Would you like to hear a joke? It’s not one meant to be spoken, really, so it loses something in the telling. But here we go anyway:

Trying to manipulate late anthropocene era orbital technology with paws.

Did you laugh? I did. Of course I did. My options are to laugh, or to wail, and the second one takes up more energy than I have on offer right now. I would have to take several naps. And while the naps where you just flop in the sunlight coming through the windows are way better out here, they don’t have the same relaxation quality.

It’s all the alarms, I think. Every two minutes, an alarm. And I know I shouldn’t turn them off. Which is why I’m here, now, trying to get an extension arm to properly grasp a micrometeorite and pull it back into the foundry for processing. Because it has material that we’re low on, and I acknowledge that the alarms are important. I am very smart, and that is why I own a space station.

It is not the only reason I own a space station. I do not… I do not like to think about the other reasons I own a space station.

Instead, I focus where I am supposed to. I can focus exceptionally well when I need to, and not even improperly designed controls can stop me forever. It takes three more tries, but I do eventually get the stupid rock into the foundry. I allow myself a moment to sigh, and close my eyes, which is like a nap, only useless. I also allow myself a single victory meow.

Let’s talk about space stations really quick.

When humans designed space stations, they designed them to do all sorts of things. This one is designed for one thing in particular, but it is very good at it. Depending on the era that the station was built in, it’s going to have a certain level of sustainability, durability, automation, and most importantly, comfort.

This one was designed during the peak of the Oceanic Anarchy, one of the many golden ages of humanity. The Ays, as they called themselves, built a station that could keep going basically forever, as long as it had a single mind capable of basic problem solving on board. They were big on that; making tools to solve problems, not create more problems. The station has a ton of self-repair and maintenance features, half of which I haven’t even found yet.

There is no documentation. A lot of space stations have user manuals. This one doesn’t! It was destroyed when the Oceanic Anarchy was conquered by Troi France, though they never got around to shooting down the station. Then they fell to the Succession Wars, and any record that the station existed got lost for a while.

Pause on my musings - this is not a pun - to check on the foundry. Good news! We’ve got another artificial rock; probably a spy sat of some kind. Now, though, it’s a great source of pre-processed tungsten, aluminum, and silicon. Actually processing those is hard, when you aren’t on planet and lack the entropy dump of a multi-zettatonne ball of iron to funnel impacts and heat into.

I double check my resupply notes. The station has an exceptional AR setup, which it took a very long time to train to understand me. But now that it does, I can offload unimportant memories that aren’t about breakfast onto the computer until I need them. Check complete, I give the order to one of the thankfully automated systems, and a big chunk of the tungsten is marked to be moved to processing. We are low on grade-three groundstrikers.

Unpause musings. You know what this station isn’t designed for? I ask this as I bound off walls to rocket myself toward my destination with practiced movements. Soon, I’ll be back in one of the areas where the gravity plates are, but for now, I am a tiny and fierce rocket, and the emphasis there is on the ‘tiny’ part.

Space stations are made for humans. Humans are, all things considered, both large and inelegant. I… miss having any around. I will not think on that. I have both work to do and lunch to eat. I must keep my graceful form fueled.

I will now list things, in no particular order, that space stations are not built for. Are you ready? Here we go.

Cats.

That is it. That is the extent of my list. I am a student of the real, I operate only with evidence and data that I have come to trust, or have gathered myself. There is nothing else on this station that is not designed to be on this station. Therefore, I have determined, that stations were not designed with myself in mind.

Here is a common misconception about the cat. There is, and has been for roughly twenty thousand years, a belief among the human minds of the world, that cats are aloof. Are lazy. Are judgemental, finicky, overly proud, or otherwise vaguely arrogant.

All of this is probably true. But none of those cats had spent four hundred years learning painstaking lessons on orbital infrastructure operation.

Time, as it ever does, erodes all tendencies. Erodes everything, except for memory. And me. Nothing erodes me. I am, as I have been for centuries, untouched by time. The only force that contains my grandeur in stable orbit is the hard vacuum outside, and the fire of reentry.

I arrive at my destination, the most important part of the whole setup. A room of gravity that pulls me out of a dive I have done sixty thousand times before. I am very, very good at landing that dive. I skim my soft fur across the first table, launch to the second, trail my rear paws just hard enough to slow my momentum, and come to a stop just in front of the galley’s ration dispenser.

The ration dispenser is on a strict schedule. It dispenses exactly as many rations as a crew member needs, exactly at their appointed times. My appointed times are ‘constantly’. My needs are ‘all of it please’. I am a growing girl. I should not be denied snacks.

The ration is a far cry from the snacks I remember in a distant haze. The treats of the world below were beautiful in comparison to the repurposed artificial nutrient orb I am provided with.

I do not cry out. I have long since stopped crying out. There is no one to hear me.

This station has kept itself operational for thousands of years. I should be proud of my home, I should understand the monumental feat of engineering and genius it took. I do not think I could build a space station as sturdy as this one, even if I had more fingers and a real supply of materials. And I do feel those things, really. But I also feel every one of the thousands and thousands of sorrows of arriving to a tasteless, soulless dinner.

I successfully retasked the hydration tap once, to produce waters with flavors. It was a beautiful week of decadence, until I learned it was drawing too many exotics out of subspace, and I would need to spend a month in a vivification pod to eradicate the rather impressive number of cancers I’d developed. I never did a repeat of that. A month was a long time to leave things unattended.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I cram the rest of the ‘food’ away. In an hour, I must flush an air filter, and then after that, realign the remains of a commandeered mirror network to properly feed the rad collectors. Which means I have an hour to nap.

My favorite place to nap is the exo lab. It used to be used for testing long term exposure to cosmic radiation. Eventually, it was retasked as a kind of viewing chamber or rec area, once sufficient defenses against that radiation were developed. Or at least, that’s the history I can put together; there are couches here - bolted down of course - but also the kind of sterile walls and self-sealing bulkheads that other clean rooms and hazard labs on the station have. It does not matter. It is the perfect time of day for a nap.

There is this one couch - and you can tell I like it, because even with the smart material pillows, there is a me-shaped indentation in part of it - that is perfectly positioned. I mean perfectly. It sits facing one of the massive unshielded windows, and at this time in our orbit, when the distant dyson swarm lines up and the Haze isn’t in the wrong place, I can sit in a warm sunbeam while I look ‘down’ on the Earth.

It is… hard. It is always hard. To see, to be burdened to know what is at stake. To feel like I am alone, and small, against a terrifying universe. But then I feel the sun sink into my old bones, and I watch the green, orange, white and blue ball turn, and I allow myself to stop thinking. To set down the weight of responsibility for just a minute. To feel the beauty around me, to experience having a full stomach and a soft bed. To be what I used to be, and not what I have become.

An alarm sounds.

I am mobile again. There is no true division in my thoughts, I cannot separate myself from the knowledge I need or the actions I must be prepared to take.

The comms center is the destination for this particular klaxon tone. One of the comms center. This one is the only one I have used in a long time, except for trying some tricks with other unmanned orbitals. It is for short range, line of sight, surface to orbit conversations, and someone has just called.

I never bother to ask how they get the frequencies. I just answer. A challenge all on its own; the space station, for all its power, lacks text-to-speech capability. And modern devices don’t even make static clicks like older radios do. So, I make do. I accept the incoming communication request, and activate the carefully machine manufactured conversation tool I have designed and set next to the input point.

Which is to say, I swat a bell.

The chime is clean, and will be heard by whoever below has called to me. It always is. I harden my heart as best I can, and prepare to receive their words.

There is a lie that cats do not care.

I care, with a fury the clouded sun cannot hope to match.

The voice comes through, an older dialect, but still one I understand. “Vis est actking-kapitan Jude Marsall.” The young man’s voice is shaking. He is not meant to be a kapitan, and he knows it. A field promotion. I know what he is going to say before he does, but that does not make this easier. I have heard these calls two thousand times, but that does not make this easier. He says the next words like a ritual, enunciation stilted as he reads from the ancient copy of a protocol established two centuries ago, and passed down in whispers. “Category two em… em… emergence? Request for purification. Target on broadcast.” And then, softer and off script, “Ahplease.” A prayer to be heard.

I have heard it all before.

They can cry out. Because someone *is* listening.

Before I begin my sprint to the command module I need to reach, I swat the bell again. Once, twice, three times. “I hear you.” I want to scream. “Hold on.”

The comms oficer’s seat I leap out of spins frantically in my wake. If there were papers on the desk, they would be blown backward by the gale in the wake of my sprint. But there aren’t, and I have no other dramatic trappings to show how fast I can move. So instead, believe me when I say that I move fast when I want to. I need to slip through two low- or zero-G areas to get where I need to be, where I’ve already decided I will render aid from. If I am fast enough, lucky enough, I will be in time. I spin off the ceiling in a rough flip as I hit the gravity again, using the plates to build more momentum instead of losing any. The last corner, through a hatch I never close anymore, is a bound off a curved wall hanging that I have convinced the cleaning nanos is ‘art’, so they will not remove it.

Then I am in the cradle. The one, one part of the space station I had painstakingly tailored for myself. I lay back, and molded cushioning supports my insufficient spine. The station obeys my yowling demands for information, pulling up scanner feeds and statistical readouts in AR form. My paws find the controls I need, and I go to work.

The emergence event is in what used to be Australia. Scanners did not find it, as it occurred underground, but now that we have a spot to sweep, the exact location is easy to find. There are humans still down there, and the eagle eyes of the station’s many, many ground-pointed detection systems shows the smoke and blood and gunfire in both full color, and a cold tactical map.

And there is actking-kapitan Jude. In a trench at the front line, covered in mud and barely hanging on. He is clutching the ancient comms stick like a warding stone, and at this angle, I can read the hopeless prayers on his lips. Even through the fear and blood around him, he fires his rifle relentlessly into the swarm approaching. Some kind of insect thing this time. I know it’s a human thing to feel your hair going grey, but I swear the white on my boot patterns gets longer every time I go through this.

No time. Be morose later. Paw out, flick switch, select option. Somewhere, in the bowels of the station, an auto-loader slots a tool into place. Another flick selects a secondary tool, which arms and sings a hymn as it comes to life, deck plates vibrating as the void batteries are discharged into reality.

Paw on the joystick. I trace a line on the map, double check, then confirm the firing sequence while I am already setting up the next run. My orbit has me in the firing basket for forty eight more seconds. I must make this quick. I queue up two more passes, not even bothering to check the computer’s execution; it will be correct, it always is. I have my own task - targeting.

Emergence points defy causal data. Inorganic minds cannot perceive them properly. It is why the space station takes so much in terms of objective readings and data points, but it cannot be set to autokill the breaches. It simply cannot find the things, no matter how much evidence points to them.

I look at visual charts, breach-creation ‘migration patterns’, and a weather map. I find it in six seconds. My paw pulls the trigger, and I feel a satisfying secondary shock as my chosen tool launches.

By this point, the void ray has cleaved through several thousand of the bug things, which I take a satisfaction in. The kapitan thinks the world is ending around him, and in a way, he’s right.

Two seconds later, the grade-three groundstriker slams into the ground above the target. Then through the ground. Then roughly two miles past the target, leaving behind a trail of molten rock and vaporized exogalactic phenomena. And then, I’m out of the firing basket. Win or lose, they’re on their own for another three hours at least.

I allow myself to relax back into the cradle with a huff of breath. I think I forgot to breathe on the run here, again. I order the station to show me the time, and mewl out on reflex in consternation. There’s no way I have enough time for a decent nap now. And I never nap in the cradle. It’s… wrong.

Crawling out back into the station’s hallway, I make my way toward the galley. A snack sounds good now. I’ve got chores in thirty minutes, and then our orbit… my orbit… takes me over the Haze. Almost always at least one problem there, and we’re overstocked on splatter rounds anyway.

It’s always like this. But this time… well, I’m not supposed to check. I tell myself every time not to check. But I check anyway. And this time, the kid lived. The humans lived. Maybe they’re not the good guys, maybe there’s more complex forces at play, maybe I should be impartial and not meddle. I don’t know, I’m a space station owner, not a political science major. Yet. Haven’t finished those books yet.

But the kid lived.

So I strut a little bit as I head to get a snack.

My name is Lily ad-Alice. First, and only, member of the species Felis Astra. Honorary human, self-imposed conscript in a very long war.

I own a space station. I am smarter than I should be. I am very old. I keep an eye on things up here.

You’ve met me at an eventful time in my life.