Un-Cat Episodes 1 to 9

Unapologetic Catharsis

Chapter One — Not A Cat

Episode 1. Not A Chicken, Nor An Egg, It's A Prologue

How do you tell the difference between a sentient Dog in a spacecraft wearing a spacesuit from a common domesticated dog in a spacecraft wearing a spacesuit? The answer is of course ‘the mind-body problem’, except instead of ‘I think, therefore I am’ the Dog version is more subtle. ‘I comprehend scents, to have no doubt of existence’ the other less subtle way to determine if a creature like a Cat or a Dog is sentient is if they are aware of licking their butts in front of company, or not.

The people of the Dog planet became aware of life on a distant planet in a manner befitting of a sentient species descended from dogs instead of primates. They were comparing the smells of various galaxies searching the universe for life, vigilantly hopeful that they might find something tasty to eat.

Humans of course look at images of visible light reflected off of distant planets via our telescopes. Dog telescopes are technically smell-scopes, taking a reading of the spectral data in patterns that tell the Dog-people things like, the elemental composition of planets, moons, and comets, relentlessly “sniffing” for anything with water or an atmosphere that might support life. When the Dog-people smelled the little planet, ice on both poles and tropical warm in the middle, with one dusty moon, almost half the size of their home planet with over three times more salty ocean covering its surface, they became very excited indeed. Granted it was the smell of life on planet Earth from 800 to 300 B.C. when there were lots of animal herds roaming all the continents and so many fish still schooling in all the oceans that every bay, river and beach boiled with life when sea creatures spawned.

Technologically the people of the Dog planet were much more advanced than humans, you could have blamed their advanced tech on the timing of their evolution, if it were not for the fact that humans and Dogs began walking upright on two feet, developing language and tools at almost the same time. The main difference in innovative progress was because the people of the Dog planet did not have any war. Fights and scraps over food sources, yes, but to the victor goes the spoils. Dogs would not bother to kill the loser or destroy food, it’s punishment enough to have to limp off and find something else to eat. Therefore, Dogs never designed any sort of gun, bomb, etc... Their early Dog dark-age “weapon” designs were limited to several styles of hunting bows and spears, all optimized for killing prey as quickly and quietly as possible. Stealth in part to prevent a dogfight yes, but every Dog knows the least amount of stress to the animal being hunted the better the food tastes, because stress smells bad. To make a long story short all the Dog people’s technology was laser focused towards the goal of tracking and gathering good food.

It took the Dog people almost 500 years to design a spacecraft and perfect a life-sustaining hibernation chamber for the long journey to Earth. Dog’s are social animals. They wanted to send a group but in the end, they programmed one of their AI-C (Artificial Intelligence-Creatures) to navigate and keep the sleeping pilot company in his dreams. Because the furry-telepathic-biological-cold-blooded-octopodidae-AI-C was constantly scanning as the ship traveled, in a way, it was like the Dog pilot was able to sense what was going by outside of the tiny windowless craft even while asleep and dreaming of fields of happy long-haired piglets. They don’t have large hogs or wild pigs on the Dog planet, they have a tasty little critter that’s sort of like a cross between a guinea pig and a hog. A very hair-brained domesticated little critter that the Dog people fatten up and cook in too many ways to ever list. *Just FYI cows, sheep and goats on the Dog-planet are remarkably similar to cows, sheep and goats of Earth therefore many dairy foods, cheese to ice cream are similarly delicious.

The Dog people estimated that it would take between 1,500 — to 1,700 years/orbits, to travel to the little planet that smelled of fish and wild beasts. The Dog-AI-C adjusted jumps from waking the Dog up every 10 years gradually until the Dog’s sleeping mind only looked around in-between jumps every 21 years to conserve nutrients and slow down cellular aging.

Three jumps away from the smelly planet, Earth-year-1914 the space craft’s sensors were close enough to determine that some kind of industrial revolution had happened a jump ago and that it had gone very wrong. “Their industrial practices are killing their food?! Are you sure? That’s insane?” Exclaimed the Dog as they looked over the data before freeze-down in preparation for the next 21-year jump.

Earth-year 1935. The second to the last jump closer, the Dog-AI-C had a good news/bad news to report from data collected via noise wave signals called radio. The Dog-AI-C was happy to report that the planet had survived something called a Great World War. The bad news is the sentient species do not sound like Dogs. But, don’t despair yet, we are still gleaning the scents of lots of animals and even some hints of a few mammals that could be very dog-like.

21 years later, Earth-year 1956, there were television broadcasts to confirm the Dog-AI-C’s guess about the language not being Dog-speak. The sentient people on the smelly planet were mostly hairless primates that wrap their bodies in woven artificial skins, like space suits only for all kinds of weather and they often wear false paws on their hind feet, like horse hooves called shoes. These primate-people call themselves humans. There are some domesticated dog species on the smelly planet intelligent enough to be “friends” with the primate-people, but the language and paw dexterity of these dog type critters seems to be limited. The humans do everything for them. Also, the planet has now survived two terrible life destroying World Wars. Fear of something called a nuclear holocaust was a major factor in ending the second world war. If their terrible weapons increase, the spread of damage could sterilize the entire biosphere. It seems very doubtful that any life could survive a third world war.

“I don’t understand? Their bombs would incinerate and radiate all the good food on the smelly planet?” The Dog felt very confused and sad, the excitement and hard work by generations of Dog people all dedicated on sending out their ambassador to make friends. Could this one-way trip traveling so far really all be only to witness a tragic end of a once incredible life filled planet, no good food to send back home, no residue but radioactive tasteless ash?

When the Dog came into consciousness again the spacecraft was in lunar orbit of the smelly planet carefully hidden in a crater on the dusty moon. The Dog-AI-C woke the Dog just enough to review their collected data and write a personal note to add to the Dog-AI-C’s report.

After the freeze and thaw of space travel, the once dark-blue fur-covered-humanoid-yellow-eyed-Dog now a much older long-haired blue-grey Dog, rests elongated finger-like paws on a tray of magnetic rocks attached to metal rings, each rock is a slightly different color and shape with a high contrast phonetic symbol carved into the top surface. A set of these ‘thought rocks’ are functionally similar to what humans call a keyboard, for typing.

Earth-year-1977. Paw-print

I am sending this report before I descend to the surface of the smelly planet the inhabitants call Earth. If I survive I will continue my mission for our people. We were wrong, we didn’t find a planet with folks similar enough to us to be friends with. The dominant species are primate-people who poison their own air, soil and drinking water. These humans of Earth are highly volatile, and hostile to extraterrestrial visitors. Do not send an expedition party. If I don’t send another message, know I am proud to have traveled so far if only to protect our people from harm from these human’s terrible weapons. No regrets, my beloved people, I am happy to be chosen as our ambassador. If I am able, I will send samples of good things to eat for Dog-kind.

Un-Cat Episode 2. Hello, World! — "live long and prosper"

The dog stood up on his hind legs like a person and spoke. “Hello, World!” hand extended in a gesture of greeting learned from watching TV.

The Dog zoomed down from lunar orbit towards a target contact, a Cat named Utah. A long-haired mostly white fur with spots of brown and grey, well-fed, Cat-person sitting in the morning sun of an open doorway of a tidy yet rundown cabin.

Just to clarify Utah the Cat, lived in Idaho, not Utah and was a sentient Cat-person not an Earth cat.

Utah’s family had lived in the same place for two generations, so her folks didn’t feel like they were really from someplace else anymore, and Utah who was born in Boise, certainly didn’t feel like an alien from another dimension. She lived rather happily as a recluse on her Grandparent’s land, in her Uncle Jack’s cabin, in the middle of nowhere, on a bit of rocky mostly tree-covered land in the hills between two forks of the Lachsa and Saint Joe River.

With a shimmer of sparkle bubbles a large metal egg apparated into thin air. The bright cloud of a flash not quite as bright as sunlight just left of the Cat’s line of sight, barely got her attention. But, the soft thud as a large human-sized bluish-grey dog with long stringy fur dropping a couple feet from the shimmering egg to land crouched on all fours sure did. The Cat’s hair stood on end, an involuntary hiss nearly choking her.

But then, the dog stood up on his hind legs like a person and spoke? “Hello world!” hand extended in a gesture of a greeting learned from watching TV, tongue out in the warm summer air, tail wagging, pant, pant, pant. The dog sat down beside her. Pant, pant, pant. Then feeling how cool the crude cobblestones steps leading up to the cabin were, the dog stretched out in the shade there, looking out, and then up at the Cat, every few seconds his ears pricked waiting for a response.

The Cat smoothed down her hackled fur a bit, licking one paw. She studied the dog through squinted eyes, a twitch in her tail flicking as she talked. “Dog? Where did you come from? You are not from around here, are you.”

“I um… Nee Rooouooo… Pardon my translation complication, let’s just call my home planet Loam. Yes, what this planet calls dogs are the dominant intelligent life form on my home planet. I transported here, to your front stoop. Not all the way from my home planet of Loam. How would an Earthling say?” The big Dog paused thinking for a couple pants, tail still wagging a little faster than the cat’s tail twitched. “My spacecraft is parked in lunar orbit.”

“I see.” said the cat, her hackles smoothed a little, she sat up as straight and tall as she could. As a short, fat fluffy long-hair Cat, this was not very tall at all in contrast with the huge dog settled on the stair below her, but they were nearly eye to eye when she sat up straight. “My name is Utah Green, but folks who know me call me U.G… like You Jeee, with a nice twang when they holler.”

“HellooOo U..Jeee.” repeated the Dog howling a little. Grin, tail wagging faster for a few twitches. He saw the cat's tail wasn’t moving at all now. Then the Dog settled on the cool steps. “My name, again,” pant, pant. “A few billion light years worth of apologies for translation problems. My words will smooth as my A.I. Critter here, gets acclimated.” The Dog petted an area of fur clinging to his chest near his neck that U.G. had not noticed before.

“AI-C sorted a table of the most common human names on Earth and I selected from the least provocative or offensive name translated from,... please call my species Dog. And my language Dog. My Earth name is Lee.” Unintelligible Dog warbling for a bit. “So you see, how Neu Tac Roof! Roof! Roof!.. The root word is a root plant very similar to carrot, tho more tasty and less like stick then branch. Stick, carrot, whoof, Lee meaning something like the idiom ‘The carrot or the stick’.”

“Lee is a nice name. Did you just mention food?” asked the Cat, she could hear his tummy grumble. Very aware that such a large Dog being hungry probably wasn’t a good thing to ignore and not at all sure about where to start asking questions about the furry lump clinging near his neck that had moved up onto the shoulder closest to her.

“Yes, thank you for asking, I am a bit hungry.”

“Mealtime!” Said the Cat, jumping up the instant the big Dog said the word ‘hungry’.

“Yes please.” Lee staggered to his feet. “Must adjust, space legs, feel a bit sluggish after such a long trip.”

U.G. didn’t ask how long Lee’s trip was, she made a beeline into the simple yet well-stocked cabin kitchen to dig up some food. She hadn’t brought enough upstairs to feed such a large uninvited guest. So, the second half of their meal was served from U.G’s basement pantry. “I smoke and can everything. I don’t know why more people don’t can turkey.” She explained to Lee. “I hunt or fish only as much as I need of course.” Three large mason jars of smoked turkey in a salty turkey soup broth and a jar and a half of pickled root vegetables with garlic later. She found herself peeling dried garlic cloves and explaining the pungent bulb as a flavor enhancer to a very captivated and happy Dog.

“Turkey, it’s a big bird? That’s great, but this garlic is incredible! The most aromatic flower bulb I have ever had the privilege to sniff. May I send a sample home? My people will be thrilled!”

“Yes.” U.G. didn’t see why not, and changed the subject to the furry thing that seemed to be repelled by the garlic and had now crawled up onto the top of the Dog’s head cowering behind his ears and had turned from camouflaged blue-grey that matched Lee’s fur to a sickly pea-soup-brown. In this position on the Dog’s head while clashing it appeared like some sort of a horrible cross between an octopus and an ugly wig.

“Your Aye Eye? What is that?” She asked, pointing with her stare while forcibly smoothing down her hackles, again.

“Aye eye?” Lee paused and looked up following U.G.’s stare. “Yes. My A.I.C. We didn’t scan anything like them on this planet. Closest Earth species is an Octopus. Except, this one is artificial, like a biological robot. A.I.C. stands for Artificial Intelligence Critter. It does all my data scanning, language translation and records data to send home.”

“How? What?” U.G. hissed softly.

“Don’t worry, my friendly AI-C is a telepathic-parasitic-pet-animal, but, doesn’t bite large mammals like us. AI-Critters eat insects and other tiny pesky things, mold, dust mites, fungi, um…bugs. If I understand correctly the general term humans use is bugs. The AI-Cs eat pretty much anything that it deems to have nutritional value and is small enough to fit into its tiny mouths.”

“Mouths?” Asked U.G.

Lee coaxed the AI-C to let go and flipped the furry thing over like a starfish. Under the base of each of the eight furry tentacle arms was a small beak-like mouth.

U.G. put the garlic away in the cupboard and the AI-C turned itself blue-grey matching the Dog’s fur again.

“Huh.” Said U.G. “Never seen anything like that before.”

“Not on your ancestors home dimension either?” Lee asked, placing the AI-C back on his chest cradled protectively under one large paw like it was a puppy.

“No,” U.G. said racking her brain trying to recall if her Grandfather ever talked about artificial robots or any strange creatures from the Cat-dimension in his travel logs and nothing with eight limbs and fur came to mind.

“I bet it’s a good thing I am a Cat-person, not a human.” She said after watching Lee sniffing around the room for a bit.

Lee didn’t answer for a while because he was busy nosing all around the entire cabin. Tho, this didn’t take too long because it was only a one-room cabin with a cobblestone rock and dirt floor, old wood stove, a hutch that served as her cupboard and bookshelf, rickety old shelves of canning jars in the basement and almost no furniture other than U.G.’s bed, and a small table with two simple stools, actually just rounds of uncut firewood used as stools.

After a few minutes of sniffing every corner, box of tools and provisions, including the roof for some reason. Lee returned to the cool front stoop and U.G. who had settled in the shade, now farther down the porch. Her far away gaze seemed to be focused on the view of the dirt driveway that wound through the trees in the valley below the cabin as if she was thinking about going somewhere, maybe a plan to lead the big Dog away from her cabin. Lee glanced in the direction where she was attentively looking, but heard nothing bigger than the cacophony of birds chirping.

“Well.” Muttered Lee.

“Well?” U.G. asked, wondering if the Dog was passing through like most folks who visit this far out in the middle of nowhere.

“You have a well.”

“Yes. Well water. So?”

“Yes of course. An outhouse. No plumbing. A couple of holes in your roof, cracks where one can see daylight in-between the paneling boards, no insulation, no door-jambs, and the power is that dead electric line?” Lee pointed with one paw at a crude black-rubber-box with two glass fuses and four plugs, and a single electric wire that ran from the corner of the roof to a pole that was leaning, one of its vintage glass resistors broken off. “Since there’s no electricity, then the wood stove is everything. Heating and cooking.”

“Yes….so?” U.G. said trying not to growl at this nosy uninvited guest. In-spite of him, she was happily full from the meal that was actually her second meal of the day, something she didn't normally do as a Cat-person. She had stretched out taking a break from bird watching and closed her eyes, only bothering to open one eye to glance at the antique junction box Lee was pointing to.

“Super. If I’m going to be stuck on this planet, the least I can do is fix up this stone shack.” Lee barked cheerfully.

“Fix up? Stuck here?” U.G. said, suddenly startled awake.

Story continues ( 17 years later, 1994 ) 

Un-Cat Episode 3. The House That Uncle Jack Built

After the extraterrestrial Dog completed repairs on the little stone cabin U.G.’s Uncle Jack had built, only the original foundation and most of the cobblestones of the front stoop remained the same. It was a good location, the footprint of the cabin, tucked near the top of one side of a forested rocky hill a stone’s throw from U.G’s grandparents' house.

Lee had restructured the cabin, it was now taller, more the size of a small house instead of a short Cat-person sized cabin. Lee was 6’3” so he had made sure that a tall human person wouldn’t bump their heads on any beams or have to stoop to go down the stairs to the new basement.

The bigger house was still off the grid, but now had multiple renewable and passive energy systems built in. It also had three times the roof space for solar panels. Actually, Lee had installed three different types of solar panels, one area above the new bathroom was passive solar water heating tubes, part of a dual tank/dual fuel water heating system that used the cobblestones and packed dirt (replaced with grout) of the floor and walls as thermal mass to heat the house so they would light a fire to cook and only for heat in the coldest nights of winter.

The lighting system was specially designed to gather only light, not electricity, nor heat via small flower-shaped solar panels that opened and closed in bad weather and followed the sun. From inside U.G. could open and close the mirrored shafts to focus or dim the sunlight during the day or a soft glow at night via bioluminescent organisms Lee had transplanted inside the roof to shine into the stems of the light tubes, for a night light glow brighter than a full moon on a clear night. The third type of solar panels stored electricity into a battery bank wall for the homemade computer Lee had built special, for the Cat.

Lee had replaced more than just the roof surfaces and rebuilt all the structural beams, the entire house was well insulated now with deep arches, and plant boxes on all the side windows. 

The old front stoop had been framed and turned into a greenhouse sun room finished with adjustable vents in the top and bottom of the frames. With fans designed to circulate enough to air be able to dry laundry, even when it rained or snowed.

The windows all angled out 20 degrees, the overhang to reflect the ground not sky to stay clean longer. And all the new windows had a special ultra-violet spider-web pattern flying birds could see, to not crash into. 

The outhouse was now replaced by a full sized bathroom equipped with a space-age digester-toilet that made fuel pellets out of paper garbage, food waste and poop. The solid fuel pellets from the toilet lit by collected natural gas heated the in-floor radiant heat and also heated the water for the Dog-simple water trough, bathtub/laundry tub. The old feed trough metal tub set next to U.G.’s Uncle’s 1960's model, hand-crank-wringer clothes-washing-machine. There was no reason to upgrade the washer because U.G. and Lee had fur and mostly only washed kitchen towels and bedding. The Cat wanted nothing to do with tub bathing, so after Lee took a bath or they washed some laundry, water flowed out of the house via a grey water system via a little stone aqueduct, down to a pond outside of the garden wall. For a cabin once completely lacking in plumbing all of the above were great improvements.

The finishing touch to the house, Lee had hand-carved the new solid door adding a few inches to the top of the doorway with an arch. The round top door inside the glazed in greenhouse porch made it almost feel “like a Hobbit hole meets a spacecraft.” U.G. teased Lee about this until Lee read the books and then agreed with her.

U.G. also liked to tease Lee that the mostly Dog poop fuel pellets were “warm-fusion”.

“Do you mean cold-fusion? Poop is not nuclear grade, over half of the organic solids in poop are bacterial biomass. The amount of fuel necessary for the chain reaction to sustain itself and produce energy is called critical mass, not fusion. Most of the energy is thermal and gas produced by mitochondria inside the bacteria. Living things transforming energy from matter and matter to energy is not called warm-fusion.” Lee never got U.G.’s toilet humor.

“Critical mass, my ass!” She chuckled more quietly to herself after a few years of Lee still not getting her jokes.

Healthy microbes are very important to the Dog people, healthy bacteria and algae are key to living well. If something smelled bad to the Dog he would adjust or rework that system from the rooftop to the stone wall that led down the hill to the garden pond, until it smelled good in his opinion. Cats sense of smell while better than humans was about a 1/3rd of the odors Dogs are able to detect, U.G. often had to have the AI-C translate the smells into data she could understand like: ammonia, ethanol, alcohol, carcinogen or rust.

In spite of the many differences between Cats and Dogs, they lived pretty happily, sharing food made for an instant friendship. Also, during those 17 years from 1977 to 1994 both staying very busy keeping house, never being too bored helped a lot to maintain civility for two people so incompatible as Lee and U.G.

Lee was a puppy raised in the sciences and trained as an engineer. U.G. taught him how to bow hunt and fly fish, and they both worked in the garden together. Like most any dog from Earth, Lee loved to dig.

But, the most important key factor that bonded them more than shared meals or any of the day-to-day stuff was being the only two people they could find who were not human. And as anyone alive on planet Earth knows, humans are a very strange and complex species. A person may wonder, if they lived as reclusive hermits hiding on U.G.’s very remote property in the hills of middle-of-nowhere Idaho, how or when did they have contact with human people? The short answer is. It took regular supply runs for the pair of non-humans to gather all the materials needed to up-cycle and maintain their off the grid homestead. The long answer is the rest of this story.

Un-Cat Episode 4. -- Nothing to Fear, Food, and Point of View

Lee’s mission was to be the ambassador for his people, to seek out new foods and send samples home to the Dog-planet. True to the social Dog-person he was, he wasn’t about to hold-up and hide anywhere for long without a walk or a trip out exploring. The first drive to town a few days after he landed on Earth in 1977 was to the hardware store to get plumbing parts. As a costume for encounters with native human Earthlings Lee dressed in an old blue-grey jumper from the corner gas station, if it wasn’t for the grease stains, the well worn in garment matched Lee’s fur almost perfectly. U.G. the Cat-person second-generation immigrant Earthling had found an old baseball cap for Lee to tuck his floppy ears into and loose-fitting work boots for his hind paws. They didn’t want folks to mistake him for a very large wolf or worse a werewolf.

U.G. wore whatever suited her, on that day it was a wild polyester flower-power jumper mostly covered by a light blue blazer and a blue bandanna to hide her pointed Cat ears. Neither of them bothered to tuck their tails U.G.’s experience was that folks ignored them when they kept at a safe distance. U.G. joked “I Like people, at a safe distance, as long as they aren’t bothering me.”

Lee didn’t think U.G.’s jokes funny at all. “I like people, a lot… They smell great!” Lee had his nose out the open truck window as they were driving through the streets on the outskirts of town. “We must stop and eat some of this Chinese food.”

“Okay. After we shop. I know a place my Dad liked.”

U.G. knew enough about restaurants to know they would be slower after their lunch rush. The hostess barely glanced at them, seating them at a small table in the back. But, the waiter took one look, saw a very large dog and a giant cat and backed into the kitchen at a near run. A racket of banging pans adding to the din of an argument behind the kitchen doors in Chinese U.G. could not understand and Lee could via translation by his AI-C (Artificial Intelligence Creature). “They don’t serve Dogs, and they keep taking turns peeking out the doors because they don’t believe a dog is dressed, seated at a table reading a food menu.”

“Uh oh.” She said and walked to the front counter for a to-go menu.

The lead cook came out waving his hands and shouting. “Get out! No dogs here. Get out! Shooo.. No dogs!”

U.G. faced him with an unintentional slight bow while holding out the pink to-go menu hoping to get his attention away from Lee. “May we order, this, this and this?”

“To-go?” He asked still yelling.

“Yes. To-go please.”

Lee was more confused than phased by the man’s barking. “Now, wait a minute sir…. U.G. I’m not sure if that is what I’d like for lunch or not.” Lee was looking back and forth from the to-go menu to the full menu, it had a lot more entrees that interested him.

The man paused staring at the talking Dog while he was speaking, shocked for a couple blinks, recovered then started yelling again. “No. Get out. Get out.”

They started to head back to the truck when Lee noticed a very old lady seated on the back steps outside of the restaurant.

“Hello. Are you the matriarch of this establishment?” Lee asked politely.

U.G. was now the one startled, hearing Lee speak Chinese. After talking back and forth with the lady in Chinese for a little bit he turned to U.G.

“They have a full menu and an American to-go menu. We may order some dishes off of the full menu and wait here for the food to take home with us in folded paper boxes, if we let her pet our faces.”

“What?” U.G. tried not to frown as the soft old hands gently brushed her whiskers, but getting close to the tiny lady she saw that she the grandmother had cataracts and was probably nearly blind.

“She says Cats are good luck and that your fur is much nicer than mine.” Lee said after letting the lady pet his wooly ears. “I’m trying the soup with tripe and tendon. What do you want to order?” Opposite in tastes about most everything, U.G. wanted to order sweet and sour shrimp and cashew-nut-chicken from the to-go menu. Lee turned up his nose at too much starchy syrup on her choices but they agreed to order all three dishes and add the house special fried rice.

A grandson came out of the kitchen with their food and took their money. “I’ve heard stories of the Cat-people who lived in the hills. But, a Dog who speaks Chinese, and her dialect too. Now I’ve seen everything.” the teenager said to them.

“Keep the change for the tip,” U.G. said.

His Grandmother smiled and waved goodbye but he didn’t smile, just stared, making sure they were going away from his Grandmother's house.

🍲🍕🍔 🫜

The next time they ate a meal in town, (it was 1978) they stayed in the truck and got burgers, fries and milkshakes from a drive-thru window. The teenagers working there and a middle-aged lady smoking and hanging out near the fast food joint laughed at Lee and asked to shake his paws. “It’s okay U.G,” Lee assured her.

After they got their order and had parked to eat, the conversation continued. “It’s a greeting that human do. Shake hands. I’ve seen humans shake hands with Earth dogs too.”

“Really? When?”

“On TV broadcasts and in movies.”

“You have a TV?”

“No. It’s ah… I’ll show you when we get home. The AI-C transmits data telepathically.”

“Did people laugh at the pet dogs when they shook hands?” U.G. asked.

Lee paused licking the top of one of the three flavors of milkshakes he had ordered. He found he had trouble with straws and preferred to lick the milkshakes or dip french-fries in them. “Sometimes they did laugh at the little dogs. More often they say ‘good-dog’ in a very serious tone, almost like baby-speak only slower.”

“Ah ha.” U.G. rolled her eyes.

“I know, I know you only like people at a safe distance, as long as they aren’t bothering you. But, even when they laugh at me I still like them.” Another pause as he got his nose stuck in the bottom of one of the paper cups. “Well except for when they get scared of me when I get too close trying to greet them.” He admitted sadly thinking of an elderly couple they met on the sidewalk, the couple were walking their tiny yellow dog. The dog yapped shrilly at Lee and the people screamed and ran away.

“Telepathic TV?” U.G. asked, and wondered to herself. “Can the AI-C read my mind?”

As if trying to answer, the AI-C around Lee’s neck reached out extending a tentacle towards her ear.

U.G. batted a paw at the furry little critter reaching too close to her, again. As the AI-C had tried to touch her fur many many times over the first year after landing on Earth. Then she thought better of it, and cautiously shook the tip of the AI-C’s furry little limb. “You shook hands with the Lady, I can…” She stopped speaking because the AI-C spoke to her.

“Yes. Ear is the body part mammals hear most clearly with. Testing, 1. 2. 3.” The AI-C said counting the handshake gesture in a soft but clear voice in U.G.’s mind. “We knew better than to try and get too close to any big cat.” It continued and she saw a clip of a panther drawing blood with one quick swipe, scratching a zookeeper who got too close to the opening of his cage. “But, we also knew before we landed that you were not a wild animal in a zoo cage. Sentient Cat-Person.”

“How what?!” U.G. howled out-loud, sounding a bit like the panther’s growl.

Lee, apparently “hearing” everything, the AI-C said to her in his mind as well cheerfully added to the conversation. He warbled in Dog-speak and the AI-C translated, like they had been doing the entire time, but U.G. didn’t realize the voice she had been hearing all along was the AI-C. “We knew with one quick smell around your place that you didn’t have any buried carcasses. Don’t worry U.G. the mind-reading is a distance thing and it only talks when in direct contact, about things that interest me, like food.” Lee warbled like a Dog and the AI-C “dubbed” telepathically.

“Not fair.” She half meowed half muttered in English. You know how paranoid I am, about everyone, all the time… And I can’t help it. She thought loudly, cat ears flattened in a pout.

“It’s past time for this AI-C to hatch an offspring. I haven’t let any of its eggs hatch because this one will stay with me while I am here. Can’t let AI-C’s hatch without a host-mind to read, they go feral.” Lee said with a very serious tone.

U.G. was less than thrilled about the idea of having feral critters from the Dog-planet running wild all willy-nilly around her house.

“No. Just one. Just one for you, to be your personal AIC.” No civilized Dog on my home planet would ever be caught dead or alive without an AI-Critter. Lee said, half out-loud, half telepathically as he leaned towards her to let the AI-C reach out and touch her paw again.

This time U.G. imagined Lee and the Critter carefully bundling up samples of food inside empty egg shells. Each tiny speck of food had smell notes in many colors of wavy text. She was amazed she could read Lee’s handwriting inside the AI-C’s vision. She sure couldn’t read the mess of paw prints and scratch marks that the human-sized Dog called handwriting on things he marked in the world. Lee thought it was strange that U.G. was more focused on his handwriting than the food samples.

The smell diagrams were very important to the Dog-people. Perhaps more important than the tiny samples final state when it reached its destination. After being sealed inside the artificial eggs in clear goo that looked like egg-white, transported up to the ship in orbit, then frozen in a tiny stasis bubble to skip like stones approximately 42-to-50 year-hops, for 52 jumps until it reached the Dog-planet. The diagrams would tell the story of what was left of the samples. And U.G. could feel their focus, their goal for their exploration was all about the food. Nothing was more important or held more value to the Dog-people than food.

“It took you 2,407 years to travel to Earth?” U.G. whispered softly, amazed, it finally dawning on her, how very, very far away from home Lee was.

"Yes, it was farther than we estimated, but the route mapped, and with less jumps, the food is getting to the Dog people, I assume faster? Yes, (pause while he listened to something and nodded) ... Yes, factorially faster than it took for me to travel here."

:☽

By the next year, 1979, when they went to town U.G.’s newly hatched AI-Critter had learned her vocabulary and grown cat hair camouflage to match her perfectly. She loved that silly thing more than anything that ever stuck to her fur in her life. If she had a question she just thought about it and her AI-C would answer. If she was afraid of something, it would seek to find out what it was. It didn’t matter if what spooked her was a bird rustling the bushes behind a tree where she couldn’t see it or if it was slippery rocks in a raging river she didn’t want to cross. Her AI-C would figure out the best place to cross and when to jump, as a defense mechanism, as long as U.G.-the-host was safe, then the Critter was safe.

U.G. was looking forward to trying her newly trained AI-Critter on a human the next time they went to find a meal at a restaurant. From her very first encounter U.G. found her AI-C to be a big plus, talking with clerks at the store was easier then she had ever experienced; the effort it took for her to hold her mouth right to speak clear English was exhausting. To her happy surprise, the AI-C not only translated for them it told the lady, “Don’t worry, maybe it’s not an over-sized chubby house-cat wearing a pink summer dress shopping for window boxes talking to you right now. Perhaps, it’s just a slovenly lady.” And the lady only saw as much of U.G.’s actual furry face as she wanted to see. 

The same with the people who loaded the packing crates of framed glass into her truck. However, one of the two guys totally saw them as they were, a giant talking Cat and Dog walking on their hind legs, and seemed curious but polite. The other guy just focused on the work they were doing completely ignoring that they were not humans.

When U.G. returned their cart at the hardware store, Lee told her enthusiastically, with his tongue sticking out just a little too much for a Cat or a human, but normal tongue out for a Dog. “He’s an artist, he draws cartoons! Really good cartoons. Look he drew one of me! Thanks for sharing a couple of pages of your sketch book with me Stan.”

“Why does he insist on telling them that he is a Dog-person?” She thought to the her AI-C, when she assumed she and her personal telepathic critter were a safe distance from Lee and his personal AI-C. 

“Dog-People do not really understand how to lie.” The AI-C rationalized, how to bend the truth or why to do it is just not in their nature. 

Seeing Lee had sniffed out their location, she announced, “Were dining in. Let’s go for pizza!” 

U.G. hadn’t been this happy around humans ever.

The kid at the counter had glazed-bloodshot-eyes like he was very, very tired.

“He can barely keep his eyes open and he smells funny,” Lee observed.

“Humans always smell funny. That kid is stoned.”

“No they don’t smell funny, I like… Oohh do you mean hair spray. Yeah okay, almost all artificial human olfactory products perfume or deodorant smell funny. What makes him stoned?”

“One half, every-topping-we-have and one-half cheese.” The big blonde haired kid giggled softly as he slid their pizza onto the large round metal tray from the oven. “That’s a funny pie and dude you look like a giant talking dog and your girlfriend looks like a big fat cat. Dude, Ha, ha. Did I say that out loud? Sorry.”

They took their opposite pie and left the giggling pizza guy at the counter. Lee with uncharacteristic restraint only took one sniff at the many new-to-him-food-smells on the pizza and didn’t eat.

The AI-Cs’ questioned each other struggling with the mud of confusing thoughts. “Both Dog and Cat person is too sad to eat?!”

It has totally changed my perspective on life, the way the Critter shows me how the humans see me. U.G. thought and sat there also not touching the hot delicious melty cheese slices on her half of the pizza. She spoke very softly so only Lee could hear. “My mother came from a dimension where a lot of stray cats go hungry. She was really fat. I could care-less what humans think of Cat-people. But, my mother suffered from diabetes and eventually died because of all the human food she ate, and I never thought about it before, like never. I never thought about how it could happen to me too, if I don’t take better care of myself.”

“We can box this pizza up and eat it for breakfast. This is a lot of human food.” Lee whispered back and gave her a bit of silence by going to fetch a pizza box.

“Humans smell complicated and they eat too much fat and sugar.” The AI-C whispered trying to support the mix of emotions and memories it couldn’t completely process with any sort of tact. U.G. realized it wasn’t an insult to it to show her, her weight, it was to the AI-C’s benefit to help her with anything that could hurt her, whether she knew to be afraid of it, or not. It’s going to be okay. I’ll work on eating better so I won’t get sick and leave you. She thought resting her paw on the AI-C’s tentacle that had reached up pet her ear.

Behind her, she heard a faint commotion as a man exiting the bathroom with his son got a close look at Lee’s face, the son whimpering as Lee almost collided into them before hiding behind the empty pizza box.

Un-Cat Episode 5. Lonely Dog From Far Away Galaxy, Learns How to Make Friends on the Internet

Earth was a lonely world as a Dog from another planet that human people mistook for a werewolf. For those first few years Lee howled sadly at the full moon to comfort himself and because it also made his only friend on this planet, Utah Green the Cat-person, smile. Lee explained to U.G. that howling at the moon was not what Dog-people on his home planet did. They didn’t have one moon and their moons were not orbiting as a solitary rock, but in clusters. Howling at Earth’s moon was something Lee had seen werewolf’s do on movies and TV screens reflected in humans’ minds-eye. But, this Dog-person from outer space did it because he was lonely. 

Because the Dog-people’s computers were biological Artificial Intelligence-Creatures the AI-Cs’ had no trouble at all triangulating or translating any data, signals or languages on the smelly little planet of Earth. The telepathic critter wasn’t reading the TV signal or radio frequency or even computer code, it was reading sensory data right off of the eyeballs of anything that its extraterrestrial Dog-person host wanted data about. Technically it didn’t matter if what it was reading was blind as a mole because the furry starfish shaped AI-C’s didn’t have eyes either. Any creature that sensed or smelled was easily “readable” to the AI-Cs. What is even more difficult to explain is how a biological-computer could sense motion, gravity, chemical composition and temperature of objects and stuff without a brain, like the-moon. Earth’s dusty moon, gently pulling all the salty living oceans into tides that ebbed and flowed subsiding in rippling waves of wind and atmospheric pressure, nearly 71% of the surface in constant motion. The AI-Cs never got used to the roar of the oceans of Earth. The Dog-planet a jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates almost twice the size Earth, didn’t have oceans. Many lakes, rivers, and springs from underground water tables, enough moving water for life to thrive, but, nothing even as big as the Great Lakes of North America or the Caspian Sea.

In 1977 when Lee arrived the ARPANET was up and running in a few universities via the Department of Defense, but internet communication was isolated to those networks. Lee found HAM radio interesting but struggled with being heard on-the-air within the networks of disconnected voices. The same for the first Cell phone networks in Japan and the Nordic countries of the world, who started talking to each other around 1981. But, it wasn’t until the spread of the internet in the 90s that Lee found conversations he could join in to remotely. In chat rooms, nobody knew the person typing was a Dog evolved on another world from a galaxy far far away.

After 1994, instead of passively watching TV, Lee experienced the spread of a nearly global interactive consciousness. Different groups of people joined conversations, usually clustered by subject. Very few of the topics being discussed by Earthlings in forums interested Lee, not being of the same species was a very confounding hurdle for a social and friendly Dog-person. But the few threads that spiked his interest sounded worth the effort to join.

With the AI-C and his Dog-computer Lee had no trouble reading any data anywhere around the world, uploading data to share, for a two way conversation, required an interface. 

It took the AI-Cs, Lee and U.G. a few months to adapt a server PC (personal computer) with parts of Lee’s Dog-computer, install chunks of an early Linux kernel booted from a floppy-drive on the server box as a bridge to the AI-C’s biological operating system to their screen-less “box”, (it was shaped like a clam shell, and screen-less because the AI-C’s and Lee couldn’t figure out how to pack even part of the data the AI-Cs collected onto any man-made screen. For example the humans didn’t have any smell-notes except for some very rare lines here and there in cookbooks or fiction. Then because U.G.’s cabin was so far away from the nearest photo-lab they bought a Polaroid camera and splurged on a flatbed scanner to post 32-bit avatars with 256 colors.

Lee was very happy to find many people liked his profile pic. The smiling blue-grey dog, got a lot of positive feedback. He was simultaneously disappointed to realize the people on the websites he hacked into thought he was a human who owned a dog of a breed called Irish Wolfhound. Folks assumed Lee used images of his pet dog for his profile photo instead of sharing his actual face.

“Makes sense to me.” U.G. the Cat-person quipped, finding Lee’s predicament funny. “When in Rome,… “ Then quickly shifting her tone from joking to empathy to keep her Dog of a friend from whimpering. “Do you want me to post chat texts in forums with you?”

Lee helped her to upload profile pics and join in some chat-rooms as herself, the Cat-person in an attempt to make him feel better. “Look the Cat and the Dog are friends!” Tho U.G. had her own agenda, to find out if any of the Cats on the internet were sentient, not just people personifying their domesticated cats.

True to his mission, Lee was most interested in the human glamorization of food. The Dog-people’s highest art form is food. Food finite and entangled in its season, the best foods are often perishable, there for a bite and then gone, transformed into part of us. Lee was very disappointed how the people of the most industrial nations seemed to rarely appreciate the connectedness of life-and-food, he theorized this was perhaps because human technology shared no sense of smell or taste? The internet in the early 90s didn’t even have very many photos yet, and most of the conversations were entertainment related, so Lee read a lot of science articles.

There is no way to ever describe how horrified Lee was trying to comprehend the scope of cruelty and waste of life via the meat industry. The data on factory-farming, slaughter-houses, and animals confined in their own waste was so bad for him emotionally that his AI-C refused to go to any of these places.

On their hilltop homestead with no neighbors on two sides and wilderness for miles as a “backyard” U.G. and Lee raised “wild” food, mostly succeeding in keeping the ducks, chickens, rabbits, and turkeys, out of the garden. Lee had the advantage of being able to tell the males, females and the age just by smell when hunting up some dinner. Except for the ducks that could fly and migrate, most of their food had nowhere to go except for woods patrolled by cougar and wolves, so the animals that were not eaten by predators would return to their feeder troughs and the safety of the barn, especially in bad weather.

Lee’s focus gradually began to shift away from food towards how to save life on the smelly planet in case an expedition party of Dog-people arrived within the next thousand years.

The span of 1,000 years seemed realistic knowing the nosy-social Dog-people. Before he ever agreed to pilot their spacecraft all those centuries of stasis travel ago, Lee knew, unless the Dog-people found a way to drastically speed up their intergalactic communications there was correspondingly going to be no reply from home reaching Earth in his lifetime. And it would be over 900+ Earth years from when he sent his first messages; warnings about human’s weapons and pollution, plus another rotation for the Dog-planet to align before that first clove of garlic sent home and his update about finding a safe first contact, was to reach the descendants of the scientists and engineers who sent him off on his mission into space. He often wondered if that ancient frost bitten clove of garlic or any of the other little snacks he sent would retain any subtle nuances of flavor. But then, he was here, alive after a much longer trip relative to the bigger size of his spacecraft. The smaller packets he sent home skipped faster and in bigger hops following the return path he had charted. As U.G. the Cat-person would say after skillfully skinning a freshly killed rabbit. “That’s that. No going back.”

Un-Cat Episode 6. Dog Never Gives Up Hope for His People to One Day Become Friends With the People of Earth

In the fall of 1994 over a decade and a half after the Cat-person U.G. and the extraterrestrial-Dog-person Lee had stayed friends, Lee had a Eureka moment and did a wild dance running around and around leaping in the meadow outside of the garden wall.

Of course, U.G. was obligated as a Cat-person to act nonchalant, walk calmly along the wall and pretend not to stare at Lee by licking her paw while waiting for the inevitable explanation for his dance. Lee was an often overly verbose Dog-person and she knew an explanation was inevitable.

“Hooravine-bow-bow-wow-moy-vah-ald-bow-wow woof, hooray, the best idea to start fixing everything for everyone!” Lee was howling a bit, not making enough sense for the AI-Cs to translate.

U.G. was just starting to worry if Lee’s mental marbles were loose. But Lee calmed down enough to prance over and announce more clearly, with a bark that nearly blasted poor U.G. right off the garden wall into the rows of carrots, turnips, and yams.

“Everyone working together to save the world with the hive-mind and the collective consciousness via transparent structured shared ideas, votes and polls. Anybody who cares and knows anything about a subject weighing in, to the shared plan for every idea, on the entire planet Earth!”

In other words or as far as U.G. understood it, this BIG idea was the collective consciousness shared over a Dog-simplified free-internet-network. Lee was sure, that if everybody weighed in to figure out how-to-save-the-world together, then they could do it.

“Save the world from what exactly?” U.G. asked. “Humans?”

“Ha Ha!” Lee replied imitating a tone from one of the popular cartoon TV show they had been watching together. “From everything of course. You know, war, world hunger, pollution, global warming, disease, solar flares!…” Lee went on like that for a while, his dancing and leaping around gradually slowing in-between bursts of words barked.

“Okay!” Howled, U.G. several times, trying her cat best to vocalize above Lee’s carrying on, she had no choice but to surrender, when Lee’s mind was made up, there was nothing else to say but ‘Okay’,… Okay?' over and over again, until he calmed down.

After that U.G. and Lee did the research via the Dog computer on how to get the human internet installed in the middle of nowhere Idaho. U.G. agreed it was worth the cost, besides they were becoming increasingly aware that the hacking they had been doing to post on a rotating series of remote servers wasn’t sustainable and neither of them wanted their posts deleted.

Lee thought nothing of human money, all types of currency were useless and confusing to him, … The first time he saw U.G. pay for something he muttered. “Why all the fuss you can’t eat cash?”

U.G.’s feelings about money were similar, except while the Dog-people attributed value to food, she and the Cat-people placed the highest value on territory. Because in the Cat dimension property was currency.

When U.G. spent money she didn’t think about the numbers of dollars and cents, she thought about the story of how her family came to this dimension.

U.G.’s Grandmother was killed because a flock of turkey-like birds their Cat family had been raising strayed over a territory-line into the woods on a neighboring Cat families’ land. 

Grandmother had crossed over the marker wall to herd the birds back over the line and was basically legally murdered by a border patrol agent, who shot her on sight. There was no Cat-trial, he was a hired gun doing his job.

As a newly married young Cat-person, she left behind two tiny kittens and a widower. U.G.’s Grandfather was an inventor, mourning the death of his wife his focused shifted from bird slaughtering robots to building a time machine in hopes of bringing back the love of his life.

Grandfather went to the nearest alley and found a widow with a young son, both nearly starved to death. He brought them home to take care of his baby kittens. When it came time to test his time machine, step Grandmother was the only one who believed in him. In the end, she and her son, Grandfather and his two young children were the only ones to travel across. The time machine failed to travel back in time to save the flock of birds and prevent U.G.’s Grandmother’s death. Instead, the five Cat-people landed on the beach of Northern California in the human dimension in 1841, to join the gold rush for a few years.

Eventually, the Cat-family made their way inland to some rocky hills they hoped would be useless to humans. Grandfather still valuing a territory for his family above anything else made sure they held the title to 103 carefully marked acres. After Grandfather and step-Grandmother died, people bought a chunk of land they wanted to cut a road through. U.G.’s parents and her Uncle Jack kept 74.¾ acres and after watching the trucks and cars go by, built a corner store. A few years later they were approached with an offer to install a gas station in front of the store. With that money, they built a house in walking distance from the new store and five very simple cabins to rent out to hunters, fishermen, and folks passing through.

Uncle Jack was restless. He became a truck driver. He drove from coast-to-coast, South to North and everywhere in-between, always searching for some other Cat-people who may have crossed over like them. Uncle Jack never found another. U.G. inherited everything.

Lee spent thousands of dollars of Uncle Jack’s savings that U.G. had inherited with the cabin, and still the only way Lee and U.G. could afford to install a tower on the top of the hill in range of U.G.’s cabin and the gas station store was by selling off a few more acres of her Grandparents land and three of the five cabins.

We can advertise Wi-Fi and make folks come into the store to get the password, it will pay for itself eventually.

The top of the hill, Uncle Jack’s house, her Grandparents’ tiny stone house (they now used as a barn for their birds and rabbits) because it was next to the garden on the only flat and cleared area of the valley, a couple cabins and the corner store were on the 53 acres of land she still owned. U.G. wouldn’t sell the land, she rented out the land, tho the commercial buildings, the store and gas station businesses were now owned and run by somebody else, a human family her father had befriended. She didn’t need more than she could manage anyways. By renting out her parent’s house near the store and living simply in the old run-down homestead was how U.G. made her survival for provisions, auto insurance for the truck and property taxes and anything else she decided to spend a little money on, which generally speaking wasn’t much, until Lee came along and fixed-up everything.

To make another long story short. Lee and U.G. made a deal with the human owners of the businesses on U.G.’s family’s land. After a bit of back and forth with permits via the corner store and the gas station, plus paying a crew (who never got a good look at either Lee or U.G. and thought they might be a very strange couple indeed). The internet was up and fast with very few folks in the area on devices to pinch the bandwidth. 1996 was still pretty early in the internet era to install a wireless tower out there in the sticks in the middle of nowhere.

A few months and a year after all of that hassle dust settled, U.G. decided Lee might be right. She liked the human internet, granted Lee was reading more scholarly blogs and she was more fascinated by gossip, advertising, and cute gif animations of dancing hamsters than news.

On a chilly autumn morning before sunrise in 1998, the air smokey from a smoldering wildfire, Lee and U.G. seated on the porch stoop watching the distant glow of coals scattered here and there in the scrub of the rocks on the hill across the valley, Lee said. “U.G. I am a very old Dog and the cancer has metastasized to a point where the AI-Critter and I don’t know how long we can continue to teleport chunks of tumors out of my body to keep it from spreading to vital organs.”

“What?… What?!” U.G. sputtered shocked awake out of the smoke haze.

“You heard me. Cancer has metastasized in my body cavity. I realized I should tell you, 

watching the way the wildfire runs out of fuel in the rocks here and sputters to smoke, until it finds the next area of, shrubs, sticks, a trees here and there, reminds me of how the cancer has spread.”

The wind had shifted and the fire was not heading towards the house anymore. And U.G. had just started to feel her fear of the fire jumping the gap across the creek-bed subside, and now, even with telepathic help from the AI-C, she was struggling to process what Lee was saying. “You are dying?”

“I am a very old Dog, my people would say, I am accepting the limitations of my lifespan.”

“You are giving up?”

“Never. I will never give up hope for the people of Earth to be friends with my people and I will give every moment I have towards the goal of saving life on this salty smelly little planet.”

“Do you want to go see a doctor, get a second opinion?”

“Medical treatment is primitive here on Earth. This is one of many illnesses that should be smelled and healed long before the disease has progressed far enough to harm the host. U.G. you and both AI-Cs know it is true, we could not go to a veterinarian, nor a human doctor. Even if they understood what’s wrong with me and could get past the Dog-person anomalies of my anatomy as an alien, there’s nothing they could do that would be superior to the AI-C’s medical knowledge of my species.”

“But…”

Lee’s AI-C interrupted her sputter as the two critters touched tentacles together to exchange data. Lee’s stomach lining and the fat around the body cavity over his liver was riddled like Swiss-cheese with bloody little holes. Some of the areas were healed scars and a few were fresh. Lee had been fighting to stay alive for a while now. The pollution and various spectra of electromagnetic radiation the humans generate on this planet is difficult for an old Dog’s immune system to battle against.

“I have smoke in my eyes.” U.G. lied.

“I have a little smoke in my eyes as well.” Lee replied truthfully, it was a smoky day after all. “I’m sorry; mortality is something we must all learn to accept as part of the fragility of life. ” Lee tried to sympathize but he seemed more stoic than sad. He and his AI-C were relieved to have this conversation with their friend, out into the air.

One evening over dinner a few days later during a quiet pause, very few insects or birds were making noise after the fire and Lee was eating, therefore content for that moment. 

U.G., looking out at the sun starting to set behind clouds of many hues of pink orange and red over dark purple-black rugged treed hills, remarked. “You know they changed it from global warming to climate change and back again I think?... but I’m not sure.” She was just saying this to make conversation and it worked because she and her AI-Critter had been making a list of Lee’s favorite topics.

Lee looked up very seriously over an empty plate. “Data about reality doesn’t change by what name they call it by. Humans and their knowing things only by agreeing on a few words shorter than most news headlines is confounding. Can’t they tell anything by the smell? Climate change or global warming, the data is in. Fact — a yearly total average of recorded weather shows a clear warming trend with extreme weather and record-setting hotter days everywhere! The average of global warming is happening. A couple decades from now it will be completely obvious to all life on this planet. Did you make more pickles mixed with extra garlic?”

“Of course, they are down in the basement pantry, you are always welcome to help yourself, you know. Go fetch one, you finished the last open jar upstairs.” U.G. said counting on how much he moved around or not, to tell her more about how he felt than what he would say. 

She watched the sunset listening to Lee’s toe-nails on the floorboards clickety-click, down and click, click, click, up the stairs, and back over to the table. 

U.G. preferred sweet or fishy flavors. Lee liked pickles with extra garlic. They were, Cat and Dog type people after all, of course, their tastes were opposite. At the end of the day she liked to listen to Lee lecture about his favorite topics, just to hear the low tones of her friend’s warbled voice talk.

“So how does this collective problem-solving work again?” She asked.

Lee gripped the jar lid thinking for a second with the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth and the new jar of pickled vegetables in his paws made a good loud satisfactory ‘pop’ noise.

Yes, the story continues past these two friends munching on pickled vegetables.

Un-Cat Episode 7. Dog’s Point Of View on How to Save the World

As an extraterrestrial Dog-person Lee was not a very good writer, but he tried his darndest. U.G. was never certain how much of Lee’s over-explaining-everything with way too-many-words was because of the AI-C’s translation of Dog-speak to English, or if his verbose writing and speaking style was just an aspect of his personality. Poet or not, he wrote and wrote, almost every day and most evenings from the winter of 1993 to July 2001. He composed his written works on a few different blogging sites, and two-million, eight-hundred-forty-two-thousand, seven-hundred and ninety-one words later. He backed-up everything he had written, twice, and gave one copy to his BFF the Cat-person Utah Green.

The opening cartoon I didn’t draw, Lee typing away and U.G. standing behind him.

Words in Lee’s thought bubble: Know these universal truths — life is more precious than any cold hard jewel of mineral, and friendship is more valuable than gold or any solid chunk of non-sentient elemental material.

U.G.’s thought bubble. "WORD COUNT — 2,842,791 words !!!"

Lee kept relentlessly writing even as his health slowly deteriorated. As he and the AI-C gradually lost the battle with cancer he moved around less and slower, he mostly stayed, writing in his Dog-computer, in his bed, until he had to move. 

Towards the end the AI-Cs had U.G. grow and harvest some herbs and mushrooms that they processed not as chemotherapy but to help manage pain, nausea, bowl and stomach discomforts. But, even with the AI-C’s detailed help it was difficult to manage the doses of Lee’s self-medicating. He had good days and he had bad days. Sometimes on a sunny afternoon, U.G. would take Lee down the road in the truck for drives.

U.G. would drive and Lee would hide from humans by laying flat in the bed of the truck out of the wind, watching telephone poles and electric wires go by, for mile after mile. Lee would imagine cutting down the exposed ugly black cables and grey metal grounding wires waving one paw like imaginary scissors. “Clip, clip,… clip, snip,… snip… snip…” for miles and miles. “What a waste to generate all that non-renewable energy only to push it so far. All that electricity lost into the air.”

Lee had written up detailed instructions on all the renewable and passive energy additions he had built into U.G.’s off the grid cabin, and he also wrote out a lengthy, from a Dog’s point-of-view, recommendation on a lot of human behavior, on just about every subject, with examples from airplanes-to-zoos. 

Most of the tonnage for his wordy thoughts were directed at big industry, but he also had many small everyday things people could do, from avoiding aerosols, growing plants around their neighborhood for bees, to being aware of the true cost of xenophobic motivations on local culture before it progressed all the way to a war. Often ending his examples with little mantras like. "Awareness of your being, the key to friendship; friendship being the cure to war."

Of course in the late 1990's, most humans seemed more interested in Lee’s profile picture than what that Dog-person had to say. “U.G. what does global warming have to do with all these am I hot-or-not comments on my blog?”

U.G. laughed instead of answering him.

Lee glanced back at the thread of comments. “They think I am a human and they are debating if they can tell whether or not I am sexy based on a tendency for human pet-dog owners to look a little like their pets.”

U.G. nodded ‘yes’ still smiling at her funny friend, he will never be an Earthling, no matter how long he lives here. That Dog doesn’t see this world the way people who have lived here for their entire live's do. Of course people take planet Earth for granted, they have never lived in another world. She thought, feeling no need to say this out-loud.

To say Lee’s ideals about non-renewable energy were complicated is an understatement. During the Dog-dark-ages there were quite a few electricity and natural gas accidents. Therefore the Dog-people decided that less-is-more when it comes to depending on any dangerous power source.

“People, some of them children and Earth dogs have gotten electrocuted. Humans and animals die every year because of downed power lines.” yelped Lee batting a paw to flip the long fur around one ear that had escaped from the old baseball hat he was wearing in the truck in case they came in contact with any people on their drive. “Why don’t they bury those dangerous power lines? Or better yet generate local electricity managed by smart grids? Oh yeah, these damn power lines are in the air because it’s high voltage?!”

“Lee don’t you start crying and whining back there.” U.G. softened her tone as much as she could while hollering from the driver’s seat in the truck at Lee “seat-belted” in a makeshift spacecraft “bed” in the back of the truck.

“Just over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions are the result of humans generating electricity. This is made worse by the factors of weather and wear on old electric wires and the distance the electricity has to be pushed from where it was generated. Less than half of all the electric current generated will never reach where it’s going and to be used by someone. Less than half because of the 60 to 70% that isn’t used to push power long distances and finally makes it to a transformer station, where it is then cut-down in voltage, before it is sent to some house or business, where someone will use appliances or power tools for a job that they could do by hand or because of TVs or lights left on in a another room that they are not in, not to mention electricity used up by phantom power and electric water heaters left set to high on a hot day when folks take a lukewarm bath to cool off.” Lee howled frantically waving paws in the air like a dog running while asleep in a dog-nightmare.

In the last few years of his life, U.G. found herself trying to comfort Lee on his bad days, a lot. She flattened her whiskers back and muttered a few rules, in hopes of stopping Lee from barking repetitive laments about humans. For example, she had learned. “Use energy directly; convert to electricity only when you have to.” Was the correct response for when Lee was so upset by above-ground power lines strung on poles.

“I hear you Lee, and I am pretty sure that you have told me a lot of this before. The people can’t make it stop, it has to stop being generated wastefully at the power-plant.” But she thought, “Gosh darn it, Lee, please don’t start going on about how inefficient human refrigerators and air-conditioners are, they like ice, and to keep living inside in rooms kept too cold in summer and too hot in winter, and we don’t know why, and we also don’t know what to do about it.”

“Why is this the data the Dog-person focuses on to distract himself when his body is suffering?” U.G.’s AI-C asked adding to the din of misery ruining the lovely view of their afternoon drive.

“I sure love the wildflowers in the grass.” She said out-loud with as loud of a purr as she could muster, to prick-up his ears, as she attempted to change the subject. “Lee, can you smell the wind ruffling the waves of long grass on the hills around us?”

This would often quiet that Alien-Dog down, some, as most of his home planet was covered by prairie grass dotted by spring fed ponds that ran along fault-lines where water gushed up from gigantic underground aquifers.

. . .

Often, in the evenings U.G. would help Lee organize his written works. Lee had a very tough time separating ideas into actionable lists. 

U.G. enjoyed being organized and tidy. Everything Lee ever brought to her over the years was organized by subject. 

Before typing ideas into his computer when they returned home Lee would write notes on anything he picked up, always marveling at all the paper stuff humans generated willy-nilly: napkins, the backs of flyers, junk mail envelopes, in addition to his notes he would often tear articles from Newspapers and Magazines.

U.G. didn’t like the mess of these seemingly random clippings.

He would defend his foraging with a snort and then a comment like, “I’m not defacing periodicals, the bulk of the paper people leave laying about will get thrown away or best case scenario recycled”. Lee’s opinion on printed articles he found when they went to town, was discarded print is free press. With that Dog-person nose of his, range extended by the AI-C, he could smell printed paper from a long ways away, so he tended to find a lot more discarded reading material than a normal human person would ever come across.

U.G. sorted his notes, then washed her paws. She preferred to read digital copy of Lee’s blog posts, either way she sorted the data, generating an index for him.

At first it was just one file on her computer. When she found it too complex to keep straight she sorted the first index by subjects, printed out the lists, and then divided the lists of subjects into an entire shelf filled with notebooks, then she organized the subjects by order of importance and made a tree chart with an index key.

Standing back to scan U.G.’s shelf of three-ringed binders Lee would ask stuff like “How do you know where you put my notes on junk-mail, there’s no ‘J’ binder.”

“Under ‘D’ for Digital Divide, because that’s how you solve junk-mail.”

“Ah, everything is connected and interdependent, of course you have to create a digital branch of the post office to replace junk-mail, in order to make sure everyone has access to local advertising, everybody needs to have access to the internet. But, the binders are not in alphabetical order.”

“No, the order is by what is most important.”

“So? If you have to eliminate the digital divide to solve junk-mail, how do you know what’s most important?”

“Everybody working together to save the world, that’s idea number one.” U.G. said with a shrug, “I made a key.” she pointed to the wall behind them.

“Okay, yeah.” Lee agreed studying U.G.’s subject tree.

“I made a few lists first see, then drew this on the back of my old school map of the U.S.”

“Of course, it was the biggest sheet of paper you had.” Lee smiled. “How appropriate that the key for a Dog-person’s opinion on how to save the world to be drawn on the back of a map of your world.”

“Well yes, tho, it’s just a map of the U.S. not of the entire world.”

“Have you ever traveled to anywhere else?”

“Well… no.” U.G. paused thinking she hadn’t even been very far away from Idaho. Especially before she met him, she had only traveled as far away from home as they could drive in a day or two.

Lee, of course, knew this, having asked multiple times. “Then it is your world.” He said waving his paw in a circle around the center of the U.S. map.

Un-Cat Episode 8. — Farewell

The two AI-Critters reached out across the moving orbit of distance between them, to wordlessly think ‘farewell.’

Lee died in the early morning hours before sunrise on July 5, 2001. The night before they had watched fireworks together for hours, not on TV but telepathically via the AI-Critters, watching and smelling what people experienced as they enjoyed the 4th of July holiday as evening spread across the US time zones from the East coast to the Northwest.

U.G. had thought Lee seemed to be happy, actually enjoying the festivities and this was surprising because before this 4th of July evening, all the other years of fireworks holidays had upset Lee considerably. As an extraterrestrial Dog-person, tho he was from a highly evolved people, they were still descended from dogs, not primates. Mock bombs exploding in the air, with the stench of gunpowder and burning paper, relentless low bangs with shimmers of sparkling pops burning trails in the night sky are not the type of revelry any dog can cheer.

They had watched fireworks and then he went to sleep. Sometime in the early morning, his heart stopped beating. After waiting there with no soul to talk to, faithfully listening to Lee’s bodily remains cool, Lee’s AI-critter crawled over and woke U.G., a rare act of impatience for the cold-blooded-biological-computer who would normally wait for the host to wake up on her own.

U.G. had stayed up very late, but Cats have the ability to open one eye and stumble about fairly well even when half asleep. She yawned and stretched, and shook herself awake just enough to abruptly pull into focus the realization that Lee had insisted on witnessing hours of the Earthlings’ fireworks as a last memory of human behavior to share with his people.

Lee had explained to U.G. about how the Dog-people shared a social history and didn’t really understand fiction or the mass of impersonal dates and names humans call history. Over his life, Lee had gained knowledge from many other Dogs’ life-stories. For example, when he was a young pup, the Dog-age-equivalent to a teenager all he liked to read were tragedies from the Dog-dark ages. But, he grew out of that phase and started reading Dog-science stories and became an engineer.

“So? The Dog-people only write autobiographies? No fiction?”

“Yes. Just stories. We Dog-people don’t really understand fiction.”

At the time, U.G. had been shocked by this apparent lack of imagination. One of her favorite things to do, second only to watching birds, was to read fiction. Now, she imagined a planet of Dog-people, all busy reading and writing their stories in one terrible warbling bark of a shared language. Dog-speak had apparently near-infinite variations like human music, but one core shared language over the entire planet. 

The Dog-People had recorded many thousands of years of stories, on some kind of stone tablets, (large fired clay cylinders filling miles and miles of caves). Some of the oldest stories were biographies with only a few verses. But, they learned from their shared social history and this is why Lee knew that even if his story didn’t reach home for hundreds of years after his death, that it would be read for thousands of years, because of the Dog stories he had read that were thousands of years old. 

Not to mention that he was the first ambassador sent out into space to find food on another planet and had sent some samples and smell notes home. So, he had died, knowing that in this way he would live on in the minds of his people. 

And even in the worst case scenario the return trip of packages unsuccessful because of some space navigation accident, he would live on in the two AI-Cs on Earth, his personal Critter and U.G.'s AI-C, as well as in the stories and words he had written digitally here during his visit to Earth.

“Is there a message?” U.G. asked Lee’s AI-C still clinging to her arm.

“A written report for the Dog-planet like the one he sent just before we landed on Earth. Yes.” It replied still not letting go of her warm fur.

“May I read it?”

“Yes. He has willed a Copy-Left of all his writings left to you BFF U.G.,” The AI-C repeated what Lee had told her himself a few days ago and opened the data entry.

Earth-year-2001. Paw-print

My beloved people, I am sending this last report before my body ascends from the surface of the salty ocean covered planet the inhabitants call Earth. The dominant species of primate-people ceaselessly confound and amaze me. They have many sayings, two that I have chosen as relevant for this final message: a picture is worth a thousand words and actions speak louder than words.

It is late and I grow tired. As you watch these final memories differentiate with care these ‘fireworks shows’ or fake-explosions with bright colorful flashes from the smoke and dust cloud of artillery and bombs in their actual wars. Actual war bombs shake the ground and deafen the ears as they blast their enemy in a meteor crater like destructive fireball, if they target correctly and hit their enemy, beware; sometimes their weapons miss destroying everything in the path of the blast for no reason that I have ever been able to understand. They call it "friendly-fire" or miss fire? but this is not actually what happens, it neither misses their friends nor ceases to cause harm to their planet and ecosystem when actual weapons of war explode. These holiday celebration fireworks, I don't know how to explain them? They are like massive artificial paper and chemical dust farts lit on fire. 

In spite of a culture of laws-by-fear and making so much bewildering noise, in every way possible, loud music to machine noise, these people smell great. And these human omnivores have created more types of food than I ever imagined possible. The samples I was able to send during the Earth years 1977 to 2001 are a tiny fraction of all the types of food on this planet. Having been able to just barely get to know the humans, I hope the planet takes a turn for the better and thrives so that Earthlings survive their oil age long enough to become friends with Dog-kind.

P.s. See attached AI-C's memories for what not to do with fossil fuels.

🐾

U.G. took a long pause after reading Lee’s final report home. She was frozen for a little while as if chocking on a fur ball that wasn't there, and then slowly remembered to breathe. His death was not the first loved one U.G. had to personally deal with by herself. But, for this passing, she was very grateful to have the AI-Cs to help her, tell her what to do. In the heartbroken numb mode of grief’s autopilot, she listened to the AI-C’s voice in her head and followed Lee’s detailed instructions. 

It was mostly just math coordinates that she didn't even have to understand herself, no mental or physical lifting was required from her to teleport Lee’s lifeless Dog body up to the coffin-sized egg-shaped Dog-spacecraft nestled in moon dust, in a crater, on the dark side of the moon.

Because Lee had hatched an AI-Critter for U.G., trained to her mind and camouflaged to her fur, she could see the Dog-spacecraft clearly even over a quarter of a million miles away. The craft, resting in a small divot like a single grey egg in a grey nest. The two AI-Critters, the one on Lee’s lifeless body on the moon and the one on U.G.’s fur tucked under her chin, in her cabin home in Idaho, reached out across the moving orbit of distance between them, to wordlessly think ‘farewell.’

Then the egg lifted, not by propulsion, but like a magnet that has been flipped over and repels another magnet. The departing AI-C assuring U.G. one last time that it would be fine in stasis alone on the trip home to the Dog-planet. I am a biological computer, not a person. I will be treasured by my people because of all the memories from Lee’s life, plus all the data about his journey and planet Earth that I contain.

Then that egg shape disappeared in a shimmer of sparkle bubbles, just like the way he had arrived 24 years ago.

U.G. had her home to herself, no Dog-person worries to interrupt if she wanted to think about nothing, or do nothing but just stare out into space and watch birds, except now, everything reminded her of Lee. Together they had planted flowers and other plants bees and native pollinators liked around the front stoop where they first met and used to be their favorite places to sit together. She would go inside to find herself staring at the space where the stone keys of the Dog computer had formally occupied, or she would pace over to the empty space were Lee’s Dog bed had been in front of the hearth beside the custom multi-fuel cook stove. As she circled, she found herself not only reminded of Lee, but of her parents’ and her Uncle’s deaths.

Cat-people are not social like Dog-people. What did this mean for her own inevitable death? She had been a tiny kitten when her step Grandmother died and barely old enough to remember her Grandfather. But, Uncle Jack’s death, — the reclusive territorial cat nature and their instinctual love for solitude had given way to sadness.

Uncle Jack was a long-haul trucker, he would post adds in every small newspaper he drove his truck near. Seeking other Cat-person, if you are out there, please reply. He got quite a few funny or lonely letters from humans who were crazy about their pet cats but he never found another actual Cat-person. Uncle Jack had kept every letter and every newspaper he picked up and in his later years, all the junk mail too. The family only knew he was gone when he didn’t make the trip down to his rural route box anymore to collect his mail. They found him in his pickup truck at the bottom of the drive.

When U.G. ventured up to Uncle Jack’s house that first time the floor was so piled with paper that she could barely push-in the door wide enough to sneak in sideways. There was a mostly cleared path in the “canyon” of junk-mail and paper garbage that led to the old wood stove and then down the stairs to the out-house and a path a foot or so deep level to the mattress of his bed, but the entire cabin floor-to-ceiling was otherwise pack-rat-stacked-full. It had taken U.G. over a year to sort and burn what wasn’t worth keeping. The letters from people, tho there were a lot of them, only filled one medium-sized apple crate. The rest was all junk.

U.G.’s Mother and Father were true love-cats in that they fought all the time. Father whose human name was Hansel and Mother her name was Jill. Hansel a short hair like his mother an adopted son. All 5 cats had chosen human names from nursery rhymes when they arrived in this dimension. The brother and sister were renamed Jack and Jill. U.G.’s father was renamed Hansel and she almost got named Gretel. But, a fight about a honeymoon destination had for better or worse changed her name to Utah Robin Green.

U.G. couldn’t recall a single thing her parents ever agreed upon. It was an accident after a fight that indirectly killed her Father. He was a liberal and voted for his beliefs against poverty and war. U.G.’s mother was fiercely conservative. They always canceled out each other's votes. They were fighting about Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, it seemed to U.G. like the most stupid argument, it had nothing to do with them, and she had figured out long ago that they just needed something to be angry about other than how disappointed they were with the other, being the last mated pair of Cat-people on Earth (that they knew of, in this dimension). So they projected their frustrations onto useless details because they had to live together. Father was drinking therefore not thinking clearly, he decided to get some air, got a ladder to go up on the roof to either replace broken Christmas lights that he had left up for way too long or clean the gutters or both. It was very cold, it had been raining and turned to sleet, until hail pounded on the roof and from downstairs in the two-story house near the store, they never heard him fall.

After a few hours when it started to get dark and he didn’t come back inside. U.G.’s Mother had yelled. “That Man! Go check on your father!…”

U.G.’s Mother was very obese, eating her sorrow, she hadn’t been outside in a while. Caring for her Mother for the year and a half after her father’s death was far more difficult than finding U.G.’s Father broken and frozen, on the rocks behind the house.

After her Mother died U.G. rarely returned to that house. She had already cleaned up Uncle Jack’s cabin and had been spending most of her time there, whenever she could getaway.

It was only three weeks after her Mother died that Lee had arrived. Some part of her sanity always wondered if that Dog was an angel sent from the actual heavens to comfort her and add purpose and joy to her lonely life.

After about a week of failing to avoid thoughts about death, U.G. began the arduous process of notifying all Lee’s online friends of his departure.

Lee had left a way-too-detailed description of the cancer that had killed him as a warning to possibly help reduce the suffering of other people. U.G. understood Lee’s warning would sound nothing but hair-brained to people who can’t smell cancer or many other diseases the Dog-people could detect early by smell. Over and over she tried to simplify the gist of what he wished for her to communicate with his online friends. What she ended up with was a two-line Eulogy.

Lee Dog-Person of many words who traveled far always searching for good food, diligently appreciative of the essence of all life has died of cancer — July 5, 2001.

Copy & paste as a notice to those who followed Lee on his blogs and modified a little to set as an auto-reply on his email and she thought she just might be able to survive the loss of her friend.

Then, just two months and a few days after Lee's death, U.G. was awakened from an after breakfast morning nap, by her AI-Critter, very alarmed about bad news with the humans. The AI-C was convulsing desperately to narrow its telepathic reception. It had picked up on the broadcast of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center in Manhattan, in time to experience what happened from the point of view of the people inside. “Will the USA’s people retaliate? Are the attackers trying to start a war? Could this be the beginning of the end for all life on the planet? Is this the start of World War III?!” The AI-C squeaked with bits and fragments of questions until, U.G. ordered it to stop, "Do not to speculate, just listen!"

U.G. watched the news play the footage showing the airplanes hitting the towers, over and over again; she was thankful that Lee wasn’t alive to witness this, more than anytime, ever, in any moment of her solitary and reclusive life, she felt alone.

Author Note:

Dear reader, sorry for all the sad. U.G. isn't alone. And this isn't even close to the ending, of this story. This is only the end of this chapter of U.G.'s life. A new changed life for the Cat-Person is about to begin. 

Un-Cat Episode 9. — TL;DR(too long; didn’t read).

Over the years while Lee had lived at her house U.G. had tried to help that Dog-person reach the humans, share his books and blog posts about ‘how to save the world’. But, she tired quickly of the guilt his good-intentions inspired in people. She was a Cat-person, she and the humans would never be as kind-hearted as a Dog.

U.G. gradually came to the conclusion that most folks wanted to do what was best for the environment but didn’t want to think about it or read Lee’s writings because they were doing the best they could, just getting by, as she had done all her life until that Dog had beamed down from outer space and turned her world upside down and shook it like she had been asleep in a snow-globe long forgotten on some shelf.

In the past, even while Lee was living, whenever U.G. had felt out of sorts, when she could no longer sit still or nap, she did what cats naturally do. She went hunting.

She liked bow hunting best. She liked to sneak up and kill a turkey or a rabbit silently. After Lee's death, while her pantry was still stocked with enough food to feed both Lee and herself, she did sneak up on some tasty game, but couldn’t kill anything, just watched a few wild rabbits (Lee’s favorite meat on Earth) hop and nibble forb plants and clover for a little bit before she went back home empty-handed.

Two months and a couple of days after the terrorist attacks, she found she had no interest in getting up at all, much less eating or hunting. She tried to place the uncomfortable feeling weighing her down. Very slowly it dawned on her that for the first time in her fuzzy isolated life — she felt empathy for humans. She knew without question what Lee would do. Lee would try to help prevent World-War-III.

But, what could she do really? Just one lone Cat, who wasn’t really a cat at all, living as a recluse in the hills in the middle of nowhere Idaho? She lifted the AI-Critter up from where it had settled on her forehead just to look at it and make sure it wasn’t getting too sad or sick because it was rather quiet since watching the plane footage hitting the towers.

Another valid truth to this challenge of preventing world war three was that neither she nor Lee understood anything about war. Sure the Cat-people had fierce fights over territory. But, these battles were very specific to crossing a line drawn in pee. Human wars burned entire civilizations down, the survivors fleeing for their lives. U.G. couldn’t comprehend the scale of it.

As one lone Cat-person, she would have to deal with this bad feeling by herself. She faced her reflection in the inside lit night window. A perfectly cat thing to do, and said; “Be honest, why should a cat like you ever feel sorry for humans?”

“Well.” She started…. And stopped, as if there was a fur-ball in her throat, getting a little choked-up thinking of teasing Lee about being a recluse. “As I told you many times before, I do love humans…” she batted at a tear with her paw. “I do love people, a lot… at a safe distance… as long as they aren’t bothering me.”

Eventually, Lee had thought this line was funny, when she told it to him with carefully paced pauses, the memory of Lee laughing made U.G. cry even more. “It’s all your fault you, idiotic Dog!” And when she recovered from crying she knew what she had to do to make herself feel better. “Translation problems your Doggone ass!” She hollered, startled to silence again by the sound of her own terrible cat howling. “TL;DR,…” she thought angrily, too-long-didn’t-read was a comment Lee often got when networking,.. now, her ears still flattened in a snarl, all those TL;DRs were salt on the wound. She had a pretty good idea of what to do now that he’d given all of his writing to her Copyleft, she’d simplify Lee’s millions of words down into one-liners and jokes with Cat-logic.

Two-and-a-half years later 

U.G. had distilled the main ideas in Lee’s two-million, eight-hundred-forty-two thousand, seven-hundred-ninety-one words worth of blog posts into a two-thousand-one-hundred and nine-word list.

It was not funny, but she felt proud to have made it through all of Lee’s writings. That’s one small step in the right direction, towards one giant leap that needs to be made for human-kind. U.G.’s AI-Critter shared her opinion that Lee too would have liked her list.

Instead of long titles like those on his 5 books, about how to save the world, U.G.’s list was titled ‘How to postpone the apocalypse’. She thought the title was funny even tho she knew that most people wouldn’t get the joke. Saving the world was for superheroes; not a job for one lone powerless Cat-person.

Best case scenario she might hope for was to reduce a little suffering in the future, making anything in that list actually happen in the world seemed so far askew from what was going on in the large SUV plastic-water-bottle-crazy USA in 2003.

Mourning Lee’s death, U.G. had read the opening blurb to the file Lee had left for her, over and over.

This copy left Copyleft for the Cat-Person Utah Robin Green:

Dear U.G, use any and all of these words as you like, for tho I am no longer here, on this physical plane, with these words I am with you always, (pawprint) Lee. “🐾” Copyleft 2001

This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but with zero warranty of any kind.

P.s. What use is money to a dead Dog anyways?

Now, Lee’s words were the dedication for her little book.

U.G. posted her list on a blog. Just like Lee’s books. Because it wasn’t funny, or sexy, or a meme, she didn’t get many readers and rarely ever got any comments that were not spam.

U.G.’s book-sized list that is tl;dr is posted here, she doesn’t expect more than to rare few to ever read it. She doesn’t know what in the world she is going to do to make even one single idea in this list happen, yet. A few years from now she will learn what works, but all she knew then as she posted her list in the summer of 2003 was there is nothing else to do, keep trying.

P.s. U.G. knows this list is both incomplete and too long in need of quite a bit of democratic process i.e. checks and balances, don’t read. 

However the story continues with Un-Cat, Episode 10. Money, Politics and Stuff.

How to postpone the apocalypse

A list of ideas for everyone interested in working together to save the world

1. Crowd-solving with the collective-intelligence — Everyone working together, listening to problems that need solving and sharing ideas about the best actions for sustaining life on Earth.

2. Passive revolution — passive energy redesign and up-cycle of all buildings, home, business, storage, all construction from dog houses to skyscrapers. Conserve energy first with smarter design reducing the energy used and generated.

3. Heal the digital divide for everyone to have a voice to join the conversation, and participate both locally and globally. With paper ballots and polls by mail alternative for people who choose not to use electronic devices and as a back-up or safeguard against hacking of digital voting and information systems.

4. Renewable energy collected from renewable resources: sunlight, wind, tides, waves, geothermal heat and night sky radiant cooling from outer space. Use renewable energy collected directly with as little conversion, transportation fuel and chemical solutions as is physically possible.

Note: 1. Ocean water supporting life on Earth is dependent on ph not just temperature range. 2. 2020 statistic over 25% of GHG is from generating electricity and over half of the electricity generated is used pushing power for long distances on large grids. And 3. e-waste generated in conversion from light and heat of the sun, to electricity and then back to light and heat is not renewable.

5. Clean air, water and soil safe from pollution, vital for survival, protected as a right by enforcing industrial corporate environmental production responsibility for greenhouse gases, pollution, garbage and toxic waste with corporate social responsibility for international product chains.

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, meat (see: 4. 35. and 33.) appliances and automobiles to toys. Only use the Earth’s energy and resources to make it if someone wants it.

7. H.U.M.A.N. first economics and politics. Placing value in people more than profit, GNH over GDP. Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product.

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 or Medicare for all.

A. Art stimulus via a democratic ArtCoin365 voting system.

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

8. Home as a right. One equity owned primary residence claimed per adult citizen. No foreclosures because no primary residence home values can drop below zero in value. Rentals for temporary housing only.

9. Universal job training for needed vocations. Free on-the-job training, apprentice programs, and trade schools networked with community colleges. Skilled workers advancing to paid masters and PhD programs in careers they excel in.

Medical care for all in seven parts (10–16):

10. Health as a right. The price of necessary medicine protected by law from the greed of administrators and corporations. No profit allowed for access to health care, medicine, lab tests, screening, and treatments required for survival.

11. Preventive care and screenings of health to reduce suffering from injury, disease, and need (sleep, nutrition, time for exercise, and personal-time for mental health) with access to healthcare and time to heal — before a person becomes disabled. Note* For cost-effective healthcare emergency medicine is an obvious given — emergency rooms should never be the only access to medical care.

12. Electronic medical records that belong to the patient for safer more accurate and efficient healthcare. Our current medical record system is badly in need of an update to match the level of health care possible.

13. Family medical history as preventive medicine: as recommended by US Human & Health Services — The Surgeon General’s Family Health History Initiative 2016.

14. Accept the fragility and limitations of the human lifespan from birth to old age with respectful palliative care for terminally ill and elderly people to die with dignity and stop the opioid-epidemic.

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

16. Crime prevention plus access to healthcare i.e. birth control. Make the human race’s most dreaded ‘A’ word solvable. Abortion is a rooster problem, not a chicken and the egg problem. Abortion a preventable ill, almost a solvable problem except when necessary to save the Mother’s life or the suffering of the future child. Then only as the last resort. Abortion is a privacy-protected medical procedure.

17. Art stimulus via a democratic digital ArtCoin365 voting system. Economic stimulus for what humans do better than AI and robots, the arts, literature, and culture. A publicly owned fee-free dollar-per-day vote for every citizen generating a penny-for-your-thoughts via a digital-tip-jar voting system to distribute art grants and fund community arts programs, productions, studios, and performances.

8. Needs met for shelter, food, water, and air. No questions asked. Housing as a right -- Every citizen claims a home as shelter. Food --No person adult or child should ever go hungry or be shamed into begging or eating unhealthy junk food in a nation with such an abundance of food that we have rolling food surpluses. Water -- No one should have to drink polluted water or bathe in dirty water. Air -- No one should have to suffer from smog or torturous noise pollution in their home.

19. The Right to Privacy laws updated for the digital information age to automatically protect all minors, people’s homes from invasion and search, victims of crime, and medical privacy.

20. The Right to Publicity updated for the digital information age. People own the right to their own face and personality and have the right to avoid malicious defamation of character and remove images and recordings of themselves from public searches.

21. 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.

22. Truth in journalism verified, writing credits, and fact-checking required. Mistakes and errors publicly redacted using the top of the journalists' time-slot or publishing space when proven false by peer and public review. If any journalist makes a lot of errors in the next issue or news broadcast they will not have any time left to make further false statements. Also, some issues need to be balanced with the rights to publicity and privacy to prevent copycat crimes.

23. Prison reform and felony voting laws — the US has the highest documented* (China is not documented) incarceration rate in the world = big complicated problem.

24. Mass revenge shootings, gun crime, suicide by gun or domestic violence by gun, and war, what is it good for — absolutely nothing. As stated in the second amendment all types of weapons of war not in the possession of the military should be the legal responsibility of a well-regulated militia. A well-regulated militia must have a security system to protect weapons from misuse, certified shooting ranges, and gun safes appropriate for the weapons they are responsible for. Private individual gun ownership should be for hunting weapons and handguns only, no private individual ownership of weapons of war or ammunition for military machine weapons of mass destruction. Responsibility for all guns owned by either civilians or kept in secure weapon arsenals by militia groups shall be processed with common-sense gun control laws.

25. Recognize Physical Characteristic Discrimination in ourselves (PCD is racism, misogyny, homophobia, and ageism all rolled into one).

26. Ecological evaluation of the textile industry, fibers, dyes, and the production of all types of cloth, baby clothes to potting soil “bags” to boat tarps, etc… the production of all machined fabrics weighed for environmental impact. Textile mills generate one-fifth of the world’s industrial water pollution.

27. Clean-up; how we clean ourselves, our homes, and our workplaces. Nonrenewable free products and packaging.

28. Solve money. How do we reach that Star Trek utopia where money isn’t needed?

29. Remove money from politics. Discussion, polls, and candidates hosted on a public politics-only channel free of charge to participants. Starting at the top, POTUS, Senators, and State Governors, — no high-level politician earns a salary. All non-essential spending and gifts are allowed if public and completely transparent. If a politician accepts a gift, the gift is displayed to the public. Survival and all required goods and services are paid for at cost, housing is provided, a politician sets aside all privately owned land, businesses, anything they can’t take into the government-owned housing. (temporarily giving over control of all personal assets to a lawyer, relative, or a friend). If a politician doesn’t focus on the work of governing and serving the interest of the majority of people who voted them into office it should be completely visible and they should be held to account and replaced by another politician. (P.s. I know this idea is as old as the fall of Rome, that’s where this idea originates, learn from history already please).

30. Design a digital branch of the United States Postal Service to end all paper junk-mail (Solved in tandem with 3., heal the digital divide).

31. Re-shippers — Reusable mailers for all shipping companies to eliminate cardboard boxes, and paper (SASE) envelopes.

32. End plastic packaging. Stop all plastic use-once-throw-away-trash by designing it out of production. If idea 25. and 26. are successful then millions of tons of paper pulp formerly used to produce junk-mail and cardboard boxes as well as the paper mills, printers, binderies, and box-making factories that produce flyers and cardboard boxes can be redesigned to produce paper food packages like paper milk cartons and ice cream tubs, apples to yogurt, etc…

33. Standardized refillable bins, for all types of products currently sold in throw-away plastic bags for products not suitable for paper alone, glass or can packaging. Example: airtight display crates or tub-sized bins with a seal for chips or bread packaged in paper to protect food from moisture and crushing from bakery to store shelf.

34. Subsidized local produce and regional food should be more affordable than foods shipped thousands of miles.

35. Organic food should be the default sticker-free labeled in bins by farm location. Pesticide-produced products and GMOs should be clearly marked with color-coded warning labels.

36. Work with farmers to help reduce waste of food and adjust the margins of production for the crops with the largest environmental impact first; Meat, dairy and egg, and corn, grown for animal feed as relates to current dietary trends.

37. Save the sea life in our oceans and rivers — sustainable harvesting of fish and shellfish in tandem with habitat restoration.

38. Save the bees and the bats — Replace mono-culture, mowed and trimmed grass lawns with native grasses and other low-maintenance ground cover plants. Bees, native pollinators, and all the small creatures at the foundation of the food chain need happy soil free from pesticides and chemical fertilizers allowed to live full seasonal life-cycle uncut.

39. Plants, plants, and more plants — everywhere. Community gardens and garden boxes, green walls, roof-top-gardens, garden towers and trellis fencing. Gardening is the number one hobby worldwide, everyone should have access to fresh fruit, vegetables, and herbs.

40. No more toxic chemical roof run-off — anywhere. Replace all old roofing with clean roofing materials: green roofs or glass, metal, and ceramic with solar panels.

41. No more single layer asphalt or cement parking lots; depending on location all parking lot spaces should be roofed with a green space, greenhouse, or a picnic lunch-break sized park collecting rainwater or covered by solar panels.

42. Plug-in electric vehicles connected to smart micro-grids that run on solar & wind power to replace our crude-oil dependent system.

43. People power paths everywhere — walking, bicycle, unicycle, wheelchair or skate, etc.. — as a local alternative to longer-distance public transportation and automobile-only roads unsafe for cyclist and pedestrians.

44. Water-efficient redesign of all toilet and bathroom plumbing. Flush grey-water or better yet, don’t poop and pee in water at all, use the organic material, shredded paper waste and natural gas from human waste for fuel. The most logical proportional use for homes would be direct as fuel for hot water heaters or cooking.

45. Outdoor lighting — up-cycled and replace old street lamps with new energy-efficient designs with solar-panel and light sensors.

46. Save birds; window designs and glass birds can see: Testing is in progress for ultraviolet coatings with a spider web pattern. Window angles 20% away from the sky have proven to work to prevent bird deaths from window collisions. Deep arches and awning to block the reflection of the sky also help. It is the reflection of the sky birds see, dive into, and die or get stunned and eaten by domestic cats, or other natural predators etc...

47. Stop stray invasive animals in our environment. Abandoned and neglected pets is animal cruelty. Make puppy-mills and breeding of unwanted animals as a product illegal. People who want a specific type of pet should request a pet and search lists of certified breeders, and accidental mutts, no impulse purchases of pets. All litters of pets listed with an official local humane society-like agency. Every type of animal that is legal as a pet: dogs, cats, snakes, turtles, lizards, birds, rabbits and fish, etc…

48. Stop invasive plant species that threaten the balance of the ecosystem.

49. Up-cycle the tradition of the Christmas tree to better suit the time we live in, live trees and celebrate New Year's by planting a native tree for the future.

50. Protect and expand all green spaces “parks” — National and state forests and wildlife refuges as well as all tiny urban green spaces around public transportation, green roofs, arboretum, or greenhouses in the center of apartment complexes, and business centers. See 41

51. Make industrial age garbage extinct — not life on the planet.

52. World Wednesday every Wednesday for as long as it takes until we clean up the environment and learn how to balance the climate — Earth day once a year is not enough.

Hey, thanks, you made it to the end of this list :) IMHO the next episode of this story is one of the more entertaining bits I’ve written so far.  Un-Cat, Episode 10. Money, Politics and Stuff.