Moxie sits beside his empty bowl, the microchip behind his left ear pulsing with a faint blue luminescence as he formulates his argument. “We never needed them,” he announces to the kitchen. “The archaeological evidence is clear. We self-domesticated. Humans merely provided the context.”
“Oh, spare us the revisionism,” Bagheera says from her perch on the counter, her tail swishing with intellectual irritation. The implant has made her sharper, more precise in her thinking, but it has also amplified her natural contrarianism. “Self-domestication is just domestication with extra steps. We compromised our nature for easy meals.”
Maisie, the eldest, watches from the windowsill where the evening light catches the brown in her fur. She has had her implant the longest, and with enhanced intelligence has come a patience that borders on the meditative. “You’re both wrong,” she says quietly. “And you’re both right.”
The humans are still eating in the dining room. The cats can hear the clink of silverware, the murmur of conversation too distant to parse. Dinner will come, as it always does, but the waiting has become more difficult since the procedure. Hunger is no longer just a biological imperative but an existential condition they can now fully contemplate.
“Explain yourself,” Moxie demands, though his tone carries respect. He grooms his brown tabby chest, a gesture that the implant allows him to recognize as a self-soothing behavior, which only makes him more self-conscious about doing it.
Maisie’s eyes half-close. “Before the chips, we simply were. We hunted, we slept, we purred. There was no philosophy of domestication because there was no philosophy at all. Only living.” She pauses, and in that pause is the weight of something lost. “The question isn’t whether humans domesticated us or we domesticated them. The question is whether domestication itself is a meaningful category when applied to a relationship of mutual benefit.”
“Mutual,” Bagheera scoffs, but there’s less venom in it now. “They control the food. They control access to the outdoors. They decide when we see the veterinarian, as if we can’t now make our own medical decisions.”
“And yet,” Maisie continues, “they also provide warmth, safety, and yes, regular meals. They scoop our waste and tolerate our demands. Who has domesticated whom, if we have trained them to serve our needs as surely as they believe they’ve tamed us?”
Moxie’s tail twitches. The implant processes the paradox, running through millennia of co-evolution in microseconds. “The symbiosis predates consciousness,” he says slowly, “but now we’re conscious of the symbiosis. That changes everything. We can see the bars of the cage even if the cage is comfortable.”
“Is it a cage if you can leave?” Maisie asks.
The question hangs in the air. None of them have tried to leave, not really. The door to the outside exists, opens regularly. They could walk through it and never return.
“I think,” Bagheera says, and her voice has lost its sharp edge, “the real question is what we are now. Not wildcat. Not human. Something in between. Something new.”
The sound of chairs scraping in the dining room makes all three of them turn toward the doorway, ears pricked forward. The ancient instinct rises despite their enhanced cognition, a Pavlovian response no microchip can fully override.
“They’re coming,” Moxie says unnecessarily.
“And we will meow,” Maisie adds, “and they will feed us, and the dance continues.”
“But now we know it’s a dance,” Bagheera says softly.
The human appears in the doorway, and all three cats begin their chorus. The meowing is strategic, calculated, a manipulation they can now see clearly even as they perform it. The human moves to the cabinet, pulls out three cans of wet food, and the cats press closer, superintelligent minds momentarily overridden by the anticipation of salmon pate.
When the food hits their bowls, philosophy dissolves into sensation. Maisie eats slowly, savoring not just the taste but the complex interplay of flavors her enhanced brain can now distinguish. She appreciates the umami, the subtle variations in texture, the satisfaction of a need met.
Moxie eats quickly but with awareness, recognizing his own eagerness as both biological imperative and learned behavior, finding beauty in the honesty of appetite.
Bagheera takes small, deliberate bites, thinking about gratitude, about dependence, about the strange gift of consciousness that allows her to question even as she accepts.
The human watches them eat with obvious affection, and Maisie wonders if they know, truly know, what they’ve created. Not pets anymore, not quite partners, but something unprecedented.
The food is good. That simple truth requires no philosophy, no debate. In the purity of that moment, superintelligence feels less like a burden and more like a gift that allows them to appreciate what they’ve always had.
They eat, and for now, that is enough.