Page 32 of Tapeworld Induction

Fuckers.

Isaak grinned. “Just think of any pet, like you summoned the hills of sand. I’ll add the magic sauce.”

Dylan nodded. She knelt down, coating the skin on her knees with sand, as her white dress pulled slightly higher. She started waving her arms around like she was casting a spell.

Isaak gently touched her shoulder. “You don’t have to do all of that.” He smiled. “Just think it.”

“Right.” She nodded and rested her hands on her thighs. A pet. The tall, handsome man is going to get me a pet! She hadn’t felt this much excitement in years, but she felt she had to contain it a bit, to match his energy. She didn’t want to scare him away.

She looked at the flat area of sand in front of her and concentrated, focusing her eyes and furrowing her brows.

After a few seconds, a shape popped into existence like popcorn, growing around a central point. As this happened, Isaak made a gesture with his hand and the shape swirled in red-and-blue light. The magic sauce he’d talked about.

The shape grew larger, swirling in a blur, fur visible around the edges now. Dylan opened her eyes as wide as she could, wanting to take in every detail of the transformation.

In less than a minute, a living, breathing cat, yellow-eyed with a tawny brown tabby coat, sat in front of her.

She hopped into Dylan’s waiting arms.

Dylan’s heart felt like it was going to melt at the gentle being. The cat pushed its paws onto Dylan, audibly purring. She took a hand to the cat’s face and it licked her fingers. Dylan was delighted, petting it and drowning it in hugs.

“Oh, who’s a beauty?” Dylan asked it, her heart beating quickly with joy, warmth flooding her chest.

But she froze when a squeaky voice raised barely above a whisper replied, “Me?”

Dylan nearly dropped the cat. Her mouth hung open. “It talks?”

Isaak just smiled and nodded, like he knew the animal would talk. Was the strider being coy, or did he not even know what her new pet could do? He let the two of them play, fidgeting with a handful of sand and lying down on a newly summoned recliner chair.

Dylan looked at the cat with wild curiosity. “Do you have a name?”

The cat meowed in a deep, pleasant way, a musical sound. “Miss Kitty’s a beauty!” it said.

“Okay! Miss Kitty. Cute. How come you can talk?”

The cat pawed at Dylan’s hands gently, like she was trying to reassure her. “Why wouldn’t I be able to talk?” Miss Kitty spoke like an wise old creature dispensing advice to the naïve young hero in a movie.

She’s got you there, Dee. Dylan had spoken with chat models before, and their suffocating attempts to love and praise everything you said were always so incredibly grating. Pure sycophancy. It felt special that Miss Kitty didn’t just agree to everything. “Fair. Are you an AI?”

With a gentleness to her movements that felt natural and organic, Miss Kitty jumped down from Dylan’s arms.

“No way, AI,” the cat hissed, in the rhythm of a children’s rhyming chant, her expression just perceptibly different from before. She looked kind of annoyed.

Dylan’s twisted mouth twisted with doubt. “So, you’re not an AI, and Isaak here summoned you. Did you come from somewhere? Did you exist before?”

The cat just meowed again. She started pacing around Dylan’s feet, sniffing her boots, studying them with its nose. Gathering information. She paused and looked up at Dylan with her mouth hanging open, looking dumbfounded like she had no idea what she had just said. But Dylan had seen enough cute videos to know this was just the ways cats responded to new smells.

“You had a good sniff? Oh, you’re just gonna ignore me now?” She put her hands on her hips and turned to Isaak, still slouching on the chair. “I’ve never actually had a cat before. I’m not sure what she wants me to do… You want to come and help me?”

“Sorry, I just need a little rest. I was up late last night.”

She realised she’d only ever really seen him at night. He clearly wasn’t someone with an early morning routine. “Please?” She couldn’t deny that the cat was cute, but it troubled her that she couldn’t figure out how it worked. “I’m a bit wary of her.”

He slowly got up. “I’m coming.”

“I mean, have you ever summoned anything like her before?”

“I… I have.” The strider stood beside her now, shifting his body weight from one leg to the other.