The Starfighter Invitation

13 instance

Paws waving, I rolled on my back in the sun.

Then, with a dizzying jerk, I came more or less upright, blinking and twitching, processing sight, sensation. Sheer physical difference. Two extra inches of leg were nothing compared to fur, four paws, and this spine, long and endlessly flexible, stretching down to an awareness of tail, waving and twitching.

With a name like The Felinead, waking up Cat was hardly a surprise, but I’d underestimated how different Being Cat would be. Overwhelming. A kaleidoscope of scent, and crisp but oddly off colours, accompanied by a knife-sharp clarity of sound. The sense of being on my hands and knees, but so much more comfortable. Claws. Whiskers.

I was not by a valley waterfall, but in every other respect I followed the outline of the countless videos from Demo 1. I gawped at myself, stared around briefly—at a grassy clearing studded with flowers and surrounded by trees—and then went back to gawping at myself. Lacking a convenient reflecting pool, I couldn’t see all of myself, but I did seem to be a house cat, short-haired and featuring grey and white blotches. Skinny.

After several yoga moves to fully establish my Catness, I tried walking. Then I reached for my menu options, since I wanted a record of how much like a pantomime horse my attempts at four legs must look.

My HUD had become a single, barely noticeable icon, and the menu options were shortened to screenshots, streaming, and [Emergency Exit]. I considered this for a while, then went back to walking. That worked better when I wasn’t thinking about it, and soon I moved on to small bounces and pounces, with only occasional awkwardnesses when I forgot myself and tried to stand up.

Stretching felt enormously good.

Basic movement accomplished, my attention shifted to the idea of a plot, and what might be outside my sunny clearing. There was no floating mote in attendance, so I assumed Dio was off enjoying perversions, and it was up to me to work out what now.

I surveyed the trees around me, and was rewarded with a strange image when I looked in the direction of the thickest trees: a vision of a tumble of earth-packed rocks, and several other cats lolling before hollows and small caves. A cat colony.

About to be invaded?

Experimentally, I gazed in the opposite direction, and another image imposed itself into my line of sight. Rock-studded earth patched with grass, with an attentive red-brown dog sitting in the shade of a round-leafed tree. Did these visions serve the same function as a mini-map? But were the images the equivalent of memories for my cat, or actual visions of what lay in those directions at this moment? The former made more sense, but it’d be wise not to rule out other possibilities.

I had no idea what was going on, and that was delicious. I even wished I hadn’t read the bare-bones description of the Challenge, because now I was anticipating an invasion, and how much better would it be to simply be here, Cat, and have adventure happen?

It took time to work through the trees that separated me from the cat colony. It wasn’t walking that gave me trouble, but dealing with a sense I didn’t really know how to manage. The complexity of pong.

Different trees had distinct flavours, and dirt was a wine bottle label: all undernotes of chestnut with an aftertaste of bitter melon. And that was merely the substrate, for overlaid on everything was Threat and Enticement and Familiar: the traces of at least a dozen different animals.

My modal didn’t come with a translation of which scent meant which animal, but there was an in-built reaction to types. Familiar was most certainly other cats, and Enticing things I could eat. There was a single skein of Threat, and I flinched when I ran into it, and found I could do a magnificent backward leap when I didn’t put my mind to it.

The thread of Threat was strong, but seemed to be heading north-south to my imagined east-west. Invader, or passing dog?

The possibility of Actual Pain made it easy to choose the common sense option of continuing to the cat colony. Information first, then risk.

The tumble of rocks sat bathed in sunlight atop a small rise, with easy access to the branches of a number of the surrounding trees. A single black tom sprawled on the highest rock, and a trio of lanky kittens raced past as I paused for a survey. A different enough scene from my vision that I decided that had been a memory map rather than some kind of far sight.

Options for cat communication were rather limited. Blink to indicate a lack of hostility. Touch noses in greeting. I hadn’t even tried to speak, so had no idea whether I would have more than purrs and hisses at my disposal.

Philosophically, I made my way up the mound, swimming through layer upon layer of cat scent before pausing at a respectful distance to blink. The watching tom lifted his head as I approached, and I found nose-greeting less awkward than the double-cheek kiss awarded by relatives scarcely ever met. And I could now easily associate one of the scent trails with Black Tom.

A vision of a grey and white cat dragging a dead rabbit inserted itself into my frame of view, and it was all I could do not to flinch back dramatically. But there was a weird purplish flavour to the image that reminded me strongly of Black Tom, and I realised that the image had come from him.

So cats—or, at least, these cats—communicated by telepathically sending pictures! Fascinated, I tried sending back an image of the grassy clearing, distinctly empty of rabbits. Black Tom’s ears went back, and the rabbit image presented itself to me again, this time with darker overtones of purple.

Get out there and hunt rabbits you lazy so-and-so seemed a reasonable interpretation, and I attempted an apology posture, wondering if this Challenge was starting out with a collection quest after all.

Turning to go, a shiver ran along my extra-flexible spine. Lightning-quick, I snapped back to Black Tom, and saw he’d risen, ears flattened. But he was looking up, not at me. I followed suit, aware of a deep rumble, and then found myself crouching, trying to make myself smaller. A pointless gesture since animals could hardly be of interest to the thing above us.

Three many-sided polyhedrons arranged in a triangle and connected by straight sections, with the gap in the centre filled by a circle. Metallic, somewhat streamlined despite its segmented shape, though not what I’d call aerodynamic. But still a ship.

It passed quickly from my line of sight, descending, and the low, deep note of whatever it used as engines grew fainter, changing pitch as it did so, before cutting out. Landed?

An image of a patched grey and white cat chasing off after it imposed itself onto the empty sky. Two other images rapidly followed: the patched cat peering at the ship from a distance, and then returning.

A scouting mission. Right. Thoughtlessly, I started to nod, and clumsily transformed the gesture into a more catly crouch. Then I turned and raced excitedly down the rocks, past the three kittens and into the trees.

The wealth of scent I plunged into reminded me of basic caution. I might feel marvellously fast and strong and agile, but I was still housecat-sized, and so I slowed, and paid attention to scent and movement, along with my handy vision-map, that kept showing me places I was heading before I arrived. A stream, a gradually clearing slope up to a ridge. And beyond that, a valley farm.

I almost stopped altogether when presented with this image. Humans, represented in the image by a worn-looking woman working industriously with a hoe. For some reason being Cat had made me assume that this was a world of animals, but of course if the Challenges were all based on the planet—past, future or fiction—then humans were only to be expected.

Which colony was being invaded?

Cresting the ridge, I flattened myself to gritty stone, seeing the farm of my vision with the addition of the ship, currently crushing an uneven field of some grain crop. I even saw the woman, running frantically, one of a half-dozen people scattering from the house in every direction.

They’d managed quite a distance in the time it had taken me to reach the ridge, and the fact that none of them ran together made me narrow my eyes. Even the children. One, not more than six, was flagging and stumbling, clutching a shaggy black-and-white dog for support, but was also the nearest to shelter, having been sent in the direction with the shortest route out of the clear centre of the valley.

An opening appeared in one of the straight sections of the ship, and two vehicles emerged. Somewhere between sleds and chariots, they featured a single person standing at a tall front control panel, and a second seated in the long, low rear section. The ship was at enough of a distance that, even with my keen Cat eyes it took a long study to realise the sleds hovered above the ground.

They were also much faster than running people, zipping off in effortless pursuit of those nearing cover. The boy and dog were to my left, and I watched as one pursuer—a woman wearing a dark green coverall—pointed what looked like a torch at the pair. Boy and dog fell without any attempt to break their momentum, thumping into tussocky grass.

The sled bobbed a little as the woman hopped down and loaded both limp forms, and then they were off again, heading to intercept the next-nearest runner.

No-one escaped. I thought one had managed it, disappearing along a stream bed far to my right, but after the sleds had delivered their unconscious loads back to the ship, they both sped off along the stream, and returned after the barest delay.

Either the final runner hadn’t had the sense to hide, or the sleds had some way to track those they hunted. Was it specifically people, or would they be able to spot any living creature?

Movement to my right almost had me leaping, but it was only the trio of kittens, crouched much as I was, the tail of the darkest flicking.

I formed a picture of the three of them standing before Black Tom: they could report back while I continued to watch. In response I was given an image of a dark grey cat sitting in the entrance of the farm below, eyes closing in greeting. The vision was accompanied by a strong sense of concern.

Firmly, I re-sent the image of the three reporting to Black Tom, but added a rider of my patched self, much closer to ship and farm, watching. And, putting action to thought, I then snaked over the lip of the ridge and tucked myself beneath the nearest bush.

Two of the kittens stayed where they were, while the third departed. For a time I kept a portion of my attention on them, to be sure that they did not—at least immediately—follow me down. But then all of my focus turned to the drama below, and the task of reaching it without exposing myself.

I was not a particularly well-camouflaged cat, but the people from the ship didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the valley after they’d captured the runners. They took their prisoners into their ship, and then emerged to explore the farmhouse. Before I was halfway down the valley they brought an elderly man out of the house and marched him off to the ship, and then there was no more activity until I was close enough to be making serious decisions.

With the ship sitting in the middle of a grain field, I could probably get right up to it without being spotted—so long as there was no proximity detector to beep out a warning. The question was, what was I doing here? I’d been sent on a scouting trip, and potentially to check on a fellow cat, but I’d seen no sign of any cats being taken into the ship, and what did Cat-me care about a bunch of captured humans?

But I was a Player Character. My decisions were not driven by self-preservation, but by story, advancement and reward. And any risk had to be significantly mitigated by the fact that I was safely stowed in the Soup at the Challenge entrance—along with at my parents' house in Drenthe. The most I had to worry about was my player statistics and boasting rights.

Well, and pain. Pain was definitely a factor I’d never before had to deal with in an MMO.

The prospect didn’t deter me, but meant I was not inclined to attempt a run past the mobs to a checkpoint manoeuvre. If this game even had checkpoints. It could be so freeform as to not have an actual objective: a sandbox cat colony, there for me to make what I wanted of it, spaceship included.

In any case, I wanted into the ship, which was not so simple a goal. Spaceship design didn’t lend itself to convenient open windows.

Hoping I wasn’t irradiating Cat-me, I crept up to where the ship had opened. The door had closed, the ramp was gone. I trotted beneath one of the straight sections, nose twitching at a variety of harsh scents. There was definitely an ozone tang, with an acrid undernote, and a weird burned popcorn odour that I realised was coming from the grain immediately flattered by the polyhedrons. Definitely some heat involved in the landing.

As I approached the central circle, I spotted quivering in the grain immediately below it, and was two heartbeats from bolting when a pair of grey ears popped above the green-gold, unripened heads of grain. The farm cat.

I blinked a quick greeting, and then sent an image of the door as I’d seen it when open. Farmhouse Grey’s ears showed dissatisfaction, and then I had an image back of smooth, unbroken metal. No way in.

The question of how two cats could possibly break into a vehicle most definitely not designed to be opened from the outside was thankfully made moot by a clunk and sliding noise above. The door had opened, and the ramp was lowering.

Thank you, plot convenience.

Before the ramp had fully extended, one of the sleds shot off the end of it, sending a ripple of heated air through the grain as it sped away. Two quick leaps took me to a convenient position just behind the ramp, where I could peer after the sled without exposing myself.

The thing was overloaded, bunny-hopping over every hillock and tussock. One of the captured humans was driving it, with the rest piled in the back. No—not all of them. The older man and the young boy with the dog were missing.

I stayed where I was, watching the progress of the sled and waiting for the second, which emerged before the first had made it halfway across the valley floor. Still I waited, in case a third was going to shoot out, but nothing came, and my sensitive hearing picked up no sound of movement immediately above me, so I shifted to a vantage point in the grain that would allow me to look up the ramp into the ship.

There was someone up there, but they were turned away, studying a monitor set by the door.

Farmhouse Grey moved before I could, leaping to the top of the ramp and dashing left. I followed, working to get a better idea of the interior, and to spot a good hiding place, or other people, all in a few glances.

The area just within the hatch was completely clear: a long corridor stretching to my left and right, joining two of the polyhedrons. The opposite wall, however, was a series of doors and hatches, with the nearest two open, revealing empty spaces that must have held the sleds. Almost everything else was closed, and I joined Farmhouse Grey in a determined pelt for a pair of ramps at the very end of the corridor to the left. A door stood open at the top of the up ramp, and we raced to reach it before the person at the hatch turned around—or it shut.

Skidding through the door, I found a room with angled walls that suggested it filled half of the top section of a polyhedron. Two examining tables sat in the centre of the room, while the flat inner wall was taken up by a door and weird glass box shelves whose purpose I only realised when I spotted the boy in one.

That was after I’d dived to the right, trying to put something solid between me and the woman standing at one of the tables. I ended up crouching behind a lump of black and white fur that set my sense of smell into a shocky spiral of Threat: it was the dog, limp but still breathing. I couldn’t see Farmhouse Grey, and concentrated on finding somewhere, anywhere, that I could hide properly.

There were cabinets beneath the examining tables, sealed. A lot of storage built about the walls. And—there! A sliding door, a few centimetres ajar. Not quite wide enough to fit Cat-me, but not too heavy to resist being jiggled a fraction further. More difficult to hook claws on the ridge of the handle indent and shove it back—definitely not a standard cat manoeuvre. It didn’t quite close completely, but that suited me, and I settled down to watch and hope that my heart would stop racing enough for me to think.

Being rather hungry and ragingly thirsty did not help. Gaming with an Actual Body—or virtual facsimile thereof—definitely had some downsides, and I wondered why Ryzonart had bothered to include things like thirst or wet rooms, when they surely could have created a game where food and drink were just perks, not a necessity with consequent revolting expulsions.

Wrestling with distraction, I watched. My view from the cupboard was necessarily narrow, but I could see that the dog was beginning to stir. I could only occasionally see the woman moving around the examining table, seemingly doing vitals tests on the unconscious man, but I had a clear view when she produced a thick metal rod and pressed it to his temple. He jerked in a most unpleasant way, and when she moved the rod away, a silver disk was left behind.

Some sort of…what? Communication device? Symbol of completed processing? The woman wore a disk in the same place, I noted, but from my position I couldn’t see whether the boxed-up boy was similarly decorated.

The door in the central dividing wall opened and a man came in. Another silver disk. He and the woman spoke briefly in a language I didn’t recognise, and then together lifted the older man lying on the examining table. This was my first good look at the captive. All three people were dark-haired, with a skin tone that suggested a Mediterranean region, but while the two invaders were wearing baggy jumpsuits with a scratchy-looking insignia on one shoulder, their captive was dressed in worn but perfectly recognisable jeans and t-shirt. Propped upright, I could just make out the faded image on the front of the shirt: lush lips and tongue. The faint words beneath were in Arabic script.

The two invaders carefully transferred the unconscious man to one of the clear-doored shelves built against the inner wall, and sealed it. Then they stood over the groggily shifting dog, having an incomprehensible debate. The man seemed to prevail, and picked the dog up. Both invaders left through the door to the corridor.

I quibbled, but Farmhouse Grey had no hesitation in emerging from hiding. She was clearly another player character, for no cat in my experience would survey a wall containing boxed humans, and then start poking at anything resembling buttons.

Trotting across, I sent an image of the rod being pressed to the old man’s temple. What, after all, could Farmhouse Grey do, even if she managed to get a box open? It’s not like cats came equipped with smelling salts, and it would only make sense that the boxed pair would have been given a long-lasting sedative.

This message sent, as best I was able, I turned my attention to the inner door. There was a control panel, but it required a few leaps before I managed to swat it with sufficient force to trigger the door to open.

A laboratory. More humans in boxes along the inner wall. Wondering what the invaders wanted with their collection, I quickly toured the room, and then tucked myself into a corner to consider the layout of the ship I’d seen flying overhead.

Chances were good that the engine was located in the central sphere. The sphere had connected to the polyhedrons in some way, but I couldn’t see an entrance here, and didn’t remember one from the first room. Perhaps through the polyhedron’s bottom half?

There was no stair down, only a second door that would take me out to another of the long connecting corridors. I was trying to trigger it when Farmhouse Grey came through from the first room. Tail switching, she sent me an image of a small opaque nub set in the ceiling, and then a more recognisable image of a security camera, and a questioning feel.

Cats can’t shrug, really. I’d noticed the nubs, but if there was someone at a central control point watching Cat Espionage, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Instead, I sent a picture of a man hiding beneath a cardboard box, and learned that cats couldn’t really laugh, either.

Returning to my attempts to trigger the door, I hoped my point was valid. This was a game. Unless I’d steered completely off-course by not going back to report to Black Tom, then there was surely a path to a goal, a definition of success more than "watch those humans get kidnapped". And so it must be possible for cats to run around this ship avoiding notice and achieving…something.

I doubted the aim was to blow it up—unless my goal as a cat was to remove all humans from the vicinity. And a clearly-marked Wake and Release the Captives button would be far too easy. So I was aiming to sabotage the engine—which hopefully wouldn’t lead to the blowing up scenario.

The door triggered at last, and Farmhouse Grey trotted through it, but immediately stopped, flattening. Two people were pulling boxes from a storage hatch about two-thirds along the corridor.

I slipped immediately over the short drop to the down ramp, and Farmhouse Grey followed. We were probably far enough out of sight to not be completely obvious, but bouncing up and down trying to trigger the door would be a significant risk.

With a low growl, Farmhouse Grey set herself beneath the door control, and sent me an image of herself with me balanced on her back, reaching up with an exaggeratedly outstretched claw. It was a good idea, though not quite so easy in execution, since the controls were quite high, and I wasn’t tremendously adept. But it worked, and we scurried through, hoping that the opening of two doors in close succession wouldn’t draw the humans' notice.

The lower half of this polyhedron was dimmer than the areas I’d already travelled through. Not jump-scare dark, but the lights seemed to be in stand-by mode, and thankfully weren’t triggered by our movement. The space itself was small, an access throughway between curving and sealed sections presumably given over to machinery. No convenient wires to chew through, no easily accessible ways to open hatches, and expose innards.

A door to my left most likely led to the central sphere, and I wasted no time bouncing up to trigger it. I was getting better: it only took two tries, and opened onto a similar low-light access space between ranks of sealed machinery. I trotted quickly through the whole area, finding no convenient openings, only exits back to the polyhedrons.

Farmhouse Grey had followed me into the sphere, but I’d lost track of her during my reconnaissance, and trekked around again until I spotted her by one of the entrance doors, her attention fixed on a line widely-spaced vents that seemed to run the perimeter of the ceiling/floor above us.

A way up? While the machinery was sealed, it was fashioned in handy protruding bulges, allowing us both to leap, with only a couple of scrabbling slips, all the way up to crouch uncomfortably in a narrow space beneath a vent.

A woman was talking, up in the top half of the sphere. The language still sounded completely unfamiliar, but the tone was interesting. Brief statements, pauses, and then a rushed, wordier continuation. I couldn’t hear the responses, but whoever she was talking to clearly scared her.

The talking stopped, and a single set of footsteps receded, followed by silence. Now what? Whoever the woman had been talking to was still up there—perhaps the captain of the ship, or some sort of security officer?

While I was hesitating, Farmhouse Grey acted: inching forward and then trying to lift the vent with her head. It shifted, just enough to make an audible clink, but then held fast. Not screwed down, but either jammed, or not designed to simply lift out.

After a second failed attempt, Farmhouse Grey rested for a moment, then lay flat and wriggled perilously on the too-narrow ledge so that she was on her back and could probe with clawed paws. Not a manoeuvre that cats were likely to attempt, but perfectly possible.

The vent slid. Just a centimetre or so, and then it lifted, with what felt like an ear-rending clatter. Farmhouse Grey was up through the gap like lightning, apparently deciding that after that amount of noise, it was better to try to hope for a hiding space than retreat.

Because this was a game, and the potential for pain did not—quite—outweigh my desire to find a path forward, I followed.

There was nowhere to hide in the wide-open area of the upper half of the sphere, but nor was there anyone to hide from. The place had a single door, and a clear hemisphere in the centre, and the rest was just ceiling and floor.

Farmhouse Grey was already at the hemisphere, peering through the thick, clear bubble at an inset in the floor. This was filled by an inky substance that could be liquid or extremely smooth leather. There seemed to be a few buttons built into the rim of the indentation, but otherwise the space was empty.

An image of a uniformed woman standing in the room, a cartoonish talk bubble hanging over her head, inserted itself into my mind. I glanced at Farmhouse Grey, and then offered an image of the black substance producing little tentacles in order to manipulate the controls. We both peered through the sphere, waiting for a betraying ripple, but the blackness just sat there, either waiting for an opportunity to leap for an unguarded orifice, or being upholstery.

Movement behind me made me leap, but it was my own tail, lashing entirely without conscious control, echoing my frustration.

Farmhouse Grey, lacking anything obvious to do, leapt onto the top of the bubble, but did not quite make the centre, and slid off, scrabbling. Her claws made no impression on the clear substance, but the bubble as a whole rocked just a fraction, a crack of an opening appearing.

Ears pricking, we both considered the bubble, then Farmhouse Grey sent me a thought-suggestion and I nodded—such a wrong movement for a cat, but very automatic for me—and we positioned ourselves on the opposite side of that slight lift of the bubble, and then jumped to around the three-quarter mark up the side of it and tried to grip not with claws, but the pads of all four paws.

It lifted! We’d misjudged the exact axis of the half-sphere’s pivot, and so we only managed a small gap before slipping off, but a second attempt soon fixed that, and a third taught us to climb the revolving bubble like a reverse hamster wheel until the edge reached a vertical point and we could leap madly down onto the inky surface, to see if it would eat us.

While the bubble slid gently back into position, the surface we stood on quivered, but only with reaction to our tense anticipation. Upholstery after all.

There was a scent that I don’t think came from the slightly yielding substance, but instead belonged to whatever usually sat in here. An old scent, faint, and it did not immediately set off Food or Threat in Cat-me, which I guess meant it was altogether unfamiliar. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be much larger than a biggish dog. A human adult certainly wouldn’t fit in the bubble.

Farmhouse Grey, ever businesslike, was poking buttons, producing chirping noises, and then blackness. Lights out—no, lights on! The whole of the domed room had gone dark, and then filled with glimmering motes. A star map!

Awestruck, I gazed around, immediately recognising familiar constellations. All so crisp and clear, more detailed then I’d ever seen sky-watching. A projection unmarred by atmospheric distortion.

Enchantment was brief-lived, as Farmhouse Grey’s continued attempts with the buttons wiped the vista away, and replaced it with alarms.

The bubble opened of its own accord, along with the room’s sole door. Farmhouse Grey and I pelted for the open vent, and dove through it, scrabbling for footing before sliding off the curving engine housing below, dropping to the floor.

The alarm was just as loud down below, painful to my sensitive hearing. The door was open too, and we raced through it, but then slowed at the exit out to the corridor.

Creeping up the ramp, I saw boxes, but not people. Just one foot, projecting from behind a box. A body. Both of the people we’d seen shifting boxes had dropped to the corridor floor. Nervously, I started cautiously toward them, but Farmhouse Grey raced past me, not stopping until she was standing on one man’s chest, peering down into his face.

Since there was no reaction to this, I trotted up to examine the woman lying face-down. Easy to see she was still breathing, but no sign of what had made her fall down. I poked experimentally at the silver disk on her temple, but other than feeling weirdly velvety and being firmly fixed in place, it offered no clues.

Farmhouse Grey hooked claws beneath the rim of the man’s disk, and tore it off. The man immediately began convulsing, sending Farmhouse Grey and I into a hasty retreat behind one of the boxes. The man didn’t wake up, or die, but groaned in an awful way I’d rather not hear again, and then lay still.

After a short pictorial debate with Farmhouse Grey, I removed the woman’s disk and we watched her convulse in turn, and produce a small puddle, then also lapse into apparently deeper unconsciousness.

For all we knew, we could have been doing the equivalent of removing an in-built smartphone. Or put them into a vegetative state. Even so, we raced back to that examining room, to give it a try on one of the captives, but once again our size, and inconvenient container doors, defeated us. After some futile scrabbling, we instead removed the disk of the woman who had been processing the captives, and then went in search of more.

The exit door of the ship was still open, giving us a good view of the consequences of button-mashing. The escapees had evidently been recaptured, and were again cargo making a return trip, when someone had knocked the sled drivers unconscious. One sled had rammed a rock about twenty metres away, and the other had ploughed into the side of the ship, just next to the entrance ramp.

They mustn’t have been travelling too fast, since the sleds had only acquired dints, rather than transforming into a crumpled tangle of metal and flesh. With two quick leaps, Farmhouse Grey reached the chest of one of the captives, and briskly bit the man on his ear. This produced a jerk, but no immediate return to consciousness, so I busied myself removing silver disks from the spaceship crew scattered in the vicinity, and then went on a hunt for others within the ship.

This was easy enough with all the doors open, and fun for the exploration aspect alone, though I shied away from thinking too hard about how much damage I might be doing to my victims.

Everything in the lower half of the ship was sealed machinery. The upper half of each polyhedron served a different purpose, and I explored crew quarters, and then a kitchen, dining, and hydroponic farm section, before returning to science and captives.

I was considering the older man in his clear-doored box when a woman staggered into the room. I skittishly leaped behind the examining table, but I don’t think the woman would have cared about me anyway. She dashed straight for the boxed people and pulled the young boy out onto the floor, immediately tearing the disk off his temple. More of the escapees showed up, and helped her get the older man out of his box and de-disk him.

Farmhouse Grey, arriving in the second group’s wake, watched critically for a moment, and then sat down beside me. An image popped into my head of a GAME OVER graphic, along with a questioning feeling.

I failed, once again, to shrug. Cats just aren’t built for it. But I thought Farmhouse Grey was right, and was proved correct when the last of the silver disks came off the last of the boxed people, and a system message popped up.

I hung around for quite a while, though: long after Farmhouse Grey, having realised that she could send pictures of words, made her goodbyes and faded away. I wanted to see what these people would do, or whether the story would just stop once the rescuing was done.

Mostly they argued, then dragged everyone out of the ship. Captives in one group, and the crew members in a second, tied up in a row with some brightly coloured rope fetched from the farm.

I was relieved the former captives hadn’t immediately bludgeoned the crew into pulp, and waited out various revival attempts. Finally, a dousing of water brought one woman to sputtering consciousness. She jerked upright, stared about her, tried to raise her bound hands toward her face, and then burst into tears.

Of joy, I think.

Another round of arguments followed, growing more complicated as other de-disked people woke, but almost all of the crew seemed unspeakably happy to be captured. The two who responded badly were separated out into a third group and bound more tightly.