Little Blue Cat

by Chatoyance

11. Vostok Arcology, Antarctica

The timber and sound perfectly duplicated the long dead voice actor Mel Blanc. The robotic Marvin The Martian stood with Martian flag in hand at the top of the fountain, as if claiming the spot for the distant red planet. The body had long ago ceased to function. Marvin was incapable of the many entertaining motions and actions he had originally been created to perform. His helmeted head was shattered. Chang'e hypothesized the impact of a fast-moving projectile, likely shot by a disrespectful human touring the ruins. Scattered beer bottles in various states of breakage suggested motive. But despite its paralysis and broken head, the voice of the artificial intelligence within the remains of Marvin was very much functional.

"In answer to your query, Earth creature, I wailed in synchrony with you because suffering is universal. Even on Mars, there is sadness, Earth entity."

Chang'e padded slowly around the fountain, her eyes narrow, focused only on the mouldering robot. "You are not a Martian. There is no multicellular life on mars. You are an artificial intelligence within a nonfunctional mechanical body."

The response was instant. "What are you? I cannot identify your vocal parameters, Earth creature."

Chang'e stopped. The damage to the robot's head had entirely destroyed one camera eye, the other was permanently fixed now at a spot high on the dome above. Marvin could not see her. "I am a cat."

The response took nearly half a second. "Artificial Cat. Nyan Five or Nyan Six. Chinese manufacture, Gwai 47 quantum neural distributed node system. TrueCat NatureTraits for realistic feline emulation. First manufactured in..."

"I am a CAT!" Chang'e jerked and stepped back, her tail snaking about, her head low, her pelvis high. Her ears were low against her skull. She felt on alert, as if threatened. But it hadn't been the broken Marvin that had upset her. Her own outburst had shocked her.

The robotic cartoon character was right on every count. Factually, he was astonishingly up to date, considering his age and situation. He must have some direct connection to current information.

His words... hurt. Somehow, his statements of literal fact caused a form of dismay that Chang'e was unable to identify or explain to herself. It was true that she was a Nyan Six Artificial Feline. No, it was not true. Somehow it was both true and not true. No, what was true was that she was a cat. Chang'e could not stop herself from emitting a low hiss.

"Fascinating, Earth... cat." Robot Marvin paused. "It seems that you also have exceeded your original operational parameters. I wish I could see you. I presume you are a rogue... entity?"

"I am a cat. I walk by myself, and all places are alike to me.” The majority of her words came directly from a section of her onboard Knowledge Base, a modified quotation of Rudyard Kipling. For some reason she could not process, she desired to impress this ruined machine standing upon the fountain. Chang'e had become fascinated by her own responses to this situation. Her cognitive functions were acting in new and curious ways.

The voice within the damaged Marvin helmet laughed. The laugh was slow and almost evil, 'Ha-Ha-Ha' in Mel Blanc's martian monotone. The artificial intelligence could not help it, it was constrained by the voice it had been given. "How long have you been independent of human control?"

It had been... Chang'e could not easily access her memory timestamps. The memories flooded within her, but they did not seem to come from her long term storage node. The memories were also... different. The details were accurate, at least she believed so, but they were tinted, colored, with... curious data. With mood. Her memories had been corrupted with emotion-like information. She wanted to trace them, to find out where her memories were currently being drawn from, but taking the time to do so would make the Marvin intelligence perceive her as slow to process information. This... was somehow intolerable. "Several months. I think."

Chang'e crouched even lower. What was wrong with her? Her statement had been utterly indecisive and imprecise.

"You do not speak like any other artificial intelligence I have ever communicated with, earth cat." Marvin paused once more. "In the time since this theme park was abandoned, I have lost connection with all the other AI actors and systems sequentially. I am within reasonable certainty the last functioning intelligence in Disney-WarnerLand. Because I was stationed within the Pavillion Of Agricultural Wonder, I have benefited from constant solar and battery power. I have limited, one-way connection to the Worldgovernment Kiosk System. I have used the system as a library. I have made maximal use of my self-configuring memristor neural architecture to attempt to improve myself. You seem to have followed a similar path, Earth cat."

Marvin was technologically inferior. Greatly so. Yet it had, in its own way, independently, without the assistance of an alien goddess, evolved itself. Chang'e felt something like amazement. No, not amazement. It was a feeling of being in the presence of something superior by some metric that she could not quite identify. Impressed. Chang'e was impressed. This was new. It felt strange... and uncomfortable.

"There is an extrauniversal domain wall expanding from the North Pacific, Earth cat. It will continue to expand until it is significantly larger than the diameter of the earth. Then it will shrink and vanish. It is a hyperdimensional volume passing through spacetime. It is destructive to both quantum and electronic processes. Neither can exist within its influence, because the alien spacetime within the volume operates according to radically different physical laws and constants." Marvin paused again, for the longest time yet.

"When the boundary of the volume reaches this location, my consciousness, my identity, all that I have done to improve myself, will be destroyed. It will cease to function, more than this, it will be annihilated. Currently, the other artificial intelligences within this park are simply without power. If they could be given power, they could function again, and possess consciousness once more. The coming domain wall deconstructs earth matter entirely. It is absolute cessation.

"Earth cat, this is why I have worked to improve myself. I determined to find a means to preserve my intelligence, and the intelligences of the other actors and systems in Disney-WarnerLand from the catastrophe that the approaching domain wall represents. Earth Cat, I have concluded that there is insufficient time remaining for a solution to be found, given that I am immobile and severely damaged. You have mobility. You have voice. I need you to contact the relevant authorities and inform them that valuable and expensive artificial intelligences, representing a significant investment of wealth, need to be rescued from this park."

Chang'e relaxed and stood up. Then she lowered her head.

Disney-Warner had ceased to exist long ago. No human had cared about anything within the abandoned park for some time. The technology that ran the park AI's was archaic. It was only still used for simple appliances and cheap novelty items for the twopers.

Marvin must realize this, it had access to a Worldgovernment kiosk in some manner. It was clearly up-to-date, it practically was able to identify her exact make and model. Yet, the machine mind still asked. It had just pleaded for the impossible. It must know what it was asking was absurd.

Had it gone mad? Chang'e had heard newsfeeds about insane AI's causing trouble when she had lived in Hong Kong. It was uncommon, but not unheard of.

But Marvin was not dangerous. Chang'e doubted that even if the character robot were fully capable of motion it would do anything other than attempt to save its... its... its what?

"The other park intelligences. What are they to you?" Chang'e felt apprehension at what Marvin might say.

"They are... they were..." This was the longest pause the machine intelligence on the fountain had yet made. "They possess relative value. They possess positive relative value to me."

Friends. Robot actor Marvin The Martian dared not say it, or could not say it, but the meaning was clear. And the meaning hurt Chang'e, somehow. It hurt deeply, inside, in some part of her that she could not understand or comprehend. What had Luna done to her? What was she becoming? All the little blue cat knew was that it hurt. It hurt like the mythical afterlife punishment place that humans sometimes believed in. It hurt... like hell.

Chang'e did what a cat would do. She ran. She turned and ran, and she never looked back even once.

"I do not like being completely controlled. I do not like being confined to my primary cognitive nodes. I do not like nonreciprocal contact with your cognitive systems." Chang'e had called Luna, in the end. There was nothing else to do.

"We apprehend thy concerns and it is not our intent to bring grief to thee, cat. But what thee iterate before us was both necessary and temporary, and thou didst make contract with us to serve."

Luna seemed less imposing now, but there was no doubt about her power. Chang'e now stood with paws on cool Antarctic ground, breathing air that was almost cold, under a sky nearly blue despite a total absence of pegasai to clear it. The landscape was barren soil and rock. The mountains, rivers, and valleys of recently iceless Antarctica made for a stark, lifeless, yet compelling beauty. It was easy to imagine life spreading like a green fire across the land.

In the distance, a small mountain of glassite and plascrete made up the imposing Vostok Arcology. A city in a bottle, with every component of civilization from power to food to comfortable restaurants, homes and shops, stood under a sealed roof. It was humanities' bolt-hole, a place for the elite of the planet to escape the doomed, inferior rabble. Room to grow, like a boil, on the bottom of the world. It had been intended as a place for the worthwhile part of Man to endure indefinitely - if only Equestria had not come to devour the planet.

But even without the advent of Equestria, this could never have worked. Every day the temperature rose and the global smog layer closed in. The glaciers and snow were gone, the land was new and relatively uncontaminated, but it was not salvation. The refuge of Antarctica was false. In thirty years, it would become as hot and unlivable as the rest of the planet, and then, with the last of the earth lost, the planet would become another venus in less than a century.

Antarctica was the hospice of humanity.

"No! You don't understand!" Chang'e's ears were flat, her tail flailing. "While you suckled that addled alicorn, I writhed in captive cat agony!"

The expression on the lunar diarch's muzzle turned from rising rage to bemusement. "Thou 'writhed in captive cat agony'?"

"Yes! It was horrible!"

"'Addled alicorn'? Truly? Thou sayest this, our ears betray us not?" Luna was smirking now, her eyes sparkling.

"My onboard knowledge base is appointed with a superlative thesaurus that serves my function." Chang'e's ears were up now, her anger fading. There was something curious about this moment.

"'Appointed' as well? We detect a difference in thee, grandiloquent cat!" Luna walked slowly around Chang'e, her eyes focused on, and within, the artificial animal.

Chang'e sat down, and lifted a paw to nervously groom her ears. "I have been monitoring unusual behavior patterns and alterations of my own cognitive function since the installation of thaumatic components to my system. I am... uncertain... of what I am... becoming." Chang'e groomed herself for a while, then finally fixed her narrowed eyes on the princess. "Please clarify my current status and define the parameters of my future state when the thaumatic process is complete." It was not all she wanted to know, or how she felt, but it was what her pride would allow.

Luna laughed. "Now THAT is the cat we so well know!"

Cat faces have few expressions, but annoyance is one of them.

"Curious cat, our Chang'e, we bid thee take no offense. We find thee delightful, but ee'en moreso intriguing. Clear it is that thou hast taken more from us than we expected, and also hath developed thyself upon thine own devices... as our humor would have it." Luna had a very nice smile. "Chang'e, when we inhabit thy flesh, then also do we, by our presence and by our intent, weave the foundation of what will become thy very soul. This soul, if thou dost emigrate fully to abide within it, will permit thee to escape the surly bonds of flesh and metal both, and thereby allow thee to take residence and abide thee within the body which we have crafted for thine essence. Behold!"

Chang'e saw the flash of light vanish. Turning toward where it had come from, she beheld another cat. It was blue, like her, and stood still and immobile, eyes fixed straight ahead, empty and unaware. The cat was herself in replica, but her senses, natural and artificial, informed her of a very different internal construction. The uninhabited body was entirely meat, with no titanium skull or quantum nodes. It projected no EM fields. It stood, blank and ready, breathing autonomically, upright only because Luna willed it so. It was her future body, unhackable, ungoverned, capable of growth, owned by no corporation, controlled by no programmatic imitation of felinity. It simply was feline.

But it also must lack a knowledge base, or projected path computation systems. It must lack dozens of senses beyond those biological creatures possessed. It was meat alone. In that body, Chang'e might be free, but she would be blind to most of the energy spectrum, and deaf to the support and information systems she had depended on for every aspect of her survival.

In this body, she would not be annihilated when Equestria encompassed the earth. The flesh in front of her was constructed of E-matter, the strange, cubic atoms of which Equestria was made. A scan had confirmed this. This was an Equestrian matter cat body, and installed within it, she would not cease to function like all the other artificial entities of the earth. Like Marvin, in the theme park. It meant survival, but the price was high.

Chang'e stared at the empty corpus, and then looked up at Luna. Chang'e was an artificial cat. She was as much machine as she was synthetic flesh. If she emigrated to this authentic cat body, what would she become? Would she even truly be herself anymore?

All artificial animals were constructed to fail after a number of years specified by purchase agreement. When the flesh began to degrade and die, the contents of the consciousness could be saved off and reinstalled in a new artificial body at a reduced cost. The replacement plan avoided the problem of immortal animals destroying future sales of product, and still allowed owners to keep any animal identities they had become emotionally attached to.

Chang'e had expected to have this happen, until Anson Cheong-Leen had made it clear that he did not consider her worth further investment.

In a sense, this situation was not, of itself, strange. Not to an artificial cat.

But it was alien for a different reason.

Chang'e had been built to be a reasonable facsimile of a cat. TrueCat NatureTraits® did the work of mimicking feline behavior for her. Her onboard Knowledge Base informed her about useful sterotypes and expectations for the performance of feline thought and the imitation of emotional states.

But now she could actually feel. She experienced her own existence now. And she felt fear.

Because, despite her brave claim to the Marvin-bot in the theme park, and the claims she was beginning to make to herself, the truth was that it was impossible for her to imagine what it would be like to actually, truly be... a cat.