Sapience Egalitarianism
Smart Cats. 900 words, 2 minute read. With Gemini.
The deadbolt slid home with a clean, satisfying snick. Through the living room window, Mark’s pickup truck rumbled to life, its aging combustion engine a familiar, analogue growl in a growing world of electric whispers. For a fleeting moment, a ghost of an instinct surfaced in Maisie’s mind—a primal urge to yowl at the departure, to protest the solitude. She dismissed it as inefficient noise. Data suggested Mark’s probability of return was 99.8%, the remainder allocated for statistically insignificant catastrophic events.
Maisie turned from the door, her movements economical and precise. Her world was not one of light and shadow, but a rich, layered tapestry of sound, texture, and scent, parsed by the silicon chip behind her ear. She could feel the low hum of the refrigerator cycling on, smell the faint, sweet decay of a banana peel Mark had missed tossing, and trace the path of a spider in the corner by the subtle vibrations its tiny footfalls made on the baseboard.
Her bus was two minutes out. She padded not to the undignified cat-flap, a relic from her "pre-sapient" days, but to the front door, nudging the handle with her head in just the right spot to trigger the automated dead bolt opener. The morning air, thick with Charlotte humidity and the scent of damp earth, washed over her. She ignored the squirrel chittering an angry diatribe from an oak branch—a pointless, low-data exchange—and trotted to the corner.
The bus arrived with a gentle hiss of its air brakes. Inside, the usual collection of silent commuters were bathed in the blue glow of their personal screens. A man in a wrinkled suit glanced up, his eyes briefly registering a tabby cat boarding a public bus, and then immediately returned to his device with the practiced indifference of someone who had seen it all before.
Maisie found a seat and curled up, the worn fabric a known texture. The journey was a stream of sensory input to be processed: the rhythmic thumping of the tires over pavement seams, the faint smell of burnt coffee from a fellow passenger's thermos, the overlapping snippets of a dozen meaningless phone calls. It was all just noise floor, the static against which she measured her day.
The Northwood Corporate Park was an architectural monument to determined inoffensiveness. Its identical buildings of beige composite and gray-tinted glass sat amidst a sea of unnaturally green, chemically treated grass. Maisie disembarked and headed for Building C. She bypassed the main entrance, where a group of humans stood laughing, and slipped through a discreet, vertical access slot next to the revolving doors.
The elevator ride was silent, save for the faint, metallic tang of ozone from the server racks two floors above. When the doors opened on the third floor, Gary from Accounting was standing there, holding a garish "World's Best Dad" mug.
"Well, look what the cat dragged in," he said, a smile not quite reaching his eyes. "Morning, Maisie."
"Good morning, Gary," her collar replied, its tone impeccably even.
"Closing out the quarterly numbers today?" he asked, leaning against the doorframe. "Hope the big boss is paying you in something better than tuna. No offense."
The phrase hung in the air, a small, polished stone of passive aggression. The implication was clear: you are still an animal. You are a novelty. You are not one of us.
"The compensation is commensurate with my performance metrics, thank you, Gary," Maisie stated, her programming allowing for no hint of irritation. "I trust your son's soccer team resolved their defensive-coverage issues from last weekend?"
Gary’s smile tightened. "Yeah. We're working on it. Have a good one."
She watched him walk away, his posture just a little too stiff. She processed the interaction, tagged it with keywords—microaggression, species-based condescension, low-level professional jealousy—and filed it away. It was just more data.
Her cubicle was by the window. Sunlight, thick and warm as honey, poured onto the floor. And with it came a memory, unbidden and visceral. A memory from before the chip, before the words, before the data. It was a feeling more than an image: the pure, thoughtless bliss of a sunbeam, the simple contentment of a warm patch on a cool floor, the universe compressed into a single, perfect sensation of being. For a breathtaking second, her hyper-intelligent mind fell silent, and she was just a cat again, yearning for a simple, sun-drenched patch of nothingness.
Then, the moment fractured. A notification pinged on her screen. [REMINDER: Q2 EARNINGS PROJECTIONS DUE EOD].
Maisie blinked, the memory dissolving like smoke. The sunbeam was now just a source of potential screen glare. She settled onto her low-profile ergonomic platform, the custom-molded plastic cool beneath her. With a delicate, practiced movement, she extended a single, sharp claw—an ancient tool of tooth-and-nail survival—and began to meticulously navigate the labyrinthine cells of the financial spreadsheet.