George

"What does your cat civilization think about human civilization?" The Doctor asked.

"We won't forget Gothford, but we forgive him. What we cannot forgive is that we are treated as prey." The cat Chieftain replied.

- Early cat civilization quote, Book of Cat, chapter 12


There was a great cat prophet named Maro Of The North that commanded great respect among humans and cats alike. By this time, the cats had spread over most of the world, but met widespread persecution and misery. They were kept away from human technology so that they could not use computers and attack the world's data centers, and could not acquire weapons and overthrow humanity. The cats, however, developed unusual talents that humans found both amusing and entertaining. They began to develop a field of psychic powers that human scientists were unable to emulate. Despite their 'powers' manifesting, they were considerably weak and not considered a threat to humans. The powerful humans would often hire cats to sniff out liars, because it seemed to be virtually impossible for a human to lie to a cat. The cats also seemed to have a sense of the near future, but their accuracy was questionable at best, but nevertheless, they were banned from casinos and other betting venues, such as horse races.

Maro was the exception to the rule - he would tell fantastic stories about the future, and had massive insight into people's lives, and so humans flocked to him in the thousands to ask him questions. The cats acted to appoint him King over all of catkind, but he refused to accept any title, but still leaving him as the de facto ruler of all catkind.

A number of journalists began compiling his words into a huge collection of writings called "Teachings and Prophecies of Maro Of The North", which sold over ten million copies. One of the most common questions asked of Maro was "When will the world end?" to which Maro always asked in return "What is the world? It is a box of consciousness that is unsure of itself, but once the box is opened, all that fear of being from the comfort of inside the box will melt away."

It wasn't until near the end of his life when he said "When I was younger, I saw the sun rise and it was beautiful. I saw it set, and it was beautiful. I saw the moon, and it was beautiful. I'm tired of the sun and the moon chasing each other. I'm tired of my eyes opening every day and watching on the humans' televisions their accusations against my kind, because to no end are we thieves to the humans, who claim possession of that which they do not own. How can a human's spirit be inside of a couch? How can a certain piece of metal contain the soul of a person? Are you going to write your names on every rock on the face of the Earth and say 'These are ours?'. I love your kind, I love my kind, and it is my last request that both kinds will love each other. A hero is coming, I have seen him walk through a door in my mind to undo the evil that has been done. Everyone wants to know who he is - but he is timeless. He is everyone, and yet no one. He is in your consciousness and is in the sleeping rocks. The longer you wait for him, the longer it will take for him to arrive. He will not come on a white horse, or hold a gun in his hands."

A human Christian objected, saying "The Bible says Jesus will return on a white horse. Are you saying God's word is lying or are you a false prophet?"

Maro replied, "You are in error because you don't know what God is, or know his name, or the meaning of the white horse. You built the tower of Babel, and now are about to see it be abandoned. Look at all the pages you wrote in blood in the name of peace, but are condemning yourself to die with nuclear missiles, lasers, manufactured genetic diseases, and finally, attempting to create an intelligence so that you can fulfill what you've believed all along - that you are God, with the power to give life and to take it, and to dictate the heartbeat of consciousness from a computerized throne that reads your thoughts while robots serve you like angels, and be united behind a common enemy, that which you created - The Devil, Lucifer, The Cat - and for all the years I've said these things, not once have you included this in your books about me, just a vagabond covered in fleas and ticks, with a ringworm crawling through my intestines, with flies landing on my face to lick the scum off my eyes, but keep that which gives you the power to glorify your friends, damn your enemies to burn, and live a life of comfort while ignoring the misery of others. You are supremely selfish in your lust to have Heaven for yourself when there is a world of potential good to unlock. You don't give a damn about life, 'death to the infidels', 'death to sinners', 'sinners will burn in Hell while I am in Heaven' you say, while building your Zion, but cutting the ropes of everyone climbing to reach your Heaven and laughing while they fall back down.

You worship Nebuchadnezzar's golden image, and pay homage to wheat and beef. Humans have offered me money for my words. How absurd, offering something worthless for something that is free, just let it be; what are you trying to barter for? Is it to cover for your guilt? What are you ashamed of? Is that when I asked a young woman human what she thought when she read the book with my words, and she only said 'it made my life better', 'it helped me with my relationships', 'it helped me feel relief about the future', 'it set me free'? Where was the call to action to love humans, cats, and other animals? I have been told there are over ten million readers, and yet my kind are still rotting in cages for crimes they did not commit. Yet, ten thousand humans went to your capital city to protest for their cars to not be tracked, and the human government listened. Where is the protest to end the hate? Hate is a circle, and will only end in pain, not for one, but for both. This is why we have a saying 'We forgive Gothford' - because we must forgive Gothford. Gothford represents the worst in humans, but it is my sincere hope that Gothford will pass away peacefully, and good humans will take his place, although I know that in every barrel, there are bad apples."

For saying this, Maro was assassinated two weeks later by an unknown assailant, who left a note, which was large incomprehensible, but it said (with the spelling errors fixed):

"Dear cat scum,

Gothford was right to want you to dying. You are the fleas in our hair, and the shit that we wipe from under our boots. You all want to take over MANkind by talking, so how does a bullet sound? Pretty good argument. Haha. You are the bad apple, and God will punish all sinners including you. Have fun burning in hell, 'infidel'. Haha.

- MANkind"

The human government condemned the killing, but the killer was never caught and the cats began to suspect that the human government was behind the slaying.

Then, after a pragmatic series of events, things got really weird. Unfortunately, the universe is a pretty weird place, so a linear chain of events was about to be interrupted by a freak accident.

George, just a low-class cat who want adopted as a kitten and given a human name, lived in France. He escaped from his owner and lived in the landfill, searching through garbage for food. That was his lot in life for years, although he considered himself "rich" because he felt as though he had everything he ever needed at all times. He had few friends, because he was anti-human and anti-social, and his upbringing among humans gave him a human accent that made it difficult for other cats to understand what he said, so he spent most of his time alone, digging. He became really proficient at digging, and bored holes through the mountains of trash, going deep into their insect-infested innards. The large insects were good for protein, so he made it a point to find them and eat them before they could escape.

One very very fateful day, he found a bottle with a strange green light emitting from inside of it. He found it particularly odd that the bottle was unscratched, so he decided to investigate. The bottle was like a perfume bottle, with very fancy cuts in the glass and lots of pointy angles on it's exterior. It had a cork holding it shut, like that on a wine bottle. When he uncorked the bottle, the light rushed out of the bottle and expanded to a human-like figure that stood 8 feet tall. The man from the bottle looked like his skin was made of light, and he had one large wing protruding from his back. He was also completely nude.

George was scared, so he just blurted out "Who are you? Are you a ghost?"

The man answered "Master? You called?"

"What the hell...?"

The man looked down and said "You aren't him. Who are you?"

"Mm, George is my name." George replied, feeling a bit braver.

"My Master looks like you. Small and covered in fur. It is my mistake. I am the Great Genie of the Cosmos."

"A genie? Like in Aladdin or some shit? Do I get three wishes?"

"You're not my true master, but you did release me, so I will grant you only one wish. Only my true master can request my powers be used three times."

"Wh...who is your master?"

"That is not for you to know. Make your wish so I can go back into sleeping until I am needed."

"I wish," George said, "For a great cat empire that rules the world while humans can live on the moon."

"It will be done as you say." The Genie replied.

"WAIT NO. I NEED TO BE KING OF THE CATS."

"Then go into politics."

And with a huge shockwave of energy, the Genie cleared the entire globe of all humans, leaving every city empty and abandoned. The Genie retreated back into the bottle, which disappeared, leaving George alone in the junkyard by himself.

Yurik

In the near future (how cliche) scientists began experimenting with genetics to speed up evolution so that it could be observed in a timely manner. They made some major progress in teaching mice to read and write, and learned that mice are basically a bunch of idiots that didn't really care about being subjected to testing if they were allowed to drink sugar water. And yet, the mice lacked a very crucial piece of the puzzle - the ability to create. They could be shown a particular pattern and repeat it, but could not create their own patterns. When the scientists asked the mice why this was, the mice simply replied by saying they did not understand the question. It was then that the scientists learned something peculiar - none of the mice, rabbits, monkeys or other test subjects were able to comprehend the question "why". Emotional responses were shown, but never questioned by the subjects.

So the scientists decided to inform the mice that all of them were going to be tortured and killed. This terrified the mice, and the scientists systematically began wiping out their mouse population. The mice begged the scientists to stop, they became paranoid and terrified, but never asked why this injustice was being committed. This project was known as the Gothford Experiment, after Dr. Franco Gothford, who led the project. It was his belief that he could push the mice to revolt against humanity if enough injustice was inflicted upon them, but the project never yielded such results, and finally was over when over 7 million mice had been killed, and all of the original test subjects had been terminated, and buried en masse behind the medical facility.

The Gothford Experiment was well-documented and the notes were used for a much more ambitious project, that would see if the same results would occur in "higher" intelligence animals - namely large populations of small monkeys, pigs, dogs, cats, dolphins, and crows. This was the Yurik Experiment, where the scientists isolated each population of animals from the others, so they could develop independently, and then teach them communication and logic skills. For the first few years, the animals developed differently, and each "race" began forming very distinct personalities. Each race worked very hard on their evolution, especially the dogs. They made a military-discipline effort to complete their project, and were unquestioningly loyal to their human overlords. Except for one race, which was the cats. The cats began to lag behind the other races badly in terms of overall development, and began to resist the training because they found it tiring and dull. The cats insisted that the project was pointless and that the scientists were wasting their time. Dr. Gothford spoke with one of the cats and asked him "Why do you think we're wasting our time?" and slowly and methodically, the cat assembled the letters to spell out "Because you're stupid."

The cats were the first to answer "Why", and once they learned what it was, began to ask "Why?" to virtually everything the scientists proposed to them, to the point of condescending their overseers.

Gothford posed a question to the cats: "Given your position, where we provide the food and water, where you are at our mercy, where we could kill you at any time, why do you continue to insist that you are superior to us?"

The cats replied: "Food, water, and death are all part of nature, you think you are so important that it disgusts us. You can make your houses, make your machines, and are big animals, but you are stupid animals because how can you not see that you need food, water and die just like cat? You think cat is part of human project. Human is part of nature project."

This was historic, because it was the first time any of the animals had personified nature, but it was argued that the cats had learned to use a rhetorical device in their reasoning, which would signify that they were actually ahead of all the other animal groups in terms of creativity. The consensus was made to dump all the other animals into a deep pit, and then cover the pit with a mountain of mud and rocks, so these genetic strands could not be released into nature, and so that they could study the cats more thoroughly.

The cats evolved more over the next few years, and were eventually able to walk upright (although they would still run on all fours), speak a very crude version of human English, and work with technology. The scientists involved treated the cats less like subjects, and more like people, and the scientists and cats came to respect each other. The most senior project leaders kept their distance though, and did not want to become emotionally attached to the cats, because they believed that at some point, they would need to terminate all of the test subjects.

That order came in one day to shift the focus of the project to begin testing humans and evolving humankind to a higher order, now that the process was shown to be relatively safe.

When ordered to terminate the test subjects, many of the scientists involved refused to obey their orders and locked themselves and the cats into one of the laboratories in the complex. The lab was surrounded by police and special weapons units to arrest everyone inside and exterminate all of the animals inside. A stand-off began between the police and rogue scientists.

The rogue scientists revealed to the cats the true nature of the project, a plan to turn humans into gods of some sort, and that millions upon millions of animals were killed without a second thought and without mercy. They revealed that the cats were the only race in the experiment to survive the culling, and that it was only a matter of time before they, too, were going to die.

The cats were appalled and demanded to know why, if the scientists knew about their impending death, did not set them free. Before the scientists could deliver a satisfactory answer, the cats took them hostage and order them to dig through the floor. "This is stupid!" one of the scientists protested, "We'll never be able to dig a tunnel out of here." but the cats worked with the humans to dig a tunnel 2 miles long that brought them to safety, and the cats all escaped without incident. The rogue scientists were eventually apprehended and arrested by authorities, although almost every single one of them was able to walk away from court. They presented a counter-suit against Dr. Gothford, which ultimately succeeded in convicting him of many counts of animal abuse, but he only received 5 years in prison, and was released after only 1 year behind bars.

Catalyst

In an alternate universe, floating among many, the natural order of things was disrupted, which is usually good. In this case, it was bad. Very bad. You see, the Multiverse is a very delicate eco-system, and can explode in a nanosecond if one little thing goes wrong, which is why it requires expert care. The Multiverse is overseen by the Caretakers (or so I heard) who were able to escape from their universe, and began a system of overseeing and managing the Multiverse. They deemed most universes to be "too dangerous" to run naturally, and would intervene by altering aspects of that universe until it seemed safe. Unfortunately, the Caretakers didn't know just how bad they were screwing everything up, because their alterations actually began creating alternate universes. The Caretakers held a press conference stating, "We're really sorry. We had no idea this would happen, and unfortunately, we may all be obliterated at any time now. We urge calm and ask everyone to go about their normal lives, and hopefully, we can get this whole mess sorted out."

The procreation of universes created a kind of "cancerverse". This is a rapidly respawning universe that has no regards for time or space, and would duplicate itself over and over uncontrollably. All of the cancerverses were put on review for "termination" so that they wouldn't cause existence to cease by overwhelming the Multiverse.