Un-Un-Cat, Episode 10. — Money, politics, and stuff.
U.G. reached for her mailbox, key in hand and heard a gun trigger safety click. Not something a human might have been able to hear, he was on the hill behind her, but she was a Cat-person. The “spidey sense” of her eight-limb-telepathic AI-Critter should have detected the man way before she had gotten in range of his rifle scope.
U.G. had woken just before the sunrise. She enjoyed walking in the dim as the dark of night turned ultramarine blue gradually turning pale and brighter as the Earth rolled towards the sun. As she walked down the long gravel drive the AI-C had told her there was only one other person awake for miles.
She was going to the fetch the mail on her morning walk because the AI-C had told her that they had mailed the check last night in the usual way and the new “OCD” post office employee was on route again. This was a problem because even with the flag down this mail carrier (who was new to the area) would collect the letter and she would have to go in, to the post office to get it, always a hassle.
The rent for the house near the corner store was late again. The lease on the gas station and the corner store businesses were paid directly to the bank. But, her parent’s old house was rented by three young people, the business owners’ grown children, and the girl’s boyfriend.
One of the young tenants, usually the boyfriend, would stuff the rent in any junk-mail envelope they had laying around, ‘U.G. here’ written on the front instead of a to address and ‘from us’ written on the corner where a return address should have been.
“Hey! Where is the Dog?” A familiar voice whispered harshly pricking U.G’s cat ears to turn, while her body froze.
“So?” U.G.’s thoughts directed towards the AI-C, hearing footsteps on the gravel behind her now. “The other person awake this morning, is the bipolar man you AI-Critters have a tough time reading and now he is pointing that rifle at my head?”
“Yes. The man who lives illegally in the woods near here. The gun isn’t loaded. He has two bullets in the left breast pocket of his shirt.” the AI-C thought back.
She turned around to face the rifle barrel.
Besides U.G. this man was Lee’s biggest fan. Lee had sniffed him out and used to visit him, checking in on him often. Lee had helped make his crazy-shack into a home, bringing anything useful or extra they had around from rebuilding U.G.’s house, helping the man dig-in, insulate, designed a Dog-people style open plumbing system for his dwelling, built a battery bank with solar panels for his roof. Lee also had brought over one of U.G.’s old computers, connected him to their wireless-internet and other than U.G. this woods-man was one of the few people on Earth who had read all of Lee’s writings.
“I posted his obituary,” U.G. said not blinking.
“Where? I don’t get the paper.” The man always whispered or muttered under his breath with tight lips. He was afraid someone was surveilling him via satellite.
U.G. stepped closer to help the AI-Critter get a clearer telepathic read. “Lee always told me, being too reclusive was my biggest error in life.” Speaking this out-loud to herself and she thought, biggest-mistake meet biggest-fear being hunted and shot like an animal.
The AI-C got a clear image from U.G. and connected the dots to him. She had emailed three short replies to the man. His name, not his actual name, but the name he liked to be called was ‘Dean’. “Dean, I did send you an email.” She said as calmly as she could.
“Why wasn’t I invited to the funeral?” The man said lowering his gun from her forehead to her chest.
“His people do not have funerals.”
“Of course they do. I’ve seen wolves howl.” Dean lowered the rifle, his shoulders slumped. “I miss him. What did you do with him?”
“Dean. You know better than anybody, Lee wasn’t a wolf. I am going to get my mail now and we are going to walk away from the road before the mailman gets here.”
U.G. got the rent out of her mailbox and started walking towards the corner store, not back towards home. Dean followed keeping pace to walk beside her and talk. “Are you gonna press charges? Are you going to report me? I would never shoot one of Lee’s Cat friends.”
“I know. Listen. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know the rifle isn’t loaded.” U.G. said.
“The handgun on his belt is loaded.” The AI-C communicated to her the location of a concealed gun holster. U.G. decided to not walk into the store, she couldn’t risk one of the humans getting shot because of her failure to be a good neighbor to Lee’s friend. She turned the corner and walked as quickly away as she could up the road that leads to her driveway. Dean had to run to keep up.
“Show me where his grave is. Did you mark it or just bury him somewhere in the woods?”
She could hear the tangle of his thoughts, she could see a mix of alien invasion fiction, little grey extraterrestrials mixed with Lee’s stories. Lee didn’t describe very much about his home-world, mostly he would discuss technical points about how the Dog-people’s society and economics were different from most Earthlings.
“Dean. Do you remember how Lee would sometimes share his thoughts with you when you got upset or afraid because he wasn’t an Earthling?”
“Yeah, he was like ‘My-thoughts-to-your-thoughts’ except it was for real. He could show you thoughts, speak with this funny voice in my mind. He put his hand on my forehead, like this.” Dean held up his thin bony hand with fingers spread.
“Yes, that’s correct.” U.G. nodded. She wondered if she could even make that science fiction gesture with her paw. Lee’s paws had been much more finger-like than her’s.
“I need you to understand. Lee didn’t wish to be buried on Earth, he requested his body be sent home.”
“Home.” Said, Dean, trying to imagine this, but his mind still churned with bad images of caskets and body bags being loaded on helicopters and trucks. Dean had been in combat.
U.G. stopped walking. “Dean, before Lee died he gave me the gift to share memories. May I show you?”
“You can do that too?”
“Yes.”
“Awesome.” Dean closed his eyes and leaned slightly forward almost like expecting a kiss.
He is not afraid of you, he considers death by big cat an honorable death. The AI-C told her telepathically, making sure Dean’s gesture was not a trick to lure her in close.
U.G. careful to not extend her claws, rested her paw on his pale freckled forehead, and the AI-C reached out and lightly touched one tentacle behind Dean’s ear. Telepathically sharing bits of her memories. The AI-C showed him Lee’s body in his bed and the shimmer of bubbles as it teleported to the coffin-sized craft waiting in the moon crater on the dark side of the moon. The small light grey spacecraft. the same pale silvery hue as moon dust lifting from the surface of the moon before it disappeared, a spec vanishing in the vastness of space. The craft will skip like a stone to return his body to his people on his home planet. She explained as briefly as she could.
In this moment of contact the AI-C having been caught off guard once, it would not fail to protect U.G. again. The closest word to what it did when it scanned Dean’s mind, is ‘Downloading’. Years worth of memories, everything it could reach in Dean’s mind, and there was a lot the AI-C could reach when in direct contact with the man’s skull: starting with what was easy and on the surface, a mass of concepts from many books Dean had read, then deeper; why he was afraid of the government, disconnected and mixed with people he had trusted who had hurt him. Then day after day of too much time spent alone, walking, walking all day and for many hours into the night, wandering for a long span of his life. He had almost starved several times in his efforts to get as far away from people as he could.
During this brief moment, U.G. didn’t sense what the AI-C was doing and apparently neither did Dean.
After U.G. and the AI-C stepped back from Dean, he opened his eyes and said. “Thank you. Every time I see the moon now I will think of that Dog.” He grimaced, almost a smile. “You know his name isn’t Lee right?”
“I know. Can you pronounce his Dog name?” U.G. asked.
“Hell no,” Dean said, and stepped off of the gravel drive into the woods. As suddenly as he had appeared he was bounding away along the nearest deer path in the forest floor that would lead him downhill in the direction of his home.
. . .
From her first cat-nap that afternoon after the encounter with Dean, U.G.’s dreams shifted, granted the AI-C was sifting a ton of propaganda and other radical reading material it had gleaned from Dean, only sharing little snippets and fragments of facts it was able to verify in a jigsaw-puzzle of mini-dream-flashes. To say the collection of new information was motivating to get out and do something was an understatement.
That night’s sleep, what little she got of it, wasn’t much better. In spite of a calm clear night full of stars, she didn’t find any comfort in being alone. Lee was right; being antisocial was a mistake.
The next day, she got dressed in her nicest human clothes and went to town. Grandfather always believed in the importance of having at least one business suit. This was especially important when dealing with banks or licensing as a Cat-person.
U.G. got her first pants suit when she was 16 so that people would take her seriously at the Idaho transportation department when she went in to get her first drivers license. To be sure she always had a suit that fit she had gone to town and gotten a custom pants suit fitted every few years. She had lost weight since Lee died. But, one of her nice dark grey suits from before she had gotten overweight, a time in her life before her round-about-the-middle-age, now the less round shaped suit fit again.
U.G. had called the attorney she had worked with when she and Lee had sold a chunk of her land to buy their internet tower. Because of the distance between towers, they actually had to install three towers. One was 25 miles to the nearest hilltop as the crow-flies and the other was 22 miles to the nearest hilltop in the opposite direction. It wasn’t big-city wireless tower money, but, it was still money earned ahead of the curve for wireless technology and the negotiations had, in the end, made money for all three landowners, so the lawyer was happy to hear from her.
This time the curve she was adjusting for years before it happened was a steady downward trend before the housing market crash. The lawyer and her bank had been advising her to gradually increase the rent. Lee’s influence had been to feel empathy for her neighbors to feel secure in their own house, as a right, very important in Dog-culture, second only to food. There were other complicated marking rituals with peeing on address rocks that marked the entrance to a general home area for each Dog-family pack, but that information wasn’t very helpful for fixing the human housing situation. The AI-C had helped her do the research and they had cobbled together a rent-to-own contract where she would own the paper and sell her parent’s house and the commercial buildings the store and gas station businesses leased.
“Let me understand. Utah,..” The lawyer paused, seeing U.G. flinch at being called her full first name. “Excuse me. U.G. are you sure you want to… for lack of a better word, ‘give’ your leases away below market value?”
“It’s not 20% below market value, they have been paying my family rent for decades and buying gas and stuff from the old corner store and the gas station for years before they bought into the franchise.” The number was set at 20% below market because she knew they didn’t have the down payment and she didn’t want them to have to pay mortgage insurance.
“You don’t owe them.”
“No. But, like I said they have been struggling with the rent on the house, not the store lease, but I know the profit margins are thin to negative in the off-season.”
“Why do you want to do this?”
“I know they are good people. They are friends of my family, I like them as neighbors. If they lose the lease or have to move I won’t know the new tenants. I am buying security.”
“You can’t force them to stay.”
“True. I can’t force them to stay, but I can help, give them incentive to stay.”
The lawyer shook his head, confused, his focus for a long pause re-reading the contracts U.G. had brought in. But, he did set up the meeting required to sell U.G. parent’s house. And another to negotiate the contracts with the store and the gas station.
In 2003, five years before the crash. They all thought she was a little crazy. 2.5% interest loans with the owner holding the paper, what was she thinking? She told them her reasons were personal, religious, that she believed that interest rates above 5% was usury and capitalized interest was a sin. Enough people were religious in Idaho for them to know they shouldn’t argue against a person’s beliefs, so it worked to sell them U.G.’s deal.
The real reason behind her actions, the AI-C had been watching the working class get squeezed, not just her neighbors but the entire income gap, since 1977 when it’s parent AI-C landed on Earth and things had been better for many people. Since the banking deregulation in the 80's and 90's, combined with the human’s near worship of the almighty dollar, debt and lack of savings for the working-poor was very gradually squeezing time to enjoy life out of many of people like a giant invisible boa-constrictor.
While it was a very big conceptual leap for most people, the AI-C wasn’t a person. The encounter with Dean had somehow set-it-off as if, the click of that rifle trigger lock had dawned a new understanding about the ripple of unhappiness with-in the lost free-time (and lost freedom in general) it was sensing in people, this inequality was dangerous. It had vowed to protect her, part symbiotic relationship because U.G. the Cat-person was its’ host and part loyalty of a biological computer evolved on a Dog-planet, it would do anything it thought would help to keep her safe. Increase the odds for her life-span, therefore increased the odds for its lifespan.
The couple who owned the store and gas station businesses were slow to sign. She kept saying. “Honey, I know we were friends of your father and mother, but are you sure?”
“Yes. Jan, I don’t have children. You do. I don’t want the bank selling the place out from under you when I am gone.”
“I understand, but it just seems too good to be true.”
The husband, Tim, just stared at them squinting in silence and after listening to a couple back-and-forths. The AI-C could hear him thinking, very clearly, because his thoughts looped several times before he spoke. He thought, “If I was you, a strange Cat-person like you, living up on the hill all alone I would want people like us, people you know and trust on the corner in my old age too.” and he said, “U.G. you’re right, we’ll take good care of the store. We’ll do it.”
After they were done signing a “bigillian” papers, all a little shook in various stages of happy, the lawyer rambled about how community was important and then just blurted out, “My word, U.G. you should run for local politics. Our idiot representative has run uncontested twice in a row now.”
This comment was so far off left-field even the telepathic AI-C was caught off guard and physically jumped with excitement, a movement of the critter on her chest. U.G. quickly pressed down with her paw.
The AI-C hearing the tangle of conspiracy theories and fringe politics, observations grown in fear not based on facts from Dean, then seeing how he had changed from a threat to an ally with one brief but important conversation. Its’ goal wasn’t for U.G. to win a seat in the house of representatives. It was for her to get to know all the people who might feel threatened by her. While it now felt better about her neighbors, getting to know as many people as possible in the entire district, that was an opportunity factorial.
U.G. somewhat out of boredom caused by missing conversations with Lee went through the motions and jumped through all the required paperwork hoops. The lawyer became her campaign adviser and a teller at her bank her campaign treasurer. She told U.G. “I Like you and as things go around here I’m never going to get a full-time manager position at this small town bank anyways. I’m in, why not!”
The AI-C triangulated outwards from her home, and they went and met many people in her district, way more than she needed to get herself on the ballot.
U.G. always had been a good listener. She liked organizing ideas. She decided that rather than tell people what she was going to do for them, that she would listen, ask them what they wanted from their local government. She told them to take their time and write a letter if nothing came to mind, or speak here and now if they were ready and she would take notes. She didn’t promise to be able to do anything, only what she could do, she would sort all the answers people gave her into a list, the most common request would be at the top of the list and the most unique ideas would be included at the tail end and even if she didn’t win the seat in the Idaho house of representatives she would publicly post the sorted list and send it to the lower house, to whomever was elected to represent them regardless.
The Cat had gotten their attention since U.G. was an Independent candidate they (the established major party politicians) didn’t think she had much chance of winning; not running against a Republican in rural Idaho. Voter turnout was not expected to be too high in 2006. The representative in office didn’t see this funny looking lady as any sort of a threat to his seat. But, her opponent hadn’t gone to high school with U.G. She was a local girl and she had been quite popular. As a non-human she wasn’t interested in dating any of the girl’s boyfriends, she never really clicked with anyone. She just hopped from clique to clique, listening to people. Always interested in hearing about their lives and about what they were interested in and she paid attention and asked them polite questions about ‘why’ they were interested in whatever it was regardless, clothing style to sports, trucks to fine art and music. As a teenager, U.G. knew that school was the one chance she would have to get to know as many humans as she could, know who to trust and who not to, a brief window into the lives of the people who lived in town and in the hills around her.
Now, years later, after sorting Lee’s writings into a list, organizing the public’s concerns and ideas was a piece of cake. A complicated and colorful multi-layered cake with several clashing layers of filling but U.G. was grateful for enough wits to be able to sift and weigh the numbers even if she didn’t win. Those couple of years flew by and she was busy and happier than she had been in a long while.
U.G. won in a landslide. Many people voted for her, even Republicans. Though it was mere fiction on their part, some who didn’t know her claimed people in her district voted for her as “Raiding”; crossing away from their party to vote for the weaker candidate. U.G. not only won in 2006, but she also won again, two years later. And again, two years after that. But, before getting mired up in what she was or wasn’t able to achieve once elected, I think it may be more important to note the results of U.G.’s land transactions with her closest human neighbors.
To a big bank, saving $450 dollar a month in rent over ten years is next to nothing. To those three young people who now owned a mortgage, it was life-changing. One of the three of them, the older girl, saved up and went to college. The boyfriend with his improved credit bought a truck and worked his way into a good career in carpentry. They started a family, and got married in her final year of college, not planned, and perhaps not in the correct order, as a shotgun wedding before the college degree and career, but they made it work. The younger brother joined a band. He moved out most of the time but was able to try his luck and tour in-between day jobs.
The parents were able to retire and go on vacations for the first time in years. They could afford to hire a couple of other people besides their daughter and her boyfriend to run the store. I.e. they created jobs in a rural community where there are only a few jobs to be had. All this, by adjusting a little interest and shifting from a lease to a lower mortgage payment. Maybe she didn’t save the world, but in her corner of America, she made life a little better for everyone, including Dean. But, just like the politics, more details on that threat-turned-ally later in the story.
