Chapter Text
“You are a lifesaver,” the head of the shelter said, being quite literal, as her subordinates inspected the carrying cases X brought one last time to make sure the cats would be comfortable. “Most cats are capable of hunting to feed themselves, but most of the strays we have left are former second-generation indoor house cats.” Whose mothers might not have been able to teach them the skill, even if given the chance to do so before the kittens were handed out.
The former pets were dropped off here when their single owners no longer had enough of a meat and fish ration to keep their pets from dying of malnutrition. A household of four could still support a cat, but that meant very little meat for the family, and it was illegal for children under a certain age to give brain food rations (foods high in fats and protein) to other people, let alone animals.
Meat animals had to be fed, on grain or grass, and with the majority of the granaries lost and much of the breadbasket hit by dirty bombs the order had come down for cattle to be slaughtered and stored. First priority went to hospitals: meat helped humans heal faster, and there were many in need of healing.
Not as many as one would have hoped, because hospitals were where the sick were brought as well as the injured, and those whose bodies were exhausted by the effort to rebuild themselves, those with breaks in the skin, were vulnerable.
The people who wrote the laws knew that no-kill shelters would be a dangerous loophole, if families could leave their pets there and expect to get them back. It was a dangerous loophole because over the decades since the ecological collapse, quite a few shelters had been covers for illegal and thus unregulated and unsafe butcher shops. A potential disease vector like that just wasn’t safe, especially now.
Since hawks and most predator species were extinct dogs and cats, especially cats, were one of the best and sometimes the only way to keep down the numbers of vermin.
Cities and towns both radioactive and plague-stricken needed cats and dogs to keep down the number of rats and pigeons, when there were diseases that could use both those animals to spread. All the animals that might be halfway-competent hunters had already been drafted from shelters for that purpose, and those that remained would probably be sent off within another month. It was better than letting them stay here, where they would certainly starve to death despite the shelter’s chickens.
A breeding facility, though, where their children could learn to hunt even if they didn’t know? They could be useful there.
X wondered how many underground butcher shops were trying to use this ruse, but their paperwork wouldn’t be as impeccable as his was. And he was planning to send most of the animals on to a breeding facility he’d checked out. Just… afterwards.
It wasn’t as though he could bring Zero here to meet the animals. Even with a disguise, he wouldn’t have a prayer of being able to deal with a staff that was actively trying to find holes in X’s story, that would see Zero being stiff and unnatural as a reason to suspect criminal behavior. He couldn’t tell him to act natural and not speak beyond pleasantries when Zero didn’t know what those were and the staff wouldn’t settle for pleasantries when they were trying to make sure these people weren’t going to kill their cats.
So he had to come here alone and lie to people for four hours while being introduced to a lot of very sweet animals and lamenting that so many of them had been spayed and neutered by families that couldn’t afford the meat and milk to support kittens even before what had already been dubbed the Cataclysm. Those animals would be easier to deal with, but he wouldn’t have a home ready to take the ones that Zero didn’t want to keep.
He hid a sigh with a smile and reflected that maybe he should have gone with breaking and entering as his means of getting a few cats to introduce to Zero. X just didn’t like knowing that the caretakers of those animals would have to assume they’d been killed and eaten if they disappeared like that. Leave a note? What kind of note could he leave? That he’d stolen their cats on behalf of a killer robot?
It wasn’t a good idea to show too much relief when they were finally done and loaded up, then there was getting out of sight before teleporting off, which took longer than one would think.
Fortunately all the animal inspection and adopter interrogation meant he had a fairly short list of animals to introduce to Zero, he reflected, trying to look on the bright side.
“So they’re like plants.”
X wondered what Zero meant by that. Emotional support lifeforms?
The last Lightbot (although he hoped not, from some of what Wily’s remnant let slip) didn’t sigh. “Well, they’re organic life,” at least. None of the three cats X released had much interest in Zero. They instead scattered around X’s main room, or cave, as he lifted each of them up out of their traveling case. One of them was already taking refuge in one of the plants.
Zero frowned at that one: X had told him not to step on plants ages ago, from the more-recently-activated unit’s perspective, so if this organic creature was going to go and do that, it wasn’t a good one.
Well, that cried out for yet another ‘rules are situational’ discussion, not to mention that ‘differences between how animals and people should act, and yes, I’m aware that humans are technically animals’ was difficult to handle with Zero’s father butting in. At least with the debate keeping Dr. Wily occupied, Zero tended to get irritated with his father and go off to listen to Dr. Light instead. X’s father did have some experience with children, even if he wasn’t as good at articulating the finer points of ethics as he was with robotics details. As an academic it wasn’t his field, but Zero wasn’t an academic period.
It seemed to be working out well enough so far.
“More like humans,” Zero acknowledged, checking his database. “Kill other living things, including for pleasure…” There, now he looked contemplative. Considering whether that just sounded ‘like humans’ or ‘like Zero.’
X slid a tablet (it was very nice to have access to Dr. Wily’s materials reserves and processing and construction facilities) with feline hunting statistics and how they were used to manage vermin populations over to him. Zero just had to glance at it to get access and pull in the data, if he didn’t already have it infected. There was a difference between data being on an infected system and Zero being aware of it, otherwise the Copy…
He stopped that line of thought.
Tabbing over to the new owners’ guide to interacting with cats and how to choose a cat who would be compatible with a certain kind of owner he’d also loaded into the tablet, he asked Zero to, “Get acquainted with these three and see if you like any of them while I feed the rest?”
Nano-assemblies capable of not just creating chips but constructing taurine and pseudo-cells… Regardless of his feelings about Dr. Wily’s ethics, especially pertaining to free will and logic-bypassing, the former human’s lab equipment was as borderline miraculous as Zero’s capabilities.
Letting a pretty little half-grown cream-colored tom push his head up into X’s hand, X wondered about the twins. Breeding facilities couldn’t use as many tomcats as queens (for the sake of genetic diversity they should, but they also had to use their rationed meat as efficiently as possible, since they were feeding animals while humans went malnourished), and while Iris and Colonel weren’t copies of X and were free to decide to do what they wanted now, they had been designed with an aptitude for social interaction. You couldn’t get good at anything without practice, so that meant they seemed more eager to make friends than the rest of the former heralds. More lonely?
The two of them seeking Zero out was… worrying. Especially because they were somewhat based on X. It wasn’t just memories of the Copy: had Dr. Wily given them additional programming to ensure loyalty besides the virus? X should like the idea of people making friends with Zero, but the idea of people being controlled, being forced to seek others out and obey them made his skin crawl so much that seeing the two of them around Zero, especially Iris seeming so eager to hang off Zero’s every word, was… And of course Zero picked up on that and had the two of them stay away from him, at least while X was around.
If they were just lonely, X didn’t want to make that more painful for them, so… If Iris was just a naturally affectionate person, he hoped she’d like a cat.
While Iris liked her cat, X did not like having dead mice brought up to him. “So, you’re… teaching them how to hunt?” he asked Zero, wondering what else he’d expected.
Given Zero’s stare, he was also wondering what else X had expected him to do with them.
Well, X supposed this was better than Zero calling Sigma and the other baby androids useless for not being able to improve fast enough to satisfy him without any teaching. “I’m glad that you’re bonding,” he said, knowing he was condemning himself to more presents. If he’d wanted a pet for Zero that was from a species of organic life that didn’t have to kill or at least damage other living things in order to survive, he… would have been out of luck, come to think of it. Even plants could be quite vicious, which was sadly understandable when they didn’t have the option of retreating if some other organism tried to harm them. There were robots, but X wanted something Zero couldn’t just take over the instant he got frustrated.
It was hopefully worth it to see the cats throw themselves onto Zero’s lap, appreciating the waste heat from his systems the same way they claimed unguarded tablets and consoles. It was Zero more than X who didn’t know what to do when they dug up X’s plants (X had taken that as a given), and perhaps the icing on the cake was Dr. Wily’s remnant screaming when he found the mice Zero colonized his base with so the cats had something to hunt nested behind a panel.