Spacekitten Kitlin

Dear H.A.S.T.,

I hope the Earth is okay and this message finds you.

I am sorry for your loss. I wish I knew more things to say to you. More meaningful things. But I have nothing to say that would do justice to… all of this. Besides, I’m aware you wouldn’t want condolences that much, so let’s go straight to the point.

He would’ve wanted me to share this autobiography with you, so here it is.

I took the liberty of translating many names and measurements into terms you would understand (the big numbers are in the short scale). The other complexities I’ll try to abstract as much as I can.

See you, perhaps.

My Mama is almost as old as life on Earth. She was born from a supernova, like most of the others. But unlike most of the others, she was charged with Catus Radiation, that rare radiation that human eyes would interpret as green mini-lightnings. She had storms of it all around her inside the event horizon. After a good while, one of those storms brought me into existence.

My first memory is the bright, chaotic ocean of stellar plasma within which I was. When I reassess this memory now, I find that place both intriguing and disconcerting, like those places that make me want to leave and stay a bit longer at the same time. But back then, I didn’t feel any of that. My immediate and only thought put into words was “I’m hungry. Must eat.” So, after existing for two seconds, I opened the mouth of my holographic body and started sucking everything inside me.

I was sucking everything from in front, behind, and beside me. All that plasma was heading to Mama’s singularity, but then it was all heading to my mouth. My eyes could only see the bright chaos, but with my third eye, the “snail eye” one, I could see the disk of hot gases that orbited Mama, her accretion disk, getting smaller and smaller at an impressive rate, until it was no more. I sucked and sucked until there was nothing more to suck. I ate all of Mama’s stellar plasma, down to the last neutrino.

I looked around with my third eye at the now much clearer landscape. The closest thing to me was Mama’s singularity. I still wanted to eat, but I ignored the singularity. Somehow, I knew it was Mama’s and eating it would be like eating myself, so I closed my mouth and proceeded to look for anything outside. I could see, with my third eye, large masses of gas and dust far away, so I started to suck in their direction with my mouth. They came at impressive speeds until they fell inside Mama and finally reached me.

Several millennia passed before I decided it was enough and closed my mouth. But after that, I would suck anything that fell inside Mama, like a stomach parasite, stealing all of her food for myself. In the meantime, Mama’s singularity was constantly getting closer and closer, like an unavoidable future. I instinctively knew that touching it wouldn’t be good, so whenever I got too close, I would fade out my holographic body for a split second, exposing my own singularity long enough for me to get myself back to a safer place.

That was my life. Eat everything in sight and keep my distance from Mama’s singularity. I never considered leaving Mama’s event horizon. That would be much hard work, and I was still living mindlessly. I had consciousness; even sentience. But I couldn’t think. I was sleepwalking, mindlessly consuming everything that got close enough to me like a zombie. That was my life for 500 million years.

But one day, my consciousness woke up. I was staring at the starry void of space with my mouth shut when a creature materialized in front of me, a green and white being closely resembling an Earthling Felis catus, but with a third eyeball connected to the body by a very flexible tube. I knew it was one of my kind, even though I had never seen one before, nor had I seen my own image in full, even with my third eye. So I kept my mouth shut and paid close attention.

As soon as the spacecatus appeared, it recoiled in disgust at my sight, speaking a language I understood: “Ew, look at how horrible it is!” Immediately, another one appeared to its right and reacted the same way: “Ack! Horrible indeed!” Then they both continued to overreact to my sight for some time. Remembering this now hurts a little, but back then, I was concentrated on the accessories they were wearing. The first wore some sort of golden neckerchief of a material I had never seen, and the second had something of that same material on its head, like a small fancy hat with a hole for the third eye. They looked delicious, but it didn’t feel safe to steal them from their owners for a reason I couldn’t grasp.

“Are you sure it is a spacecatus?” asked the hat one. “Unfortunately, it has to be. The radio signature of its holo-body couldn’t be from something else”, answered the neckerchief one. So they both agreed to “apply the protocol” and introduced themselves. The neckerchief one was Kristine, and the hat one was her quantum twin, Kristina. They were both rangers for the Spacecati, an occupation focused on patrolling the universe to find the sleepwalking ones like me.

They spoke alternately, explaining the threat a spacecatus like me is to our universe’s existence because of our insatiable appetites, and the importance of joining Master Klang’s civilization, where all Spacecati contribute to a self-sustainable way of preserving our existence and security. I listened carefully to their words, as they hit me hard like speeding asteroids. A vibration started to permeate my mind, and I could feel it getting stronger and stronger the more I considered what I was hearing. I had only known the feeling of gluttonous desire, but the twins were presenting to me the clutch of fear, followed by the relief of hope. I was finally waking up.

They finished the protocol by asking me in unison to join their civilization. Everything they said made complete sense, so I did what I considered the only logical thing to do and said “yes” with a smile. So we left Mama. It was hard work as I would expect, but it went well. Kristine and Kristina asked me to follow them, then disappeared, heading to our destination by fading their holographic bodies for a split second and using their singularities to open a wormhole, as I already knew how to do.

I, however, stayed behind for a bit because I had never seen Mama from the outside. My eyes gleamed as I witnessed that lone, perfectly black orb with such strong gravity that the light around it was distorted like a lens. Many creatures fear black holes as ruthless beasts. But that view of my humble Mama is still one of the most beautiful, glorious things I’ve seen in all my existence.

Kristine and Kristina guided me to Home Void, the secret pocket dimension where every civilized spacecatus hides from the rest of the universe. It is complex to get there, but I managed to find my way in by tracking the twins’ Catus-ray signatures on spacetime. The landscape was black except for the occasional Spacecati and their technology. When I arrived, the twins gave me the stink eye for the wait, then walked me to the leader, Master Klang. There was no floor, but I could feel some gravity force keeping my four paws at the same horizontal level in the void, which felt a bit jarring, as I had never been on any solid ground before. My life was only floating in space until that point.

Klang is our word for “first”. Master Klang was the first spacecatus to wake up and start waking up other wild Spacecati. Unlike me, he had left his black hole’s event horizon before waking up and caused great damage, consuming a whole galaxy cluster before noticing the existential threat he posed to the universe. So he made it his mission to gather all Spacecati of the universe together in a self-sustainable society. They were all persuaded the same way I was, and eventually made him their leader.

Master Klang was sitting on his white throne, which had a great contrast with Home Void’s dark background. The twins announced that they found the number 98, and Klang, with a concerned face, replied, “Is this really a spacecatus? It is so skinny, and its head is so round and large compared to the body. And the body’s size… small. What went wrong with it?” Once again, I wasn’t really offended by the reaction to my look, but rather curious about the Master’s throne, made of another material I’d never seen. It was beautiful. And seemed really tasty… but I quickly brushed off the thought of tasting it because, for the first time in my life, I understood I wasn’t hungry.

“Yes, master, it’s really ugly. Do we really need to include it in our society?” said Kristine. “Could we not put it out of its misery?” continued Kristina. I got focused on the twins’ accessories again. Master Klang thought for a second and answered with his default wise elder face, “No. If it really is a spacecatus, we cannot. All of our siblings deserve a chance. Besides, we could use another garbage collector.”

I focused back on Master Klang, and then he stood up on The Throne and told Kristine to gather the others for an announcement. She left, and while we waited, I looked at Kristina again, and she immediately asked, annoyed, “What do you keep looking at?” I didn’t notice she was annoyed and simply answered: “The thing in your head looks reeeally good.” She turned her face with disdain and said: “Heh. Of course it is. Now stop scanning me! It is disturbing.” So I looked back at The Throne and then to the opposite side, excited that I was about to meet 94 new faces.

Less than 30 seconds after leaving, Kristine returned to Kristina’s side, and 91 Spacecati materialized in front of us, all facing Master Klang. Everyone gasped at my sight, and Klang explained that the twins found me and I would be accepted regardless of my “freakness”. He declared that my name would be Kitlin, which is our term for “abnormal person” or, less technically, “freak”.

When the announcement ended, I finally started to ask myself what was so weird about me. Master Klang mentioned my skinny body, but his body was also different from the other Spacecati: wider and fluffier, like a big fat cat. Only then did I notice how fat he was, and my mind started racing with questions about how he managed to get like that, such as “Was he born like this? Did he do that on purpose? Is he like that because he ate too much? How much do you need to eat to become like that?”

Then I stopped and thought that maybe the others felt the same way about my different appearance. “They just accept him more because he is much older. That makes sense!” At least Hok, the garbage collector, seemed happy to know he wouldn’t be the only one on his assignment anymore, as he shouted “THANK GOODNESS” when Klang mentioned it.

Overall, I was looking forward to contributing to the future of the Spacecati and, by extension, the universe.