Civilian Report & Recording #20090811-SF - Cat Got Your Tongue

RECORD #20090811-SF TYPE: CIVILIAN REPORT AND INTERVIEW
RELATED PERSON(S)/ENTITY(S): Hiro Rei, San Francisco Branch Record-Keeper (HR), Anna Victoria, Record-Keeping Assistant (AV), Robert Howe, civilian (RH), ‘Jerry’, presumed pseudonym, suspect (J), ‘Nancy’, presumed pseudonym, suspect (N), Wendy Richards, victim (WR)
(Recording begins at 8:03 PM Local Daylight Time, in the Interview Room of the San Francisco Branch of the Chatter & Melody Society, 1811 37th Avenue, San Francisco, California, United States of America.)
(AV) You’re here to make a civilian incident report, correct?
(RH) Yes. The police would probably call me crazy, and my classmate reccomended you, so… why not.
(AV) Okay, please sit here. I just need some basic info to fill out the report. Name? You don’t need to use your real one, we just need something to put down.
(RH) Robert Howe, spelled H-O-W-E.
(AV) When did you experience the incident?
(RH) Three days ago… I think. It’s been a blur.
(AV) Concerning..?
(RH) Uh, a large number of stray cats, I guess.
(AV) …Thank you. We prefer to take reports through audio, but you can write it out if you’d like.
(RH) Oh, you can record me. I just want to tell someone.
(Anna retrieves a tape recorder and digital microphone from the shelf. The microphone is plugged into the laptop already on the desk, and the tape recorder is turned on.)
(AV) Anna Victoria, Record-Keeping assistant, is recording the report of Robert Howe concerning a large number of stray cats. Go ahead.
(RH) So, I’m a medical student at UCSF, general surgery. So I’ve seen my fair share of nasty things. I’ve dissected my cadaver, observed real live surgeries, disposed of surgical waste, y’know, the usual. I’ve even seen mentally unstable patients in psychology classes. This was different. This was… wrong.
I live in Inner Richmond, classic condo. It’s a nice enough neighborhood, and though I’ve got two roommates, it’s a comfy place. It’s close enough that I could walk to school. My roommates were nice enough, and Wendy didn’t have anything to do with… the cats. She’s allergic. But Jerry… he was involved. Somehow.
It isn’t odd to see the occasional wild animal or stray around. There’s raccoons, a few coyotes, and dogs, but the cats were new. I didn’t think anything of the first one, just a skinny brownish cat in the street. It stayed around our bins, and I just thought it was looking for some food. So I ignored it for about a week. But then another cat showed up, skinny and gray, who stayed around the bins. Again, I thought it was just looking for food. But then there was another, an orange-ish one, and another, tabby brown, and they just kept coming. Most of them looked like strays, dirty and skinny, but some of them must’ve been purebred pets. There was one, a pretty Siamese, the only one with a collar, blue leather, that seemed to… well, lead them. It was always visible, despite how small it was, and it was always looking. Always, with those piercing blue eyes, it was staring at me whenever I was outside. But at that point, it was just a normal cat.
Wendy was getting really bothered by the cats. She likes cats good enough, but her allergies are really, really bad. Like, touch a cat and get a rash bad. So she was understandably trying to get the cats to leave. We sprayed them with water, we alerted the SPCA, we set out traps to try and relocate them. But they just stayed. And they never made a sound. Just sat there around the bins looking at us. Everyone on the street seemed to be annoyed by the cats, except for Jerry. Jerry… liked them. Too much. He kept on talking about how cute they were, and how badly they must have been eating to search our bins for food. But I swear that I never saw any of the cats eat anything. Not the food in the traps, not the scraps in the bins, not anything. They were just there. Looking. And then… the incident happened.
Wendy had moved out at this point, but we’re still on good terms. Or…we were. We had gotten a new roommate, a nurse-in-training named Nancy. She liked the cats too. At this point, the cat horde was blocking our access to the bins, so we had started putting our trash with our neighbor’s. And then, one night, while I was doing schoolwork, I saw that damned Siamese. My desk is right near the window, and it was open, and it was just… sitting there, looking at me. But… then it spoke. Like a human. I swear that I’ve never hallucinated before, never taken drugs, never done anything or experienced anything like this before. But that Siamese with its blue leather collar spoke to me. And it… sounded like Wendy. The cat asked me… “How much of a person must be there for them to be considered a person? How much? How much of a person must be there for them to be considered a person?” Over and over and over again. And that whole time, I couldn’t. Move. An. Inch. She… it, just kept on asking it. And its mouth, as it spoke…it was all wrong. Too wide, too many teeth, and the teeth were blunt, and human-like. It moved so much like a human mouth, with expressive lips and smiling corners. Looking back now, the whole of it was wrong. It’s anatomy didn’t make sense, it was too much…like a person. The paws were like hands, the fur was like hair, it… had a human-like face...It was horrible.
I don’t know how long it took for it to stop. Its. Asking. But it took all night at least. And that whole time, I was looking into the eyes of that Siamese, eyes so blue… like Wendy’s.
I confronted Jerry and Nancy about it after school the next day. I didn’t tell them about how the Siamese spoke, cause any sane person would think me crazy if I claimed that my former roommate was now a cat asking about the nature of personhood. I just asked them about why they liked the cats. And then… Nancy said, “Well, it took you long enough.” And I swear that as she said that, she had the eyes of a cat. Slit pupils, yellow irises, the whole package. Then Jerry said, “We like the cats. Why don’t you like the cats? The cats like you. That’s why you are still here, and that’s why Wendy isn’t. Even then, they were nice with her.” He had cat eyes too. Green and wide and wrong.
After that, I ran. I… just ran. I ran out of that house, I ran down the street, I just… ran away. I thought I could get away from the cats, but they followed me. I saw them in the alleys all around Inner Richmond. Skinny and plump, long-haired and short, clean and dirty… they all looked at me, like they wanted to speak, like Wendy. And so I just kept running.
I slept in Golden Gate Park that night, near the conservatory of flowers, because I had read somewhere that cats can get poisoned by some kinds of flowers... like roses, I think, and lilies. The next morning, I ran again, ran to a classmate’s house here in the Sunset. They’re the one that referred me to you.
(AV) Thank you for your report. If you’d like, please fill out this contact sheet so that we can follow up with you later.
(RH) Okay… wow. That, uh, did help. Getting it off my chest and all.
(Robert leaves after filling out the contact sheet.)
(AV) Okay, [Inkwell], you can stop the backup now.
(RECORDING ENDS)
(RECORDING BEGINS)
(HR) Thank you, [Inkwell]. Follow up, date is sixteenth of August, five days after the report was given. This is an interesting one. Cats, questions about personhood, a medical student… this has to be Contradiction. It is undoubtably connected to such nebulous and debated things as personhood… and of course, there’s Schrödinger’s Cat. Anna did the requisite follow-up, and did discover that a medical student named Wendy Richards went missing around two weeks before Robert’s Siamese incident. She was an aspiring neurosurgeon. Robert was cooperative when we reached out to him for follow-up. He seems to be doing good, considering that he made contact and conversation with an instance of Schrödinger’s Cat, especially since it was once someone he knew.
We have surveillance running on his former residence, which appears to be unoccupied. Kyle managed to get in completely legally, and he reported that it seemed perfectly normal, just with a lot of cat toys, and that it was clean. We have yet to find any person named Jerry or Nancy that lived there and were students of UCSF. They are presumed to be pseudonyms, possible manifestations of the Butterfly Effect, or victims of the recent manifestation of the Academy of Discovery. There are still twenty unaccounted for from that incident, and six could fit the descriptions given by Robert. It is… concerning that so many Cats may or may not be present in San Francisco. Not as big of a port as Los Angeles, but the large population here is certainly a concern. What do you think, Anna?
(AV) Oh! Well, the Contradiction is unpredictable by nature, so we can’t ever quite know what it will do next, though if we could get a really perceptive Mimicker or Speculator, we might get some insight into the situation.
(HR) Hmm, well, we don’t have many Mimickers here, Los Angeles seems to snap up all of them. I probably couldn’t pull something off without help. We could try to get convince New York to send out one of their Reporters… I’ll ask Nathan if we can trade a field Wanderer for one of them for a month or so. Follow up concludes. End recording please, [Inkwell].
(RECORDING ENDS)
(RECORDING BEGINS)
(HR) Thanks. Addendum, one week later. Kyle did some digging, and we managed to get Angelica Lilac, an exchange agent from Paris and Mimicker, to do some on-site investigation at the Conservatory. Turns out that around half of the most common flowers there were replaced some time ago with Pretty Flowers. Almost all of the roses, lilies, and hyacinths had been replaced, while around two-thirds of the daffodils, narcissuses, and hydrangeas were. This is a somewhat concerning development, as it could indicate a shift in the territories around here. Fluctuation doesn’t seem to have moved from Civic or Financial yet, Wanderlust is still clearly in place at the Embarcadero, Bayview, Marina, and North Beach, and Chatter still reigns over the Tenderloin and Sunset. Chinatown, Mission, Pacific Heights, Richmond, and SoMa are still neutral ground as far as we know, but Expanse seems to have lost some of its hold on the Presidio and Golden Gate Park, while Lakeshore is still firm. Mimic has taken its place in Golden Gate, but parts of the Presido were claimed by Duty, oddly enough. But Contradiction seems to have not moved from its base near South San Francisco. It might be trying to muscle in on neutral territory… and if so, this could start a turf war like we haven’t seen since the founding of Silicon Valley. I will be informing all other USA branches immediately, and passing on the message to all North American branches and stations once we have more info. Addendum ends.
(RECORDING ENDS)

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Cat Got Your Tongue is the first report I’ve written for Layered Earth, but it surely isn’t the last! I’ll probably look back on this and think about how bad it is, but for now, I’m pretty proud of it.