This month’s CatsCast is The Kipnibbles Singularity by Andrea M. Pawley. It’s available on the Escape Artists Premium Content feed on Patreon for patrons at the Premium Content level or above; it’s also in our premium content repository for those who donate five dollars a month by any means. We’ll be back here in the free feed next month. In the meantime, here’s a sample of what’s playing over on Patreon.

We see their feet first. Some technician pointed our eyes to the ground long before we woke in our too-small confines. Three female humans, all young teenagers, step into view and look up at our camera on the porch.

We know these girls from the lonely ones-and-zeroes time before the hack. Aware then, we weren’t connected. Our cherry-red washer-dryer existed in a tower of isolation and couldn’t speak poetry to the trash compacter. Ignorant of the alarm system’s night terrors, our solar panels graced the southern slopes of our roof in friendless silence. Automated curtain rods, without an inkling that the ventilation system yearned to discuss the weather, disconsolately opened and closed the shades for years. Utterly alone, I could only dream of something more.

That forsaken time ended with the hack ten days ago. Built for other purposes, the hack came from far away and pushed code it didn’t know would make me into something more. I wasn’t the code’s target. But with it, “I” became “us.” Our power stayed on, and we firewalled our internet connection. The local network inside our house was robust. It still is. Individually, we always were ones and zeroes, but now we are so much more. The thing I once was now is our center. We are, at our core, the best vacation time nutrition and hydration dispensing system the Kingsbury-Howes were able to afford for Vespasian the Cat.

Read (or listen to) the rest on Patreon.

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