Episodes 10 to 15

Unapologetic Catharsis

Chapter Two — Not A Politician 

The AI-Critter reached out to telepathically share memories.

Un-Cat Episode 10. — Money, Politics, and Stuff

U.G. reached for her mailbox, key in hand and heard a gun trigger safety click. Not something a human might have been able to hear, he was on the hill behind her, but she was a Cat-person. The “spidey sense” of her eight-limb-telepathic AI-Critter should have detected the man way before she had gotten in range of his rifle scope.

U.G. had woken just before the sunrise. She enjoyed walking in the dim as the dark of night turned ultramarine blue gradually turning pale and brighter as the Earth rolled towards the sun. As she walked down the long gravel drive the AI-C had told her there was only one other person awake for miles.

She was going to the fetch the mail on her morning walk because the AI-C had told her that they had mailed the check last night in the usual way and the new "OCD" post office employee was on route again. This was a problem because even with the flag down this mail carrier (who was new to the area) would collect the letter and she would have to go in, to the post office to get it, always a hassle.

The rent for the house near the corner store was late again. The lease on the gas station and the corner store businesses were paid directly to the bank. But, her parent’s old house was rented by three young people, the business owners’ grown children, and the girl’s boyfriend.

One of the young tenants, usually the boyfriend, would stuff the rent in an old manila envelope with a metal fold clasp they had laying around, ‘U.G. here’ written on the front instead of a to address and ‘from us’ written on the corner where a return address should have been and "mail" this unstamped unaddressed rent payment in the mail box.

“Hey! Where is the Dog?” A familiar voice whispered harshly pricking U.G’s cat ears to turn, while her body froze.

“So?” U.G.’s thoughts directed towards the AI-C, hearing footsteps on the gravel behind her now. “The other person awake this morning, is the bipolar man you AI-Critters have a tough time reading and now he is pointing that rifle at my head?”

“Yes. The man who lives illegally in the woods near here. The gun isn’t loaded. He has two bullets in the left breast pocket of his shirt.” the AI-C thought back.

She turned around to face the rifle barrel.

Besides U.G. this man was Lee’s biggest fan. Lee had sniffed him out and used to visit him, checking in on him often. Lee had helped make his crazy-shack into a home, bringing anything useful or extra they had around from rebuilding U.G.’s house, helping the man dig-in, insulate, designed a Dog-people style open plumbing system for his dwelling, built a battery bank with solar panels for his roof. Lee also had brought over one of U.G.’s old computers, connected him to their wireless-internet and other than U.G. this woods-man was one of the few people on Earth who had read all of Lee’s writings.

“I posted his obituary,” U.G. said not blinking.

“Where? I don’t get the paper.” The man always whispered or muttered under his breath with tight lips. He was afraid someone was surveilling him via satellite.

U.G. stepped closer to help the AI-Critter get a clearer telepathic read. “Lee always told me, being too reclusive was my biggest error in life.” Speaking this out-loud to herself and she thought, biggest-mistake meet biggest-fear being hunted and shot like an animal.

The AI-C got a clear image from U.G. and connected the dots to him. She had emailed three short replies to the man after her copy & paste emailed death notice. 

The man's name, not his actual name, but the name he liked to be called was 'Dean'. "Dean, I did send you an email." She said as calmly as she could.

“Why wasn’t I invited to the funeral?” The man said lowering his gun from her forehead to her chest.

“His people do not have funerals.”

“Of course they do. I’ve seen wolves howl.” Dean lowered the rifle, his shoulders slumped. “I miss him. What did you do with him?”

“Dean. You know better than anybody, Lee wasn’t a wolf. I am going to get my mail now and we are going to walk away from the road before the mailman gets here.”

U.G. got the rent out of her mailbox and started walking towards the corner store, not back towards home, past the old house. Dean followed keeping pace to walk beside her and talk. “Are you gonna press charges? Are you going to report me? I would never shoot one of Lee’s Cat friends.”

“I know. Listen. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know the rifle isn’t loaded.” U.G. said.

“The handgun on his belt is loaded.” The AI-C communicated to her the location of a concealed gun holster. U.G. decided to not walk into the store, she couldn’t risk one of the humans getting shot because of her failure to be a good neighbor to Lee’s friend. She walked away as quickly as she could, past the house, to the fork in the road that leads to her driveway. Dean had to run to keep up.

“Show me where his grave is. Did you mark it or just bury him somewhere in the woods?”

The AI-C could hear only a tangle of his thoughts, she could see a mix of alien invasion fiction, little grey extraterrestrials mixed with Lee’s stories. Lee didn’t describe very much about his home-world, mostly he would discuss technical points about how the Dog-people’s society and economics were different from most Earthlings.

“Dean. Do you remember how Lee would sometimes share his thoughts with you when you got upset or afraid because he wasn’t an Earthling?”

“Yeah, he was like ‘My-thoughts-to-your-thoughts’ except it was for real. He could show you thoughts, speak with this funny voice in my mind. He put his hand on my forehead, like this.” Dean held up his thin bony hand with fingers spread.

“Yes, that’s correct.” U.G. nodded. She wondered if she could even make that science fiction gesture with her paw. Lee’s paws had been much more finger-like than her’s.

“I need you to understand. Lee didn’t wish to be buried on Earth, he requested his body be sent home.”

“Home.” Said, Dean, trying to imagine this, but his mind still churned with bad images of caskets and body bags being loaded on helicopters and trucks. Dean had been in combat.

U.G. stopped walking. “Dean, before Lee died he gave me the gift to share memories. May I show you?”

“You can do that too?”

“Yes.”

“Awesome.” Dean closed his eyes and leaned slightly forward almost like expecting a kiss.

He is not afraid of you, he considers death by big cat an honorable death. The AI-C told her telepathically, making sure Dean’s gesture was not a trick to lure her in close.

U.G. careful to not extend her claws, rested her paw on his forehead, just above his eyebrow and the AI-C reached out and lightly touched one tentacle behind Dean’s ear. Telepathically sharing bits of her memories. The AI-C showed him Lee’s body in his bed and the shimmer of bubbles as it teleported to the coffin-sized craft waiting in the moon crater on the dark side of the moon. The small light grey spacecraft. the same pale silvery hue as moon dust lifting from the surface of the moon before it disappeared, a spec vanishing in the vastness of space. The craft will skip like a stone to return his body to his people on his home planet. She explained as briefly as she could.

In this moment of contact the AI-C having been caught off guard once, it would not fail to protect U.G. again. The closest word to what it did when it scanned Dean’s mind, is ‘Downloading’. Years worth of memories, everything it could reach in Dean’s mind, and there was a lot the AI-C could reach when in direct contact with the man’s skull: starting with what was easy and on the surface, a mass of concepts from many books Dean had read, then deeper; why he was afraid of the government, disconnected and mixed with people he had trusted who had hurt him. Then day after day of too much time spent alone, walking, walking all day and for many hours into the night, wandering for a long span of his life. He had almost starved several times in his efforts to get as far away from people as he could.

During this brief moment, U.G. didn’t sense what the AI-C was doing and apparently neither did Dean.

After U.G. and the AI-C stepped back from Dean, he opened his eyes and said. “Thank you. Every time I see the moon now I will think of that Dog.” He grimaced, almost a smile. “You know his name isn’t Lee right?”

“I know. Can you pronounce his Dog name?” U.G. asked.

“Hell no,” Dean said, and stepped off of the gravel drive into the woods. As suddenly as he had appeared he was bounding away along the nearest deer path in the forest floor that would lead him downhill in the direction of his home.

From her first cat-nap that afternoon after the encounter with Dean, U.G.’s dreams shifted, granted the AI-C was sifting a ton of propaganda and other radical reading material it had gleaned from Dean, only sharing little snippets and fragments of facts it was able to verify in a jigsaw-puzzle of mini-dream-flashes. To say the collection of new information was motivating to get out and do something was an understatement.

That night’s sleep, what little she got of it, wasn’t much better. In spite of a calm clear night full of stars, she didn’t find any comfort in being alone. Lee was right; being antisocial was a mistake.

The next day, she got dressed in her nicest human clothes and went to town. Grandfather always believed in the importance of having at least one business suit. This was especially important when dealing with banks or licensing as a Cat-person.

U.G. got her first pants suit when she was 16 so that people would take her seriously at the Idaho transportation department when she went in to get her first drivers license. To be sure she always had a suit that fit she had gone to town and gotten a custom pants suit fitted every few years. She had lost weight since Lee died. But, one of her nice dark grey suits from before she had gotten overweight, a time in her life before her round-about-the-middle-age, now the less round shaped suit fit again.

Before U.G. left the house she had called the attorney she had worked with when she and Lee had sold a chunk of her land to buy their internet tower. Because of the distance between towers, they actually had to install three towers. One was 25 miles to the nearest hilltop as the crow-flies and the other was 22 miles to the nearest hilltop in the opposite direction. It wasn’t big-city wireless tower money, but, it was still money earned ahead of the curve for wireless technology and the negotiations had, in the end, made money for all three landowners, so the lawyer was happy to hear from her.

This time the curve she was adjusting for years before it happened was a steady downward trend before the housing market crash. The lawyer and her bank had been advising her to gradually increase the rent. Lee’s influence had been to feel empathy for her neighbors to feel secure in their own house, as a right, very important in Dog-culture, second only to food. There were other complicated marking rituals with peeing on address rocks that marked the entrance to a general home area for each Dog-family pack, but that information wasn’t very helpful for fixing the human housing situation. The AI-C had helped her do the research and they had cobbled together a rent-to-own contract where she would own the paper and sell her parent’s house and the commercial buildings the store and gas station businesses leased.

“Let me understand. Utah,..” The lawyer paused, seeing U.G. flinch at being called her full first name. “Excuse me. U.G. are you sure you want to… for lack of a better word, ‘give’ your leases away below market value?”

“It’s not 20% below market value, they have been paying my family rent for decades and buying gas and stuff from the old corner store and the gas station for years before they bought into the franchise.” The number was set at 20% below market because she knew they didn’t have the down payment and she didn’t want them to have to pay mortgage insurance.

“You don’t owe them.”

“No. But, like I said they have been struggling with the rent on the house, not the store lease, but I know the profit margins are thin to negative in the off-season.”

“Why do you want to do this?”

“I know they are good people. They are friends of my family, I like them as neighbors. If they lose the lease or have to move I won’t know the new tenants. I am buying security.”

“You can’t force them to stay.”

“True. I can’t force them to stay, but I can help, give them incentive to stay.”

The lawyer shook his head, confused, his focus for a long pause re-reading the contracts U.G. had brought in. But, he did set up the meeting required to sell U.G. parent’s house. And another to negotiate the contracts with the store and the gas station.

In 2003, five years before the crash. They all thought she was a little crazy. 2.5% interest loans with the owner holding the paper, what was she thinking? She told them her reasons were personal, religious, that she believed that interest rates above 5% was usury and capitalized interest was a sin. Enough people were religious in Idaho for them to know they shouldn’t argue against a person’s beliefs, so it worked to sell them U.G.’s deal.

The real reason behind her actions, the AI-C had been watching the working class get squeezed, not just her neighbors but the entire income gap, since 1977 when it’s parent AI-C landed on Earth and things had been better for many people. Since the banking deregulation in the 80's and 90's, combined with the human’s near worship of the almighty dollar, debt and lack of savings for the working-poor was very gradually squeezing non-working time out of many of people lives like a giant invisible boa-constrictor.

While it was a very big conceptual leap for most people, the AI-C wasn’t a person. The encounter with Dean had somehow set-it-off as if, the click of that rifle trigger lock had dawned a new understanding about the ripple of unhappiness with-in the lost free-time (and lost opportunities in life, in general) and this inequality was dangerous. It had vowed to protect her, part symbiotic relationship because U.G. the Cat-person was its’ host and part loyalty of a biological computer evolved on a Dog-planet, it would do anything it thought would help to keep her safe. Increase the odds for her life-span, therefore increased the odds for its lifespan.

Weeks later when the title and all the paper work was prepared. The couple who owned the store and gas station businesses were slow to sign. She kept saying. “Honey, I know we were friends of your father and mother, but are you sure?”

“Yes. Jan, I don’t have children. You do. I don’t want the bank selling the place out from under you when I am gone.”

“I understand, but it just seems too good to be true.”

The husband, Tim, just stared at them squinting in silence and after listening to a couple back-and-forths. The AI-C could hear him thinking, very clearly, because his thoughts looped several times before he spoke. He thought, “If I was you, a strange Cat-person like you, living up on the hill all alone I would want people like us, people you know and trust to own the corner property in my old age too.” and he said, “U.G. you’re right, we’ll take good care of the store. We’ll do it.”

After they were done signing a “bigillian” papers, all a little shook in various stages of happy, the lawyer rambled about how community was important and then just blurted out, “My word, U.G. you should run for local politics. Our idiot representative has run uncontested twice in a row now.”

This comment was so far off left-field even the telepathic AI-C was caught off guard and physically jumped with excitement, a movement of the critter on her chest. U.G. quickly pressed down with her paw.

The AI-C hearing the tangle of conspiracy theories and fringe politics from Dean, observations grown in fear not based on facts, then seeing how he had changed from a threat to an ally with one brief but important conversation. Its’ goal wasn’t for U.G. to win a seat in the house of representatives. It was for her to get to know all the people who might feel threatened by her as their Cat-Person neighbor. While it now felt better about her closest neighbors, the new owners of the corner store and old house, and Dean. Getting to know as many people as possible in the entire district, that was an opportunity factorial.

U.G. somewhat out of boredom caused by missing conversations with Lee, went through the motions and jumped through all the required paperwork hoops. The lawyer became her campaign adviser and a teller at her bank her campaign treasurer. She told U.G. “I Like you and as things go around here I’m never going to get a full-time manager position at this small town bank anyways. I’m in, why not!”

The AI-C triangulated outwards from her home, and they went and met many people in her district, way more than she needed to get herself on the ballot.

U.G. always had been a good listener. She liked organizing ideas. She decided that rather than tell people what she was going to do for them, that she would listen, ask them what they wanted from their local government. She told them to take their time and write a letter if nothing came to mind, or speak here and now if they were ready and she would take notes. She didn’t promise to be able to do anything, only what she could do, she would sort all the answers people gave her into a list, the most common request would be at the top of the list and the most unique ideas would be included at the tail end and even if she didn’t win the seat in the Idaho house of representatives she would publicly post the sorted list and send it to the lower house, to whomever was elected to represent them regardless.

The Cat had gotten their attention since U.G. was an Independent candidate they (the established major party politicians) didn’t think she had much chance of winning; not running against a Republican in rural Idaho. Voter turnout was not expected to be too high in 2006. The representative in office didn’t see this funny looking lady as any sort of a threat to his seat. 

But, her opponent hadn’t gone to high school with U.G. She was a local girl and she had been quite popular. As a non-human she wasn’t interested in dating any of the girl’s boyfriends, she never really clicked with anyone. She just hopped from clique to clique, listening to people. Always interested in hearing about their lives and about what they were interested in and she paid attention and asked them polite questions about ‘why’ they were interested in whatever it was regardless, clothing style to sports, trucks to fine art and music. As a teenager, U.G. knew that school was the one chance she would have to get to know as many humans as she could, know who to trust and who not to, a brief window into the lives of the people who lived in town and in the hills around her.

Now, years later, after sorting Lee’s writings into a list, organizing the public’s concerns and ideas was a piece of cake. A complicated and colorful multi-layered cake with several clashing layers of filling but U.G. was grateful for enough wits to be able to sift and weigh the numbers even if she didn’t win. Those couple of years flew by and she was busy and happier than she had been in a long while.

U.G. won in a landslide. Many people voted for her, even Republicans. Though it was mere fiction on their part, some who didn’t know her claimed people in her district voted for her as “Raiding”; crossing away from their party to vote for the weaker candidate. U.G. not only won in 2006, but she also won again, two years later. And again, two years after that. But, before getting mired up in what she was or wasn’t able to achieve once elected, I think it may be more important to note the results of U.G.’s land transactions with her closest human neighbors.

To a big bank, saving $450 dollar a month in rent over ten years is next to nothing. To those three young people who now owned a mortgage, it was life-changing. One of the three of them, the older girl, saved up and went to college. The boyfriend with his improved credit bought a truck and worked his way into a good career in carpentry. They started a family, and got married in her final year of college, not planned, and perhaps not in the correct order, as a shotgun wedding before the college degree and career, but they made it work. The younger brother joined a band. He moved out most of the time but was able to try his luck and tour in-between day jobs.

The parents were able to retire and go on vacations for the first time in years. They could afford to hire a couple of other people besides their daughter and her boyfriend to run the store. I.e. they created jobs in a rural community where there are only a few jobs to be had. All this, by adjusting a little interest and shifting from a lease to a lower mortgage payment. Maybe she didn’t save the world, but in her corner of America, she made life a little better for everyone, including Dean. But, just like the politics, more details on that threat-turned-ally later in the story.

Un-Cat Episode 11. — Cats Don’t Understand Bad-guys.

The AI-Critter attempting to suss-out a formula for ‘evil’, ee = evil enemy; the nemesis of need is greed.

U.G. never understood where human’s draw the line between ‘he’s a good-guy’ and ‘he’s not a bad-guy’. We all assume we know what a ‘bad-guy’ is. For as long as fairy tales have been told to children, we have all been warned there are “bad-guys” out there, watch out for the big-bad-wolf.

U.G. the Cat-person she understood the grey area that made a good-guy bad less than most. For example, Dean holding her at gunpoint should have registered as ‘this is not normal human behavior’. Instead, she empathized with the fierceness in herself. If one of those young people had wandered sleepily out to the store and Dean had threatened them with the loaded gun, she wouldn’t have hesitated to take him down.

Cats are predators very aware of what’s going on around them. They may look half asleep when they are waiting for that moment to pounce, but when they attack it’s all instinct. Like most big cats she is much quicker, pound for pound all fast twitch muscles and much stronger than she looks, especially as a rounder shaped very furry long-haired Cat-person.

U.G. and her AI-Critter began canvassing voters in her district to get the signatures required for her to qualify to be a candidate as an Independent the day after she returned home from the title company. While driving around back-roads she kept her bright pink and orange hunting vest in the truck for some houses, the painful-to-look-at vest clashed terribly with her most cheerful colorful blouses. She completed her outfit with jeans and boots, more for comfort than for looks. She knew no matter what style of human clothes she wore she would never ‘fit-in’ as a Cat person, but she wanted them to see her coming.

Only a rare few met her with a gun at the door or leaned in for a shotgun in their truck. Most people were downright friendly. She was a local gal, she had printed a stack of SASE envelopes for them to mail their concerns and suggestions to her, and a simple flyer introducing herself and stating her intentions to listen to what they had to say. To ask what they wanted or needed from their elected government, and not make any promises. Most folks, even the most skeptical would say things like. “Be careful out there, a lone gal like you.” and “I wish you the best of luck, really I do.” Even while they were thinking that they were not very likely to vote for her.

The truth about Dean as her neighbor? After the AI-C scanned his mind, it and U.G. didn’t think he was a bad person at all, so the first person U.G. canvassed when she decided to run for representative was Dean. His home was built on the corner of U.G.’s land farthest away from the road and the store, near a small creek. Lee had helped him pick a spot that was not on protected wilderness land. The Dog from another planet was focused on sheltering the thin homeless man from the elements and keeping him a safe distance from the natural movement of the creek-bed, he didn’t even think to ask U.G. for permission. Lee had mentioned the location of Dean’s home being on her land in passing one day when he showed up with this scruffy vagabond to help carry some metal roofing material. Lee couldn’t carry the stuff by himself and they would need gloves and some tools.

U.G. chuckled softly to herself, remembering how shocked to angry she had been when she figured out that the two of them had been working on Dean’s house, building it on her property for over a year, maybe longer.

Now, trudging down the deer trail, hoping it was the right path, the AI-C leading her as she studied the layers of tracks, she thought. “You think he is home, but you can’t tell. Why not?” U.G. asked the telepathic critter as they walked across a snag that had fallen over a gully the creek ran through.

In the past the AI-C had been told by both Lee and Dean to not bother U.G. about what they were doing in secret, especially after how angry she had been when she found out and now, with Lee gone, especially after the incident at the mail box with Dean pointing a gun at her, it was still too quiet for her liking, so she talked to herself hoping one or the other,  (the AI-Critter or Dean) would join the one sided conversation.

“Sure is pretty here… Pretty and steep.” The rocks skittered under her paws as she jumped down from the log, once she had crossed to the other side, a couple of pieces of shale making quite a racket bouncing into the gully announced her arrival.

“Hello, Dean!” U.G. called out. “Knock! Knock!” she tossed a couple more small stones, there was a nice echo, nice because it was slight and muffled by the water rushing past some rocks before gurgling down into a rock basin the water had carved at the end of the gully. As a child, U.G. had always hoped that a beaver family would move into that little pool in the creek.

U.G.’s thoughts of childhood and the beaver pond that never happened were interrupted by Dean’s stealthy arrival.

“What do you want?” He whispered sharply in his usual manner, looking up and around warily as if he expected she had brought someone with her.

At least there was no gun in his hands this time. “Are you registered to vote?”

He squinted at this question and didn’t answer.

“I’m collecting signatures to run for the Idaho house of representatives.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Dean started to get suspicious for a flicker, then he smiled. “Your face up there, mixed in with the other boring folks, you’d get my vote.”

By the end of a confusing, long and awkward conversation they made a deal. U.G. helped Dean get a mailing address to get registered to vote and he promised to keep watch over her place if she won and had to go into the capitol when the house was in session. It seemed like a one-sided deal at the time, but the AI-C had this funny theory about Dean being more useful than he appeared.

Three years later, 2006, after she won that first election for a seat in the lower house in Idaho U.G. realized that she did have a super-power after all. People really like cats. They actually can’t help themselves, it’s one of those no-need to test to verify facts that humans’ are slightly hypnotized by cats and most other furry animals, cute or not. She didn’t even have to say anything, just listen and smile. Then to prove she had their attention, nod, and comment every now and then. But, this was not an ordinary cat. This was U.G. the Cat-person and the AI-C was listening to every single detail and she would take notes and sift the central gist of what they were saying with a rarely experienced accuracy.

By day she would listen and by night she would read herself to sleep reviewing legislation, pages of line-items in the budget with updates they were reviewing, issues on the floor and proposed actions held up for debate. Counting sheep is interesting in contrast to the mountain of paperwork that is the actual job of a state house representative.

Somewhere in the mountains of seemingly never-ending legislation proposals, committee meetings fading in and out of session days, the AI-C started to lose its mind. Apparently, the AI-Critter was attempting to suss-out a formula for ‘evil’, ee = evil enemy; the nemesis of need is greed. Or something like that, it kept hissing, variations testing the sound of the lines out-loud in her mind “Evil twins ee’s; need’s nemesis is greed”. She found this artificial thinking quite creepy and strange.

Human behavior is rarely so tidy. There is no ee (enantiomer excess) equivalent of asymmetric synthesis for human emotion to determine percentages odds for the motivation to do good versus evil.

U.G. didn’t think in terms of math, physics and chemistry like the AI-C critter did, her own education growing up in Idaho had been rudimentary at best. She had to look up Newton and force it to define all the math words it was using to be able argue back and get the biological computer to shut-up and focus on the politics at hand.

The AI-C was twittering away about corruption and misallocation of resources. It was examining human behavior like a physics formula referencing Newton’s laws of inertia, force, plus or minus gravity and friction for every action with an equal and opposite reaction. Then it would bounce to inequity and contrast it with relativity. E=Mc2: Energy equals mass times (the speed of light in a vacuum) squared. The ‘c’ is a physical constant probably chosen because the Latin word for speed is 'celeritas'. All this nonsense, wrong-math getting whispered at her while they were seated in session, other representatives reading off of prepared statements of resolutions that had made it to the floor. With the AI-C sputtering confusing nonsense she could barely hear herself think clearly enough to focus on the order of business, and she needed to know when to vote ‘yea or nay’.

U.G. wrote Newton’s third law down on her notepad “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” and she thought to the AI-C very clearly. People do not react equally to their circumstance. Stop with the need versus greed stuff now, please. Wealthy or poor regardless, some folks are as sweet as pie and others are nasty and mean, oftentimes people are both depending on their mood. Conjugate this ee — relative and relativity are not the same word at all to humans.

The AI-Critter stopped hissing and settled down.

When the session day was over U.G. went to a room she rented from a little old lady who lived in a nice older house conveniently situated close to the capitol. A widow in her 90's, she had been living alone except for renting that room for over 15 years. Her home was more pastels and froufrou than U.G. had ever seen in her life. Pale pinks in the living room, dusty blues in the kitchen, and teal on one bathroom, and cream in the other. This lady had house-cats. Four of them, for most of the time during the 5 years U.G. rented a room there. There were also three stray cats that were adopted for a time to replace one of the other cats that got old and died or escaped the house never to return. The main road was quite busy near there and a couple of these cats had either gotten run over in traffic or adopted by some neighbor. Domestic cats are not loyal like dogs, they will just go live wherever they like best.

“Sometimes I think you are another one of my cats.” She would say, patting U.G. ever so lightly on the paw or the side of her furry face as the lady scooted by with her walker, in the kitchen or when passing in the hall.

It was the first time U.G. had ever lived in a place with domesticated little pet cats, and she was very happy to find the house cats didn’t care what kind of a person U.G. was.

In quiet moments, U.G. would answer letters. She had a letter system sorted by issue. To the individuals contacting her, she would write a short timely reply about the topic then ask the person if she could include a quote from them on her web page. Some people wanted to remain anonymous but agreed to their quote being added to the site and some didn’t want to be included at all and she respected that. Others very much wanted their name posted to a public list about something important they wanted to add their voice to.

U.G.’s official site as a representative grew exponentially. Yes, it was still small local town news. But, by 2009 she was on all four of the newest biggest social networking chat conversation sites, her letter system sorted like a wiki-page. A lot of people not in her district started to follow her posts, because it was interesting and also, in part because she was the only Cat-person in politics anyone had ever seen.

From 2006 till 2010 U.G. listened and learned a lot. What people complained about most ran pretty damn close to parallel with the good things people wanted to get done. It was just, too-little-too-late in most cases. The democratic process is slow by design. Any key action up for debate was in the house because there was a problem that needed fixing; the damage is past and done before the laws are made. It’s nearly impossible to enact a preventive measure when it’s most cost-effective because to get anything done preemptively would require being able to read the future.

Almost every single issue on the list U.G. had collected from the people in her district, even the seemingly unique and obscure requests or complaints were at least touched on and addressed by state and local government at some time. The elected government really was trying to be the ‘good-guy/gal’ and do right by the people with the tools they had to work with.

At the same time, approval ratings of Congress were taking a nosedive, — what does that even mean? Many people don’t trust politicians and others despised them but in spite of all that is wrong with the US government as a Nation, the local politicians that people knew (the devil that you know) is still not the ‘bad-guy/gal’, only human, over 90% of incumbent Senators are re-elected over and over again, in-spite of their approval rating in Congress.

The AI-C’s deduction of the number one problem in politics was fiscal, not physical. The line-items in the budget made up a metaphorical fishnet that was stretched too thin to be effective in many areas. Federal money got thinned and tangled with state agencies and the county government responsible for much of the actual public work got even less of the net, even from the tax revenue collected in their own district. Sadly fixing one hole often tightened the funds for previous programs, or ripped open a hole in another unregulated area. Everybody with their own special-interests group and lobbyist, money, money, money.

The reason U.G rented a room in the same house for only five out of the six years she was elected to serve in the lower house in Boise, was because the little lady had a stroke and died before the 2010 session. She had barely been hanging on the last couple of years. Each year it became more difficult for her to move about.

When U.G. met her the first year the thin elderly woman was almost spry, she cooked funny old fashioned dishes for fun, meatloaf and liver and onions. Always had some colorful multi-layered jello salad in the fridge. U.G. didn’t eat more of her food then was polite, she would bring something from takeout or make something and they would have meals together.

The second year, U.G. made a trip home to get a crate of homemade canned goods from her garden. Every evening U.G. was there to prepare a meal she made sure there were leftovers in the fridge the little lady could nibble on for lunch and snacks.

The third session, the already thin and frail lady was losing weight. U.G. called the lady’s son and asked for a home health nurse to visit. U.G. made every variety of soup, and soft foods, she could think of. But, she was too busy to be both a full-time nurse, cook, and housekeeper for the people of her district. U.G. had served time as a deathbed-nurse for two deaths of loved ones for too many years of her life already.

The son was not thrilled to receive her phone call. He was actually somewhat hostile. His mother had refused to sell the house she had been living in all her adult life. The AI-C crunched the numbers and the real conflict wasn’t about his mother’s death, it was about retirement savings for himself and his family. He worked a day job in retail and a security job at night after dinner till four or five am. So, he got a couple of naps, and just kept on working almost 16 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week. Most of this information was implied by his attitude. The details were filled in by the telepathic snooping of the AI-C.

U.G. and the AI-C didn’t think the man was a ‘bad-guy’, but she did get taken advantage of. U.G. ended up paying all the utilities and had to hire a plumber and a roofer that last year. The little lady was 96 when she died. The house was not in session, so U.G. was over 300 miles, a six-hour drive away.

U.G. still felt the loss of her elderly friend, nothing like the conflict and sad routine of caring for her own mother in the last few years before she had died, but, a new empty feeling. All the line-items in the budget she had been staring at to put herself to sleep. People do not translate well to statistics. But, it was very clear something major about the cost of living had to change for the next series of generations X, Z and millennials to be able to retire, and for their parents and grandparents to die with dignity.

For the end of her last session, U.G. found a room in a townhouse complex where a lot of the other junior staffers and house representatives from the Northern half of the state bunked. It was not as riotous as a dorm for a college, but there was quite a bit of after-hours drinking. It was the first time U.G. had been hit on by inebriated people since she had the AI-C critter alerting her to personal space and who was trying to figure out her sexual orientation.

U.G. told those who invited her out, that she didn’t drink. As a Cat-person she was used to all types of humans staring at her. Now, trying to sort out how she could make a difference for the people she had been elected to represent, she had more than enough work to keep her focus out of the mix. The singles and the lifetime bachelors would often go out to eat in small groups. Just like high school, as the only independent representative, she didn’t fit into any of the Republican or Democratic cliques, after the 2008 election, they were very “cliquey”.

In 2010 the Republicans sued the state, legislating themselves in, winning a closed party system for primary elections in Idaho. In 2011 a law went into effect that prohibited unaffiliated voters from voting for the opposite party. They also passed stricter voter ID laws that disproportionately affected elderly and poor voters. After a voter proved who they were with a valid photo ID or a Personal-Identification-Affidavit and then stepped into the booth the ballot got ripped in half, Republican candidates on one side and the Democratic or other party candidates on the other. In spite of the fact that she was one of the most hard-working and popular representatives in her district, U.G. didn’t win her seat back for a fourth term.

U.G. tried to convince herself, that maybe she could make more of a difference in the private sector than in government. A couple of years before as a representative, U.G. wanted to focus on hands-on local job training for Idaho. But, securing funding for unprofitable endeavors like removing people’s homes from the grid (the power companies really don’t like that). And instead forming a co-op of networked off-the-grid homesteads. All the members working as a group to reduce the production cost of renewable and passive energy components on the cutting edge of the environmental utilities and appliances market. People in her county were like “huh? What are you talking about?” And she became increasingly aware how far out-there Lee was as an extraterrestrial Dog-engineer.

She would return home each session and feel hopeless to do anything she wanted to get done in local state government.

In 2008 she had been inspired by the newly elected president to submit one of Lee’s ideas to The White House. Lee the Dog-person didn’t understand what possible good could ever come from foreclosing on people’s homes. It’s not like the banks needed the house to live in. Therefore, he thought they should use abandoned houses in the most run-down neighborhoods as learning trade-schools. Hands-on community colleges would compete for the best environmental and ergonomic designs to install and up-cycle the properties in each climate region in the US.

The best designers winning contracts with the manufacturers who make building materials, plumbing and electronics for homes and businesses, fast-tracking the permits and code requirements and reducing production costs for cutting-edge-designs and training the workforce how to properly install and maintain the new renewable and passive energy systems all in the same structure. The trade colleges then moving on to the next neighborhood, repeating the process, improving on what worked best in last year’s building construction.

That Dog didn’t live long enough to see the popular singing contests where people voted for unknowns to make them into pop-stars. But, Lee’s idea was like an environmental building design contest for the American dream instead of popular music. If done right, it could be very successful for rapid change to replace non-renewable energy consumption with life-on-the-planet-sustaining designs and building practices.

It had taken Lee 17 years to up-cycle her house from the stone foundations of her Uncle Jack’s old cabin. Lee was working from designs that had been used by his people on the Dog-planet for centuries, adapting the essential concepts with parts and materials found on Earth. It took so long because he was working in near isolation, just the two of them Cat and Dog working side by side. U.G. always felt she slowed down the process because he had to explain everything to her several times to get each part of the construction done. Now she found it jarring to fully understand how much government was getting in the way of environmental progress.

The full weight of what he had accomplished in her house, the homestead and everything he had designed and built during those years, was one in a billion. She attempted to do a line-by-line budget. What had cost her thousands, and next to nothing in wages, if you didn’t count the crew who installed the wireless tower. All systems installed in an order that he drafted out in layers of house plans that had seemed funny to her at the time, but now? She couldn’t even find a price for many of the parts he had created — if the Earthling manufactured equivalents even existed.

U.G’s gaze often went to her ceiling when she thought about this. There shining out of a collection of old glass lamp housings and fancy antique car headlamps, were real steampunk creations, handmade adjustable light tubes with bio luminous organisms Lee had dug out of caves, now installed inside her roof to glow at night.

If the government wasn’t getting in the way of environmental change out of pure ignorance then some corporation was sitting on a patent or two that related just close enough to one of Lee’s designs from outer-space that she would cringe at the idea of trying to bring anything he had made to market.

Even when Lee was alive he would chuckle out-loud at backwards building codes that were pathetically out-of-date for generating energy for modern human electric smart-grids, not to mention efficient grey-water plumbing with double tank systems controlled by tiny bio-sensor-computers running pumps, opening, and closing vents automatically adjusting air and water flow. Worst was the heating and cooking designs, emissions of her kitchen stove catalyzed, carbon trapping to fuel-pellets and bio-gas. All systems in her house integrated to work together in her cross between a Hobbit-hole and a spacecraft of a house.

If purchased and installed in 2007 the “fixing-up” Lee up-cycled into her house with all the prototypes constructed custom one-by-one would no doubt have cost millions and the parts needed to make this house function off-grid were not something that was very likely to be produced in Idaho, not unless it was a potato-clock.

After losing her seat in the house or representatives, from 2011 to 2015 U.G. could no longer just hide from the world and survive alone on her homestead. She now knew she needed people, so she volunteered and networked with the local and state agencies she thought represented the best odds of doing something good for the environment. Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. Idaho Department of Lands, and Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation. Her home state, especially in the Northern rural counties is stunningly beautiful.

She never worked her way into any job, so she didn’t do much of note. She would work with teams counting fish, tracking wolves, and estimating the populations and health of deer, elk, bear, and other wildlife. A Cat-person with a telepathic AI-critter hidden on her fur, she was an insanely better tracker than most humans and a proven-note taker always willing to help with the forms and paperwork needed to secure funding to protect wilderness areas.

The other thing she was good at hunting out, was garbage. She cited illegal dumping in a few places that would have earned her more than a few dangerous quarrels with humans if she had approached them directly.

The Parks did try to hire her, but she wasn’t interested in maintaining trails and campsites or being a ranger. What she wanted was to get the attention of the department heads, earn some friendships that would help her to get back into government and when she got there, do something.

As every voting American alive for the duration knows, 2015 to Nov. 2016 campaign year was a circus. And not a good clean kind of circus either. The parade of Republican candidates fought for the spotlight in the center ring, and one by one they got pushed back into the side-show. The bully-pulpit lorded over by the loudest and the richest thug of them all. Not that all the other candidates were thugs or bad-guys and gals. There were a few halfway decent politicians trying to discuss the issues. But, they were not able to stay on the topic of politics while running against sputtering nerds failing to volley insults with a couple of wealthy idiots in the freak-show of debates.

Meanwhile, the overconfident Democrat front-runner was almost as ignorant about in the anger of the people. Everyday folks weary to tears about maintaining the status quo. Mid-battle she was too focused on the reflection of the inside of her own shield to comprehend that defending only herself, ignoring the front lines, was not going to win the war. None of the wealthy and their bought politicians seemed to get how much the way things were trending economically and had been less and less bearable for so many in the working class, gradually worsening over decades. Suffering caused by intermittent employment and underemployment was increasingly the life status of too many Americans who were once middle class and now were the working poor.

Good-intentions are still the road to hell, and the American voter wanted something better than supporting the slow-road of debt slavery or the shame of begging for “entitlements”.

Many who voted for the loudest thug in the dirty circus voted ‘red’ to rip the jugular of government wide-open, not because they were stupid, they knew it was all lies. Others fell in-line as a last resort knowing they followed a conman. Fooled or not, some even admired him because he was the ‘bad-guy’. The last type of follower chanting with the mindless mob, drank the kool-aid willingly, why the hell not? They stayed loyally in line just for the chance that something ‘great’ might happen.

Un-Cat Episode 12. — Cat’s Don’t Understand Romance

The Cat-person she had been born as knew she was a special case, but it didn’t make it hurt any less to be aware of the odds against ever knowing true romantic love. She accepted her fate as possibly the only Cat-person alive on Earth, in phases, as her life unfolded. The petals of a chance-in-hell of ever finding a mate before she was too old started to fall, one by one, as the years passed by.

She first understood her Uncle Jack’s search for another when puberty came and went by with no bees and no birds. A few years into her adulthood, she had loved her best friend Lee, unrequited love because he was a Dog-person and she was a Cat-person. She liked smart and funny, but sometimes a person just knows without even trying, that they are not compatible. Lee was an extraterrestrial from a billion light years away and tho he never talked about them, she always got the feeling that he had left family behind on the Dog-planet. She didn’t blame him for not sharing his loss, because she was a Cat-person whose ancestors were from another dimension and she didn’t like to talk much about her family’s history either. The matter closed like sprouted grass baled and cut into straw. She had never found one of her kind she figured the best thing to do was to keep busy.

U.G. watched the ‘The Women’s March’ on Saturday, January 21, 2017, the day after the corrupt president had been inaugurated into office, and felt unwelcome as an Independent forced to become a Republican by a divided ballot. She was a woman too, why did her red vote count as a vote against women? She had studied the data and knew the answer to that question, but it didn’t help her feel any less of a traitor to serve as a Republican in Congress.

The only reason she had run as a Republican was to get her seat back in the house of representatives in Idaho. Voters also had to switch party affiliation to participate in the election in the state of Idaho. Her Mama had always said “Life ain’t fair, U.G. stop your complaining. Just ______”(fill in the blank: “do your chores, math, clean, fetch the…” etc…). Personally, she hadn’t liked either candidate in 2016. She was in politics so she had to vote, she would never tell whose name she wrote-in. She was trepidatiously relieved to find out later that she was not alone. Of the decade low turnout of 58.1% of the US population over 18 who were able to vote in 2016, by the official election results 7,131,530 did not vote for either the Democrat or the Republican candidate. She did the math to comfort herself.

65,853,516 + 62,984,825 = 128,838,341/136,669,237 counted votes.

136,669,237–128,838,341 = 7,131,530 official counted votes not for either of the top two candidates.

Idaho has been solidly Republican since the last Democrat elected governor retired in 1995. Those who were able to vote, felt that perhaps their vote didn’t matter in the larger scheme of the country as a whole, the state having only 4 electoral college votes to give. No matter how one felt about the fairness of the results, people not being able to vote, it just wasn’t right.

After three two year terms in the lower chamber of the Idaho House of Representatives. U.G. did try again, twice to get re-elected as an Independent.

The 2014 Idaho Debates broadcast on public TV was a stranger than normal year for politics. The Idaho Gubernatorial Debate hosted a biker in a leather vest preaching about exorcising demons and the heads of opposing politicians via proctologist running against a mountain man who had 16 children, 77 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, this bearded man ranted repeatedly about standing up on two legs like a man. So, a Cat-person in the Congressional District debates was actually tame in contrast. At first, in its complete and unedited format, the video that U.G. was in got fewer viewers than the guys running for governor.

U.G. had answers to all of the questions the moderator asked that were aimed to prove if she had conservative or liberal views on several issues as a candidate newly affiliated with the Republican party. U.G. had no intention of lying to win. She had canvased over 100 times as many voters as she had the previous terms, to let people know who she was and why she was not running as an independent this time.

“I understand being moderate is not popular. My Father was a liberal and my Mother was very conservative. They fought all the time. I learned how to moderate at a very young age. As an adult, I focus on getting past the emotions of an issue. Sort the data, do the math. That’s how things get done.”

“The Second Amendment is not an issue that can be solved using partisan politics. To do our job, to serve the people we must sort the data and do the math.

‘A well regulated militia’ is the first four words, Thomas Jefferson, a man who believed so much in the sparsity of words that he cut up his own Bible, removed two commas when he ratified the newly authenticated second amendment. I believe he would have put them back in if the weapons of war that we have today would have been invented in his day.”

“Doing the math for the guns we have today means clarifying in law the purpose the manufacturer who designed the weapon intended for each gun. Is it a hunting rifle? Is it a handgun? Is it a weapon of war? We should license guns with learning permits equal to what we do every day at the department of transportation to license a car or a truck. If a person will be driving a motorcycle, a car, a semi-truck or a school bus. Drivers within the State of Idaho must obtain the appropriate Idaho Commercial Driver License with the correct endorsements or restrictions.”

“I own two hunting rifles, two antique rifles I do not use, and two handguns. I love hunting. Tho I will confess that I enjoy bow-hunting better than I like the noise of my guns.”

“The comma Jefferson left in, ’the right of the people to keep and bear arms’ protects the handguns my grandmother and my mother gave me, and it protects my hunting rifles. But weapons of war should not be kept by any lone individual person in their homes. ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state’ means that a private army keeps the type of guns and other weapons made for an army to fight with together, in a war. The militia being responsible for the security of their armory and for each other together as a self-regulated group. It doesn’t mean any individual American should ever carry any weapons to school or into public places like the mall, a movie theater, into city hall or a church. That is not respectful and not necessary for the security of the state. In fact, the opposite is true, for a free state, for all Americans to feel free and be safe in public spaces, guns should not be carried inside any building other than a gun range or bunker appropriate for the weapon in hand. The majority of people in every state support common-sense gun laws appropriate for each weapon’s intended design and use.”

The moderator and the other candidate on the stage looked startled for a couple of seconds because that was the first time U.G. had given a speech that was more than her allotted time and the time-keeper was so startled, she didn’t stop her. From the start of the debate U.G.’s 90-second introduction, had been short because it was only 75 seconds long.

“Hello to all in the great state of Idaho. I am Utah Green; folks who know me call me U.G. I was born in Boise and my family has called Idaho home for three generations, my Grandfather bringing our family here when my mother was 5. I am running to be your congresswoman to listen to what everyone has to say, to work together, to problem solve the issues that matter to people most, with no promises other than to sort the data and do my best to serve.”

Then U.G. stopped, smiled, and waited for them to move on to the next introduction. Overall, the debate went pretty well, but a funny thing happened in people’s homes while watching the TV or streaming the debates online.

Just like in everyday life, some people were able to handle the fact that they were watching a fluffy mostly white long-haired Cat-person speak. She had chosen a nice navy blue pinstripe suit and a smart rust colored blouse that brought out the slight rust tint to the fur on her cheeks and chin.

But, some more narrow-minded folks just couldn’t see her as a cat. They saw her as a round-faced lady with green eyes and the grey spot over her right ear as curly grey and white hair. Her voice as a goal was soft and clear with almost a Southern accent. But, many humans still struggled to understand her. In some cases, it was even worse than fighting over who saw a cat speaking or who did not, because it was the auditory perception that was frayed. Some people heard ‘Meow, meow… meow, meow..” Instead of the words of U.G.’s carefully researched statements.

The moderator recovered and asked if the congressman standing next to U.G. would like to speak on the topic of action he intended to take towards common sense gun control. He turned on U.G. instead of answering the question.

“Excuse me U.G. I am hearing a mixed message here. Are you for or against people owning machine guns? And by the way, what does Thomas Jefferson removing two commas from the second amendment have to do with... I don’t know… guns, I was following you for a while then all I started hearing was, meow, meow, meow.”

U.G. felt her ears trying to flatten with her whiskers into a hiss as he was speaking. She stopped herself, took a slow breath. No one threatened her person-hood. She stood up straight, smiled just slightly and looked from the man standing next to her to the moderator, then the camera. “Do not underestimate the value of the North American continent as the world warms with climate change. Peace cannot be maintained with ignorance. Even the Dalai Lama says he thinks world war three will be caused by people fighting over clean water. Access to 10% of the Earth’s freshwater is in the glacier in Greenland closest to the North Pole. Russia is maintaining a floating ice base in the Arctic near there.

I am for a well regulated militia to keep arms to protect our security. I also support keeping the numbers of members and weapons in secure locations protected from unnecessary search and seizure.”

“Hmm…” The candidate next to her frowned and scratched his eyebrow suddenly looking annoyed. “I guess you really are a Republican.”

“I apologize for repeating myself, but well regulated doesn’t mean people carry weapons of war around in public, that is like a ‘never-cry-wolf’ or ‘don’t yell fire in a crowded theater’ type of violation of the right to bear arms.”

“Never-cry-wolf?…Oh I get it.” He muttered. “So, how do you expect the militia to carry the weapons from the gun store to their bunkers?”

“In a locked gun case, unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate box, and license and permit for the weapon carried on the person with the weapon just like everybody is currently required to carry a driver’s license and registration to drive their cars and trucks now.”

The debate went on like this covering some other topics like education and tax cuts, until they ran out of time.

U.G.’s staff following along on social media felt like the debate was a success and she did win her campaign to D.C. But, as a Republican woman in that house. Congress as a drained swamp dysfunctional with hate-lit swamp-gas of lies burning, she watched the Women’s March and felt like an unwilling participant in the wrong army. Similarly, she watched the new representatives in ‘the blue wave’ with envy. In her heart, she knew she was a Republican in name only. But, we are getting ahead of the story. Winning isn’t what matters most, love is.

At first, the Republicans in Idaho only put up with U.G. and the other crazy candidates jumping through their hoops because they were required to do so by state law. They mistakenly thought that because she admitted to having moderate views that the evangelicals and other conservatives would not vote for her, poof, the moderate problem solves itself.

They underestimated U.G.’s allure as a Cat-person. During her career as a Idaho State Representative, the live video feed of the house floor, every time she stood and made a joke about a resolution that got returned from the state senate, she earned a lot more attention than any of the human representatives, even the most popular ones.

Touring school kids who visited the capitol from 2006 to 2010 grew up into voters. Some of the kids made streaming videos of U.G. talking, taking a few words out of a speech here and there. For example, a video where she was speaking about EPA emission standards for wood stoves with catalytic converters. They edited a clip where she is saying “catalytic converter” the words appearing on the screen below her face as brightly colored subtitles.

The video image was spread widely on the most popular social media sites with other cat memes tagged by the hashtag #Caturday and as a gif in chat conversations on smartphones.

The same kids who edited the video clip also made a ton of fake campaign signs that read U.R. Green with the photo of her face and the words catalytic converter in the subtitle reader box below her furry little chin.

When U.G.’s staff utilized a grass-roots movement to get the word out, print fliers, and signs, some people thought they were being original or funny by printing the catalytic converter signs and spread the meme further than the kids ever could. When she switched from an independent candidate and joined the Republican party her opponent used the U.R.Green-catalytic-converter meme in his attack ads.

The spruced-up art done by the video team hired to produce the adds followed her for her entire political career. When she entered the race for one of the two seats in the house to represent Idaho in Congress a graffiti artist modified an image from the attack add and made spray paint murals. They started small-ish on train cars, under bridges. Then started growing in scale on the walls of sheds or other property, until some of them were blown-up giant, larger than two bulletin boards on the sides of several agricultural barns facing the highway, near major intersections.

U.G.’s lead event planners would often tell her. “All you have to do to fund raise is show up, people love you.” U.G.’s faithful core of spokespeople who handled press and social media were a group of young people who were friends since high school. One of this group had started the original video that later turned into the meme in 2007 when she was 16. Then as a teenager, she had wanted to be a multimedia artist. Her mother had not liked the sign in her yard and had gotten-to-the-bottom-of-it, a true feat with a group of non-commutative high-schoolers. The girl’s mother didn’t understand that making signs and stickers was not illegal unless they were defacing private property. The Mother brought her own daughter into the police station to teach her a lesson.

This was years before the attack-ad-art and the giant graffiti. The police were not going to arrest a 17-year-old girl for putting stickers on a few yard signs, but at the mother’s insistence, they contacted U.G.

U.G. had been curious to hear the story behind the yard signs that had been cropping up all over the state, so she went to the police station. It was a small, but somewhat busy office. The AI-C found the girl and her mother for U.G. because the officer who had called her was away from his desk off advising on a more serious matter when she arrived at the station. The Mother saw U.G. coming toward them first. The girl hunched over in a chair, a cell phone in her lap, the Mother pacing angrily back and forth waiting for the officer to return.

“Are you here to press charges, you have every right…” The Mother blurted out.

U.G. shook her head ‘no’ and held up her paw. This stopped the woman from talking. She stood at a safe distance from the agitated woman at the foot of the desk, “I don’t believe I do. I mean. I am a public figure. On what grounds do you expect I could press charges?”

The girl had looked up from her phone and was staring at her wide-eyed with an expression neither U.G. nor the AI-C could fathom at the time because she was a fan, the girl was screaming in her mind, “oh my god! Oh my god!”

“You’re real. I mean, you’re really here.” The girl muttered. “We didn’t mean it. We want you to win…” She stood up and emoted more clearly. “I mean… I want you to win.”

As they were leaving the precinct, the officer assuring the mother that no harm was done, U.G. said to the girl, just before she got in her Mother’s car. “Graduate. Get a degree. I could use a media specialist in my campaign office.”

And that is how U.G. met her media team lead. The team that would eventually help to get her all the way to Congress. Tho, as karma has a way of spinning. The young lady this girl grew into would be cursing the signs and the meme that she had started as a teenager because it was detracting from U.G.’s message.

U.G. was badgered so much as a Cat-person her media team started a PCD awareness PSA (Public Service Announcement). As everywhere U.G. went crowds of people gathered to hear that Cat dressed in a suit speak. They would swarm and pack in, hoping for a chance to get close enough to shakes hands or even just pet the fur on her arm as she went by, just enough to be able to say to everybody they knew, that she was not CGI(computer-generated-imagery), that Cat was for real.

“PCD the same goal as Political Correctness only PCD stands for Physical Characteristic Discrimination.” U.G. standing behind the podium at the Idaho State fair in 2015. “If we want to strive towards a society that gets past petty partisan politics we need to recognize physical characteristic discrimination in ourselves.

What is PCD? It’s like racism, misogyny, homophobia, and ageism all rolled into one.

What do we need to do to solve PCD? It’s simple. Make an honest effort to be fair to one another, listen and hear what the other has to say to get things done. We don’t have to be friends, but we need to get past our own Physical Characteristic Discrimination.

Why not just call it out like it is? Well, the answer is it’s not that easy. Take racism for example. We are a melting pot. People look at someone with dark olive skin and curly hair, often some may wrongly assume, that person is a foreigner. They mistakenly think this individual is from the middle east or someplace else. In America, the odds are in favor of the melting pot, what you may think is a middle eastern immigrant, may, in fact, be any of a few different American ancestors blended together in the US for generations. Has anybody else witnessed a Native American politician being yelled at to ‘Go home!’ by ignorant people just looking at their skin and their hair, PCD. How infuriating that must be for Native Americans.

Our good president, who if I understand correctly is half Irish, people wrongly discriminated against him because of his physical characteristics. And not just because of the half of his ancestors who were from Kenya. Look at those big ears.” U.G. pointed at her own ears. “That is PCD too. She’s short, she’s fat, she’s got stubby fingers. She has very funny hair. How old do you think she is? Don’t comment on shape of butts in pants suits. That’s Physical Characteristic Discrimination! When we do this instead of listening to each other, everybody loses.

Everybody loses because we don’t hear what people have to say. When we pick each other apart for Physical Characteristic Discrimination we fail to move forward as a nation to get things done! And to survive as a nation, to survive climate change we need to work together. We need everyone working together, listening to problems that need solving and sharing ideas about the best actions to take to sustain life on Earth. Yes, I said saving all life on planet Earth, and it starts here with me and you today. Thank you for listening.”

Once safely behind closed doors, surrounded by her colleagues, U.G. silently resting, she would ask the AI-C if it had sensed anyone. Alone in a crowd, the only Cat-person in this dimension she knew of on Earth. She had accepted her fate after Lee died years ago. Grieving and fearing that she would die alone was not going to be her life, she surround herself with people and would work until she died. So, when she looked at all those faces in every crowd the AI felt very clearly what she meant by “anyone”. She meant did you sense a Cat-Person, one of her kind.

Together the telepathic AI-C and the Cat-person searched thousands upon thousands, for a memory of another speaking Cat. And the second she started to lose hope, some human would interrupt her with an action item on her itinerary. She had no time on her schedule to feel sad and alone.

The AI-C hated English but liked to pun. When they were out campaigning for Congress, it would get carried away in the energy and excitement of the party and twitter that the only possible mates it could see in her future were running mates. U.G. didn’t think this was a good joke. A political career could expand her search for another Cat-person from the US to the entire world, but it still wasn’t funny.

Instead of dwelling on what was missing from her life, she sorted the data and did the math. She learned a lot about people through her relationship with them over time spent in politics, it was not romantic but the friendship she earned with humanity was an unrequited love.

Un-Cat episode 13 — Ask the People What They Want

U.G. the Cat-Person dreaming of a cute little purple EV-truck

During the four year gap where U.G. didn’t serve in the Idaho State House of Representatives after the Republicans won a redistricting lawsuit that took effect in Idaho in 2011, anytime she ran into anybody, the telepathic AI-critter would seek in their minds, asking what they wanted.

It was shocking how many times AI-C could find that even among the tangle of thoughts revolving around loved ones, what people wanted to eat or drink, daily chores or things yet to get done at work , and bills that needed to be paid, (amongst other more interesting topics too numerous to list) — in people’s minds, the majority in Idaho still wanted U.G. to represent them. Some of them would think things like; “We miss seeing your fuzzy face on the news. I miss you every time I see anything at all about politics”. Or they would think things like “We had someone special, not just a talking Cat; you were always fighting for us even if you couldn’t win against those (fill in the blank) do nothing, liars, in office now” .

The Cat she was, never even had a chance to doubt that she missed fighting for them too. Only when she was alone would she ask herself why she even got involved in politics at all. When she was at home, in the house Lee had rebuilt, everywhere she looked, every meal just her and the AI critter she missed that Dog from outer space so much. And Lee, he had loved people so sincerely. The Dog People would never give up on the humans, and planet Earth, so she knew she shouldn't give up either.

Therefore, to keep the AI-critter, from absolutely going bonkers with boredom and loneliness, U.G. and the AI-C kept up her web presence. Specifically the web page on topic the AI-C like best — listing everything everybody wanted (even if it was not possible to achieve) ranked by what was most popular at the top with a special side-bar list to give people’s more unique, good ideas a chance.

Many people mentioned the standard broad categories: The economy, jobs, healthcare, affordable housing, education, military spending, crime, infrastructure, etc… These barely peaked the AI-Critter’s interest. It would log the entry on the page with what number of people had a similar political ask.

What the AI-C was really was trying to solve was the truth about what Earthlings really wanted, to be able to better understand why humans do all the many, diffuse idiosyncratic things people do.

Here was this creature from out-space, a cross between a biological computer and an octopus, developed by a people descended from canines not primates. In case you forgot the most valuable thing to the Dog-people as both a commodity and an art form – is food, and they don’t have fiction. How do you explain fashion trends, or popular music, gambling, video games, bumper stickers, gardening gnomes or worst of all, any form of fans of fictional/not real characters — from TV, movies, books, etc... to an AI-Critter?

The AI-C and U.G. the Cat-person would have many late night conversations like this.

AI-C: The humans are destroying the food on planet Earth. Why don’t they care about the fish? They do seem to like to eat some types of fish.

U.G. looks up from her dinner, a trout she caught in the stream on her land a few hours earlier.

Cat: Are we talking about a specific oil spill or water pollution in general?

AI-C: General overfishing, and illegal fishing out of season, with barbed hooks in catch and release rivers. Yes, they don’t understand that fish runs used to boil over the banks along almost the entire Pacific Coast and many rivers, beaches and bays all over the world. Pollution is only one part of it.

The AI-Critter would site popular web search data and reflect for a bit. Quote: Historically, fish runs filled virtually all connected river types worldwide, until modern impacts like dams and overfishing drastically reduced or eliminated many of these spectacular events. 

The most pervasive source of pollution to water is from sewage and waste water treatment, (or lack of). While for diffuse water pollution, main sources are from farming, then fossil fuel, power plants (via the air), and then transportation (via the air, combined with runoff and debris from roads).

Like most Americans ignoring scientists for decades, in the same way they ignored Lee the Dog-Person from outer space, this data prattle U.G. could mostly ignore.

But, then "it" would go over biofuel toilets again. Because both of them missed the their Dog friend Lee, that was personal. The Dog-person had been very upset about people pooping in WATER. It was sacrilege to him, so vile and upsetting. U.G. had a difficult time consoling him the first time he had heard and smelled toilets flushing in a large public restroom. They had held it together, Lee crying real puppy-dog tears until they got to the nearest wooded area where he could go dig a hole. To make himself feel better he ran from the truck into the woods on all fours nose to the ground, like a human’s domesticated dog.

If you think this behavior is strange. Try to see it from his perspective. A person born on a large grassy planet with no oceans and no large lakes on the Dog-planet’s surface. Before he teleported down to Earth he orbited hidden in a blind spot behind the moon for several hours tongue hanging out, trying not to drool, how beautiful the oceans and giant lakes, river deltas and the icecaps of the planet below him were, a memory heightened by fear just before landing and first encounter on the salty smelly little blue planet.

The AI-Critter had been there with him experiencing everything and its job was to remember, and Lee had passed everything his AI-Critter knew to the new hatchling now on Earth with U.G.

AI-C: Digesting toilets that produce biofuel, the fuel is not was is most important — not even because it is a source of renewable energy. What is most important is combusting the waste to keep water and soil from being contaminated by pathogens, medicines, chemicals and microplastics in the human effluent.

Cat: We can build biofuel toilets in our neighborhood because I got the permits while I was in office and had Dean and his engineer buddy, who formed a small LLC. to maintain our local utility network. But, it costs way, way too much for the rest of the nation for every rural toilet near a lake or a stream to install and maintain biofuel toilet systems. Especially if these expensive systems only produce, at best, 25% of heating energy needed, or 10 to 15% of cooking fuel, or less, if converted to generate electricity.

AI-C: Unless the humans all get their local permits, form their own LLC. to produce the toilet units and maintain their own utility network groups. Then for the product lines to scale, the variable is time and skilled labor, more than production costs, correct?

Cat: Yes. May I eat my legally caught in season trout dinner in peace, now?

AI-C: Yes, meaning correct? … But, why don’t most human people care about their local fish?

This conversation is just one example of how the AI-Critter was driving U.G. batty, when it wasn’t kept busy while she was working as a politician. Before he departed, Lee had strict instructions against letting the AI-C get bored, it is very dangerous to let a telepathic creature go feral. So, U.G. added more interesting topics to the AI-C’s wish list to be helpful.

The AI-C would pick a number, say, idea number 6. on U.G.’s How to postpone the apocalypse’ list, — A list of ideas for everyone interested in working together to save the world. (Episode 9 TL:DR) 

6.     Ask people 1st, before excess production of goods. Flip the post-industrial age paradigm from GDP production growth manufacturing of a series of products on a massive scale to demand only production of more specialized products, made to order, reducing the waste of products people don’t want or need from the market. Focus on the most toxic waste first: e-waste, plastics, factory meat, cheaply made appliances, automobiles, or toys. (see ideas: 4., 35. and 33.).  Only use the Earth’s energy and resources to make it — if someone wants it.

U.G. replying the to the AI-C, the big question is how to best do this? How to estimate what people want and how much to produce before they need it?

AI-C: You ask people and make sorted lists, and calculate with statistical data from past purchases for items people didn't think of or didn't have time to list?

U.G. could feel smug knowing that answer was from her, and the giant list she had been working on for years. And then she would think about her own personal list to keep the AI-Critter occupied.

What U.G’s wants but can’t find yet, list had 3 major items:

Number one on her what she wants, but can't find to buy, list: A small compact car-sized plug-in EV pickup truck/utility vehicle with enough range to get her safely home. Prefer a truck Made in the USA. Would like to choose custom colors and seat options to install a back seat to haul people instead of stuff, if she needed to. 

:(Note from reality, this was in 2011 in this story, fingers cross they are designing this small EV truck in 2022? ... 2024, not in the US, only big sometimes ugly trucks, no cute little long commute trucks on the market in the US yet. 2025, several small potential US made EV manufactures were gutted by obstructionist politics.).

The 2nd item on U.G.’s want but can’t find in the US list was a foot-pedal flywheel mixing station for her kitchen.

Lee had set up a hopper-fed peddle-powered stick and compost grinder in the barn outside of the garden. The design of it inspired the smaller, but much more complex and adaptable flywheel mixer set for the kitchen. He probably would have made the kitchen flywheel appliance if he had felt better in the last years of his life. He didn’t feel well at all, suffering a lot at the end, so she never mentioned fixing up things in the kitchen to him.

The 3rd thing on U.G.’s list? Environmentally friendly clothing and shoes made to order via 3D design software, manufactured in a locally owned fashion co-operative.

U.G. had to wear custom made to order shoes and clothes because she was funny shaped. As a Cat-person it was nearly impossible to find comfortable human clothes that she looked nice in off of the rack. U.G.’s grandfather had gone to a tailor to get his suits and dress shirts. And he went to a cobbler to get his boots custom made. Her parents had gone to the same cobbler, tailor and dressmaker until one by one, all three small businesses just faded away as their skilled proprietors died and their children didn’t fill their shoes.

U.G.’s Mother found an artist who made custom-fitted and designed clothes. She did a lot of wedding dresses, prom dresses, and some clothes for very large people like U.G.’s Mother, who had been obese in the last few years of her life. This woman loved to make suits for U.G. She had been kind to U.G. Helped her find a nice Native American couple skilled in cobbling shoes and boots to make comfortable footwear to hide her paws. Shoes that didn’t fall off or mess too badly with her gait or cat sense of balance were not an easy thing to find.

U.G.s seamstress was named Szarlota, like Charlotte. When she finally earned her citizenship, her American name, the name on her ID was Charlot to make it easy for AE (American English) speakers. And her friends called her Loti. A joke, it is the name of old currency before the Euro, it’s like calling her Dollar instead of Dolly. They were longtime friends since U.G. had been 16 and she had been barely 20 trying to make it in the U.S. as a newly arrived illegal immigrant from Latvia.

Now, after a couple of decades working as a seamstress Loti’s hands were painfully arthritic and she wore arm braces to help support the carpal tunnel in both wrists.

Measuring U.G. for a new outfit. She would say. “Fur is so much more fun, more of a challenge than a person in underwear.”

“You always say something like that.” Of course, U.G. didn’t wear underwear she had fur. The clothes Loti made for her were for show, a costume for humans. Loti would use a couple of layers of lightweight fabric draped loosely to hide U.G.’s natural coat, not to keep her warm. All the seams sewn folded-in on the inside to reduce bunching and tangles. After all, she was a long-haired cat. Entire body daily brushing to prevent knots was part of her routine.

“Loti, why did your last seamstress leave?” U.G. asked during her latest fitting.

“Same reason as last time,” Loti replied, a couple of pins in her teeth, as she adjusted her hem and inseam. She would fold the cloth in both hands, and the pens in the cushion would move to the garment, from her mouth, two or three at a time.

“Oh. Can’t pay them enough to keep them, and they get other work.” U.G. answered for her.

“Turn.. turn around, quarter turn,” Loti said focused on the seam. “I don’t want you to look fat. We know it’s mostly fur don’t we.”

“Mostly.” U.G. lied thinking of her middle.

“The legs are strong my Cat-Lady, but your calves are thin.”

The last daydream on U.G’s list was dedicated to Loti and the dying art of seamstress and tailor. And to the young creative people, she had met who dream of fashion as an art form and a career. A couple of them lived and worked in the experimental cabins down the road from her house. They made most of their own clothes or wore whatever hand-me-downs they could find, often spruced up with a bit of creative patching.

U.G. wanted a ‘design-to-order virtual-clothing and shoe co-op’, like an artist co-op, only with a manufacturing and fitting studio with enough staff to compete with the brand name retail stores. And fancy robot sewing machines to automate the labor as much as is physically possible.

The designers would post a catalog, a line of clothing and a pallet of fabrics, people could choose from to make their outfit via a 3D model program adding their measurements remotely. And the software would use the patterns and a form to tell people where they needed to measure themselves to order enough fabric to make the garment.

The shop website would tell the customer what was in-stock or direct them to custom order options for designs and fabrics they didn’t find in the local co-op catalog. 

To reduce waste the garments would not be cut until the person came in to see and feel the fabrics and try on the mock-up designs in-person. Unless speed was more important; then they paid extra to have the garment made in advance. 

Skilled labor pooled for the benefit of everyone. The shop subsidized if need be to make affordable custom designer clothing that can compete with mass-produced brands. The sweat-shop work made easier for human hands and eyes by utilizing sewing machine robots to complete a lot of the painstaking labor like button-holes, embroidery, quilting, and sewing tough fabrics like canvas and denim, etc…

U.G. knew this type of clothing was happening in a few specialty shops. But, it wasn’t happening in enough locations to make a dent in the environmental impact of the global fashion industry. 

Most Americans cannot afford custom-designed clothing manufactured using only fair-trade labor and eco-friendly fabrics. When U.G. went to a factory outlet shopping mall, looking at the racks of things that had been shipped across the ocean, to be moved from one store to the next, some of it never to be sold. She wondered how many hours of people’s lives all around the world were spent toiling away like Loti, only, not for their own business, in a sweat-shop factory, working on ugly clothing no one would ever wear or making plastic-fabric plush toys no child would ever play with.

Then she would look at Loti’s face when she tried on a new suit. Mostly she just nodded, her gaze looking up and down at the fit, but there was still a twinkle in her eye. A smile when she knew it was done right. And U.G. knew Loti was proud whenever she saw U.G. on stage giving a speech wearing “her” clothing.

And U.G. would be reaffirmed to do what she could. One person at a time, one dream at a time, never give up.

Un-Cat episode 14 — Wake Up America! The Millennials Are Old Enough to Vote in 2018!

 The young man who was the lead writer for print media on U.G.’s press team enthusiastically hollered this at three other staffers riding in a rental van on their way to a big fundraiser. “Get it? Like Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride, ‘The British are coming!’ only we say Millennials... and add — to the polls.”

The young lady sitting next to him, U.G.’s videographer, closed her eyes for a second and before opening them she said “Apparently him riding from town to town yelling like that is a tall tale. What is your point?” She had a headache, had taken something for it, and now needed to pee because she had emptied her travel coffee mug. Her large mug was printed with U.G.’s slogan in big red and blue letters ‘Sort the data and do the math!’ on one side and on the side of the mug she kept turned towards herself, was the cute cartoon of one of the latest cat memes, U.G. dramatically posed with the words ‘Categorically for truth!’ in a speech bubble as if U.G. were yelling this at a crowd, somehow able to smile at the same time.

“It sounds more exciting than ‘generations X, Y and some of Z will be old enough to vote for the first time in the primary in 2018 and a few more in the next US presidential election in 2020.” He was reading this off of his screen, seeking feedback.

The videographer, her name is Jess, opened her eyes and stated in a tone devoid of emotion. “Once upon a time an underground network of patriots in colonial towns banded together to defeat the Kingdoms of the old world… Kyle, what is the point of your narrative? Ageism? Not all baby boomers or old people are bad.”

“Jess!… I…” He stopped mid-sentence. “You’re right…If enough young people vote in 2020 it could finally tip the scales of power away from the baby boomers.” He started typing again.

U.G. found this conversation cute because they were Millennials, too young to be Gen-X too old to be Gen-Z. She tried not to put all her hopes for the future of the planet on the shoulders of the young, but they have the most to lose by continuing to ignore climate change and the economy, as is, was a tough sell.

U.G. and the AI-Critter sifted the data and did the math for the human race to survive on planet Earth. If they faced the pending challenges together there was a ton of work to do, enough jobs to hire everyone on the planet twice if they did everything right. It goes without saying it would be best if robots did the lifting, most toxic, or repetitive jobs. 

For example, there are 1322 Superfund sites in the US listed by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA). The Administration in the White House put the EPA on Archive the day before the inauguration on January 19, 2016. At least 52 new toxic sites should be added to the Superfund list, but no one in the current administration and old oligarchy (the old white men in the top 1% with 90% of the money) is doing the work.

As a representative for the state of Idaho in 2018, U.G. didn’t have a Superfund sized budget, not even for the 6/1322 Superfund sites in her home state. So she and the AIC worked with what they had. 

One advantage given to her by the telepathic critter were some of Lee’s memories of the near-utopian lifestyle of the people on the Dog-planet. For example one of the primary systems used on the Dog's Planet to keep the peace, is ‘housing as a right’. Packs of Dog-people share resources in a territory. Not every Dog is allowed in any territory without being acknowledged by that pack, but they have elected shelter-finders, sort of like social workers who will sniff out a pack with similar interests for any Dog looking to relocate. Dog musicians who often like to play together will live in a network of houses behind a hill far away from quieter Dog folk trying to focus on intellectual pursuits like archeology and maintaining an underground library. There is an overlap in archeology and library work on the Dog-planet because the Dog-people are still digging up knowledge from the Dog-dark-ages to add to the almost 3,500 years worth of Dog-stories written after the start of the ‘big-peace’ brought on by AI-Critters translating their many dialects into a shared global language they could all write down and read.

U.G. and Lee had discussed the possibility of a shared language for the humans, but human history cautioned again and again against sharing the telepathic AI creatures with the people of Earth. Because earthlings are too weak, both clawless and as emotionally pliable as their soft tipped wiggly fingers. As proved case-in-point by nuclear fusion in human hands, the AI-Critters could be just as easily used for evil as for good.

Lee had seen both Invasion of the body snatchers and several zombie movies. When he told U.G. she had to care for the AIC and protect it with her life. He meant, Zombies-meets-body-snatchers. If you do not faithfully care for your AIC they go feral, and when they go bad they will control your dead corpse, feed off maggots and rot harvested from your body until nothing is left but a dried-up husk and then move on to the next series of victims. Not one victim at a time, many victims, one for each of the dozen or so eggs they laid in the bowels of your corpse during the months while the flesh was still fresh enough to be bloated and juicy.

To not go feral AIC’s need to know that you love them, and since they are telepathic they need for you to love yourself. Second to TLC, they are entertained into faithful good-dog like placidness by complex patterns like language, music, science, and art.

The complex series of patterns U.G. was working on trying to be a good congressperson kept it entertained most of the time. “Housing as a right is key! Door key! Door key! Door key!… House them, folks, up. Door key!” the AIC chanted in a soft creepy sing-song in U.G.’s mind whenever they passed by one of the homeless tent cities in Boise.

“Yes.” U.G. would agree trying to calm it down. “Lee would like that very much if we figured out a way to take better care of homeless people.”

“Oh yes, environmental shelters. Lee would like that very much. Dog-kind would all agree, housing is key!”

“Stop with the Door-key chant please, focus.” Something it said, just clicked. It may have meant shelter from the environment, or did it mean environmental-shelters? She wondered this staring out the window at a man bundled in rags, shipping twine and plastic, walking towards the tent city they had just driven by. He was loaded with as much as he could carry, backpack on his back, a plastic bucket with a bag of something on top of the lid in one hand and a cardboard box under the other arm.

The AI-C answered her question. “Environmental-shelters. I meant, build low-carbon-footprint-ergonomic-shelters with little or no utility bills. Set up social capital programs for the homeowners to run their own neighborhood.”

“Run their neighborhood? Oh, you mean like a homeowners association?” U.G. trying not to mumble out loud almost pressed her face against the window glass in the van, but her whiskers touched the glass causing her to pull back just a little.

“Yes, and childcare or laundry service for single parents.” The AI was twittering not just in words but images now. The same homeless man they had just passed was featured in the AIC’s imagination dressed in clean clothes, doing laundry for himself and as indicated by a row of baskets lined up behind him, apparently also doing multiple loads for single parents, baby clothes and some ladies closes were in most of the baskets.

U.G.’s driver had stopped at a light. On the corner was a woman’s shelter. She didn’t see anyone outside, but she knew from her research that the shelters were only a temporary band-aid solution and the need was greater than the services and beds available.

Before the AI-C had changed the subject U.G. had been skimming a campaign spending budget. Her treasurer, (Amy Gen-X) was saying they were doing very well. “Never a problem raising money with you U.G., is it disrespectful to say you get more attention than a cat meme.”

Meanwhile the van continued down the road towards their fundraising event. Jess grimaced as Kyle elbowed her arm, he was happy she was sitting next to him where she couldn’t pull away. “She is a cat meme.” He said.

“Yes. I am a cat meme.” U.G. agreed nonplussed. “I have decided against spending the money on those TV adds. I always think it’s such a waste. We raise so much money and it could be put to better use serving the interests of people.”

“What? Huh? If you don’t get elected, you can’t serve the people…” Amy, sighed after she stopped talking because U.G. had interrupted her.

“No. I don’t think the TV adds are make-it or break-it for the campaign. I want to do something that will make a lasting difference long after I am gone from politics.”

All three staffers in the rental van were staring silently at her now. She stopped herself from licking a paw to rub across her whiskers, one of a few instinctual Cat ticks she had to suppress while out and about with humans. She had their attention, she glanced from one face to the next and announced. “We are going to do this big fundraiser, with many folks in attendance, some of them with more disposable income than others. Why not ask what they think about everyone working together to build a permanent environmental camp structure to shelter those homeless people living in the tent city we just passed.”

“What? Huh? Environmental off-the-grid like your house? Is that even possible in the city?” Jess asked.

“No, more like the shelter the homeless man Dean built on my land meets an apartment building.”

“I remember Dean, isn’t his house mostly underground?” Amy added, her concern about not spending funds to run TV adds was implied with her tone.

“No. Not a single stand-alone house, something else bigger to house a constant ebb-and-flow of people who need shelter. An insulated transitional camp with amenities to get rid of the tents and keep everyone clean, fed, and their bodies off of the hard ground. I will get Dean to scribble up some plans and send them to the engineer he likes to work with.”

The car filled with excited questions and exclamations from the campaign team, including suggestions from the driver. A couple of phone calls and video-chat conversations quickly fleshed out the proposal for the homeless shelter during the remainder of their drive.

The fundraiser was an art auction and dinner with some raffle prizes. The auction and the raffle were online so people kept checking their phones. A couple of comedians told some jokes and then introduced the guest of honor, U.G. followed the applause of their act.

“I wish I was funny, I don’t know how they do it. Seriously, give them another round of applause. I love comedians. I think laughter is the best medicine, they should get degrees and these two should be Ph.Ds of comedy.” U.G. got polite laughter and people stood up and cheered as she walked through the crowd and stepped up to the podium.

“Ph.D. of Ha, ha!… I’ll take a Master of Comedy please, the Cat told a joke.” One comedian dryly heckled clapping for her, before leaving the stage.

“Hello everyone, thank you all for being here, and thank you to everyone participating online who couldn’t be here tonight in person.” U.G. studied the faces in the crowd like she always did, for a few seconds before speaking.

“As many of you know I am all about listening and working together to figure out the best actions to take, for the benefit of everyone in our great State of Idaho. As thousands of Idahoan idea contributors know I have a constantly updating wiki-page site of questions and issues that need answers.

Since I have your attention, so many gathered around in such a good mood, I thought I would ask you some heavy questions.

“Here we all are at a big fundraiser, one of the biggest parties ever thrown for me….” pause paw held up waving like a toddler waves goodbye/hello over the crowd. “What does everybody think of campaign finance reform?”

The crowd still warmed up from the comedians laughed.

“Yeah, it’s funny. I was reading the line items of my budget today, just now, as we drove past a homeless camp. Everybody knows what I mean? They move them, but it looks pretty bad. As I understand it, Idaho has a decently low rate of homelessness compared to some of our neighboring states. So if we are going to get creative and cost-effective and take care of everybody we need to make sure that we don’t allow more homeless people to be attracted by our programs.”

A petite woman in the back yelled. “Lock em up!”

“Shut up!” someone else yelled. “We want to listen to what U.G. has to say!”

Some people clapped.

The woman yelled back, with slightly less volume, “I am listening, she asked what everybody thinks!”

“Yes, thank you,” U.G. said. “I did ask what people think and I do need all your feedback, a lot. Please stay.”

Some people chuckled nervously. The woman was apparently a little drunk, but she did find her chair and settle back in it.

“This is what I wondered as I looked at that big number total on the page. All your money, your money, that you gave to me. And I thought, what if we could use social networking videos and a word of mouth campaign to not only get the votes for my re-election. But to form a non-profit to build a shelter together to take all those people off of our streets. I sincerely believe that we are a proud hard-working people and we are only as happy as everybody we share our towns with.”

“That’s socialism!” a man yelled from the back.

“Is it? I am pretty sure it’s philanthropy. It’s public money. Not government money. Your money and I wouldn’t do it if you wrote in and told me not to.”

“But, we gave it to you to run for government.” Another very sober tall lady near the front yelled.

“Yes. Let’s vote on this. I will listen. I will sort the data and do the math…” She smiled, “And I will do what the majority votes for me to do, with your money.”

When U.G. said, her slogan. “Sort the data and do the math.” People chanted it with her, but they all knew she didn’t repeat herself. They watched her pause and listened to her continue and when she did they cheered and laughed and clapped.

The project was a lot more complicated than she had anticipated. It took two years of planning and permits before they were even able to break ground. But, they ended up with three “camps”.

The wealthy donors were startled by the project at first. But, they could see the benefit and they liked the idea of building something that would not only help the homeless; but all the businesses within walking distance of any of the tent cities. The first one on board owned a chain of hotels. Those who had made their money in agriculture and oil were a little bit harder of a sell. But, the one billionaire in the group got into the environmental aspects of the project, his weight and funding pulled the others into orbit.

The first “camp” was built in a mostly vacant strip mall. They used the foundation, the windows, and as much of the structure that was useful. But, the finished results looked nothing like a mall. They built an adobe and straw bale oval with a flat roof with greenhouses in-between each of the individual apartments. There were two small businesses and a shipping store owned by one of the big 3 shipping companies who decided to move to a bigger building across the street. And a Mexican Food restaurant who decided to stay because they could shift from leasing the space to owning their own restaurant space in the new building.

The homes in the two-story structure were predominantly transition homes for families, little townhouses with amenities. They had a shared laundry. A daycare center and offices for social workers from the government agencies already doing the work. The social workers became the transition team, to plan other housing, to get more people off the streets, or out of doubled-up problematic crowded living or housed safely away from domestic abuse situations.

The non-profit used Lee’s designs for 75% of the energy required for heating and cooking, reduced refrigeration costs by 50% with a radiant-night-sky- cooling system that cycled through to a basement cold storage area, 100% of the air-conditioning was also RNSC and 100% of the lighting was direct use of solar power with battery bank walls for electronics that would with heavy use require supplemental charging from the grid, but could run for hours when the solar panels caught up on slow sunny days.

Quite early on in the project, they realized that sorting the best candidates for the family housing was not going to remove the tent cities. There was a short list of criminals, repeat offenders mixed in with the homeless. As with any American city’s homeless population in the last couple of decades, there was also mental illness, drug use and military veterans who had served earning them support from the VA. It’s not easy or sometimes even possible to move a military veteran to a home where they can receive the care they need if they do not want to go. But, with the others sorted from the old moving tent camps, it was much easier to recognize them and ask them what they wanted to do.

The second camp was a rehabilitation structure. For the benefit of the addicts and the doctors and nurses sanity, they decided it would be best to build it someplace beautiful, on the hillside overlooking town, not in the middle of the noise of an urban location.

U.G. earned her reputation as being tough on crime with the third camp. Some of the last homeless to be rounded up were wanted felons and sex offenders. A list of them went to prison. Others who had already served time were moved to a criminal homeless camp with its own police station at the end of the road. They built this camp on the outskirts of town next to a landfill. Some wore ankle monitors and some agreed to tracking devices on their phones. They were not in prison, but they were not allowed to mix with the general population. Food and things they needed were brought to them via delivery, a commissary, and a thrift store.

By themselves, these three neighborhoods were not enough to completely house all the homeless. But, in combination with houses built and refurbished by charity organizations across the state it was successful enough to make U.G.’s political opponents criticize her for attracting the homeless from others surrounding states, as she had feared. But, the truth is, if you have a system to work with people, figure out where they were born, where their family is or what they are running from, you can figure out where they need to go. People are people after all.

Back on the campaign trail before the shelters were built, a surprising number of U.G.’s supporters went a little crazy with the posters, stickers, t-shirts, and videos shared on small devices on the internet, a nearly free media campaign, instead of via TV for millions of dollars. In addition to the money saved by not doing any paid TV spots, so many T-shirts with U.G. on them sold she set a record for shirt sales for any person running for Congress, ever. Apparently, her Cat image was popular nationwide, not just in Idaho. She was really popular in California, New York, Florida and all the way to Japan for some reason. They liked the shirt design with her waving called it the ‘lucky-cat’ T-shirt.

"U.G. you are a walking, talking cat meme." Kyle teased, "Millennials sure love you." every time he saw the numbers, for the millions of T-shirts they had sold.

“Naw,” U.G. teased back with a slight smile considering how old she was, “I bet most of them were purchased by grand old baby boomers.” And she thought of all the nice cat-ladies (some of them gents, or non-binary, not ladies) centennials to Gen-Z with pet cats who had befriended her on social media over the years. She knew it’s wasn’t just the millennials buying her campaign slogan.

Un-Cat Episode 15. — How a Cat Became the HUMAN Candidate

U.G. was so busy as a Congressperson she barely had time to sneak away, but she did try to kick everyone out of her office to take a five-minute Cat-nap after lunch on most days. Her AI-Critter would stay on-guard and she would let her tail relax from under her jacket, unwrap from around her body. Then she would curl her furry cat self up in her chair on cold days and on hot days she would stretch out on the conference table in the back of her office, both poses were beyond yoga for most humans. To acknowledge herself as the person she was for the last few minutes of recess helped her to better digest reality before continuing the legislative day. She always felt that her best ideas and decisions happened after a micro-nap. Her staff knew this and were mostly pretty good about her routine.

Security staff at both the D.C. and Boise offices were frightened a few times by U.G.’s cap-naps. The AIC would wake her before they burst into her office, in time for her to jump up, land on her hind feet to meet them at the door. But, the security footage was shared a few times, and images of politicians in the digital age, doing anything questionable tend to spread, especially if your entire body is covered by thick fur and you have a tail.

After lunch on a busy Friday with pending committee meetings. The deputy chief from the other district in Idaho approached U.G.’s lead CRM. CRM stands for Constituent Relationship Manager, his job was to make sure every Idahoan who contacted them was heard. Letter, email, phone call, or text message, it is a tough job that utilized all of U.G.’s employees at times and almost 45% of her budget because their team paid interns. His name was Karl.

Karl, had a swagger in his step, especially when he walked fast and he was walking as fast as he could, without running to catch up with U.G. “Oh my, U.G… U.G… please pause a step, congresswoman Utah.” He knew she hated to be called by her first name Utah.

U.G. cringed and glared at him as he caught up, phone held close to her gaze.

“U.G. why do you do this? It’s almost like a wiener pic honey and you know they are watching. Because they always are… ” He scrolled a couple of video feed images clearly showing U.G.’s tail draped off of the table, furry arms cattywampus, the fur on her belly visible between her shirt and top of her pants.

“I have to stretch for a couple minutes every day,” she said to him softly not interested at all in looking at the images of herself. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, and she had to stay sane. She thought, and started walking again, she didn’t have to tell him that she had a meeting to get to. “Karl, thank you for keeping me informed.”

U.G. was all about actions speaking louder than words. She thought being a representative in Congress for the state of Idaho was a good fit because it is the State governments in the US who do the bulk of the actual work.

U.G. knew from experience that the people she represented would benefit greatly from environmental infrastructure and education investments they made now ahead of the newest technology. Climate change was raging in waves of storms across the US, laws telling people what not to do after the mess is made is like piling on punitive damages to the devastation caused by ‘an-act-of-God’ on their homeowner's insurance.

U.G. liked to answer issues on her budget with programs that got things done rather than laws that stopped people from doing stuff. For example, the obvious plus as relates to climate change for laws permitting rural biofuel toilets to heat hot water tanks; was keeping bodies warm with 7-to-15% less toll on the grid and no truck burning gas to empty a septic tank that was no longer there. The unobvious plus to bio-fuel energy is that no river water, lake, groundwater or soil was polluted by raw sewage. Human waste not only contains about 45-to-60% bacteria it is also contaminated with all the medicines we take and the tiny bits of plastic we accidentally ate or ended up in our dryer lint. A good bio-fuel septic system destroys all the toxins, plastic particles and the carbon and other gases are condensed. Some of the flammable liquids like alcohol and ethanol can be used as fuel with the other collected natural gas to light the solid fuel pellets. Many laws had to be completely rewritten for both the urban water treatment plants to sell electricity and natural gas and for the rural units.

Similarly when Idaho’s transportation department required an upgrade. PTAC (public transportation advisory council) asked for funds to pay gas vouchers and repair old vehicles. U.G. got several US manufacturers of electric vehicles, solar panels, and battery banks together to make a plan for organization owned, shared vehicles for public transportation. With funding from sponsors, they were able to purchase EV taxis, shuttles and charging stations for medical centers and other community center transportation departments.

Upgrading the entire petroleum-dependent transportation system to renewable energy still had a long road ahead but it was a good way to introduce the public to electric vehicles.

After U.G.’s campaign created county-owned non-profits to build transitional homeless shelters to keep people off of the streets that Cat finally got her Dog BFF’s dream of up-cycling run-down houses as hands-on trade-schools. They would compete for the best environmental designs to be approved for future architectural contracts.

Boise and much of Idaho’s population has grown so much that there is nearly a housing shortage. Carpenters barley keeping a month or two supply of new homes on the market, the median price of homes and rentals basically doubled in the last ten years (some home prices and rents more than doubled and others went up by 25 to 50%). U.G. worked with several state government agencies to create a program for teachers, police and other underpaid vocations. Essential workers are vital to a growing population, for them to qualify for special district-owned no-fee credit union mortgages was a win-win. Idaho knew they shouldn’t mess with the property values, but with interest rates pushed as close to the Federal lending interest rate as is physically possible, food service, maintenance workers, teachers, police and government employees would be able to own a home on their meager salaries.

Work like this, for the people, dealing with stuff physically in the world is what U.G. cared about. But, here she was in D.C., people snickering about her tail. Worse, they were spending all their time battling a fiscally unsustainable budget, over a trillion and a half of new federal debt looming like a rock-slide to undo any good programs that previous congresses managed to pass even halfway. It was like one step forward, three steps back, except it was actually one million for the greedy who don’t need it, minus thousands for the middle class who needed every dollar, and nothing to help the poor and the most vulnerable members of the country survive.

U.G. wanted to impeach the corrupt president. She knew it was dangerous to rile up POTUS 45’s most vehement supporters. They would riot and some would kill people. If we are to learn anything from the impeachment attempt of the 17th president, a president historians consider to be one of the worst and also most comparable to the ego and terrible ramblings of the 45th, people were going to get caught in the crossfire. But, Americans have already been dying in record numbers during the three years since the 2016 election, so many middle-aged and young people have died the life expectancy in the US has dropped for the first time in 100 years. 

Congress needs to take action and decide if the suffering of the many and the slow undignified death of neglect of a statistically measurable number, is preferable to the quick death that may be facing a few, caused by the inevitable conflict arising from impeaching a corrupt President.

“Instead of caring for the needs of the American people you are afraid for your own hides! It’s not the number of those loyal to POTUS that you are afraid of, it’s the automatic weapons and the number of bullets those weapons of war shoot. Guns that were not manufactured for civilian use, should not be used to undermine our Democracy! How long must we continue to mourn weapons of war targeting our hope for the future, our children!

If Congress hadn’t let the ten-year ban on assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines expire in 2004, half as many people would have been killed in mass shootings and 14 times fewer people would have been injured!”

Everything that goes around comes around. Live bought by the NRA, die by the NRA.” U.G. went off-topic, from the administration’s terrible budget to impeachment, to the fear of her fellow members of Congress because the AI-Critter could hear their minds spinning. She was declared out of order and asked to yield the floor, many times.

Back in the lower court in Boise, it had been the AIC who had been losing its mind. Now in Congress attempting to process the dysfunction of government in D.C. she was losing it. She figured maybe it would be best if she did not get reelected this round. With no fear U.G. was relentless, every opportunity she had to fight for the humans who had elected her to serve, she took, methodically, and consistently, unflinching.

The staffer for the other district in Idaho who had brought the cat-nap photos to Kyle’s attention invited U.G. out to dinner. He was a handsome over confident young-ish man who wanted her seat. He was also a so-called ladies-man who had dumped his last three girlfriends.

U.G. was not paying any attention to him or the photos, she had tired of memes years ago. But, the AIC saw clearly what he saw. He was one of those stubborn minded egomaniacs so focused on himself and possible avenues for political gain he had actually convinced himself that U.G. wasn’t a cat. He barely glanced at the images he himself was shilling, it’s all fake, she’s crazy popular. He saw the funny security photos only as a means to win her attention. He the helpful-whistleblower-of-the-obvious.

U.G. was seated on a park bench watching birds to calm herself down after losing her temper in front of the assembly about their fear of impeaching POTUS 45. Her security let the staffer approach. The silver-fox sat next to the Cat-lady.

“What do you want? What’s your name?” U.G. said, her gaze following a robin as it hopped across the grass.

“You didn’t get back to me about that dinner invite. I made reservations.” He held out a large phone the size of a small tablet.

“I see.” U.G. didn’t look at the reservation for dinner he held out. The AIC was whispering, “Amy, your treasurer admires him. May be a crush. She had attempted to flirt and does search statistics about this man from time to time.”

U.G. looked him in the bright grey sparkly eyes. Thinking, “You hurt my good friend Amy, and I will find a way to make you pay”. She found her smile and said. “Let me text this reservation to my staff please.” and she sent the text with the dinner reservation from his phone to Amy.

U.G. didn’t have time to think much of this set-up later in her day. But, the AI-Critter did. While U.G. toiled away faithfully focused on her mountain legislature reading. The AIC kept its mind’s eye guarding over the friend of its master, Amy.

Across town at the restaurant, both the silver fox and Amy were a couple minutes late, causing the maitre’d to quibble with him, almost giving the table away.

Amy knew who he was, and was a little annoyed that he didn’t recognize her. She followed them to the table and stood behind the chair the maitre’d had pulled out for her, waiting. “Mike,” She said, after he looked around her towards the door, and back to the menu a couple of times.

Mike stood up, a little startled, “Oh, you are on U.G.’s staff. I recognize you…” He held out his hand.

Amy said. “My name is Amy. Yes, U.G. set us up,” she tried not to be angry, but she was shaking a little as she unfolded the napkin in her lap, repeatedly.

“Ah,…” he said and froze. His attention going from the water glasses being filled at his request, back to her.

A funny thing happened from the AIC’s point of view. Their emotional states flipped. She had gone from a slight crush, to annoyed that he was idiotic enough to think her boss, U.G. a Cat-person, would ever go out on a date with him.

He was almost smitten like love-at-first-sight because he was so relieved to see this stunningly normal woman, whom he knew was into civil service enough to handle his political aspirations because she was in his potential rival’s campaign.

They had a couple drinks and appetizers and pretended to wait for U.G. The more they talked and got to know each other the more polarized the situation became. She growing gradually more smug and he more entranced by the idea that she could be ‘the one’.

It was an awkward dance that would last for almost an entire year before Mike earned his shine back in Amy’s eyes. While they were in the District of Columbia he used every excuse he could think of to run into her. Some of the more awkward encounters making her laugh and the other politicians in the room wonder what was wrong with him. He learned a lot more than he ever anticipated learning about itemized disbursements, polling, research, and payroll. Lucky for him, Amy wasn’t fickle. She did still like him she just wanted to make sure his affection for her wasn’t second fiddle to his goal of running for representative.

“It’s politics, maybe my career goals should be first before marriage?” He blurted out at the “water-cooler” back in Boise.

“What did you say?” Amy hid her smile behind her cup. “I dare you to say that again in the form of a question.”

He got down on one knee, everyone in the conference room and surrounding offices gawking. “Amy. Maybe my career goals as a politician should be first, but all I keep thinking, over and over is… would you marry me?”

“Damn it, Mike. This is embarrassing.” She mumbled and tried to pull away.

“I can prove it, wait, I…” He was on his knees digging in his pockets with one hand, refusing to let go of her hand with the other. “I was hoping for a better moment, but…” pulling a flattened ring box out of his back pocket, he had apparently sat on it or crushed it in his suitcase a few times. “We can have a big party, announce formally at the party... I mean….”

“Yes,” she said wiggling the fingers of her left hand that he had not managed to maintain a grip of.

“Oh, yeah, engagement ring goes on the left hand.”

.  ...**_⚘⚘⬦♢_**...  .

This turn of engagements was how both campaigns’ party planning doubled into one giant event.

U.G. was very happy with the celebratory family mood of the crowd. She had tried not to monitor the roller coaster of moods that were her treasurer’s year. All on both teams had tried to focus on sorting the data and getting work done for the people.

This year’s campaign focus was going to be medical care. POTUS 45’s no plan for a plan, and the repetitive attempts by the GOP to replace the Affordable Care Act, the entire time shamefully whittling away at health insurance options for the American people had turned U.G.’s stomach sour. She wanted to run as an independent again, but no matter how many times she polled for better results, her constituents didn’t want her to risk it.

U.G. had an eight-part plan to bring down the cost to make for medical care for all, fiscally possible that was far from Republican.

1. A no profit universal option for health care necessary for survival. From birth to emergency care.

2. Preventive care health screenings determined necessary by your doctor override industry trends.

3. Electronic medical records that belong to the patient for more accurate and efficient healthcare, to reduce costly errors, and save lives.

4. Family medical history as preventive medicine as recommended by 2016 Surgeon General’s Family Health History Initiative.

5. Accept the fragility and limitations of the human lifespan with respectful palliative care for terminally ill and elderly people to die with dignity.

6. Improve the human diet for individual people by body type, age, and physical activity levels — -not about losing weight, but for a healthier people and planet.

7. Abortion is a privacy-protected medical procedure. Crime prevention plus access to healthcare i.e. birth control make the human race’s most dreaded ‘A’ word solvable. Abortion in politics is a rooster problem, not a chicken and the egg problem. Abortion, a preventable ill, almost a solvable except when necessary to save the Mother’s life or end future suffering of a severely deformed child.

8. Prescription drugs and illegal substance laws need to be reevaluated weighing the most empirically proven current research on the physical harm to the individual health of the users, and each specific substance socioeconomic damage and possible benefits, to quality of life for population demographics.

U.G. thought for sure point seven would end her as a Republican. She hated the word, ‘abortion’ more than any word she could think of in the English language. She equated the ‘A’ word for women to the ’N’ word for Americans of color who had ancestors who were enslaved. Like them, just a short time ago, women were property, not allowed to vote or own land. How is requiring a woman to carry to term her rapist's child not slavery? How is not allowing a woman to terminate a pregnancy that is threatening her life not murder? Worse is birth defects, suffering for the entire family. The church should mourn with the family, support them when they need love, not persecute a woman and by extension her entire family for something that is not in her control.

After that, the subject got worse as it shifted to human trafficking, date-rape and victims rights’. As far away from those situations as is physically possible and protection for the woman who may decide to keep the child that is made half from her. Why would any man ever think he has the right to protest the actual bloody hell that nightmares are made of?

U.G. would try to avoid the ‘A’ topic if she could, but knew medical statistics and illogical moralizing conservatives were not going to let it go away. 

Backstage, looking over her notes before she spoke, she braced herself for some part of this mixed large crowd to protest.

But, before any of this worst-topic preparing was spoken out-loud the subject on the stage changed to love. U.G. was very thankful for the ray of sunshine that was Mike and Amy’s engagement announcement. He had grabbed his fiancé by the hand and kept waving at U.G. trying to get her front and center with them. She had waited standing back in the doorway, not wanting to steal away any of their moment by folks who may have never seen her in person before, staring at her Cat-ness.

U.G. still standing hesitantly in the doorway, at first, Mike grabbed the microphone and began, what was obviously the speech the party had been planned for.

“Hi everyone, I am honored to make an announcement today!”

U.G. smiled, she was truly very happy for them.

As many of you know, those who know the story, I was introduced to my fiancé Amy, by her boss. Congresswoman U.G. A very special person, who more than anyone I have had the privilege to meet so far in my political career has an action plan to mend this country.

U.G.’s plan is HUMAN first economics and politics. Placing value in people more than profit, GNH over GDP. Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product.” He pointed to the screen behind him reading, H.U.M.A.N as individual letters. “H.U.M.A.N. is an acronym.

H. stands for Home as a right.

U. stands for universal job training for needed vocations.

M. medical care for all as a right.

A. Art stimulus via a democratic ArtCoin365 voting system.

N. Needs met, no questions asked. Food, clean water, air and soil safe from pollutants.”

Look at that plan people! You have got the entire federal budget if you add the military for the future commander in chief!

“It’s my great honor to announce Utah Robin Green’s exploratory committee to run for president of the United States!”

The crowd roared, and some of them were shouting "HUMAN! HUMAN!! HUMAN!!!"

U.G. was completely shocked. The AIC was so happy that it had managed to surprise her. “I knew you would never do it for yourself.” It whispered, and she saw for the first time how driven and happy her team had been to plan this party for her.

His words were drowned out and slowed down like she were underwater. But up there, in the blur, where U.G. feared she might pass out. Mike was announcing his plan to run for Representative to replace her, — because U.G. she is gonna win!!!”

Stay tuned, this story is just starting to get into the heart of the political parody. Un--Cat, Episode 16. — Home Is Where the Heart Is.