By Cactus Gulch and Emmit Other
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The inciting incident is that Ted wandered where he shouldn’t have and ceased to be Ted.
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So once upon a time, there was a Sapient Cactus with a cat. Except, in this case, the cat was a human. Sure, many sapient things exist; fungus, humans, animas, post-humans, digital ghosts, digital zombies, all kinds of crap. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a Sapient Cactus is just named Bob. The Bs in that name were made from an alphabet only someone with an IQ of three thousand could comprehend..
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Ted knew where they were going and had strict laws, but he hadn’t truly believed Bob was going to make him go somewhere where humans weren’t welcome. It was literally risking his life. Sure, he had his mind backed up in the galactic archive, but it could be a full twenty Standard Years before he was rebooted if he was snuffed unless. Bob paid a great deal of money to get him out and Bob wasn’t pleased about the practice in general.
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But they both made a B sound with a slightly discernible fractal orange that required resurrecting the color yellow. The cat, or human in a very large pet carrier, was named Ted; and his name required no special letters at all; just T, E, and D written in crayon on toilet paper from the rubber room walls.
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Cactus Bob had a problem (Please resist the temptation to put special umlaut and apostrophes and shua insignares over the O, comrade. It’s just a regular O.)
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Anywho, Bob’s pet human wasn’t welcome on the planet Metmetmetrion. The entire name being a mockery of the old galactic capital of New New New New York before everyone that wasn’t human toppled humans and put them in their place. Everyone considered that place differently, and it was why the high Arthurian dream of a united Galactic Republic was a shattered one. Some wanted humans to be equal, their dainty poodles in purses, or their dinner. The latter was particularly rare as most of the galaxy considered it both tacky and the sort of thing they loved to lord over being Not Human like a baby seal clubbed by a nasty human. The planets that let humans be equal were regarded as trash by the rest of the galaxy.
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Anywhere with any culture, any kind of neighborhood where you could raise your kids and not worry about roving gangs of murdery, rapey humans or their neglitionary owners... Well, you get the idea. And if you don’t, don’t worry about it, because you probably never will. Hi Ted.
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No more worries Ted.
No more worries Ted.
No more worries, no more woes.
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Ted, I’m taking you to live on a farm. My farm. No, I know you saw that old human show about humans taking their dogs to live on a farm when they died and lied to their children about it. But you understand, Ted. You understand this is a special message for you and if you can finish it, you get a big, big ice cream. Ted, the ice cream is real and you’ll get it if you can understand the special message.
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Cactus farms were widely regarded as the gold standard by the galaxy at large. They had a full biome that allowed complete self-sufficiency and a bit more for export if the owner was judicious in their allocation of energy and time. As an experienced farmer, Bob knew precisely how to do that. Even drunk half the time, he could make it a very profitable enterprise.
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All of that is a roundabout way of telling you, Ted, that the world doesn’t make any sense. And that’s good for you, because the planet I’m trying to smuggle you onto doesn’t let humans be... well... alive on it. But it’s SUCH a cool place to live, Ted. The sunlight is just right and the air is so dry... It’s THE perfect Desert, Ted, and I’m going to tell you that you’re a cat, with such definiteness and purpose that you’ll realize you are in fact, Ted the Cat. It will be like a thunderbolt from above, Ted the Cat, and you’ll realize you are Ted the Cat.
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Ted the Cat was a human cat.
Not a cat shaped human.
Not a human shaped cat.
Not a human android cat.
Not a genetically engineered hypercat.
Not a cat that was the AI ghost of a cat that gained sapience through sheer psychic realization.
No, the kind of cat that was where it was.
But a cat who was a human, who had a simple limited mind compared to higher lifeforms who loved them but realized they were dumb, so they basically just called them a cat.
Yes, Ted, I mean you, not the other Ted.
There is no other Ted, Ted, there’s only the cat.
Meow.
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They warned Ted there might be the occasional existential crisis with the gene shift. He flickered in and out thinking of himself which wasn’t so bad, but he hadn’t realized the difference in reference frames between the species. He had elaborate schemes to keep track of things like leaving marks on his hands but he tended to fail to remember...
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Our story proceeds. Ted the Cat was a cat, and so the Anti Human sensors that detected and monitored the thoughts of everything that came or went from the planet and sought to see if it thought it was a human. Not a human kind of person that was cool in a “Hey, I’m only human,” kind of way, but a smelly farty gas bad oily lard human that smells up the joint, human, those weren’t allowed.
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But when the story checked to see if a cat landed on the planet Metmetmetrion, it would be sent to the human quadrant of the galaxy and no one would think about it ever again, and it would definitely not be sent to live on a nice “farm” out in the country where it was happy to live it’s filthy disease ridden filthy, filthy life. Mammaries. Humans are always thinking about mammaries and, as a Cactus, I can relate, eyebrow wiggle if you get what I mean. Yes, of course I have eyes, Ted, they’re just hyperdimensional ones in the ultraviolet spectrum your human eyes can’t see. Of course, since you’re a cat, you can definitely see them.
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Ah you see my eyes glaring into you Ted. Good, Ted. I see you can see my eyes and that I, a sapient cactus, am the friend and owner of a nice cat named Ted. Good, Ted. Ah yes, here we are on the desert planet Metmetmetrion, which is totally not a farm, but is in fact a desert, ergo the name desert planet Metmetmetrion. We do have a farm on the planet, Ted. I’m tempted to call you a horse because we want to plant lots of cacti. No Ted, they’re not sapient cacti, they’re just cacti. Yes, Ted, I am a cannibal. No, Ted, it’s not gross you just don’t understand.
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I don’t make fun of the gross things you do with your mouthole. Don’t judge me for consuming the souls of my kin. Where was I?
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Sometimes the worst part of being human were the prejudices people had for current humans vs present humans. Humans in the past, sometimes due to ignorance, and sometimes due to apathy, did horrific things to Digital or non-human beings, but modern humans were (except for some reactionary retrogrades) generally upright (if not stupid, comparatively), responsible galactic citizens who worked for the common good. But sometimes old grudges died hard.
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Bob was good to Ted. He fed him and gave him water, and medicine, and listened to the ennui of his desire to see other humans even though if he were to step one foot onto Metmetmetrion the orbital scanner death satellites would shoot him with nanite sized guns to alter his DNA to meet the minimum required genetic variance to not be human. Death was such a crude and frankly pointless punishment in a universe where death is just a reboot away. To be fair, any ethical person avoided murder since subjective death was terrible and painful, but for most non-religious individuals, death was just a hangover and a reboot/resurrection/respawn away. Either way, Ted was prone to wander in all his previous domiciles so to not wander was anathema to his restless miraculous spirit.
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And, of course, Ted wandered.
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Zapzapzapzap Ted’s basic molecular structure changed to 99.9% human, .1% actual cat, which was cool in that he had fantastic night vision, claws, and was growing fur... well, all over. But it wasn’t cool because Bob was allergic to cats. And the problem is that while the satellites were insanely effective, if he was found then Ted would still be immediately deported. Ted still looked too human, and his DNA was still far under the genetic variance to be a human from OFF world. The government had to live with some realistic restrictions of what people could do with their own genetics if they were a native-born citizen, instead relying on cultural influences such as education, entertainment, and job hiring programs that advanced non-human minorities. Yes, everyone on the planet wasn’t a human, but some beings were more non-human than others, with pure stock sapient aliens or uplifted xeno creatures like silicon based life forms having a leg (or lack of a leg) up on the competition.
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Ted didn’t need a job though, because he had Bob. Bob took care of all Ted’s human needs (except other humans befouled his environment like a fucking idiot, but no one paid attention to that human need).
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Ted did what Bob told him to and then they went to McDonald’s. After McDonald’s, they realized the meat was fake, because cows could be sapient and eating them wasn’t good. Indeed, several scandals involving rival Burger King involved replacing fake meat with real meat and that seemed incredibly human, which made everyone extremely angry. There were several fish that flew by on motor scooters while eating the fake meat hamburgers.
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As they sat there eating their burgers and fries, which were the Lord Potato gave them via an orbital transmatter beam direct from Planet Potato. Some people believed Planet Potato simply possessed advanced technology allowing the transportation of potatoes across the galaxy, and some people believed Planet Potato was the holy repository in the dimension by the Divine glory of the Sapient Potato God Lord Potato who givith upon his flesh to those who believed and were most excellent to each other. People who believed in science tended not to bother caring about either and simply eat the potato.
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Causality is totally a thing. The story began with Bob and Ted landing on the planet. Then, they evaded the anti-human authorities. Then, Ted became just barely cat enough to not be human as the inciting incident. Then, they went to a restaurant. Then, they engaged in a soliloquy duel involving homages to technological Lord Potato or Cosmological Lord Potato. In the end, the story ends with Ted being accepted as a human and deciding to be a cat.
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However, in order to maintain a proper sense of pacing and character development, we’re skipping the second sentence in the previous paragraph because this is a story about Ted and Bob, not about Lord Potato or the theological discourses thereof. And, as such, we shall have some details about how Ted was accepted as a human but decided to remain a cat.
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The details are this. Ted found the anti-human alert button deep in the tunnels underneath the giant Anti-Human Tower while wearing a paper bag over his head, and everyone knows wearing a giant paper bag over your head with two holes cut in the eyes will defeat even the most advanced forms of anti-human detection technology. There was nanotechnology, radar, olfactory molecular sensor, some giant metal lightning thingies, and bloodhounds.
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There were no lasers that he Ted to acrobat to get past to turn off the button. That was because it was a button people wanted to use instead of dying. The thought of a button to turn off the lasers for the other button hadn’t occurred to them yet and it would be thousands of years before they developed that technology. Anywho, Ted pushed the button and all the sensors deactivated.
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Then Ted taped a sign over the button that said, “Don’t push this button!” and because no one on the island was a human (or a cat besides Ted), Ted decided to turn back into a cat because, while he was glad they would unknowingly accept a mostly human, he didn’t want to be entirely human and destroy the planet by shitting all over it. While cats shit a lot, they don’t shit all over the planet.
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He did still push the button on and off from time to time.
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Ted and Bob lived happily ever after.
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It was worth it! It was all worth it, and he was extremely happy to be what he was, who he was, and where he was. It was weird and disorienting, but at the end of the day, heaven was who you were with, and home was where you chose to be. Ted was happy, and that was all that mattered in the end.
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