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Ghost Cat Hackers
he catches the movement out of the corner of his right eye, almost turns, recognises the shadow and pauses to think, seriously, about whether he should put out a bowl of milk or not this time; set out a place for it to sleep - sleep? the concept of a ghost cat needing to sleep fills him with horror, for he believed that death was the sleep from which you never needed to wake. aside from the metaphysical problems there's the responsibility; he'd have to share his affection again, even if the demands of a ghost cat were few. just below those of a fish and just above those of a screen-saver. but occasionally you'd catch it trying to sun itself in a thin slat of winter light, time faded sunbeams barely lighting the dark wood floor. the ghost cat shows only as a skeletal blur in the corner, an irregularity in the air. less obvious than those spectacularly neon Lucasfilm apparitions that fantasy cinema shows us. you have to know what to look for, and when you see it and know it... you get a chill that you can't find anywhere else. and the cat turns to look up at you and for a second all you can see are two softly glowing leaf-shapes with dark centres. as if they were reflecting sudden torchlight. and you realise: this isn't something they knew. how would cats realise that their eyes reflect? this is something that *people* knew. that they might be sourced externally, but in reality: ghosts were inside you. on the outside - or rather at the *interface*, the section of the brain where external images are turned into things we can understand (the most abused part of the brain as far as neurohackers are concerned. everyone leaves their damned grafitti in there. who remembers the classic "Wang pisses in toilets" [1] ?) - ghost-cats are desperate hitchikers holding up signs, Next Town, Up The Coast, Get Me Out of Here and I Don't Remember You and Ghost Cat and The Goddess I Used To Worship and Ghost Cat and you might see the last one. so they use that because it works. you let them in. they attach a pointer to you and snuggle into your brain, looking for the freeware and the downloads area. they hang around long enough to soak up an idea of what kind of a sap you are and then they change themselves subtly to look more appealing. trying to trigger a favourable response, looking for a firm place in your mind to plant that hook. they aren't going to stay forever but they like to give the impression that they could if they wanted to. for some reason the Ghost Cat archetype is strongly represented in human minds. it hardly ever provokes reactions of rejection except in the most fervid moggiephobes. they don't want much. a few spare cycles here and there. run one or two background tasks, nothing major, maybe shave a few points off your REMs, give you unusually detailed dreams with dozens of minor characters that seem more real than you (oh and we're going to be running our corporate logo raytraces tonight, so you may want to take some sedatives. or drink lots of coffee). a bit of ego loss, no harm there, nothing a young citizen like you can't make up in deliberately exaggerated affect or lies or drugs or joining an obviously offensive subculture or name-dropping or sleeping around. it's only a problem if you get fingered for an easy mark and the whole damn family latch onto you like Mr and Mrs Lamprey and their seventeen irish children. you end up sleeping twenty hours a day, running their goddamned routines, sorry about that barbed wire nightmare last night, old chap - had some damn *numbers* i needed to crunch! and you wake up hung over, dehydrated, feeling fucking awful. just enough time to cash another bad cheque get some food into your body pay the damn rent back home you didn't get the vitamins damn you next time okay fine. right. okay. you sleep the rest of the day, your brain running 250 percent overclocked, radiating heat, traceries of arteries down the non-dreaming side of your face standing out like estuaries and tributaries on infra-red. your brain is wearing out, slowly, by erosion, like a jumbo jet made out of wooden clothespegs. the faster you go, the more pegs fall off the edges. you're crowded off in some tiny corner of your own brain while the new neighbors fight over where they're going to sell your spleen and how they could get a better price for both eyes in Adis Ababa than for one each in the states. when you've been invaded by that lot (there isn't any other name for that clade - what would we call them? suicidal poltergeists selling victims' organs? what kind of a dumb-ass acronym is SPSVO? this is strictly from Jerry Springer), basically, you are fucked. unless you've installed a decent Cobain. ("Cobains", or "Shutguns": software that represents active processess graphically. the user selects several of the processes; the program cuts net access and uses a hook into the BIOS to kill the unselected processes. drastic form of security breach management.) the moral of this story is, i guess, when you see a ghost cat, ignore it and it'll go next door eventually. because if you invite it in it's like leaving your front door unlocked, psychic-invasion-wise. where the hell did you think that meme came from? the one about cats suffocating people as they sleep by sitting on their faces? *they* don't do it, but their ghosts do. cross-species zombie energy vampires from outer space, man. i can't think of anything more ridiculous, unless it's cross-species zombie energy vampire RABBITS from outer space. and! there is no way of determining their motives. good or evil don't even enter into it. they might be avenging ancestors who were killed by your father. they might be hosting a convention and they want to run a couple of their avatars on your system; yes, they're playing Quake (or whatever the Ghost Cat equivalent might be) and your brain is the server. you understand why some people get a bit nervous at this point. wierd feeling, having things that were, if not entire ghosts, at least aspects of dead people -having them log into your brain and check their email. that something with all the depth of a faded sepia photograph of a long-dead pet cat actually has anything to SAY in email. despite this it reassures your sense of Newtonian mechanics, of being a tiny material cog in a universal machine that encompassed both the material and the spiritual. the human-bone connected to the ghost-cat-bone, the ghost-cat connected to the ghost-mouse, the ghost-mouse connected to the ghost-cheese, hear the word of the lord!
i'm sorry, this has just become too pretentious even for me. jesus, i'm going to have to go listen to some TISM, or eat lots of Pez.
[1] "Wang Pisses In Toilets" is an inscrutible, ancient and unusually persistent piece of grafitti which can be seen between Mitcham and Nunawading stations in Melbourne. heading towards the city, look out of the left side of the train.
(i wrote this while stoned, listening to the Cocteau Twins' "Four Calendar Cafe" and occasionally glancing at an italian bestiality video which was running backwards.)
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