The Diamond Island

Random encounter time! K and I drive into the shuttlecraft parking module and grab our civilization training gear, when lo and behold, we have a critter call! Slightly bony, gray haired kitty announces his/her low fuel gage and projects that psionic command line letting you know if its not happening now, you’re dead meat! Such encounters get added to your lifetime RSS feed when you come under the province of a cat’s karmic lessons. Yup, there’s our very own cat responsibility in the window silently meowing. Yeah, thanks for letting the rogue traders know where the soft touches are.

At first, I think its smokey, our nickname for the local cat constable for the neighborhood up the hill. Might well be, in which case, way to hook up with the protection racket, purr puff! Kitty is friendly, vocal, and affectionate. Yup, pulling out all the bonuses for the Beg Roll on us. Ha! The first meow knocked out the shields and put me on auxiliary power. No worries there, nagging hungry stomach that is the cat uber-psychic “now” of feline study on earth. I pass the retina scan and open the supply lines for a hit of the expensive vet stuff. K distracts the pit stop kitty with pets and praise (humans have a few desperate measures that can sometimes be relied upon to work, or at least reassure us that something is happening).

This paw-puff knows what time it is. The meow-bombing ceases, food is calmly assimilated into main reactor, and mandatory licking of mouth commences. Without any further ado, kitty powers up disruptors and goes back to whatever appointed quest or neighborhood duties may be pressing. See ya next time! Hey, this racket has been getting these creatures by for thousands of years. I don’t see natural selection weeding this behavior out with a ten-foot pole any time soon. Next, feed the cats that, you know, actually live with us. Just another night in the maintenance of inter-species alliances, I suppose.

Next morning, as I’m setting up the recycle pod for the local truck feeding, I see a white and gray cat in our neighbor’s yard, munching contentedly on catnip I swear wasn’t growing there before, but of course its reality change 22-732 and its been there all along. Whether it’s a change in the Matrix or the local cloaking device is down for repairs today, how would I know? I don’t make monkeys; I just play one on earth. The cat looks at me and chooses at that moment to munch dramatically to emphasize how lucky I am that there’s more than one fueling station. Hrm. I guess this is what in cat free trade practices is known as “opening new markets for exploitation”.

So, what’s on the slab for tonight’s dinner, you ask? Well, lately the dinner manufacturing process has been receiving a variety of randomly created vegetables from the garden. Today’s beam-aboard material is lots of jalapeno peppers, and boy do I love the heat produced by these puppies! I dialed into my brain stem and that old reliable chili manifestation visualized itself for my tantalization. Hey, is that the buck-buck of helpless chicken patties? Yes! Victory is mine. Still have the pesto-goodness from the previous night to rely upon, and there’s that vegetable soup experiment K made as a secondary backup. I’m tellin’ ya, when you make your Cook Roll (and making your Garden Roll adds that bonus), everything comes up videos.

Of course, when I whiff that Roll, then its time to order up the community-pool wheel of taste. Mrm. Grease and processed material made by human misery or robot slavery. Yeah, the beat-down is part of the equation. Sometimes the land of android invasion requires you to rely on that rat-in-a-box, because you’re too tired from blasting away at the pincer-bots and gorgonoids to think about how you’ll plot coordinates for the refueling stop to restore your body’s health bar. Eesh! Thank goodness I put some experience points into getting Cook and Garden on my character sheet. It’s a sharing, cooperative work for K and I.

The battles against the potato beetles, the gnats dive-bombing my ocular mechanisms, the shaking of my fist at the cousin of the Caddyshack gopher as I find another tomato skin left right where I can find it at the dramatically appropriate time. The confrontation with the earth and her feral friends teaches wisdom, gets my head in the right place, and surprises me with the tasty manifestations of plant reproductive rackets. We take it back to the honeycomb hideout and it makes for a few more bonus points when the meal gets made. Making it yourself is one degree of better. Making it yourself with your own produce, well that rocks it to the crypt!