A mess at the edge of the universe

The morality of a truly all-powerful and omnipotent God has been an object of significant debate between religious scholars and academic philosophers. Those on the side of the almighty, particularly those of the Judeo-Christian variety, contend that an all-powerful-all-seeing god is, by definition, a moral being because his actions work to further an ethereal, eternal plan that only God knows. Their logic further argues that God, maker of all things heaven, earth, in-between, and beyond, is the standard-bearer for morality purely because he created the damn thing and should well know what is and isn’t moral. 

The philosophers, on the other hand, examine morality relative to the human experience and argue that, even if God existed, we have no way of knowing his intentions because he really isn’t in the habit of sharing those. They’ll argue that, since human pain exists, God cannot be both all powerful and all-knowing, for if he were he would certainly snuff out all suffering as a kind and moral entity. But clearly, since child starvation still occurs and baristas continue to burn the milk in the philosophers’ lattes, God, they conclude, is immoral. 

This line of debate frequently provokes a rebuttal from the religious scholars that goes along the lines of, “God works in mysterious ways.” The philosophers are, accordingly, quick to retort that such an argument is “Complete horseshit” and “A logical cop-out.” 

And so, the debate has continued for as long as there have been religious scholars and philosophers. This story though, tells of how a man, neither an apostle nor an academic, finally settled this age-old dispute with the help of a cat. A stray cat at that, who guided the man on a journey through space, time, the abstruse, and a rather narrow gap. 

~

Marlin couldn’t fathom how he was cleaning up cat vomit in the middle of a hospital. His puzzlement didn’t stem from a question of the cat’s capacity to vomit in a hospital. Indeed, he felt that cats on the whole were rather capable of vomiting wherever they pleased, be it on furniture, on carpet, in houses, or on surprised caretakers. Furthermore, he estimated that vomiting in hospitals was not an altogether uncommon event given the relatively high rates of upset tummies housed within the facility’s walls. No, what bewildered Marlin was not the cat’s capability of vomiting in a hospital, but rather the probability of a cat vomiting in a hospital, given that the presence of any feline in a hospital in Fremont, Ohio was exceedingly uncommon. 

Puzzled as he was, what was undeniable was that the pile in question came from a cat. Marlin deduced as much from the hairball with intermixed, partially digested bits of kibble present. His suspicious were confirmed from the faint mew he heard from behind as he was examining the bilious excrement. The man turned, his eyes scanning up the hall to find the sound’s source. His gaze landed on a black and white tuxedoed cat who was staring back with beady-yellow eyes. The cat was sitting in the threshold of a door that opened slightly ajar into a dark room. 

Marlin regarded the cat, and the cat regarded Marlin, for a moment in silence. Marlin stared at the cat’s eyes which ceded no signs of fear, pleasure, interest, or disdain with regard to the man. In fact, the cat appeared indifferent to the man’s existence and disinterested in the man’s effort to clean up the vomit it had left in the hall minutes earlier. The cat ceased its survey of Marlin to lick its front paw, wipe its face, and stretch before turning to walk into the dark room. 

“Well I’ll be damned,” Marlin said to himself. He pulled his glasses off briefly to rub his eyes. “I guess I need to go find him.” 

He entered the room and fumbled his hand along the wall to find the light switch. Finally, his fingers found the switch and flipped it on. The room was filled with aseptic white light from panels above. Looking around the room, Marlin observed that it was filled with floor-to-ceiling stacks of bankers boxes that he assumed were full of either billing or medical records on their way to a scanner or shredder. Another mew announced the location of the tuxedo cat who was again staring at Marlin, this time from around a stack of boxes.

“Gotcha,” Marlin declared as he started walking toward the cat. The cat turned and started walking away from the man nonchalantly, deeper into the labyrinth of boxes. The man rounded the corner into the first passage and reached down with both hands to clasp the feline around its midsection. Marlin’s coordination, having always been stupendously deficient, failed him in this moment causing him to grasp the cat firmly by the tail with both hands. 

Marlin froze in this moment knowing that he’d committed a grave error. He had never been a cat-person per-se, but he harbored no ill will toward the feline species either. This said, he knew that among the many established truths of the world, he had violated the one paramount rule of human-cat interaction. He stared for a moment to gauge how the cat would respond to the offense. A moment passed before the cat turned its head slowly, and stared at the man grasping its tail with every bit of aloofness as it had conveyed this point. Then, the cat did something Marlin never could have expected. 

“Fine,” the cat spoke in an annoyed, masculine voice, “Come along if you must.”  

~

Throughout time, humans have consistently sat in amazement as cats squeeze through tight spaces in a way that defies our understanding of the physical world. Cats seem to possess an unnatural ability to morph and crawl through gaps wholly at odds with their resting volumes. Modern veterinary medicine would conclude that a floating collarbone enabled such feats, an explanation that many cat caretakers decry as mundane and “Far too scientific”.

What Marlin would soon discover is that since before the dawn of time, cats have possessed the ability to transform their being to allow them to travel through every conceivable dimension, and not less than a few unconceivable dimensions as well. To humans, this manifests as the ability to squeeze through nooks and crannies with apparent ease; mainly because we fail to observe anything outside of three dimensional space. But the scope of their power spans the ability to shrink to two or one or nil-dimensional space or expand to fourth, fifth, or quadrillionth dimensional space as needed. In fact, one popular story in cat lore tells of one Mr. Tibbles the Third who, on a bet, napped in the sixty-seven-and-one-fifth dimension for a period equal to 95 eons earthtime and managed to return to his home in Springfield in time for supper.

In addition to the ability to traverse space and time with ease, cats also happen to be highly intelligent creatures who have managed to put on a clever ruse that duped humanity into being their servants. Throughout history, cats have planted subtle tidbits of scientific knowledge in clear view of their human slaves as a means to further their own comfort. It should be no surprise that some of the greatest minds in human history (think Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein) existed in direct service to cats. In recent years, many humans began to suspect that their darling despots were more sentient than previously believed. This led the cat community to run a successful disinformation campaign driven largely by internet memes that placated the human population and preoccupied them with funny videos. 

“I did not expect this,” thought Marlin as the tuxedo tomcat pulled him quickly across the floor of the file room with his tail. Later, Marlin would realize just how much of an understatement this actually was. 

The cat darted across the file room with Marlin in tow and leapt toward a narrow gap in the boxes. Marlin braced for the impact and inevitable pummeling by multiple boxes full of records. The cat’s leap into the air carried Marlin upwards. He opened his eyes at the last moment to see the boxes bend and distort around the cat in mid-air. It was as if the room suddenly existed on an elastic sheet and the cat was a steel ball thrown forcefully onto it. Suddenly, Marlin and the cat disappeared with a blip and the room and boxes sprang back to place. 

~

When Marlin opened his eyes again, he could only see a thin black line in front of him. He was pretty sure he was still dragging behind the cat as some part of his consciousness registered that he was grasping a furry tail. After examining the line for a moment, the man deduced that relative length of the black line either direction from midline told him the cat was moving left or right. 

“You better hold on back there,” a voice said, “I’m sure you’d hate to be left in the second dimension.” 

This piece of information proved to be too much for poor Marlin who let out a high-pitched scream. 

“Shhhhh!” scolded the line in front of him, “Two-dimensional beings cannot perceive your three-dimensional self. To that tribe of polygons off to the right, that little fuss of yours sounds like the rapture!” 

Marlin kept screaming in spite of this news. The totality of this experience, from the talking cat to the interdimensional travel confused him far beyond that which the vomit in the hospital hallway could. To add to his struggle, he’d never before conceived of polygons living in tribes or having the faculty to hear sound. 

“Alright, fine!” the voice exclaimed with exasperation, “I’ll leap us out of here. And to think I hoped for a quiet stroll!” With that, a screaming Marlin watched as the line in front of him contorted into a spiral. Then once again, the man and cat disappeared with a blip.

Meanwhile, two stoic parallelograms prepared a group of consisting of squares, hexagons, and one rather obtuse triangle for the end of the world. 

~

When Marlin opened his eyes again, he saw the moon pass quickly beneath him as he sped toward deep space. He stopped screaming and his mouth fell open as he looked around. The man was astonished to find that he could see stars, asteroids, and plumes of gas both near and far. He passed through nebulas in an instant and could see both the outside and insides of entire planets at once. 

He watched as a white dwarf star expanded to red giant and then condensed into an ancient sun. As he passed through the sun, he reached out with his right hand to grab at the stardust. “You’ll want to be sure to hold on,” the cat’s voice echoed from all around, “Right now my tail anchoring you in the fourth dimension is the only thing providing a boundary layer between your hand and that burning star.” 

Marlin’s hand snapped back to grab the invisible tail in front of him. 

“Not too tight!” the cat barked, “It’s a tail not a tube of toothpaste.” 

“Why can’t I see you?” Marlin asked weakly.

“Ahh, yes,” the cat replied less annoyed, “You see, my form changes to allow me entrance to and exit from the dimension I occupy. You, on the other hand, are rather fixed as a three dimensional object that is permitted to pass through dimensions by the flow void I create in my wake.”

Marlin’s head was positively spinning by the talk of dimensions, flow voids, and boundary layers, but he knew better than to interrupt. 

“You can’t see me,” the cat continued, “For the same reasons that any three-dimensional being cannot see a fourth-dimensional one. It would be like asking a shadow to describe its tree!”  

“Here we are,” the cat suddenly pivoted. Marlin looked around and realized they were no longer travelling through stars or over planets. In all directions, Marlin was surrounded by the vacuum of nothingness. 

“Deep breath now,” the cat directed, “It’ll be cold but we’ll only be here for a moment. Again, don’t let go, or you’ll be stranded beyond the edge of your universe and eons before its birth.” 

Marlin nodded vigorously and adjusted his grip to the invisible fuzzy tail in front of him. Suddenly, the cat reappeared, and Marlin noticed they were no longer moving. He shivered and noticed he felt colder than he’d ever felt before. The cat looked back at the man with its piercing yellow eyes. 

“You’ll be repulsed by what you’re about to see,” the cat’s voice echoed in Marlin’s head, “I’m not bothered but I can imagine you’ll be. I’m not sorry.” With that, the cat retched several times before expelling a glob of bile and a hairball that floated lazily in the vacuum. The cat licked its lips and then rubbed its face with both front paws. 

Marlin stared at the blob of puke with both horror and fascination. The drops and strands of bile reminded him of the nebulae he had passed through moments ago. And the liquid orbited the ball of hair in the center like planets around a sun. “Consider yourself lucky,” the cat said to the nearly frozen man, “You’re the first human to watch the birth of a universe.” Marlin looked back at the hairball to see it had started spinning and was gaining speed. The orb then started to glow red, then yellow, then bright white. 

“Hang on now,” the cat advised, “We don’t want to be burned to crisp.” With that, the cat turned away from spinning white orb and prepared himself to leap. Marlin, teeth chattering and nearly blue from the cold, was whipped around and found his back to the orb. The heat from the spinning sphere warmed his skin and he looked behind to watch the orb shrink to a singularity. Suddenly, the cat sprang into a leap as the singularity exploded. The blast curved and bent around the man and cat and then the pair once again disappeared with a blip.

~

Marlin felt the cat fling him through the air to the other end of the hospital file room. The man crashed into and toppled a tower of bankers boxes before sliding to the floor. Marlin layed on the ground and moaned for a moment as towers of file boxes fell like dominos around him. The cat jumped onto Marlin’s chest as the last box crashed to the floor. Marlin regarded the cat and the cat regarded Marlin for another moment, in silence. Then Marlin reached up and gingerly rubbed the cat on his head. The cat, seemingly approving of the gesture, closed his eyes and purred. 

So closes the story of the man who followed a cat beyond the veil and through the cosmos, and learned the humble origins of all things. Namely, that the heavens, the earth, and everything in-between and beyond owes its existence to a wet hairball spat into nothingness. And in the years that followed, Marlin realized that “God”, which is how he started referring to the cat, was neither a moral or immoral being. God was simply a cat, who was indifferent toward the human experience, its shrines, and cathedrals but who graciously accepted headrubs and cans of tuna when he pleased. 

Of course, this revelation did nothing to keep the philosophers and religious scholars from bickering.