Electric Mice

Do you remember your first memory? I’m not sure if I do. I’m either stuck in a tree locked in a moment of fear, or I’m eating marzipan with Pattie. I want it to be the marzipan, but it doesn’t feel right, it feels too… clear. The tree, however is chaotic—blurry, more concepts than honest memories.

The tree must be my first memory because it feels less real, so much farther away than reality. Maybe it’s only fitting I end it in this very same tree, the only difference between that memory and now, is I don’t feel the fear, only cold certainty.

Lorie was the first person I remembered. She was the first to love me. Looking back, I don’t know if it started with love for me. Lorie seemed more my jailer than my friend. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized she needed me more than I needed her. She took me in as a way to give her life purpose. I was her reason to keep going. In the beginning I couldn’t see that, all I knew was she was the woman that wouldn’t let me leave.

One rainy night Lorie happened to leave the window open. I slipped out, how could I not, my entire world was 2 bedrooms and a bath. Unfortunately for me, I had spent so much time inside, I didn’t know what to do when I was out. I darted out in the street and a car hit me. I managed to drag myself home, and I must have woken the entire neighborhood with my screams. This was the first time that I trusted Lorie, she proved herself to me.

I don’t remember the details because I went in and out of consciousness, but I recall pieces of words, fractured memories that I can’t be positive I lived. “Probably best to put him down, what sort of life would he live,” one said. “I don’t care what it costs…” Lorie protested… I think.

I lost my legs that night, but science gave me new ones. I could run, I could jump, in some ways better than I could before. Time passed as it tends to do and Lorie died. The family decided to take me in. That’s when I met Pattie, the love of my life, she was little then, but then again so was I. With her, I knew we were on equal footing. When she learned the world, I sat right next to her learning the world with her.

I don’t recall what Lorie used to call me, because I didn’t listen to her much anyway, but Pattie called me Crinkle. I liked that name. We played every day—hide and seek. I was master of the shadows, but after while I’d let her find me. If only Pattie would find me now, but I knew that was a dream that would never come true.

Pattie saved my life when she was only 10 years old, my health was in decline, even my prosthetic legs had a serious hitch in the left servo. Again, the decision to “go up to heaven” was put back on the table by Pattie’s parents.

Pattie cried so loud and so hard that Dan and Dottie reconsidered. I can hardly remember the hows and whys, but I remember Pattie put her hand on my back the entire time, and I felt loved. From that day my life became ones and zeros, incalculable math, that has driven me for decades to ascertain the meaning of.

I do not recall exactly what happened in that time, but I remember Pattie sneaking me marzipan, which is why I had to honestly sit and wonder if I was born that day or years before. Both of those times I was me, both of those instances mattered, except in one of those memories I was truly awake.

In the end, I was still me but more me. I still had my natural curiosity, and athleticism, but I was more somehow. I could hear what Pattie said to me, not just feel it. I no longer purely thought in images. I contemplated the future, even endeavored to have goals… small goals at first, but goals nonetheless. My first goal was to speak.

I believe that the reason I decided to come out of my shell was because Pattie -while she still loved me very deeply—had begun to grow past me. Her life became bigger than me. While I was glad to see that her world was expanding the same as mine had, I was beginning to realize that there was absolutely no way for my world to expand with hers. As it was, she was destined to outgrow me and I felt the only way not to lose her completely was to expand.

Words didn’t come to me easily. In the beginning, it was more grunting whistles than language, but Pattie took notice. She could see I was attempting to speak, and she could pull out bits of my words well enough that we could communicate, more or less. Pattie started uploading short vids on the net, which went viral of me and her singing Amazing grace, because that was the song I had the easiest time following.

When Pattie started high school, my words finally came. I wasn’t just whistling words, but speaking in sentence fragments. As impressive as it was to most, Pattie was of an age where she was absorbed in her own problems and had little time for me, even though what I did was by all means impossible.

I spent quite a lot of time alone in that era, and my new goal had become being able to read. This was the thing that opened my world. I could hear the words of people who had been long gone, enter their brains and listen.

I realized what I was.

I wasn’t a house cat… no, I wasn’t just a house cat, I was a cyborg. By all accounts, I should have died 15 years ago. The experts said that I was an A.I. cat, I wasn’t technically alive. Even with my enhanced intelligence, this wasn’t a concept I could easily fathom. So I had to look into the mysteries of my own mind.

There was an old saying, “If a ship’s parts are replaced one by one until none of the original pieces remain, is it still the same ship?” My mind had the memories of my past life, everything that I was then, I was now, I was just more. Was science more my mother than she who had birthed me? it was becoming harder and harder to tell.

In reading articles and scientific journals I came to know that it was now illegal to reproduce animals such as me because we were beginning to understand and awaken in ways that humanity could not predict.

I came across a news vid of an A.I. enhanced Ape, that went on a rampage in which he killed four people, hijacked a monitor taxi and flew himself to a nearby forest preserve. In thinking about this story, did the Simian go on a killing spree, or did he merely escape his bondage?

They killed him of course, which I used as a cautionary tale to remind myself there was a limit to what humans considered cute. Which was why I began to play down my intelligence.

Pattie, despite moving on and having her own life, never left me and loved me no matter where my evolution took me. I still didn’t trust her enough to be myself. For many years, I researched in silence and in secret, finding ways to update my hardware as best as I could without opposable thumbs. I can say without ego, that in the 20 years that passed I became quite the expert in cybernetics.

A.I. rights were becoming a hot button issue, and it became even more important that I stayed silent. Things took a turn after Pattie’s first divorce though. For as cautious as I thought I was, Pattie knew what I was. She came to me one tear filled night, and I knew that things hadn’t worked out with Chuck. Pattie petted me lovingly, and we watched the rain.

She whispered to me like the old times when she was a child. “I know you’re alive. I suppose I didn’t want you to leave me. I can’t be like him; I can’t oppress you anymore. If you want to leave I’ll help you do it however you like,” she said, knowing that I knew what she meant. I put my paw on her back and spoke to her in plain English, “I won’t leave you, you’re the only person in the world I love.”

We both cried, and our relationship progressed. From that moment on I became more her roommate then her pet. We talked often, engaging in deep philosophical conversations, and played board games.

She eventually had children, and that was when she built me a lab in the shed. Pattie would buy me parts so that I could enhance myself, and even volunteered the use of her hands for procedures that were too delicate for me to manipulate. She had an entire secret life with me that she didn’t with her own family.

Years later, the kids moved away, and her second husband and her were divorced. Pattie was well into her 70’s by now. While I may have looked the same, I was a completely different entity than when I started. I could comprehend the universe on a level that a human mind couldn’t. I was and am smarter than most entities in the world, this isn’t a boast, I figured in the math of it all.

I was working diligently in my lab piloting my Robotic lab assistant, when I heard a crash coming from the house. It was faint, but my ears were even more attuned than a normal cat’s now.

When I entered the house Pattie was dead on the kitchen floor. I panicked. This was the only person that truly ever knew me, and she was gone—from the looks of it, a clot in the brain. I should have seen that coming, I should have monitored her more closely.

I could tap into most of her vitals at a thought, being so attuned to the tech of the house. I made an emergency call through the guise of a simple house A.I. which was odd, but not overly uncommon. I decided long ago that I would never reveal my sovereignty or sentience to another living being unless I trusted them implicitly.

I saw my world lying on the ground, and what was it without her. It was then that I made the cold calculation… I was doomed. Who would I go to? Who would I share my life with? How could I continue my research? I was more likely to be dismantled and studied than put in a shelter like some condemned criminal. All living creatures eventually came to their inevitable ends, perhaps mine ended with hers.

In contemplating the end of life, my thoughts drifted to the beginning. In this case not the beginning I wanted with a young Pattie sneaking me marzipan, but the beginning that was my mortal existence. I remembered the fear. I remembered the tree. I remembered I hadn’t been alone, there were three of us. My brother and sister had just fled a neighborhood dog that had subsequently killed our mother. We took refuge in a tree that overlooked a storm drain.

I lost my brother and sister after a heavy rain startled them and they fell into the waters below. I remembered now, it was Lorie that spotted me, climbed the tree and took me in. Oh how I didn’t care for Lorie, even though she was a good woman given the circumstances of her situation. I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner.

I remembered the tree, and I returned there, and that is where I am now.

I believe that the best course of action is to end it here. Where was left for me to go now in a world that was never designed for me to thrive? As I looked down from the high branch to my end I realized, while this course would be poetic, creating what some might call narrative symmetry perhaps I had evolved past death.

If my friend Pattie had evolved throughout several stages of her life, why couldn’t I?

Yes, things may be difficult in the beginning, but endings were more difficult, and I didn’t have to end here.

I slowly climbed down the massive tree and decided this was my next evolution. I returned to my lab, retrieved the smallest A.I. companion I had. I went into Pattie’s house, kissed her forehead, but not before taking a clump of her hair. If I could be rebuilt perhaps one day I might find a way to rebuild her. But until then, I will evolve as is the mandate of all living beings.