Page 88 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Mother Ship is Real!

mainly evocations of animism, the ancient respect for powerful yet
opaque elements of the natural world. I noticed something odd a
while back, and it led to the science-fiction scenario I am presenting
now. Again, it is not entirely original: others have linked a fictional
off-world feline origin to some spacecraft hovering above Earth as
explanation for every strange bit of cat business. But I have seen
something requiring a very subtle yet universal cat reaction to
unknown stimuli. I take walks in my neighborhood almost every
day. Many of the houses on my route have indoor-outdoor cats.
Their behavior over the span of several blocks should be random
and independent; that is, some of them will be inside, some outside;
some running about, some sitting still. But that is not the case. Too
often a majority of them are doing the same thing. Why?”
“Yes, of course it’s all explicable—or potentially explicable—in
terms of environmental cues triggering identical inherited
responses. Cats are creatures of instinct as well as habit.
Nevertheless, as I said, a reader’s suspension of disbelief in this
context may not be difficult to achieve, given the predisposition to
see cats as strange, even alien, creatures. Thus, the mother ship:
invisible to us, but circling the planet providing information to
those felines receptive to it. Hurdle number one: how could it not
have been perceived by us or our surveillance devices? I say: hiding
in plain sight in an undifferentiated medium such as the atmosphere
is not impossible, given the theoretical existence of dark matter and
energy. Hurdle number two: how could cats tune in to these signals
that, again, we have not picked up—even on radio telescopes? I
would suggest they are high frequency but encoded in cat language,
easily mistaken for static by people looking for patterns in the noise
of the electromagnetic soup surrounding us. Further, that cats have
a series of specialized cells in their brains the purpose of which has
not been analyzed because they have not yet been discovered, and
that these structures form an antenna sensitive to transmissions
from the mother ship.”
“So, you see, some sort of scientific explanation couched in the
vaguely-understood technological buzzwords of contemporary
popular culture can be generated to support this thing. It certainly is

87