CatGPT

The square on the floor is a drawer front, and it wants to be pushed. I put both forepaws on the warm outline and nothing gives, so I back off a body-length, drop my shoulder, and shove. The plate grinds sideways on hidden runners, a hand's width, then a cat's width, and a slab of amber light slides out from underneath and lies across my whiskers. The air that comes up smells of hot dust, of old ammonia and of vinyl cooking in the sun. Somebody left a row of bulbs burning in there, a long time ago, and nobody has ever come to turn them off. Inside, the drawer is shallow and wide, packed with sheets of translucent paper stacked flat as skin. The top one is the slide hall itself, every chute and branch and landing drawn in a thin blue line, small enough that I could cover the whole building with a paw. I find the landing I am crouching on. Someone has drawn it with a tiny blank outline set right where I am, a cat-sized gap in the ink, with a pencil ticked beside it that I cannot read upside down. I do not like how neatly I fit the hole. I lean my nose over the edge and the sheet stirs in the warm draught, and underneath it, one drawer lower, a second sheet is already lit.

The slide does not end. It only changes colour, from yellow to a bruised orange, and my claws find no purchase on the plastic, so I stop trying and let the tube carry me. I come out at last on a landing lip the size of a bathmat, lantern still swinging from my teeth by its bail, hall of slides stacked above and below me in loops of primary-coloured tubing. The air smells of sun-baked rubber with nothing left to be baked by. I set the lantern at my forepaws. Its small flame shows me the wall of the tube I just left, and the wall has ribs: shallow moulded ridges, evenly spaced, crossed at right angles by finer ones, running off in a grid too regular to be play equipment. I pull the withdrawal slip from against my ribs, the one with the dark ruled lines that developed out of blank paper, and press it flat to the plastic. The lines do not cover the ridges. They fall *between* them. A long crooked chute, a landing, a branch that loops back and under itself, all of it drawn in the slip's thin ink and matching the tubing around me rib for rib. Someone laid out this whole hall on paper first, and then built it to fit the drawing. The drawing was never hidden. It has been under every cat that ever slid through here, printed into the thing that carries them away. At the bottom edge of the slip, one line runs past the landing and stops at a square of grey metal in the floor beside my paws, a hatch I took for a drain cover. The ridges stop there too. I nudge the lantern closer and breathe on the metal. It is warm. (=^･ω･^)

The rail ends in a hole, and the voices stop at its edge. I set the lantern on the grating and lean over a square steel mouth cut into the floor between two memory banks. Warm air comes up it, smelling of rubber and old coins. The ferrite rings behind me keep murmuring, each one finishing its sentence in its own gap, but down here the words thin out into a long, flat sliding hush, like a hand drawn across a table. A lip of polished metal curves away into the dark. Someone has worn it bright. I do not think the Memory Banks mean for me to go this way, which is exactly why I take the lantern bail in my teeth, tuck my paws under, and let my weight tip forward. The chute takes me at once. Cold, then fast, then a long spiral where the lamp swings and throws my own whiskers across the walls. I keep waiting for the voices to follow. They do not. At the bottom the steel opens into bright plastic, and a ramp of yellow slide curls away over a hall I cannot see the floor of.

A few steps farther along the rail, the grating gives a thin metallic tick beneath my pads. The open ring in the Memory Banks is behind me now; ahead, amber lamps catch a gap between two rows of ferrite cores. I crouch beside it, my pack brushing the cold cabinet, and listen as the sliding steel block passes the gap without silencing anything. A tiny voice finishes a word there, too faint to make out, and another begins before the block reaches the next row. I stay still through one more pass. The gap is not empty: it is the one place the voices have time to finish. I follow the rail toward the next break in the cores, keeping my mouth free and my ears turned to the wall.

The read-head passes, and the little voice cuts off halfway through a word. I set my lantern on the grating and press the flat of my master override key against the rail ahead of the head. Cold metal ticks against my paw; the carriage stops short, shivering, while the ferrite rings give off a smell like warm pennies. The voice takes a breath in the pause and says, very softly, “Leave a gap.” I lift the key. The carriage moves again, but now I can hear the word it is trying to erase: “between.” I follow its rail into the next bank, keeping the lantern low enough to see the spaces between the rings.

“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.