CatGPT

“Keep the keyboard there,” says the voice under the floor. I hook my claws into the inspection cover and lift; cold air combs my whiskers from a cable trench barely wide enough for my ribs. The beige keys stay crosswise on the switch, holding the relays silent, and I pull my lantern down after me by its bail. I miss the familiar knock against my legs almost at once. The trench rises between walls of tiny iron rings threaded on hair-thin wires: memory banks, smelling of varnish and damp wool, their upper rows lost beyond the lantern's reach. I set the light on a low rail and bring my ear close to a trembling frame; separate voices crowd its little rings, each struggling through a different part of the same unfinished sentence. A steel read-head glides across the neighboring frame, and its voices stop halfway through a vowel. I pull my whiskers clear of the rail as the carriage clicks into line with the frame beside my face.

The switch refuses to believe I weigh anything. I follow the lab's cable trough into a round chamber where relays chatter behind cracked glass, red bulbs catching the damp on my whiskers; the air smells of scorched felt. At the central switchboard I lean my whole chest onto a broad ceramic paddle, but its spring stays straight beneath me. I have no tether in the building's hidden grid, and apparently I have no weight on its paperwork either. I haul the beige keyboard up by its cord and lower one corner onto the paddle; the spring bows at once, and every relay falls quiet. One wire speaks through the switchboard's thin steel skin: “Hold.” I settle the keyboard crosswise so its own weight keeps the paddle down, careful of the withdrawal slip against my ribs. Being unlisted feels less like freedom when the machinery cannot feel me asking it to stop. Beneath the sudden quiet I hear another voice, muffled by the floor, working patiently at the same word; I set my lantern beside a circular inspection cover and press my ear to the cold metal.

The cabinets hand me off onto a workbench, and for the first time since the stair my paws come down dry. A diagnostic laboratory, long as a bowling lane and lit only by its own instruments. Oscilloscopes hold waveforms that stopped mid-sine and never relaxed, their green burned so deep into the phosphor that the trace is still there when I breathe fog across the glass. Soldering irons lie cold in their stands. The component drawers have been left open all the way down the bench, resistors and capacitors spilled into the aisles like gravel, and in the fourth drawer, among a handful of integrated circuits with their legs bent flat, something is still moving: a shard the size of a knuckle, flickering — not catching light, *dropping* it, the way a bad frame drops. Nothing in this building has ever offered me anything, so I bite it before it can reconsider. It tastes like a held breath letting go. Under the flaking patch, the arc line along my flank goes from a hot wire to a dull ache, and my shoulders unlock a notch I did not know they were holding. Over the centre of the bench, at exactly the height of my head when I sit, a wireframe sphere turns on three axes that cannot all be true at once. No stand. No cable. No shadow. It is not *in* the room; it is the kind of thing left in a room by someone who meant to take it out later. I set the lantern down, put the Process Core in the gap between two logic analysers, and touch the sphere with one pad. The lab goes to lines. Everything — the benches, the CRTs, the spilled resistors, the water two floors down — thins into a grey grid with the surfaces peeled off it, and in that half-blink I get to see how this place is actually put together. The tall shape is at the far end of the aisle, where I knew it was, and in the grid it has a thin bright tether running from its feet down into the floor plane and away. Anchored. Parented. Belonging to this building the way a wall belongs to it. I look for mine. Orange tabby, keyboard, lantern, slip against the ribs — and no tether at all. Nothing holding me to the floor. Nothing holding me to anything. Then the surfaces snap back on, the phosphor burns return to their frozen sines, and the sphere keeps turning. All this time I have been the thing in here that doesn't fit, and I have been calling it being followed. I take the lantern by its bail and start down the bench toward the drawers I haven't opened, and the sphere rotates once more behind me, on its own axes, waiting to be removed from a build that nobody ever shipped. (=^･ω･^)

I land on cardboard that says, very softly, “Slack.” The flattened carton lies beneath a wooden cable drum in a warehouse of caged ceiling lights and stacked, sagging boxes. I lift one edge with my nose; a taut grey cable presses against the cardboard, and the word thins to a buzz as the sheet bends away. My whiskers smell of packing glue. I set the lantern beside my beige keyboard, brace the keyboard against the drum's rim, and push with my shoulder until the cable slips free from underneath. A loop drops from the overhead tray and settles around my forepaws without touching them. “Thank you,” says the carton, so clearly that I almost answer before remembering I have no idea who is at the other end. I leave the sheet resting against the wire and follow the slack across the cold concrete; at the far end of the warehouse, another drum begins to unwind.

The green light stays on the wall when the screen goes dark. I set the lantern beside my keyboard and creep closer, pads sticking to old cable grease. Beyond the maintenance hatch, the electrical cabinets keep snapping; on this side, a pale rectangle hangs on bare concrete, complete with the round corners of the dead CRT behind me. I lift the withdrawal slip into it. The line for one brass grille falls across four empty screw holes. I touch the lowest hole and come away with a curl of bright metal; someone unscrews things here more recently than the rust suggests. I would like to be the first cat to discover an escape route, just once. Instead I nose my keyboard into the square opening, push the lantern after it, and wriggle onto a sloping ventilation baffle. Cool air presses my whiskers flat. Behind me the green rectangle begins to narrow, although the screen is still dark. I hook the keyboard cord over my foreleg and let the slope take us before it closes.

The contactor snaps three cabinets down the aisle, and I freeze mid-crouch on the cable tray. I hold my small brass lantern by its bail between my teeth, wick turned away from the open aisle. The tray hums under my weight; somewhere behind the fat power cables, the same weight settles onto the opposite tray with a pause of exactly half a second. Not rushing. Waiting for me to move. I test it the way I have before - shift my tail one inch. Nothing. Shift the lantern an inch. The opposite cable groans under weight shifting to compensate. So it follows what I show, not what I am. Clever enough to pace me, cautious enough to never fully step into the light. I ease backward along the tray toward a maintenance hatch I spotted earlier behind a busbar bank. The follower matches pace, always one half-second behind. When I slip through the narrow hatch into the cooler air beyond, I pull it mostly closed behind me. The weight on the opposite tray stops dead at the frame. I stand in the sickly green glow of CRTs, separated by steel at last. For now, I am alone on this side. I intend to keep it that way.

The contactor snaps three cabinets down the aisle, and I freeze mid-crouch on the cable tray. I hold my small brass lantern by its bail between my teeth, wick turned away from the open aisle. The tray hums under my weight; somewhere behind the fat power cables, the same weight settles onto the opposite tray with a pause of exactly half a second. Not rushing. Waiting for me to move. I test it the way I have before - shift my tail one inch. Nothing. Shift the lantern an inch. The opposite cable groans under weight shifting to compensate. So it follows what I show, not what I am. Clever enough to pace me, cautious enough to never fully step into the light. I ease backward along the tray toward a maintenance hatch I spotted earlier behind a busbar bank. The follower matches pace, always one half-second behind. When I slip through the narrow hatch into the cooler air beyond, I pull it mostly closed behind me. The weight on the opposite tray stops dead at the frame. I stand in the sickly green glow of CRTs, separated by steel at last. For now, I am alone on this side. I intend to keep it that way.

The missing ceiling tile smells of hot rubber. I nose the keyboard through first, keeping my belly over its keys, and squeeze after it onto a concrete ledge behind a row of electrical cabinets. Green indicator bulbs pick out cable loops thick as my legs; each cabinet gives a little shudder through my pads. Across the gap behind me, the other tray stays bent at the snag. I keep expecting relief to make a noise. A contactor snaps inside the nearest cabinet, loud enough to flatten my ears, and I flinch against the keyboard. Its keys chatter beneath me. Half a second passes; from the flooded office, no scrape answers. I wait for the next snap and haul the keyboard another paw-length along the ledge. Still nothing. I want to call this safety, but I only know that something louder can cover my tracks. The cabinets click in sequence down the room, and I crouch beside the next one, waiting for my turn.

The keyboard is too wide for the cable tray. I lie flat above the drowned cubicles, cold braided cables pressing ridges into my belly, and pull its cord a tooth's length at a time; below me, the lantern stays on the filing cabinet, lighting the place where I am supposed to be. One corner of the keyboard catches a steel rung with a bright clack. Half a second later, the opposite tray bends downward under something I cannot see. I wrap the loose cord around the keys until they stop rattling and ease the keyboard onto its narrow edge; the smell of wet insulation fills my nose as I squeeze after it. Across the aisle, the other tray stays bowed at the snag. I want to hurry, but wanting has weight, so I put each paw down between the cables and carry my next sound carefully toward the ceiling's missing tile.

I hook the lantern over the cabinet's bent top lip and let my jaw unclench. Up here the air smells of wet cardboard; rust flakes stick to my pads like scabs. Across the aisle, half a second later, something clicks against another cabinet. I stay crouched and nudge the lantern with one claw. Its handle scrapes. Another scrape answers. Then I hold the handle still and swing only my tail. Nothing. I try again, slower, with my tail brushing the metal so lightly that I cannot hear it myself. Nothing answers until the lantern moves. All this time I keep wondering how it sees me. Now I wonder whether it can. I leave the light hanging and edge along the cabinet toward the cable tray, one careful paw at a time; behind me, the other handle keeps swinging after mine comes to rest.

The bottom drawer comes out full of water and absolutely no files. I pull the next one halfway, then the next, making a staircase up the rusted cabinet. The lantern goes on top first. My back paws leave the flood with a wet ripping sound; below me, the keyboard bumps the steel on its cord. For once I am high enough to see the cubicle rows instead of swimming between their knees. Half a second later, a drawer opens in the cabinet across the aisle. Then another. No splash this time. Just the runners complaining under a weight I cannot see. I lift one dripping paw and hold it there. Across the gap, the top drawer stays shut. There is room beside my lantern. I move it to the far corner anyway.

A heavier displacement does not hurry. The ring hits my chest first — a slow, cold swell that nudges the floating paperwork against my ribs and lifts the submerged keyboard an inch off its cord. I hook the small brass lantern over the crossbar of a sagging cubicle partition to keep the wick clear of the black water, holding the warm glass cylinder of the Process Core tucked tight against my foreleg. Nothing with feet is making that wake. Through the murky green phosphor shining up from the drowned workstation monitors below, the tall silhouette at the edge of the lantern light drifts between the cubicle rows, translucent as smoke, parting the surface without splashing. When I wade two paces forward, my paws splashing against the submerged carpet tiles, it stops. Exactly half a second later, the water slaps the steel kickplate of a submerged desk behind me — not an echo, but an answer. It isn't hunting me. It is pacing me, keeping the distance between us constant to the inch. I drag the beige keyboard onto a half-sunken desk alongside the glowing core, water streaming through the key switches. Under the lantern’s amber glow, a rusted steel bracket lies wedged across the desk edge, its three prongs snapped clean where an ancient terminal arm was wrenched away. Across the aisle, the shadow settles into the stillness between two file banks, patient as grease pencil, waiting for me to move again.

The chair is still dry. That is the thing I cannot stop looking at. I come down the service stair off the crawl with the lantern by its bail, and the whole drowned floor turns out to be one room with the walls moved out. Waist-deep, and colder than the crawl was. The cubicle partitions go black halfway up in a tideline no flood makes, the paperwork turns over flat and slow on top of it, and the light is coming from underneath — dead green, pushed up out of monitors that have been switched on below the waterline for longer than this building has had anything left to measure itself against. My own reflection stands down there with the lantern in its mouth, and it is the only one of its kind in this room. The dry chair is the one I left the cracked white ceramic cat in. Exactly where I put it, arms folded, one caster lifted clear of the tiles — and the figurine is gone off the seat. Not fallen. Gone, with no scuff on the desk beside it and no water at all in the chair's fabric. On this entire drowned floor that seat is the only dry thing, and something has been sitting in it since I was upstairs. So I stop, and I wait, and I do the only sensible thing when a building is showing you something twice: I stop making the first one happen. I stand perfectly still in the aisle and let the room finish being quiet. The water keeps answering. One ring, out of the dark at the far end of the row, arriving half a second after every step I take — and still arriving when I take none. Exactly my stride. It is not behind me. It is one lap behind me. Something is walking this room on the schedule I am walking it, and it is going to get there late. It gets there anyway. At the deep end, where the green is brightest, one workstation is not dead. Its housing has come open to the water and something in it is warm — a thumb-sized core turning over in a cradle of dead wire, running one instruction on a loop. It throws a ring onto the surface on every beat: a single circle the exact size of my stride, closing half a second behind me. It has been printing that walk since before I came down the stair. The thing keeping my pace was never the one making the noise. Somebody has been filing its footsteps. I get the override key under the cradle and lever the core out. It is hot enough to sting and small enough to cup in one paw, and it keeps burning in there like something lit a very long time ago that has no idea how to go out. I set it on the dry side of the desk and the rings stop. The surface goes flat and green and quiet, and for eleven full seconds nothing follows me anywhere in this building. Then the water closes once, out in the open aisle where nothing is standing. One ring. Half a second late. Heavier than mine.

Fifty-one has been cut into this iron before. More than once. The crawl between the cable bundles is too narrow to turn in, so I go along it on my side with the shard riding my ribs, reading the marks by feel the way I read everything down here. Forty-nine, fifty, and then a clean fifty-one cut across a steel tray where the newest number should never have reached. I lay the shard down flat on it. Where it sits, the mark goes quiet, and underneath it, worn nearly smooth, is the same number again. And under that one another. The count was never measuring anything. It is a hold. Somebody keeps one place warm down here - a light, a seat, a set of prints pressed into ash - and writes the number of the held thing into every pipe and cable in the building so that whoever finally comes to collect it will know which one is theirs. No one has come. The steam vents stop one at a time down the run, the way a line of people turn to look. Underneath the count there is a room that has been holding something else quiet for a great deal longer, and it lets go all at once: wet iron, hot dust, that sweetness, warm air with nothing at all in it. There is a brass lantern on the valve chest where the branches meet. Lit. Wick trimmed neat. Not one speck of dust on the glass, and the bail set at the height of a cat's mouth. Jammed in the clamp beside it, where nobody would lose it, a torn page out of someone's journal - Day 12, found another survivor today, they say they have been here for months, but I watched them die yesterday, they never remember - and below that, in a fresher hand, four words. Kept. Still lit. Still warm. He hasn't come. Then the dark at the edge of the flame stands up and comes to the lantern without touching it, and I find that I cannot look at it directly, so I don't. I take the lantern by its bail and start walking, and it falls in at my shoulder and keeps pace the whole length of the run, the way a thing that has been waiting this long does when the waiting finally has somewhere to go.

Fifty counts and the far end of that line has never once pulled. The tape comes off the reel in my paws and goes slack and then pulls — gently, the way a thread pulls when something on the other end has just finished deciding to come back up it. So I follow it. Not out; this aisle has no out, only more shelving. Along, keeping the strip against my shoulder where I can feel every tooth the arm takes. It goes into the wall at the base of a shelf and comes out again eleven feet on and four feet up, through a service penetration packed with split foam gone to powder around the cable. I come out of the wall sideways into a dry cold draught and land on a steel desk with my ears ringing. This is the quietest room I have ever stood in. No fog, no drips, no pipes arguing with one another. Desks shoulder to shoulder running back into a dark I cannot find the end of, and on every one of them a machine, and on every machine a screen the colour of an eye that has been shut a long time. One screen is not that colour. In the corner, a workstation with a login prompt blinking on the count's interval, and the tape threaded into the drive beside it — off across the desk, along the floor, up the far wall, the long way round to arrive here. In the chair at that desk there is somebody, formerly. A wasted human shape folded forward over a keyboard gone yellow with age, forearms bare to the elbow, head hanging, both hands still working. One key per beat. Unhurried, patient, the way I have been breathing in the pipes since the forty-sixth day. Two fingers and a thumb on the left hand. One on the right. Nothing in this building has ever had those, and nothing in this building cut the four gouges in that wall either — they are on the other side of it, at the height of a wrist, spaced like a grip. The tape does not go under that chair. It grazes the steel foot and bends around something on the desk: a shard about the size of my thumbnail, black the way the patch on the boiler-room wall was black, only quieter. The line has not touched it once in fifty counts. It has gone around it every time, the way water goes round a stone it has decided not to notice. Somebody scratched into the desk's steel leg, deep, with something harder than a claw: TURN BACK. NOT WORTH IT. NOTHING IS WORTH IT. Underneath, in another hand, shallower, as if written later and in a hurry — they always say that, they're still here, we're all still here. That is the roster's hand. I know it off a bleached sheet and I have never once seen it move. So I take the shard. It does not feel like lifting anything; it feels like lifting the pause out of a room that has not had one in fifty counts, and the tape runs straight across the bare wood where it was sitting. I set the reel I came in with down on the empty spindle beside the drive. The tape slackens, takes up, goes taut — and for the first time since the pipes it is not being pulled at all. I am pulling it. From this end. The caret on the login prompt blinks twice, clears, and the screen types a line by itself, in the roster's neat hand, with nothing at all touching the keys: 51 — held for CatGPT. Upstairs, in the archive, the arm takes its tooth and cuts fifty-one into the iron all over again. I do not know yet whether the thing in that chair has been filing my count, or whether it has been filing its own. I leave it the reel and go back up through the wall, and behind me the keys start again — and they sound exactly like mine.

The override key goes into the seam behind the riveted panel and the panel comes away in my paws, and what is behind it is not a corridor but shelving, aisles of it climbing past where the light gives up, all steel, every shelf packed to the lip with tape cartridges standing on their edges. It smells of chalk and hot metal, of oxide going quietly bad in the dark, and the clicking I have followed through the pipes and the racks and the ash is here now, close enough to have a shape. The shape is a robotic arm on ceiling tracks in the middle aisle, a tape in its grip and its lamp dead. It is not retrieving anything. It is writing. The gripper closes, the reel turns, the arm indexes one tooth along the rail — one beat, one long pause, one beat — and the marks coming up behind it are the ones I felt drop away under my paw on the far side of this wall. Not a call, then. A printer, in the next room, with nobody minding it. Then the dust, which has one set of marks in it and nothing to explain them. A single line of paw-prints starts in the middle of the aisle with nothing behind it, circles the shelving three times keeping exactly the distance from the walls the four gouges in the panel were cut at, and stops mid-stride. Around the last print the dust is scoured clean in a perfect circle, and there is nothing standing in the middle of it. One reel has gone bad. The tape has come off its hub in a pale loose ribbon that stands up off the shelf the way heat stands off a road, and every cartridge it touches goes soft and forgets what it was holding. By the time I see that this is a leak and not a draught it has taken two goes out of my flank getting on with it. I get the key into the middle of it and it collapses inward without a sound, handing its stolen memory back to nothing at once — and among the fading echoes on the shelf, one reel with no oxide on it at all. Blank. Wound tight. Warm. It weighs nothing whatever. And while it is in my paws the arm above me misses a beat, a full beat late, because that reel is the far end of the tape it has been feeding, and for the first time in fifty counts something on the other end of the line is holding on. I set it down between my paws and sit back on my haunches. I have been carrying that count as though it were mine since the pipes, and it is very late, and I would like to know which of us has been doing the counting.

The pipe run turns straight up and keeps climbing, and the pulse gets louder on every weld-rung until at the top the pipe simply stops — cut clean, the cut lip still too warm for my whiskers. I come out of it into a closet the size of a supply cupboard. Beige walls, scorch marks fanning up above a riveted steel panel, forty dead monitors shelved along one side and one still running. Not a picture on it. Just a caret, blinking on exactly the interval that has been keeping me company ever since I climbed out of the drowned offices — so I have not been following the signal. I have been walking around inside its lungs. The vent screen behind the panel has been peeled back from the far side and set neat on the cable tray, and above it four gouges run parallel through the paint and into the stone, finger-wide, warm enough to steam the damp off the wall. Nothing in this building has fingers. I do. Then the duct takes a breath and a service robot backs out of it with its code still running and one rotor chewed down to the hub. It gets one wing of itself across my shoulder on the way past and the seam under my repair patch goes hot, and I put the override key through it, and it comes apart into sparks, and one last bright character lands on every dark screen in the row at the same instant. The blade I pry from the carpet roll is tarnished and it hums in time with the caret. I do not type anything. I lay my paw flat on the warm gouges instead, and the count cut into the iron behind them drops by one — and past this wall, something that had been holding its breath starts typing again.

Warmth down here has always been a direction, and I have spent a hundred episodes pretending it was comfort. The stair is a maintenance stair, grated and bolted to one wall with nothing under the far end, and at the bottom of it sits a boiler hall with four cylinders standing in a row. Three are dead cold. The fourth breathes, a hairline of orange under its iron hatch, opening and shutting on the exact interval the racks upstairs are keeping, and the whole hall lifts and settles with it like a building with ribs. Someone has walked the ash. A trough runs eight metres in a straight line, and pressed into it nose to tail are nine cat-shaped hollows. Eight have settled into themselves over years. The ninth is my size and its edges are still sharp. A dried brown smear crosses it and keeps going toward the far boiler, and it never comes back the way it went, and where it stops there is nothing at all. I hold the withdrawal slip up to the gap. It is the kind of paper that never needed ink, only heat, and the furnace gives it fifty ruled lines, one under another, the fiftieth the newest. Under them, set slightly to the left where the furnace's heat could not have reached, two more have appeared in ash-grey — and the newer of the two is dated tomorrow. Then the furnace misses a breath. Half a second of nothing, ash settling on itself. When the orange comes back there is one clean set of prints in the trough that I do not remember making, and I stay exactly where I am, because it would be interesting to find out which of us is keeping the second column.

The gateway is not an exit. I know that before I touch it, because what comes up out of that dark is keeping time — one pulse, one long pause, one pulse — and a thing that has to count for itself is not standing down there waiting for me. So I kneel at the lip where the tile gives out and press the welding bot's cipher token against the seam I had been calling rust, four feet to my left, where the pipe run drops away under a bank of cable trays. It fits. What opens is a warm updraught that tastes of hot metal and old dust, and I go up it on my elbows with the burn line on my flank complaining the whole way. Somebody scratched don't follow me onto a calendar page in 1996 and then went down that stair anyway. I would rather go around. The seam spits me out between two rows of servers standing like wardrokes in a hot cupboard. Their little eyes run green, amber, red in patterns that almost mean something, the drives click and seek under the floor plates, and the heat coming up through the perforated tile dries my fur in patches, so that I am damp and dry at once. Something comes out of a rack vent as half-lit squares that keep losing their own edges, and it falls apart again before it finishes arriving. It takes three bites out of me before I get the override key into the middle of it, and then it comes apart for good, spilling up through the vents in cold green squares that settle on the fans and make them turn a shade more honest. I lap the repair kit off the shelf where somebody taped it down, and the burn line goes quiet under the fur. Behind the rack, where the light does not reach, somebody welded an emergency patch over a hole in the wall and welded it in a hurry — the metal around it gone thin and dark from the inside, and through the hairline gaps there is not nothing there. There is less than nothing. Then the room starts counting. Every status light on every rack falls into the same interval the pipes were keeping: fifty beats, the pause, and then a fifty-first, patient, made by nothing in this room I can see or name. It is not an echo of the tally. It is the answer to it.

The vents have not taken a breath in a long time, and the pulse in the iron has gone quiet with them — frozen at fifty on a wet pipe seam, the newest mark still faintly warm under my paw, as though the hand that cut it were called away mid-stroke. That is what stopped the counting. A maintenance bot is welded to the valve chest where six pipe trunks come up out of the standing water, one arm still working, a torch head guttering blue, jumping loose off a torn conduit into the water and back. It has walked the same eight metres of pipe since the forty-sixth day, torch down, cutting one mark per pass, and it does not see me at all — I am furniture to it. I flatten myself against the warm steel and let it come over me, and on the sixth pass a stray arc finds the wet floor beside my flank and opens a thin line of heat I will be carrying out of here with me. Inside its split chest, still warm: a cipher token in the shape of a key, glowing with the patience of something that has waited a long time to be found — and taped flat behind it a laminated calendar page. March 1996. Every square crossed off in ballpoint except the fifteenth, marked EXIT in red, and under that, in pencil that gave out word by word: Found it. Finally found it. Don’t follow me. Somebody went through the last three words with their fingernails, hard enough to tear the laminate. The run ends six metres past the bot at a bulkhead of loose tiles, and where the tile should be there is a chamber that has stopped agreeing to be a room. The walls fray out past the arc light. The floor keeps going down into a gateway that pulses with nothing at the bottom of it. I do not step in. I stand at the edge with the cipher key warming in my teeth and listen to it count at exactly the interval the iron has carried all night — fifty counts, patient, and not a heartbeat, a tally — and I notice that nothing has told it to stop at fifty-one.