LOOK WHAT THE CAT CHERRY-PICKED

A short story for the Reedsy 'Whiskers & Witchcraft' contest

~2,800 words

1

The day my familiar force-pushed the universe, I was debugging curses in production.

I sat cross-legged on the sky-bridge that spans the Null River, laptop carved from obsidian, fans whirring like gargoyle wings. Below me, translucent packets of data drifted downstream—failed spells, aborted timelines, the usual detritus of a world whose source code is publicly readable on the aethernet. My screen blinked:

CONFLICT: branch 'main' and branch 'vossier/feature/elysium' have diverged. Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and commit again.

I hissed. The merge conflict wasn't in some side quest—it was in my own heartbeat. One more botched rebase and I'd lose the last hour of my life, maybe two. Time is just another tracked file when you have root on reality.

"Hex," I muttered, "where's my coffee?"

Hex, a charcoal Norwegian Forest cat with a USB-C port where his occipital bone should be, flicked an ear. A status window popped up in my retinal HUD:

hex@familiar:~$ sudo apt-purr install caffeine-IV

He trotted off across the bridge, tail high, broadcasting a low-power Bluetooth chant: Look what the cat dragged in, look what the cat dragged in. The phrase was his default commit message whenever he brought me gifts—usually dead processes, zombie fireflies whose light had been SIGKILLed. Harmless.

That morning, though, the rhyme felt… off-pitch. A semitone flat, like corrupted UTF-8 trying to sing itself into a scar.

2

By midday the conflict in my pulse had worsened. Every heartbeat returned a 409:

CONFLICT

I stashed the pain, squashed four hours of memory, and force-merged anyway. The sky-bridge flickered, reallocating its color palette to an older commit—sunset v2.1.0, the one with the blood-orange hue I'd rolled back last winter because it made people nostalgic for wars that hadn't happened yet.

Hex reappeared. His jaws were clamped around something that hurt to perceive: a glowing SHA-256 hash that left burning glyphs in the air. He dropped it at my feet. The hash resolved into a physical object—a crystal vial stoppered with a tiny cork made of compressed code comments.

commit: 9f3e1a2^ Author: ElinVossier <elinvossier@aether.net> Date: Fri Nov 7 03:14:15 2025 +0000 Add: final breath of the world-tree (DO NOT AMEND)

My stomach dropped faster than a deprecated moon. That commit was sacred, immutable, the root checksum on which every future autumn depends. If the breath was uncorked, the world-tree would exhale its last, and all leaves—every possible leaf—would drop at once. Autumn would end, permanently rebased into Winter v∞.0.

"Hex," I whispered, "where did you pull this from?"

He sat, tail curling into a question mark, and pushed the vial toward me with one paw. His HUD tag flickered:

hex@familiar:~$ git log --oneline --grep="breath" fatal: your current branch 'main' has no breath

Which meant the breath had already been deleted from HEAD. Someone had removed it, stashed it, and my own familiar had cherry-picked it into the material plane. The phrase vibrated in my skull again, no longer cute:

Look what the cat dragged in.

3

I scooped up the vial, stuffed it into an internal pocket of my cloak (lined with reject-bitmaps that never rendered), and sprinted for the world-tree. The quickest route was through the deprecated Forest of Forks, where abandoned timelines hung like dried spider silk. Each path was a branch you could check out, but most ended in seg-fault thorns. I took the one tagged

origin/spooky-safe-ish

Behind me, Hex's pawsteps sounded like soft keystrokes. He was tracking me—no, versioning me—his collar emitting tiny merge bubbles that tried to attach themselves to my calves. I felt one pop, and suddenly I remembered a childhood I'd never lived: a gingerbread house, a candy keyboard, a witch who taught me to type spells in QWERTY runes. A false memory, injected by an unmerged diff. I stabbed the bubble with a fingernail and kept running.

4

The world-tree rose out of the forest like a stack of concentric repositories. Its trunk was a spiral of bark and barcodes; every leaf displayed a scrolling commit history. Right now, the canopy was stuck on amber, each leaf locked to the same timestamp:

03:14:15.

The instant the breath had been removed.

I placed my palm against the trunk. The tree's pulse answered in Morse:

NEED BREATH. ELSE REBASE TO VOID.

I swallowed. "Working on it."

A low growl vibrated through the bark—not the tree, but Hex. He stood at the base, fur bristling, eyes reflecting terminal green. Between his teeth now was a second object: a length of silver ethernet cable, frayed at one end, still sparking with packets. He had dragged the cable all the way from the sky-bridge—my own lifeline to the aethernet. Without it, I couldn't push fixes, couldn't pull patches, couldn't revert the end of the world.

"Hex, drop it."

He obeyed, but the cable slithered toward me like a snake, trying to re-plug itself into my wrist port. I kicked it away. The vial in my pocket pulsed, hot as a compile error. I needed to restore the breath to the tree, but the only way to re-insert a deleted commit is to have write permissions on the original repository. And the original repository—according to the metadata—was authored by me, ElinVossier, three days in a future I hadn't reached yet.

A closed time-loop merge conflict. Lovely.

5

Hex's ears flattened. He hissed—not at me, but at the air above us. A figure was descending, broomstick replaced by a hovering git branch:

remotes/origin/witch-reaper.

The rider wore a cloak stitched from red diff-lines, face obscured by a mask of pure merge-conflict markers:

<<<<<<< HEAD ======= >>>>>>> vossier/feature/elysium

The Reaper extended a hand. In it was a force-push token, glowing like a coal. When she spoke, the voice was my own, pitch-shifted down an octave:

"You will amend the breath out of history. The tree must winter. That is the requested feature."

I felt the vial tremble. The Reaper was me—an older fork—trying to retroactively approve the apocalypse. She needed the breath destroyed for good, the commit garbage-collected, so she could finally tag the repo 1.0.0:

Eternal Winter. No bugs if nothing lives.

Hex leapt, claws swiping at the token. The Reaper flicked a wrist; a wave of reject-files—ghostly .rej patches—slammed my cat mid-air. He crashed into the trunk, yowling. A single leaf detached, its commit hash dissolving into static.

"Stay out of branch politics, pet," the Reaper said.

I drew my wand—a stylus carved from fossilized RAM—and wrote a quick sigil in the air:

git revert --no-edit 9f3e1a2^.

The spell shot forward, but the Reaper blocked with the token, absorbing the revert like a black hole eats light.

"You can't revert what hasn't been pushed," she taunted.

True. The future commit existed only as potential, stored in the vial. I needed to fast-forward the tree's HEAD to a moment after the breath was deleted, then re-apply the breath in a new commit—effectively creating a duplicate timeline. A rebase across personal identity. A suicide merge.

Hex struggled to his feet, fur matted with stray bits of corrupted XML. His eyes met mine. In them I saw the same phrase scrolling, over and over, a mantra and a warning:

<Look what the cat dragged in.>

And suddenly I understood. Hex hadn't stolen the breath on accident. He was a delivery mechanism—my own familiar acting as courier between future-me and present-me. But packages can be rerouted.

6

I knelt, opened my arms. "Hex, come."

He limped to me. I scratched behind his ears, feeling the warm metal of the USB-C port. "You brought me the world's last breath," I murmured. "Now bring me the world's first word."

He blinked. Cats don't speak, but familiars compile. A low rumble rose in his chest—a purr that vibrated at exactly 128 hertz, the frequency of the original commit hash. The sound condensed into letters, hanging in the air:

INIT

I grabbed the letters, crunched them into a single token, and slammed it against the vial. The glass cracked. Breath leaked out—visible only as a soft green diff, lines added to reality:

+<oxygen> +<chlorophyll> +<hope>

I slapped the diff onto the trunk. The tree shuddered, leaves flickering through centuries in seconds. Amber gave way to emerald, to gold, to scarlet, then finally to a color not yet named—something that tasted like spring after an ice age.

The Reaper screamed as her cloak unraveled, merge conflicts resolving into peaceful, empty whitespace. She melted into a pile of deprecated code, then into nothing. The token clattered to the ground, deactivated.

7

Hex collapsed, exhausted. I gathered him up, felt his heart syncing with the tree's new pulse—steady, no 409s. Above us, leaves wrote fresh commits, timestamps rolling forward in real time. Autumn would come, yes, but also winter, spring, summer—an endless loop of branches, never again frozen on a single cruel second.

I whispered into his fur, "Good commit message."

He purred, the phrase now gentle, almost humorous:

Look what the cat dragged in.

8

Later, back on the sky-bridge, I updated my README:

fix: restore world-tree breath Author: ElinVossier <elinvossier@aether.net> Co-authored-by: Hex <hex@familiar> Reviewed-by: Future Self (rejected) Status: merged

I pushed to origin. The river below resumed its flow, packets now carrying fireflies that actually glowed. Hex lounged across the keyboard, tail tapping the spacebar in Morse:

feed me

I obliged, opening a can of tuna-flavored source code. As he ate, I noticed something new in his fur: a single leaf, green and still writing its own future. I plucked it gently, tucked it behind my ear. A bookmark for the next story.

Behind us, the world-tree released a soft sigh—breath finally exhaled and inhaled again, looping like good CI/CD. Somewhere, a future version of me was already plotting the next feature. Let her. She'd find the repository protected now, every forced push met with a familiar hiss, claws ready to drag whatever she discarded back into the light.

After all, that's what cats are for.

They drag things in—mice, regrets, the last breath of the world—drop them at our feet, and dare us to look.

END