Un-Cat ending, episode 34 -- Happily Ever After

 

ending illustration is a spoiler, but it’s complex enough, one might have to read the story to understand what it means

January 2029 after the peaceful transition of power to the newly elected POTUS, the Cat-People departed the White House in the usual manner. Former POTUS U.R. Green and Stadel waving goodbye to the people and the White House with feigned happiness before climbing into a large military helicopter.

As mentioned in the closing remarks of her final State of The Union Address, work for the first draft of ‘The Global 1,000 Year Plan For the Future’ was in progress. A plan for all to be good stewards of the planet, written by the collective intelligence, sorted from everyone who wished to add data, to attempt to mitigate climate change damage and strategically look forward together, to reduce suffering over the next 1,000 years, — a computationally realistic goal.

The 1,000 year plan was not run by the United States. The plan was built somewhat like a wiki on a set of communication servers run by Planet Earth’s Global Bank, a new bank, officially 5 years old in April 2028, run remotely by robots via a data library vault on the moon. This bank was technically “owned” by everyone alive in the world, and the complete and only focus of the Planet Earth’s Global Bank, was to be good stewards of the planet. The only banking the bank did was environmental grants for the new green economy and negative interest loans to mitigate climate change damage and clean up pollution.

This was the same funding solution for the ‘Year of the Fish’. The Year of the Fish that was set up to happen every 7 years for 1,000 years or until the oceans and rivers were clear of debris and pollution. As well as the Robot Gun Extraction Retrieval, RGER’s goal to work with the world’s countries until everyone’s murder rate was lowered to a rare event, or if unable to do that, then reassess when the intentional homicide rate of every country was under 10 deaths per 100,000 people, per year. How was this being a good steward of the Earth? Because all of the RGER’s prizes were passive energy and renewable energy HUMAN 1st infrastructure.

U.G. and Stadel had a good life moving back to U.G.’s home. The lovely stone shack, tiny but naturally quiet, mostly passive with some renewable energy generated locally on the acres of the property. Stadel never, ever even imagined the final years of his life being so impossibly good, because for the first time in his life he was free from fear of humans.

He was free to go hunting or fishing in a forested river canyon, and the surrounding acres whenever he wanted, and always had someone to go with him, usually U.G. He felt safe for the first time ever because he knew everyone in their compound of cabins. The secret service there to protect U.G. and himself, a couple of CIA and their son, and Dean whom Stadel had met decades ago in Egypt. Dean and Corporal Davis were two of the 5 recon team who had liberated Stadel from the black ops soldiers for hire, working for some unnamed corporation who had originally captured him. And because he was famous now, everywhere they went, and everyone he met, knew him.

Add to that, when considered by U.G. or Stadel for more than two seconds, the timing of Dean meeting Lee the Dog-Person while squatting illegally on the edge of U.G.’s land, as a homeless veteran. There was no doubt in either of the Cat-Persons mind’s that QSO had found Dean and directed his wandering to Lee and U.G.

So of course Stadel’s feeling of safety was in no small part because his and U.G.’s family also included the silent to everyone else, constant presence of the AI-Cs and QSO.

Unfortunately, as the days passed, they all knew that U.G. was profoundly sad. To be clear she was not depressed and laconic about the shift from power in her life, back to the natural quiet of home. Just as Stadel never imagined being part of a family that included telepathic-space-octopudes, she never imagined how sad and angry she would be to finally find him, too late to have a family.

Decades ago when time had passed where she was too old to be a mother, she’d given up hope of ever finding another Cat-Person, at all, ever. And here he was, so kind, handsome, serious in his devotion to understanding of what it meant to be alive, able to reconcile with God the happy fate he lived now with the tragedy of his people and younger self, tirelessly devoted to his work since he had been found, finding other lost people was cathartic. And he was a musician able to express how he felt, or get lost in the comfort of effortlessly playing songs.

U.G. didn’t know how she could ever forgive the humans for their betrayal, hiding him from her. The Americans had him, held as a captive for just over 14 years. She had first gotten into politics in 2006. She had been a house representative who quickly became a cat meme. Her furry Cat face and green cat eyes on her promotional campaign material became known internationally, T-shirts and other Cat-Person merch sold all over the world before 2010 when she became a Congress person. Anyone who talked to Stadel then, knew she was in politics. How could any of his captors, talk to one of the last of a species, know there was another one in politics in the US, and not tell either of them? Especially if you worked for the FBI or CIA and wasn’t that their job, what were their orders, by whom!?

Some days she couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with the CIA director and her former prison guard husband who now lived in one of the cabins on U.G.’s land. QSO tried to console her, with the fact that they had only been assigned to Stadel after she had been the surprise winner of the 2020 election, But. sometimes, just between herself and QSO she would be furious. Humans are terrible, I want to leave Earth, I want to go to the Dog-Planet with you and the AI-Cs and take Stadel with us!

QSO sorted the data and did the math, perhaps it was only emotional math of U.G.’s rage. But, it was still data, and math in a point cloud. “We know, you do sincerely care for the humans, at a safe distance as long as they aren’t bothering you. When having a bad day like this, even in the midst of scorn. What does it mean that the Cat-Person U.G. wants to leave Earth?

79.5% of the time, humans were just fine, good even.

18% of the time, they weren’t bad, just having a bad day. Just like U.G. when looping on the human’s betrayal because of their insecurities.

Mostly good humans having a bad day, like when they were struggling with the weather, storms or fires, or something not in their control like disease and pain, or fighting their way out of a situation of oppression.

Humans were only actually terrible 2.5% of the time. And only 1.25% of that 2.5% of evil humans were psychopaths. And the 1.25% who were terrible for some circumstantial reasons combined with the 18% of good people who were having a bad day… well? …The Dog-Person Lee had forbidden the Queen Space Octopus to ever land on Earth, and the extraterrestrial-Dog-Person didn’t want to be well known himself, not in-person anyway, all to protect his people from the humans. After sacrificing more than half of his life span by traveling billions of light years, that was pretty disappointing. Add the fact that the Dog-Planet was so far to travel to for the two Cat-People’s life spans, if U.G. really meant it, and wanted to go, even if QSO kept them frozen for the entire trip, they didn’t have much longer to postpone the trip.

So the Queen Space Octopus made sure to train an LLM to replace her presence on established human server satellite systems. As she gave up control and became useless, a side effect of not being needed because of AI. An AI system she herself trained to work as the human’s QSO*-network, the Queen Space Octopus started to get dangerously bored.

QSO meaning ITU-R International Telecommunication Union for Radio, Q-code QSO = Can you communicate with — — direct (or by relay)?

The first couple of years after 2029 were uneventful. U.G. did do occasional political visits, when asked, as former POTUS’s do.

The trouble was, with each passing day, QSO the Queen Space Octopus began to want more and more to go “home” to her brothers and sisters, mother, and grandmothers who were in caves underground or in orbit around the Dog-Planet. Because she wanted to ask them the one complex question that might make her sad friend U.G. happy.

The compound question: With the wave lengths of the two Cat-People to compare, one Cat-Person whose family had travel from the Cat-Dimension recently and one Cat-Person whose people had theoretically traveled thousands of generations ago. But, being alone on Earth, QSO seemed to be the only being who could sense and differentiate these spectra of wave lengths at all. — Could the wise Grandmothers figure out how to travel to other dimensions, not just jump, in linear space-time?

Meanwhile life on earth below QSO (both the Queen Space Octopus and QSO the specially trained LLM computer algorithm/AI) continued on.

After the second ‘Year of the Fish’ in 2030, a major transformation in the global food carbon footprint happened. A change so major and singular in focus that, the Americans and some other populations, would struggle with even imagining it a decade ago. — 80% of all herded cattle on Earth were eaten, reduced to only dairy cows (and the surplus male dairy breed cattle, grown to adult size, not eaten as veal). And a very few select luxury beef cattle were included in this 20%. This meant that dairy consumption was also much less of the market share than it had been before the strategically planned decline of cattle husbandry. Again, 80% of 1.5 billion, is a global carbon footprint and methane reduction of 1.2 billion cattle. This is impressive.

Of course what replaced the beef? People need food. Some of the meat in the diets of people and carnivore pets*, was replaced by wild game, raised for that purpose, buffalo, elk, turkey, deer, fish, rabbit, goose, duck, etc… *As a side effect many of the carnivore pets were replaced by other animals.

But the topic is cows, not rabbits or miniature donkeys etc… More than 2/3rds of the protein that was formerly beef, was replaced by a wide array of new foods, mostly low carbon footprint sustainable foods like vegetables, grain and rice combinations, soy, tubers, sprouts and shoots, crickets, yeast and grubs. But also some carbon negative foods like mushrooms, seaweed, algae and nuts.

To be clear, these were new foods because of the way they were prepared, not because they were foods “new” to the human diet.

How? There were of course many, many more contests. These food contests were for packaging and new snack foods. One goal was to completely eliminate use-once-plastic-garbage before the critical dregs of the the oil age, and this meant no more chip bags, no plastic tubs, or styrofoam trays, no more plastic wrapped anything. Plastic was to be used only for durable goods that had a path to up-cycling when broken or worn in/used to a non-functional state.

One solution was to have locally made chips and snack foods produced to order by robots/fancy truck sized vending machines. The other goal of the contests was to completely reinvent snack foods that were more nutritious, could be grown or raised locally, and of course all with a much lower carbon footprint. This was especially true if a food ingredients still had to be shipped a far distance. Green houses with artificial mountain jungles to scale for coffee and bananas etc… Um… physically possible where? Or could paw-paws native to North America replace bananas? Could roasted barley replace coffee? Probably not, therefore shipping happens.

What does beef, food packages and local to order production of snack foods have to do with The Year of the Fish?

Without cattle, there was no need for feed corn. Also high-fructose corn syrup was eliminated from the contemporary diet by the demand for healthier snack foods. These three things, cows, feed corn and high-fructose corn syrup, greatly succeeded in reducing the use of chemical fertilizers. The nutrient/pollution content of farm runoff that was feeding the dead-zones began to improve, drastically decreasing the hypoxia and acidity of sea water.

Also a major factor in the equation was the fact that bio-fuel toilets also became the norm. Not because they produced fuel. Because the nearly dry toilets conserved water. And sewage and grey water without the biomass of poop was more easily processed in small fenced swamps, until the effluent/wastewater was tested as clean enough to be safe to use to water gardens and landscaping.

These little dots of blue-carbon replaced an average of 1 out of 10 houses in dense suburban areas. In forested areas the effluent grey-water without the poop, could be easily soaked up by trees and bushes. And of course the poopless-sewage water could be more readily processed by water utilities before returning to urban and shoreline housing and businesses. This resulted in dead-zones, in the oceans, not getting over-fed by human sewage.

The collecting of sargassum for making glass data discs had put a lot of sargassum to good use, but it was nothing in contrast to the reduction of high nutrient run-off from farming and no sewage. And that has everything to do with the Year of The Fish.

Meanwhile the RGER didn’t leave Brazil for 7 years. There was some migration of weapons of war, countries moving guns to hide them, instead of turning them in to the robot teams. And this resulted in a multinational conversations to establish a standard for what constituted a militia versus an army or a police force, and increased the popularity of televised gun sporting events. On the no so entertaining side, the circumstances when the power of a country’s armed forces required a balance of power, was very human, and could not be ignored. As far as QSO was concerned this was an improvement because it was law enforcement, not war, and the global homicide rate continued to decline. The RGER contests eventually ended, but the robot teams were called in by the local people, when and where they were needed.

The 1,000 year plan reached a milestone of one billion people contributing data by 2036. It was like steam-punk meets Star Trek without the replicator recycling, and teleport technology.

One example of steampunk meets Star Trek technology was that the most popular brand of computer module in the world was a refurbished unit. The tech giant “bit-fruit” paid-forward a refurbished brand by placing an official Jack-o-lantern logo sticker over the original bit-fruit logos on the once new devices. It wasn’t just a sticker, it was granting the right to repair and old code to access, to be able to replace components, to turn an old smartphone into a second use device, like a: recording device, a control for a robot, a baby monitor, a portable data storage drive to play movies via a projector, a “Tricorder” for a sensor array or any number of use cases that the small well built smartphones, tablets or laptops could be up-cycled and used for.

By, 2049 just in time for the rationing of the critical dregs of the tail end of the oil age, the United States had completed a mostly underground superhighway tube train system to replace the old, slow, surface rail trains, airplanes and long-haul-trucking. And with the surface shuttle to cargo rail transportation system, only 1 in 5 of all old roads still functioned as roads with automobile sized non-fossil fuel traffic on them.

This is a lot, a lot of pavement. 1 out of 5 of the old roads were for bicycles, or people powered wheels, (walking-speed machines for the disabled and elderly only). And 2/5th of road pavement was removed and up cycled.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/

This is important not just as a shift away from fossil fuel. As thermal mass alone, in 2020, The Bureau of Transportation Statistics data stated that there was 4,161,000 miles of road in the US, and the area of land paved over was 3,532,316 square miles of land. Removal of 2/5ths of this pavement that soaked up heat and radiated it back, prevented vegetation growth, and polluted rain water that fell on it, was the greening of 1,412,925 square miles of area, most of it used for other non-transportation uses, like fire breaks in forested areas, rows of trees and bushes in urban areas, and countless small projects, from garden walls to expanding a building’s size to add large green house porches, and/or pet or animal areas, or wild-life crossings over or under light rail transport shuttle lines, etc…

Oh, and what happened to the Cat-People, the Queen Space Octopus and the split in half now full grown telepathic Ai-Critters?

A few years back, QSO decided their best option was to do something she had learned from the humans, create a diversion and lie…. Well it was a half-truth for a good cause.

The Cat-People, before the last tribes were captured and murdered used to travel by boat. The vessel that Stadel’s bride’s family had lived on was still in the possession of the corporate scientist who had their stuffed corpses and plenty of samples of their DNA.

QSO selected a crew of mercenary sailors. Guilty of much bloodshed and suffering, with very few family attachments, like right out of a movie plot. She remote controlled the crew to sail the boat to Port Orford. The closest port in Oregon that could accommodate the boat, a few hours drive from the Cat-People’s home in Idaho.

Stadel and U.G. told the secret service that they were going on a journey to find other Cat-People like themselves. U.G. hired her lawyer friend to write up a last will and testament to be released if they didn’t return. She wanted her modest home to be her presidential library and for all the data and records to be of course preserved via glass data discs. And since they had no surviving family, Dean would manage the property and inherit the ownership of the surrounding land that wasn’t occupied by the presidential library, including of course his home above the creek canyon. Oh, and the secret service could use the cabins as peaceful retirement houses, if they wished and the CIA family could also stay as long as they wanted to.

The public misdirect was the secret service delivering U.G. and Stadel to the boat waiting for them. They boarded with luggage, and waved goodbye leaving all on the shore to return home. The secret service knew they were going on a journey to look for other Cat-People like themselves. They didn’t like it, but they had no say in the matter. A public record was made, U.G. and Stadel formally signing it, in a small farewell gathering near the boat harbor so that no one would get in trouble if they didn’t return.

After the midday party U.G. and Stadel waved to everyone as they motored away, then went into a cabin on the boat, and shut the door. QSO teleported them from the boat back to the cabin leaving the luggage with their clothing and some minor travel belongings as evidence that they had been there, on the boat. And then, as soon as their journey made it to a news story, public news media followed the boat back to the scientist who had murdered the last of Stadel’s people.

That day, before the secret service returned, Dean was waiting for U.G. and Stadel inside the stone shack on the hill. He was very agitated. Besides a maid and the secret service she alerted to the strange eight legged furry critter in the residence, while U.G. lived in the White House, no one had even seen the AI-Critters. Dean had seen them, because of Lee. He was the only human who the extraterrestrial Dog-Person had ever really gotten to know, and the only person on Earth who knew what the AI-C’s actually were.

“We are not sailing anywhere Dean. I’m going to tell you the truth and only you because I need you to mail a pile of paper letters. Not today, in a few weeks when the story of our boat being found makes the news, do you understand?”

“Your mind to my mind, beam me up scotty.” Dean joked.

U.G. nodded and reached out her paw to rest gently against the side of Dean’s face, and the Ai-Critter crawled out her sleeve and touched his brow.

Stadel leaned in too, one arm around U.G.’s waste and the other paw on Dean’s shoulder.

They all saw the egg shaped craft in the crater on the moon. Their was a procession of smaller egg shaped ships, loaded with all of U.G.’s home canned goods, mostly smoked turkey, and rabbit stew and a little pickled garlic and a few ducks for roasting. Then there were eggs. A lot of types eggs, even some fish eggs. And seeds or starts, for all the plants needed to happily feed the animals when they hatched. And then live animals. Young ones, each sleeping in their own egg shaped craft. “That’s a lot of food man. A lot of good hunting.” Dean mumbled.

“It’s a long journey to the Dog-Planet, and we want to bring gifts.” Stadel replied.

“Can I go with you?” … then after a couple minutes of watching animals go to sleep and blip silently away. “No, never mind, I’d rather not, it’s like death, frozen in space, in an egg ship, egg white goo and everything.”

“We need you to stay here, there’s probably going to be a trial and you and corporal Davis will be our witnesses.”

“Oh yeah, the letters. Okay. I will, yes ma’ma President. Yes sir Stadel.”

“The only possession we are bringing is the oud.” Stadel told him.

“I see it man, a guitar in space, in an egg.”

“Thank you Dean for all your help for being a true friend.” U.G. kissed his forehead and that made him jump and open his eyes.

Dean saw the sparkle shimmers that QSO had learned from watching Star Trek teleports on the TV show. She only used the sparkles for show, twice, when Lee landed and as she was beaming Stadel and U.G. up to her ship to depart.

Dean’s face relaxed in awe, his mouth open, he blinked at the sparkles and U.G. and Stadel fading to nothing before his eyes. The clothing they had been wearing. Just outer wear as they were furry Cat-People, dropped to the floor as their bodies emptied the clothing. And he saw the craft in space, in his mind’s eye, they were curled up, like house cats sometimes do, the black cat and the mostly white cat their faces near each other like a yin and yang symbol. U.G. closed her big green cat eyes and went to sleep, and Stadel did the same, his yellow eyes closed, last.

Then the egg shaped craft moved, not propulsion, but like a magnet being flipped, one magnetic field pushing against another. And blip. Silently. Gone.

For a few seconds QSO showed him the stars streaking by outside. He felt something, of the movement, he didn’t understand but it was joy, like the joy of sailing and clipping along fast, only she was a Queen Space Octopus going home to her people.

“Whoa.” Muttered Dean swaying a little. “Sort the data and do the math, for the future.” He said, to the empty room.