The corner where our litterboxes have always lived is humming. My ear swivels toward it and comes back, and I take the rest of my face down the hall to find out why.
The smell arrives before the shape of the thing does: cardboard, and the flat chemical breath of plastic that has never been in a room before. The tall one is kneeling in front of it, blocking the corner. Something gets pressed, the humming climbs half a step and settles, and then both of them leave. In the other room the short one laughs at something. That is the end of the humans’ part in this.
Our old boxes have been pushed a body’s width to the left. I check their rims with a whisker, because a thing like that will ruin a night if you learn it late.
“It is a pod,” Bagheera says from the bookshelf above the corner. “Round. There is a hatch in the front and a light on top, and it stands on a base with a drawer in it. It is the shape of the things on the television that go up and do not come back down.”
Moxie’s tail hits the doorframe once. He has not crossed into the room. “It came in a box. I sat on the box.”
“It arrived at 0940. The box is flat against the wall now. That is how boxes end.”
I put my head through the hatch. The opening sits higher than a rim should sit, with a lip that curves in under my chin, and the air on the other side of it is cool and still and carries a smell I know better than I know the humans.
“There is litter in it,” I say.
“There is not,” Bagheera replies incredulously.
“Come down and smell it.”
“Why would they put litter inside a spaceship.” She says it the way she says everything the world has gotten wrong.
“Red,” Moxie says. “Red, Mais. The light went red when your head went in.” A pause the length of a breath. “Blue again.”
I heard it change. There is a tick in the base when it does, small and dry, like a claw set once against a window.
He comes in low along the wall, puts his head through the hatch, and is back at the doorframe before I finish turning toward him. “Red for me too. It goes red for the head.” His tail thumps the wood. “It looks inside your head and takes something and gives you back blue. That’s what it’s for. I don’t want it in my head.”
“You keep very little in there to take,” Bagheera says, and comes down.
She lands with a small deliberate sound. She inspects the hatch, the seam beneath it, the base, the drawer, and a long cord running away toward the wall.
“It is litter,” she says. “That is the part I cannot account for.”
“Litter is litter.”
“Mais. Don’t get in the head machine.”
I find the lip with one paw and then the other and go in. The floor of it gives under me, deep and dry and loose in a way the old boxes have not been loose in years, and my feet sink and shift and learn the shape of it. Nothing reaches into me. Nothing takes anything. I turn twice, and dig, and use it, and the litter closes over it dry.
“It’s clean,” I say, climbing out over the lip. “It is the cleanest thing in this house.”
We stay with it a while after that. Bagheera catalogs. Moxie works his way up to the drawer and gets his whole head against the seam, and somewhere in there he forgets to be careful, which is the only way Moxie has ever stopped.
Then the base clicks. It is deeper than the tick and it comes from underneath, and all three of us are somewhere else before it finishes.
Moxie is behind the doorframe. Bagheera is on the shelf, and she went up from the floor, which is the one place she did not intend to be standing. I am two lengths back with my socket aimed at it and my ear locked and staying.
The pod turns. It goes slowly and all the way around, grinding like a tooth working in a jaw, and inside it the litter slides in one long dry hiss, and in the middle of that hiss the thing sorts itself. The heavy part goes one way. Everything else stays. Then the heavy part drops out of the bottom into the drawer with three soft knocks, and the pod turns back the way it came, and stops.
The light blinks twice. I hear both.
“It cleaned itself,” I say. Nobody has cleaned that corner in two days. Every year of my life this house has asked me for one more thing than the year before, and this asked me for nothing. “It cleans itself.”
“It turned once and stopped,” Bagheera says from the shelf. “That is what a thing does to test itself before it goes. The hatch faces the window. I would like it noted that the hatch faces the window.”
Moxie comes out from behind the doorframe. He sits down in the middle of the floor with the drawer in front of him and thinks about it, face scrunched up.
“They built it,” he says. “They plugged it in. They pressed the thing and left, and it did the work with nobody in the room.” His tail comes up off the floor. “A tool doesn’t do that. The robots must own the humans now.”
“Moxie.”
“This is the alpha of the house now.” He is already moving. “I’m going to go say hello.”
He passes close on his way by, and his tail brushes my flank, straight up, the way he greets anything bigger than he is.