The cat

My mother keeled over at her office desk and died five days ago, I just found out. Apparently, it had taken so long to find her because of the holidays. Workers had barely returned to the office yesterday and by then, the smell had already permeated through the thin walls. My mother always put her work over everything else. She always said that the future of automation was far more important than a birthday, or a graduation, or saying hi early in the morning before disappearing the whole day.

I was about to board my shuttle to work when I got the call. They wanted me to clean out my mother’s office because the new Chief Executive had been chosen, and he needed the space. Conflicting emotions flew through my head, because it had been three years since I last heard my mother’s voice, five since the last time we had seen face to face, and more than twenty since I stopped even calling her “mom”. 

For you see, when I was a kid, I had the most beautiful cat. She was so skinny, had white hair, and blue eyes, and never had a clue where she stood. My cat was born with a terribly functioning heart; It did half the job that a regular heart would. I remember when she was barely a kitten, my mom sent me on an autocab to get the poor thing checked after she sneezed, and a streak of blood shot from her nose.

Her heart is too big, they said. She won’t live past the year, they said. They also told me they could put her to sleep right then and there. I grabbed her bony figure and brought her back home. She lived for five more years in ignorantly happy bliss. You could see it in her eyes, she was there, but not really. She would stare at you with a vacant glare, which became more evident when her blue eyes slowly turned gray as cataracts clouded her lenses over the years. 

One morning, our service bot woke me up for school, and she wasn’t sleeping on my bed as she usually did. Instead, she was lying dead in front of the doorway to the study. My mother had left one of her machines running, and when she did, it made this very noisy and steady 'tac tac tac'— a sharp, rhythmic sound like metal tapping erratically against a hard surface.  I was very used to it, but my cat always became anxious whenever it filled the house. “Did you hear that?” I would tell her during the nights, and she would respond with a blank stare and a soft meow. 

I cried that day, probably the most I have ever cried. I really loved that cat.

My mom felt very guilty after that, maybe because she thought she killed my cat by overstimulating her or because she made her die alone and not with me. This is mere speculation, she never actually said these things to me, but I could tell. What she did do, was bring home a spent metal carcass of a product gone wrong from her work the very next day. She said pushed me away, ordered the service bot to tend to me, and locked herself in the study. ‘Tac tac tac’ I heard all night.

By morning, there was this horrifying four-legged creature staring at me from the foot of the bed. It was frightening, it was– cold. Cold like when I touched my cat’s unmoving body on the floor, just before the service bot unceremoniously scooped her up and took her away.

My mother didn’t want to get rid of it. She worked all night on it, see. It can do this, it can do that. Gave me nightmares, that’s what it did. For years, I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Even now, I wake up to that sound and that thing, on top of my chest, making it hard to breathe and staring with ominous, crystalline eyes. Then I wake up again. I never knew what she did with it. She just scolded me for not being grateful and ordered the service bot to take it away. 

Her office was on the topmost floor of a tall building towering over the rest at the center of the city. I was given permission to visit it after closing hours, in fact, it would be preferred so as not to disturb work, apparently.

I arrived when the sky was already dark. The massive lobby was empty, except for a lonely service bot at the other end of the reception desk. “Good– Night– Mis– turrr Cas– tor,” it greeted me, slowly turning its head as it followed my moves to the back of the lobby. “Secc– ond– elevatorrr, last flo– o– oor,” it mentioned. 

It had been a very long time since I last visited my mother in her office, but I still remembered the way. The last time I came, people kept coming and going, bringing different bot parts and my mother kept turning them down. I was told to stay tucked in the corner so as not to get in the way of “very important work”. 

The elevator dinged, the doors opened and there I was right in front of those big oak doors. I felt back home, facing the closed study with just enough light peeking from underneath. The air was stale across the large room cluttered with empty containers, tools, documents, and loose metallic parts. I could still smell a faint, yet pungent stench. I started sorting through the items on her desk, throwing them into the containers as quickly as my hands would let me.

At first, I thought it was just a cleaning bot that had bumped into the closed doors, but then I heard it again— that familiar tapping noise. Blood left my head and I almost fell backward. I froze, scanning the room for the source. No, it wasn’t coming from the office itself but somewhere behind the walls. It grew louder and more persistent as if calling me to it.

To this day, I still swear I heard a faint meow and a flash of white dart across the corner of my eyes towards an empty stretch of the back wall. “Did you hear that?” I said to no one in particular almost instinctively as I edged closer to the sound. I touched the wall and felt some sort of vibration as the ‘tac tac tac’ became more incessant. There was a faint outline of a panel, and with some force, I managed to pry it open. What I saw inside that hidden compartment will follow my sleepless nights until the day I die.

That frightening, cold, and loveless amalgamation my mother had forced into my dreams was staring back at me again, many years later. Besides it, the old machine in my mother’s study finally became silent. I had never felt so grateful about stone-dead silence, if only for a very brief moment.

As I looked into the still eyes of that machine, they slowly flickered into life. The head moved and I jumped back in shock. It stared back, crawling towards me, as it opened its mouth. At first, I could only hear a faint, garbled-like static sound, but even though it was muffled and heavily distorted, it finally became unmistakable. Her pain, her obsession, her life’s work, called back in her voice as if pleading for something; forgiveness, reconciliation, maybe even understanding, but this is mere speculation on my part. I will never know the answer, because I smashed that cursed thing to bits and watched it get unceremoniously crushed in the trash compactor twenty floors below.