Little Fuzzy Creatures

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Kitten.jpg

“Are your eyes covered?”

She sighs heavily. Suspiciously, and wearily too. “Yeees.”

“And you can’t see anything?”

“Yes already.”

“OK, ready... Open you eyes!”

S moves her hands away from her eyes and opens them. When she sees her beloved orange fluffy cat sitting in a dubious apparatus, her eyes continue to get wider. Of course, the feline picks that moment to emit a particularly pathetic mewl. “What the hell have you done to Rita?!?” She immediately makes to release her cat from the nest of cables and armatures, and I quickly intercede.

“No, no. It’s OK. She’s perfectly fine. She was totally comfortable and even purring just a couple minutes ago; I think she’s just picking up on your distress.” S is surprisingly strong when she’s feeling protective, but I manage to hold her back without being too forceful.

She stops fighting my physically, and sends a warning eyeball death gaze across my bow. “Clayton, get my cat out of that thing NOW.”

“Hold on. Let me tell you what this is first, and then you can decide if you want to pull Rita out before we even try it.” She’s about to answer already, and I can tell it’s not going to be the answer I want. So I start explaining before she has a chance, and reach over to tickle Rita’s chin to try to get her purring again, and save my ass. “You know how you’re always saying how you think that Rita would have been the cutest kitten ever? Well, I’ve built this machine that should be able to give us a good idea of what Rita would have been like when she was just a kitten. I call it the infrapolator.”

S still looks concerned and suspicious, but distinctly less likely to rip off my arm and use it to pry her cat out. “What will it do to Rita?”

“Well, nothing physically. I’ve already finished the majority of the background scanning, so all that’s left is a little bit of interactive brain scanning.”

“So that part of the machine she’s in...”

“...is a cat scanner, yes.” I smile benevolently.

“Huh. What’s it going to do, exactly?”

That sounds promising. “The infrapolator is going to take information about Rita, and turn it into a composite approximation of what she would be like as a kitten. I spent some time down at the cat shelter, doing cat scans of kittens to develop algorithms describing what happens to their bodies and brains as they grow older. So, the infrapolator uses those algorithms backwards to reverse-extrapolate kitten Rita.”

“And this isn’t going to hurt her at all?”

“She probably won’t even notice it happening.”

“And we’re going to see...?”

“Well, hopefully we’ll see a 3D rendering of an incredibly cute kitten on this big screen over here.” I point. “Ready?”

The spirit of a 5-year-old’s Christmas shines in S’s eyes with a flicker of innocent awe and a deepening tint of anticipation. “Yes!”

The system is already running, missing only the output, but I don’t tell S that. Instead I mouse-click on the big INFRAPOLATE button I’ve got on my control screen, which causes a mostly-orange little fuzzball to appear in a curled up pose on the output screen. S immediately lets out a muffled squeal of delight. Of course, it doesn’t really look like much, because it’s just a little ball of fluff. I glance over, and notice that Rita herself has fallen asleep. That makes sense, I guess – it has been almost a minute. I lean over to Rita and whisper, “Rita! Wake up Rita. Wake up kitty.”

Rita cracks one blurry eye, and glowers at me with unimpressed hauteur. On the screen, however, infrapolated kitten-Rita immediately perks its ears up and raises its little wobbly head and stares a pair of slightly crosseyed gigantic kitten eyes in our general direction. S’s eyes are fixed on the screen, and dilated wide. Her mouth is open like a little pursed “o”, and after a moment she starts making a cuteness-keening, “Ooooooooooooh! It’s soooo cuuuute!” I wave my hand in front of Rita and wiggle my fingers. Rita regards it blearily, but the screen kitten rears up on its hind legs and waves its teensy little front paws in the air, trying to play and bat. S resumes keening. “Ooooooooh! It’s so cute I can’t stand it!” She grabs my shirt and mock-buries her face in my shoulder with her eyes squeezed shut. After trembling in the pose for a moment, she looks back – just in time to see the clumsy little fuzzy kitten apparition lose its balance and tumble over backwards, with it tiny legs waving and cuteness sprawled everywhere. She yelps and pretends to flinch, then she looks me in the eye with a countenance of utter delight, mumbling cuteness-babble.

Which was my ultimate goal, really.

S reaches out and rubs Rita’s chin, making the old cat squint and purr lasciviously, and making the infrapolated simulacrum blink and wiggle and a delicate little purring noise ripples from the monitor speakers. “This is kind of like a window into Rita’s id?”

“Kind of, I guess. Or rather, it’s just a guess. To be really all that certain, I’d need to have actual cat scans of Rita when she was a kitten due to the fundamental uniqueness of most beings.”

“Well, it sure looks remarkably realistic.” Her head tilts a little to one side, as she looks at both Rita and the infrapolation. “But it does seem a little odd that Rita is responding to me so affectionately, but the kitten on the screen is so much less so.”

She’s right. I compare the two appearances. “Huh. Look at that.” The kitten isn’t actually annoyed-seeming on the screen, but it’s incredibly cute demeanour is mostly one of simple bafflement. I scratch my head. “I wonder if I’ve got a malfunctioning interpreter loop somewhere...”

S rubs Rita’s head, and Rita responds by stretching out her neck to facilitate the rubbing. The infrapolated kitten mostly just looks buffeted. Still incredibly cute, it starts to withdraw a little bit. S looks at me and says, “Any moment now, she’s going to bite me.” And sure enough, Rita gives a little lunge and tries to use her one tooth on S’s hand, then assumes a reluctant posture of denied guilt. The kitten image bobbles its cute little head a bit, then resumes a look of curious confusion. “No, I think it’s working fine.”

My gaze shifts between the old moggy and its reflection of inner cuteness. “I guess there’s just a lot of personal identity and meaning that is inextricably woven into the process of living.”

“Yeah.” S gives Rita another affectionate caress. “It’s really cute. Really really cute. And I’m glad you found a way to show it to me. But I think it’s helped me realize how much of my love for Rita is bundled up with the being she has become. And how we’ve grown to know each other, and the particular ways we’ve grown because we’ve known each other.”

I slip my arm around S’s waist, and hold her tight for a long, poignant moment. “Indeed.”