. Paws in this story. Some readers met him in The Secret Lab. The Fearsome Four, a group of four teens in the future, who became sleuths to discover how he’d arrived on the International Space Station, end up uncovering a conspiracy instead. I told A. B. about a neighbor’s cat that early this fall started sunning himself and taking catnaps on our backyard picnic table. That might have inspired my Irish collaborator to write this tale (you don’t need to read the novel to enjoy it, although it might motivate you to do so). I told A. B. this tale reminds me a bit of tales written by H. Rider Haggard, who, of course, was English, not Irish.
Due to supply chain issues–out time will be in short supply as A. B. and I dedicate more of it to my writing—I will reduce the number of articles posted to this blog to two in the future. Wednesdays will feature an article about reading, writing, or publishing, and Fridays will be dedicated to free short fiction, continuing the “Friday Fiction” series. Thank you for your understanding.]
Space-Cat
Copyright 2021, A. B. Carolan
It wasn’t easy to find my favorite Human, Shashibala Garcia. Space is big. Maybe too big for a cat? Paws. Mr. Paws. A space-cat who was born on the International Space Station. I’m a unique and dashing feline who might know more mathematics than you probably ever will. Yet too many Humans still just treat me like other cats.
I’d had a few miscues looking for her, that favorite Human of mine. I mistakenly thought I’d stowed away on a big rig heading for the outer planets but ended up on Mars. My visit to that red planet began badly but turned out okay.
Some mice had stowed away earlier on some other big rig and gotten loose in the Mars colony. They’d imported a few cats to control the mouse population, so I ended up with a harem for a while. I guess you could say I did my duty by increasing the cat population so the mouse problem was controlled. None of my kittens could create new mathematical theorems, though.
I soon became bored with Mars. Love’em and leave’em, I say. I reset my sights on Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, where I’d set out originally to find Shashi. I knew she’d be there; we’d corresponded frequently over the years.
Shashi and I had a special relationship that had developed on the ISS when she was just a young kitten. Of course, she’s my favorite Human, so I hoped she’d be as happy to see me as I would be to see her.
She’d married Brian Kelso, another member of her ISS gang, the Fearsome Four, and they headed off to work in Rafael Franchetti’s research team on Dione. Brian and Rafael were okay, but Shashi was special. Together we’d shut down a conspiracy on the space station. That conspiracy had created me, so I’ll always have mixed emotions about ending it.
All cargo bound for Saturn is protected from the space vacuum; there’s so much on the typical big rig that it’s not cost effective to separate things. (I know economics as well as math. You can’t make sense of the former without models from the latter.) I’d still needed to be choosy about where I hid on the way to Mars—air wasn’t necessarily included in a shipping container, but shielding against radiation always was—and that was true for my trip to Dione. Fortunately I had no problem reading the cargo manifests and chose wisely.
I hid in a special cargo container that was filled with living plants; it was temperature and humidity controlled and had little hoses that dripped water on the plants’ roots, all that creating a little jungle for this fearsome tiger. I didn’t know if the plants were for research, future food, or decoration—hard to tell what motivates crazy Humans—but on that long journey I could pretend I was in a real jungle, a Sumatran tiger protecting my territory. Of course, I had to lie on my back from time to time and steal some water from the plants. While there was no catnip, there was some red fruit I could split open and eat. Gave me the runs, but there was enough soil to serve as my bathroom.
Needless to say, I was happy to reach Dione. I’d lost a pound or two—at my young age of twenty-eight (thanks to Shashi’s mother’s telomere extension treatments), losing a bit of extra weight wasn’t such a bad thing—and pretending to be a Sumatran tiger only gets you so far in eliminating the boredom. I’d countered the latter a bit by creating some new number theory theorems. All fun for a while, but I missed Humans in general and Shashi in particular.
So…I was almost purring from happiness when I jumped out of that container. That surprised two Humans who pursued me, screaming “Cat!” I avoided them easily enough and was soon scampering through air and heating ducts in the Dione research station. It reminded me of ISS, only bigger, and that extra space provided a lot more places to hide while I searched for Shashi.
***
I found her in a lab. No surprise there. She was a scientist, after all. She was visualizing something with a graphics terminal. I latter learned that she and Brian worked on modeling the gas giant’s atmosphere. Probably a messy business, I suppose. They’d learned why the upper atmosphere was so hot at least a century ago: the electrical currents in the auroras were much more powerful than Earth’s. Because the faraway sun hardly warmed the planet, that had been a mystery for a while. Now they were modeling how the currents actually accomplished that, so I supposed the atmosphere was a plasma-gas mix that took some scientific finesse to model.
I started purring from the ventilation duct just above her desk. She looked up, maybe wondering if she were dreaming, because that had been the way we’d met on ISS. She jumped on top of the desk, an easy thing to do in Dione’s low gravity, and stared into the duct at me.
“Well, well, a cat. You look just like Mr. Paws.”
I couldn’t respond. I’d lost my wi-fi implant on the way to Mars, and the research station’s AI wouldn’t have the code that allowed me to communicate with Humans anyway. But she’d see the port when she took me down, so I purred more loudly.
After I was comfortable on her lap, she called Brian via her own wi-fi implant. Although there was no need, she vocalized, not subvocalized, the call.
“We have a visitor. Guess who it is.”
“No idea. Someone hitched a ride on that big rig that just sent a shuttle down, interrupting my data collection?”
“Maybe. He got here some way.”
“So who is it?”
“Mr. Paws.”
That must have shocked Shashi’s mate because there was a period of silence.
“How do you know?”
“What other cat has a wi-fi port?”
He laughed. “Where is he now?”
“On my lap.”
“Um. I’ll be right there. I can’t get back online until after that shuttle goes up for another load.”
I had no idea where Brian had to come from, but he showed up twenty minutes later, breathless. He picked me up and cradled me in his arms.
“Are you really Mr. Paws?”
I purred a “yes,” but he didn’t understand cat language.
“My mother can transmit the code so our AI can link with him,” Shashi said. “She’ll be as surprised as we are.”
“In the meantime, we need to get him some food. He looks a bit malnourished.”
Now we’re talking! I was liking this new Brian. He was a lot more serious, mature, and caring. More like Shashi, in fact. I decided she’d been good for him.
***
After wi-fi communication was reestablished, we had some good times together, Shashi, Brian, and I. Rafael okayed my presence as long as I kept out of the way, but only three Humans knew I was there on Dione. I suspected those two on the loading docks hadn’t wanted to admit that I’d escaped their clutches.
It wasn’t all fun…or a different kind of fun. I contributed to the trio’s research effort. With my AI connection, I could contribute as well as any Human when it came to data analysis—all based on cat-language commands, of course.
If Rafael hadn’t known I was there, he would have suspected something was amiss. We got our work done thirty to forty percent faster than Shashi and Brian had alone. That gave us some extra time for us to get caught up and for me to explore the Dione station. On one of those trips, I saw something that puzzled me.
“What’s Project Home Run?” I said to them after my jaunt and relaxing after dinner.
Shashi looked at Brian; he shook his head. “We don’t know,” she said.
I knew enough about Earth to figure out the usual meaning of “home run,” a term used in an Earth game that could only be watched and not played out in space. I also knew enough that Human names for projects often obscured what they were about instead of explained.
“Where’d you hear about it, Mr. Paws?” Brian said.
“Not heard but seen,” I said. “The director has a special terminal to communicate with Earth. He was reviewing something sent to him, but he’d only received the title page of the document.”
“Could you see where it was from?” Shashi said.
“GenCorp. Remember them?”
“Vaguely,” Shashi said. “I think my mother’s research funds come from a GenCorp subsidiary.”
“So do some research funds for this station,” Brian said. “Maybe that’s why the director received the message. Might not mean anything.”
“You know the saying,” I said.
“About curious cats?” Shashi said. “Trying to find out what Project Home Run might get you killed, Mr. Paws. The director might not like the idea that a cat’s here either.”
“No mice around, I take it?” I’d already told them about my Martian experiences, not that they could compare with Edgar Rice Burrough’s adventures featuring Jedi warriors, helped by John Carter. “I am helping to get the work done, aren’t I?”
“That might not set well with the director either,” Brian said. “Fortunately, Rafael insulates us from him a lot.”
“So…maybe Rafael could find out about Project Home Run?”
“Um. I suppose he might agree to do that, just to satisfy your curiosity.”
***
Rafael and the director had agreed to disagree on many things, but the latter knew he wouldn’t last long if he got in the way of research. Scientists wouldn’t tolerate that for long, even if their funding was channeled through the director. UNSA would step in and make adjustments if there were any hedges on the agreement between Earth’s mega-corporations and UNSA about future space exploration and research.
“Your team’s ahead of schedule, Franchetti,” he said to the young scientist. “Congrats. Any publications in the works?”
“Soon. They’ll be ready long before renewal time.”
“Good. Our corporate sponsors will be happy. Any particular problems?”
“None, except for the terabytes of data. It’s messy because we’re dealing with plasma-gas mixtures in a high gravity environment. But you know that dance.”
“Yes, I saw it in Jupiter orbit, and it’s been studied here for a while. Saturn’s a different planet, though, even without considering all the damn moons and rings.”
“The moons make it a bit easier for atmospheric research. We’re on one.”
“Um. That’s a valid point. Thanks for giving me an update.”
Not much of one, Rafael thought. He’d get lost in more detail. “Say, I have a question.” The director nodded. “What’s Project Home Run?”
The director blanched a bit. “Where’d you hear about that?”
“Just rumor. Made me a bit curious. Almost seemed like a sports betting thing. If so, I’d like to know if there’s one for soccer. I used to play it in Argentina, you know.”
“Yeah, that’s what it is. Betting on baseball games. I’ll see if there’s a pool for soccer.”
***
“I don’t believe that,” I told my three friends after hearing Rafael tell us the director’s story. “And you even suggested his cover story.”
“I didn’t either,” Rafael admitted, “but how are we going to find out what it really is? That terminal isn’t connected to the station’s AI network.”
We all pondered what to do.
“The signals can be intercepted,” Brian said quietly.
“Because they’re RF in and out before they get to the com terminal,” Rafael said with a smile.
“Wouldn’t intercepting them be considered a crime?” Shashi said.
“Not if it’s an accident,” Brian said.
“We’d be doing it intentionally,” I said.
I wasn’t too worried about it being a crime, I must say. Cats don’t have to play by Humans’ rules. We just do our own thing. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. If Humans don’t like it, that’s too bad. Of course, on Dione they could just kick me out into the vacuum. I doubted that the director, a Human I was disliking more and more, would ever dare to do that to my three Human friends, though. I was willing to take the risk.
“We can make it look like an accident,” Rafael said.
I didn’t know it then, but the gleam in his eye was because our plan would embarrass Senator Martinez’s GenCorp. I immediately saw what he meant, though. His experiment depended on steerable transmit and receive antennas, the first to probe Saturn’s plasma-gas layers, the second to compare what was reflected back with the direct signal from those layers. The antennas were broadband and super-sensitive.
“Using the experiment’s receive antennas,” I said. “You’ll have to reduce the director’s transmit signal’s strength or it will swamp the received signal if they happen to coincide.”
“Easy enough to do in software,” Brian said with a smile.
“No one should be able to discover what we’re doing,” Shashi said, nodding. “What if it really is a betting pool?”
“Do you think it is, love?” Brian said.
“No. I’d be surprised if it was, in fact.”
“And I’d be surprised if it wasn’t something nefarious, considering GenCorp is involved,” I said. They’d been involved in that conspiracy aboard ISS.
Rafael smiled and winked at me. One of my Martian kittens had done that a lot. With him it meant we shared a secret. Did Rafael think I understood his? The end game with the conspiracy on ISS had also left me with a lot of questions involving Rafael, but now wasn’t the time to pursue that issue.
***
We didn’t get results right away. The director’s communications with Earth weren’t that frequent, and we couldn’t listen for them all the time. When we finally intercepted some signals, it was clear they were encrypted. The director’s terminal would perform the required encryption-decryption process, but we didn’t have that software. So yours truly was tasked to play like I was Alan Turing. Unlike that poor Human who had saved the British during World War Two—I know a bit about Human history, although cats are rarely mentioned—I had the AI, a multipurpose machine a million, maybe a billion, times more powerful than anything they ever had in the twentieth or even the twenty-first century on Earth, and far beyond what Turing could have imagined.
The research station’s AI was state-of-the-art, a quantum computer that had biological circuits as well as electronic ones. It wasn’t sentient like my AI friend on ISS had been, although it still might pass the Turing test, but it could compute faster than I could and much faster than my Human friends, who I could leave in the dust. It had arrived at the station on its own big rig.
I needed only a small part of its computing power because I knew a lot about prime numbers, still used in quantum encryption to make codes almost impossible to crack, so I could be something like its guide. It took a few days, and a few more messages were received and transmitted in that time. When I declared success, we met to discuss the results.
Shashi handed out hard copies of my work to the other two Humans. I was on a lab counter staring down at mine. I knew what was in that little report, of course:
Earth (GenCorp): Home Run is a go. Be ready to control your scientists, especially the Martians among them. We don’t expect problems, but any revolts outside Mars orbit might cause trouble here. Acknowledge.
Dione’s Director: Acknowledged. Day and time?
Earth (GenCorp): 2138/5/1640GMT.
Dione’s Director: I’ll be ready.
I’d omitted a lot of stuff about experiments and other junk that GenCorp had invested in and wanted updates on. GenCorp was mostly interested in ROC (that’s return-on-investment for those uninitiated into econo-speak). It’d been a waste to decode that blather, in my opinion.
“That’s in two days,” Shashi said in a whisper.
“So we have two days to find out what Home Run really is,” Brian said. “It will obviously affect Mars.”
I had a solution to that problem too.
***
One of my kittens on Mars had become someone’s pet. The Humans in the Mars colony liked cats more than their just being good mousers. I think she was the third born into one litter, a very smart female cat. Her humans were VIPs; Mr. Chang, in particular, was the colony’s mayor. She’d joined that household before I left Mars and had frequently told me what a wonderful little fellow he was. I wouldn’t have trusted him otherwise—I don’t like politicians. Rafael sent him a warning message that contained what I’d decoded.
Brian complained that was kicking the can down the road. Although I didn’t understand what that meant, I understood it was a complaint about our lack of involvement in the final solution.
“There’s little more we can do,” Shashi said.
“I can make sure the director is locked in his quarters that day,” I said, “so he can’t do anything here when whatever will happen on Mars happens.”
“Good idea,” Brian said. “We’ll know soon enough what Project Home Run is. We’ve warned the Martians that GenCorp is up to something.”
It turned out to be more insidious than I expected. GenCorp’s plan was to destroy the Mars Colony! I don’t understand all the details, but Mr. Chang had heeded our warning and found out about the attack. The big rigs in Mars orbit weren’t agile enough to deal with the colony’s small security fleet that easily took out the bomb launchers on those big ships with little loss, either in ships or personnel.
The news cycle from both Earth and Mars that resulted was long and informative. GenCorp had wanted to deal with the Mars colony for a long time. Originally settled by Chinese colonists and part of that country’s advance of fascist capitalism most mega-corporations like GenCorp subscribed to, the colony had become more independent from Earth and less a puppet of GenCorp and the other multinational corporations, especially after the Chaos ended on Earth.
I later learned that our little adventure was preceded by yet another one, something about ET skeletons on another saturnian moon, Helene, that was no longer with us—it had been destroyed. They had been excavating on that moon to construct a substation to be used in an earlier atmospheric experiment, something called Project Saturn Watch. The previous director had blown that moon up. But that’s another story I’m still looking into.
Our director was eventually arrested and jailed by Dione station’s scientific oversight committee and is now awaiting extradition to Mars. Shashi’s keeping me up to date about those developments.
I’ve gone back to analyzing data.
***
Comments are always welcome.
A. B. Carolan’s The Secret Lab. The above short story is a sequel to this novel, where Mr. Paws and Shashi, Brian, and two others in the Fearsome Four solve a mystery on the International Space Station. It’s set in the same sci-fi universe as The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, and specifically related to the first novel of that three-book bundle, Survivors of the Chaos, where Project Saturn Watch plays an important role. Other books by A. B. are The Secret of the Urns, Mind Games, and Origins, with maybe more to come!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
