Un-Un-Cat, Episode 8.— 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. They 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 and he would in this way live on in the minds of his people.
“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 ‘magical-show fireworks’ 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 a 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.
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 long enough to become friends with Dog-kind.
— —
U.G. took a long pause after reading Lee’s final report home. His death was not the first loved one U.G. had to personally deal with by herself. She was very grateful to have the AI-Cs to help her, tell her what to do this time. 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 all math coordinates, no lifting was required to teleport Lee’s lifeless Dog body back up to what was left of the now coffin-sized egg-shape of the Dog-spacecraft waiting 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 of moon dust like a single grey egg in a 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 and 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, U.G. was awakened from the first peaceful morning in just over two months where she was able to look around her life and not think about death, 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.
The next episode of this story is behind the Medium pay-wall. Un-Un-Cat, Episode 9. — TL:DR (too long;didn’t read). It’s where I start to get into the details Lee the extraterrestrial Dog wrote. And of course make fun of myself.
If you would like to continue reading this story and skip ahead to Episode 10. It’s one of my personal favorite episodes, where the story takes a turn and starts to get interesting.
