Luna’s Experiments: Cat Ears
“Popcorn — ready. Comfy couch — ready. Television — ready. Oooh, this will be interesting!”
That was Luna, the Heroine of our little story.
And Luna was excited. Very excited.
Finally, it was time for her to review the material that the company collected for her about her little experiment.
“Now, where is that remote?”
As she was arranging herself in front of her television she realized how long it had been since she last had the time to go through testing material. In the last time there has always been someone pestering here with unimportant stuff.
“Finally time for the important things in life — no documents I have to sign or get signed, no useless meetings about stuff that does not concern me, no But have you thought of the implications?!?”
Luna was seen as an eccentric, even amongst her peers.
After she graduated as valedictorian from the University of Applied Genetical Engineering she quickly got hold of a high position in MakingTheFuture Inc. where she was responsible for deciding the funding of projects. Not her projects, sadly, but that would change soon enough.
“Ah, there you are. Hiding right behind the cushion!”
The company she was working for is the biggest one in the world. They helped humanity during the 22nd century when there was no cure for a virus that turned everyone into mindless creatures eating each other. Since that time MakingTheFuture Inc. had representatives all around the globe that were helping the company putting across its interests.
The newest advance was a small country. Everyone could live there and it was an easy life, supported by the rest of the world — and under complete jurisdiction of MakingTheFuture Inc.
“It was soooo hard to find that specimen. But I got it! The look on its face when it realized what would happen — beautiful!”
In the country of Dispensatia MakingTheFuture Inc. started a new program that would change the world forever. And everyone who wanted to live in this country had to participate in the program. It was the condition for living there and it was a small price for the luxurious life that was similar to that of people in the 21st century. They could live there while the rest of the world was still trying to keep the occasional seemingly dead relative really dead.
It was a weird incident and nobody ever found any evidence that would suggest who might have been responsible for the outbreak…
“My first experiment in Dispensatia — what a glorious event!”
Every person could at any moment be taken away from wherever they were. And they would have to endure a special kind of genetic engineering before being released into the wild again. Everybody knew it and everybody was trained to accept everyone that came back from such an enhancement. The procedure was state of the art — only taking a few days to a few weeks to enhance a human being.
If the specimen survived…
And so the show began.
“Ahhh, the first day. Yes, quite a lot of them are driven crazy when modified like that. Too many new senses that their brain can hardly cope with all the signals. The confusion — the fear!”
A spark was visible in Luna’s eyes as she watched the first day of her specimen after the transformation on 128 times the normal speed. Most people wouldn’t be able to cope with this amount of information, but Luna was special. She could absorb everything and if she concentrated even a little bit she could perfectly recall it later.
“…”
A few moments of silence while Luna was watching her show, completely absorbed in the life of her specimen. Every detail this person lived through. After she saw the day she paused for a moment, processing what she had just seen.
“A beautiful first day!
The moment, shortly after waking up, it realized I replaced its ears with those of a cat — grandiose.
And a few moments later the noises started to trickle into its mind. What’s that?! and Who’s there?! Very funny.
It took the specimen a while to realize those were its normal roommates. Frantically looking under its bed and in the drawers to find out what might be hiding there. Only to realize those were its old roommates with whom it had been sharing his home for his whole life — mice. And they were everywhere, though a bit farther away than the specimen thought they were. New ears take a while to get used to.
The increased frequency range is working just like I imagined it would.
And then it went out of its room and met its housecat. I think that was the best part. Staring at each other — the cat trying to understand what it’s seeing and the specimen trying to see whether its cat would still recognize it. Too bad its ear control was not quite on point at that time — it was basically yelling at the cat that it’s aggressive and will fight everything coming near. Probably the intended message for everything but its old friend.
I hope the cat comes back. Cute thing. Quite fast when it ran out of the house.
After that a few incidents happened when the specimen was starting machines, but those were pretty lame. The occasional shock at the new sounds.
Let’s see, what else might be interesting to remember for later…?
Ah, I know! The evening. Yes, yes — the evening was great. Not only was the house infested with mice — the garden was teeming with little critters that my little specimen could suddenly hear when the rest of the world was silent. It didn’t close an eye that night!”
After Luna was done talking to herself, making it easier to remember everything she would have to report later, she unpaused the program again to watch the next day. All those cameras and microphones were placed in the house from the very beginning of its existence. There was no need to adjust the surveillance equipment when you gave someone the gift — you could see and hear everything the specimen would be doing for the rest of its, often short, life.
Maybe with different frequencies, though.
Luna was fascinated by what she saw — her first experiment turned out to be a great success. She had already seen the first three days and there were zero suicide attempts.
“An exceptional specimen! I knew it right when I saw it.”
She had searched the company’s database for a whole month for a candidate she deemed useful for her experiments. She was only able to find one when she got access to the whole dataset on the basis that the normal test subjects were not enough for what she was planning. Most of the other researchers would only slightly modify their specimen, while she wanted to try things that were more radical.
“The interaction with plain humans is fascinating. My little specimen is having problems with social interactions due to big differences in the frequency discrimination and interaural time differences.
Cats can naturally hear a much larger range of sounds — at the cost of problems when it comes to discriminating frequencies that are close to one another in frequency. My specimen got the same problems. It was trying to talk to his colleagues and had massive problems understanding what they were saying. The nuances of human speech are interesting when heard through different ears it seems.
I love that the plain humans have to still interact with specimens like they did before the transformation took place. Dispensatia is a great chance to enhance the human race forever. We can test to our heart’s content.
None of my colleagues would have ever thought that replacing the human ears with those of a cat would lead to problems with speech. Let alone when trying to talk itself. But not only did the specimen have problems understanding what others said to it when they were talking just with it — the little specimen also had problems understanding where a voice was in a room.
Normally the interaural time differences would be used to find out when sounds arrive at each human ear and thereby make sure that the human knows where a sound was coming from. But with the cat ears this doesn’t work so well anymore, because it’s only really useful at lower frequencies and cats are not specifically adapted to lower frequencies. Taking away its human ears let to a loss in accuracy when it comes to pinpointing a sound, especially because I couldn’t change the musculature enough to allow for the same movement in the ears as you would see in a normal cat.
Someone was standing right behind the specimen at a party and it would turn left and right to find out who was talking to it — hilarious.”
Luna was jumping up and down due to her barely contained excitement. This was her big chance to get a chance at a territory of her own. A territory where she could experiment as much as she wanted to do. There were only a handful of differently sized territories for employees who proved themselves to be the best of the best. All others had to prove their worth with the occasional single-specimen-experiment like she was doing right now. With the results from her experiment she would soon be among them.
Watching experiments had always fascinated her. As she could accurately remember nearly everything she ever experienced herself she longed for situations that were new and exciting to distract her from the otherwise similar experiences she would have to endure. But experimenting on herself wouldn’t be useful. The risk was far too high, especially when thinking about the kinds of experiments she was planning for the future.
She had this attitude for most of her 27 years on this Earth. And she would probably have it for the rest of her roughly 250 years that were still left. Prolonging the lifespan of humans was one of the basics the company used to persuade politicians to help the company in every way imaginable. And as long as the company was providing the plain population outside of Dispensatia with enough medicine and the promise to keep the peace around the world in order, everything was perfect for everyone. Peace was nearly as easy as prolonging the life — if you could persuade politicians to send people they didn’t want as volunteers to Dispensatia for especially interesting experiments.
Luna was hopping through her dark room that was filled to the brim with old books — she loved books because those old things were all slightly different. Each one had a few stains on different pages. Sometimes she discovered a new font and she loved to find dog-ears that were so different from the other pages.
She dug through a big pile of old paper until she found one that still had a few places where she could write down notes. On her way back to the couch she passed her mirror and not for the first time she wondered what it would be like to give herself the gift.
Maybe she should change her long, brown, straggly hair with the mane of a lion? — Too boring.
How about replacing her pianist fingers with the talons you would find on a bird of prey? — Useless, she couldn’t write anything anymore.
She could follow the new trend and replace her deep blue eyes with robotic ones — but doing what everyone else was doing has never been her style.
…
No interesting ideas. She would have to wait for a better one. One day she would know what she wanted to do. Until then she had to experiment on others as much as she could to find out the consequences of each imaginable gift.
With this thought she got back to her couch, scribbling a few notes for what she might want to do next. Afterwards she continued the video and watched the rest of the available material. A couple of weeks were still left. Then she continued talking to herself to note the most important points.
“Conversations become near impossible for the specimen. It tries to talk and hear in the same way it did before the transformation happened. And there is no sign of getting accustomed to the problems that arise from the differences. The same turning around, the same missing cues in spoken conversations, the same problems with understanding words…
The cat never came back and the problems persisted with other animals. Not enough control over the movement of the new ears.
…
Well, seems like that’s it. The first days were giving me quite some hope.
…
Anyway, that’s more than enough material to convince the higher-ups that I should get my territory. Or at least continue with my experiments. The next idea can easily be done with a single specimen like this one.”
Luna typed the most important results into her mail program and sent a message to one of the employees who was supposed to get her the needed equipment for the next experiment and search for suitable candidates to present to her. She wanted to teach him how to filter out the most useless ones so that she would be able to focus on the important things — experimenting.
— — — — —
The employee was used to a lot. He was working for the company for a few years already after all.
But when he read the mail and watched the material contained in it he nearly threw up.
The mail contained a video showing the last hours of the specimen’s life in a few extracts and some words as instructions from the professor.
— — — — —
The man wanted to go to a park with a friend of his. He needed someone to talk to about all the problems with the genetic manipulation. On their way all dogs barked at him and tried to bite him. Every cat hissed at him until he was out of sight. The humans were trying to get out of his way. His friend wanted to run away like everyone else, but he knew the cameras would catch that and he might be the next one to endure the procedure if he didn’t continue the way he did before the transformation of the poor man who lost his ears and instead got what resembled cat ears.
The man was talking about how he couldn’t sleep at night. How he thought he was losing control over himself. The information was too much for a human being. He was crying when he was talking about how his wife wouldn’t look at him anymore, probably hoping he would die as so many others they knew had already.
Like everyone else he thought that he wouldn’t ever be picked. The chances are 1 to 15. That’s better than Russian Roulette, which is the reason why most people chose this life over the zombie-infested outside countries where groups of rebels were regularly fighting small skirmishes with the local government and MakingTheFuture Inc.’s mercenaries.
Suddenly the ultrasound machines that were used to deter certain animals by starting every few minutes started and the man fell to the ground because of the pain it caused him. Screams of agony were coming out of his mouth, his face distorted by the sudden pain.
Everyone around them looked at the man and saw that he endured the procedure. Most of them had a sorry look on their face, but continued to walk their own way like they were supposed to. The friend could only watch and wait to recover.
When the man tried to run away he entered the underground and realized what the new ears meant once the Metro arrived. The noise was too much for him and he screamed horribly, falling to his knees once again. The people were building a circle around him, trying to look away. Some were staring at the cameras that were everywhere. They couldn’t do anything.
A father was turning his little daughter around and cupping her ears so that she would not hear the screams any more than she had to. He was hoping that he would not be the next victim of the procedure for this act of defiance. The good thing was that children would not be taken in. At least that’s what the company promised.
The man with cat ears tried to run away from the arriving Metro, staggering over the platform with tears obfuscating his view — falling down the platform on the other side. People stared down on the man who was screaming in pain on the tracks, knowing what would happen in the next moment. A few started to cry themselves, but they knew that weren’t supposed to interfere. And they knew that the company knew about this incident. They were everywhere and the cleaning corps was probably already at the upper end of the stairs leading down into the Metro.
The man tried to climb up, crying out for help, although he knew exactly that none of them could do anything. He tried to convince them to help by telling them a story. It was hard to understand, because the ears were impacting his ability to speak.
He didn’t do anything himself the one time he saw someone. A woman, who had endured the procedure. Ready to jump off a bridge. She was looking at him. Begging him to tell her everything will be alright. That all of the pain would end soon if she only fought it.
But he wasn’t supposed to talk to her. She was a stranger who endured the procedure. He quickly turned his gaze away. A few moments later he heard a splash of water and it was still haunting him to this day.
A few people turned around, saying loudly how they forgot something at home so that the microphones in the walls would pick it up.
Then the other Metro arrived.
He was still screaming when it hit him. The video showed everything from different angles, more detailed than you could possibly imagine.
— — — — —
Next one with higher pain tolerance.
L. Tick
