Cats or Fiction: A Spacebase Startopia Investigation
Cats. A fundamentally brilliant species. As with their human universal co-habitants, the long-term workers and residents of Spacebase Startopia have a soft spot for the purring, whirring balls of chaos and aboard the station, cat chat is on everybody’s lips.
Beginning life as workers swapping stories on the supposed origins and identities of the felines prowling the on-board cat cafés (one claim pertaining not to cats but shapeshifting dogs, another to having seen compelling evidence for a ‘work-for-coffee’ contract issued to a strung-out tabby barista with a caffeine-led molecular composition), cat claims have run rampant through the base, though their validity is dubious and for now, all sightings should be taken as little more than eccentric hearsay.
What features below is an excerpt from The Cats of Spacebase Startopia – an investigative report by one Blorp McXanflomagulous, journalist from the Blorgeesian-L29 system and universal expert in all things Felis who spent an extended period aboard the station looking into the strange rumours.
Please note, due to the highly subjective nature of these accounts (predominantly, those given by altered party-goers, sleep-deprived wage staff and network engineers), all claims should be viewed as purely speculative until otherwise proven.
Cheez
Speaking to those frequenting the Fun-Deck, my hypothesis is that Cheez is a time travelling Big Boi [sub-species pending] from the year 2007. His sole motivation of burgers is curious and I’ve spoken to several patrons who reported “polite schmoozing” and a distinctive British dialect.
Fe-Line
The supposed by-product of an unlocked chemistry lab and ill-timed tuna fish experiment [I can’t find any record of this], one of the base’s elderly custodians laid claim to the iron cladding around the base as not cladding at all but a long, hefty cat called ‘Fe-Line’.
nayN
As a youngster, nayN came to answer the age old question: what happens when you cross curiosity with a breakfast bar, and then cross that with an unattended Matter-Melder? Not an indoor cat, several of Spacebase Startopia’s external maintenance staff have recounted sighting nayN encircling the station hundreds of miles away, using its mysterious mastery of pastry and light refraction to add a trail of colour [and crumbs] to the otherwise cold, empty void of space.
109 101 111 119
A rogue piece of computer code that manifests as a cute ASCII outline, the claim is that 109 101 111 119 occasionally shows up on one of the base’s hundreds of monitors to pull faces, bat at any blinking cursors and cause general mischief. One disgruntled engineer tells me that it escaped onto the network during the interrupted upload of a common house cat, which was being digitised for convenience.
Sour-Puss
The most enigmatic of all, Spacebase Startopia’s head of All Things Janitorial tells me that a late-night porthole polish and particularly vivid borealis led to the first ever sighting of Sour-Puss. Also known affectionately as ‘Grumpus’ and ‘Star Kitty-Zen’ by those lucky enough to bear witness, Sour-Puss is purported to be a peaceful, curious traveller from a higher plane of existence and concentrated form of the rare element GRP118. Despite its mopey expression, it was confirmed to me that Sour-Puss harbours no ill will and in fact, uses a powerful parapsychic link to offer mental comfort and support to everyone in the surrounding 700 light years.
Those cats may not be real, but these ones are! Spacebase Startopia launches on the 26th of March with the help and support of these development moggies.
