4-5: Close Encounters of the Bait Kind

“Okay CORVAC,” I said. “Do we have our guest ready to go?”

“Indeed we do, Mistress,” he said. “And I do not think this one is particularly happy at being taken captive.”

“They never are,” I said. “Do we have Fat Louie here too?”

“He is, Mistress,” CORVAC said.

I looked over to the bed I’d provided for the fat old grey cat, but of course he wasn’t in the thing. Instead he’d sprawled out on one of my work benches. Which involved tossing a couple of very expensive tools to the side so his fat ass would be comfortable.

Typical cat.

“Hello there, Louie,” I said.

I reached to pick him up. The cat did nothing to help me or hinder me. Some cats got pissed off that you were daring to lay hands on them. Some became your best friend. Some managed to fall into a state that was at both times liquid and solid.

Not Louie. No, he preferred to do his best impression of what I imagined some of the weights Arnold was lifting back at the height of his career must’ve felt like. Louie was the kind of dead weight that made me glad I had strength augments on my suit so I could pick his fat ass up.

His picture was next to the definition of “oh lawd he comin’.”

What I’m getting at is the only time I ever saw this cat doing anything that came close to exercise was when I opened up a can of tuna, and even then it was more of a lazy stroll into the breakfast nook than it was anything urgent.

It was simply what passed for urgent with him compared to his natural lazy state.

Louie opened one eye in a move that was always frightfully reminiscent of a childhood-scarring scene from an old animated movie called The Secret of Nimh where a giant cat pulled the same move, with the big difference being I was in no mortal danger from this fatass.

My lower back might be in danger, sure, but I wasn’t.

“We’ve got some work for you, Louie,” I said.

The cat purred in response. I figured that was about as good as I could hope for, so I sat him back down on my work bench. That seemed to be his favorite spot, and I made a point of putting at least a few expensive items up there for him to knock off since he seemed to prefer sleeping somewhere he could cause some damage before he stress tested the weight capacity of whatever he was sitting on.

Hey, I figured considering the good work he was doing for me on the regular, the least I owed him was whatever small pleasures he took in his lazy life.

“Do we have the jar?” I asked.

“As always, Mistress,” CORVAC said.

The jar with the wriggling alien that looked like something you’d find in a bait shop materialized in front of me. The thing was still wriggling around, mostly in the direction of Fat Louie, and it didn’t look happy.

I snorted.

“What is so amusing, Mistress?” CORVAC asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Please, Mistress,” he said. “You know I will only learn the intricacies of human humor and when to laugh at your jokes if you explain them to me.”

I ignored the implied dig that my jokes were something he needed to learn to laugh at. He did that on purpose.

“I was looking at this alien parasite and thinking it wasn’t the last long tubular thing that was pissed off when it got removed from a pussy,” I said.

There was a pause. A pause meant CORVAC was mulling something over deep in his circuits. I figured this time around that meant he was trying to decide whether or not he should laugh at my joke.

“That was not very funny, even by the standards of what you consider humor, Mistress,” he finally said.

“Tough audience,” I growled. “But your point is taken.”

I looked down at the worm. It seemed to have finally realized that it wasn’t alone in the room. At least it’d realized there was more than Fat Louie in the room.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said.

I opened the jar and grabbed a set of tweezers off the work bench. That was the nice thing about these parasites. They weren’t all that mobile unless they were inside a cat, and even then they were inside a house cat. Which meant they were easy enough to defeat.

The biggest issue was defeating them without looking like I was beating the shit out of a cute kitty. That tended to upset passerby even if one of these fuckers wasn’t using that mind control thing that I hadn’t noticed until this last fight.

“There we go,” I murmured as I lowered it towards Fat Louie’s ears. “Nice warm place for you to go and enjoy yourself. Nothing to worry about in there. No secret plots that Night Terror has come up with to control you.”

The thing reached Louie’s ear, and it was off to the races. It slithered in, and a moment later both of Louie’s eyes opened and looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time.

Seeing it with the eyes of an intelligent creature that cared about more than when it got its next tuna snack and where it would take its next nap, that is.

Possessed Louie got up for a moment, but then his legs collapsed. Not that the cat was actually collapsing or that he was ever in any danger. It was one of his signature belly flops, but with the worm trying to take control it turned into a collapse.

“Wh…”

The mouth worked a couple of times. Possessed Louie made a couple of hacking noises. Usually that was the sort of sound that made my spine tingle since it meant trying to get a stain out of the carpet, but this time around I merely smiled.

The asshole alien invader was trying to get its bearings inside Fat Louie’s nerve endings and figure out how to make his cat brain work to the alien’s liking.

“Take your time,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of it.”

Time was the last thing I had plenty of. It’s just that I couldn’t act like I was in a hurry.

Start letting on that you’re in a hurry and suddenly your enemies start trying to make life more difficult for you by dragging out their interrogation since that’s the only thing they can do in protest.

Finally the hacking and wheezing stopped. There was no hairball in evidence, at least. I figured that meant we were good to go.

“Welcome back to the world,” I said. “Now it’s time for you to tell me a few things about what’s going on here.”

Louie turned to me, and while I can’t exactly say the look he hit me with was filled with any more contempt than any other look I’d ever gotten from a cat, it certainly looked like he was trying his best to let me know what he thought of his current situation.

“What have you done to me?” he asked.

Of course it didn’t sound exactly like that. There was some more coughing and wheezing as the alien worm that’d taken over Fat Louie’s higher functions got used to the new body.

“I introduced you to Louie,” I said. “Try to attack me. Go ahead. I’ll even give you a freebie.”

I hit a button on my wrist computer and my suit was replaced with shorts and a T-shirt. There was nothing between me and the cat’s claws. Nothing to protect me if it went crazy.

Possessed Louie’s eyes went wide. His body jerked a couple of times as the alien tried to make something happen. The more he tried, the more frustrated he got. Finally the cat’s massive body fell back against the table, sending a Sonic Spanner tumbling off the side.

Damn it. Those things were expensive. I could hear the Interocitor Modulator snapping inside the thing as it hit the floor.

“You done now?” I asked.

“How have you done this?” it asked. “How have you incapacitated me?”

“Simple,” I said, moving in closer because I knew I was in zero danger as long as this thing was possessing my oldest and fattest grey cat. “You’re inside Fat Louie. I’ve done enough experimenting on your friends to know the whole possession thing you’re doing with the city’s cats is a two way street.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is you inherit some of the characteristics of the creature you inhabit. Maybe that’s not how it works on your world, but here on Earth with felis catus? It goes both ways. Which means, in this case, when you possess Fat Louie here there’s no amount of mojo you can work on his brain that’s going to overcome this cat’s natural inclination towards laziness.”

The alien inhabiting Fat Louie’s body tried to make some noises that sounded very close to hissing and spitting, but ultimately even that was too much work for Fat Louie’s brain.

“I very specifically chose a cat that was so old and lazy that the neural pathways for laziness carved a deep groove,” I said. “You can try and try to overcome that laziness, but plenty of your pals have tried. None of them have managed to do it so far.”

“Fuck you,” Possessed Louie spat at me.

“Oh my,” I said. “Looks like your survey of human entertainment gave you a bit of a potty mouth. How about that?”

“What are you going to do to me?” it asked.

“That depends,” I said.

“On?”

“On whether or not you’re willing to talk,” I said. “You see, I’ve been taking the advice of my computer and not letting any of your buddies I caught know I’m killing you when I’m done with you and evict you from Fat Louie here.”

“So why would you tell me this now?” Possessed Louie asked.

“Simple,” I said. “That isn’t working, and I’m getting impatient. I figure it’ll be easier to threaten your life now and make it clear I fully intend on following through on that threat if you don’t tell me what I want.”

I hit a button on my computer. A false wall behind me went down, revealing a collection of glass jars similar to the one the alien parasite had been in. Those jars contained alien parasites, but they were all good and deceased.

“What have you done?” the alien hissed.

I hit another button on my wrist computer. This time one of the flat panels built into the wall started playing a recording of Bassmasters. It’s fishing show.

“Why are you showing me this?” Possessed Louie hissed.

“Did you know we have creatures that are an awful lot like you on this world?” I asked. “I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Parasitic worm seems like the sort of niche that would show up in a lot of ecosystems, though admittedly I haven’t done enough exploring of strange new worlds to figure out whether or not that’s actually the case. Xenobiology was never my thing.”

Up on the screen a grizzled old fisherman in a boat that probably cost more than most budget cars pulled out a wriggling worm and extolled the virtues of whatever dirt they’d pulled the thing out of. It sounded like so much pseudoscience to me, but I’m sure whoever owned that particular dirt was making a pretty penny selling the worms that lived there to gullible idiots who were willing to pay any price to get an edge on their fishing game.

The grizzled old man speared the worm on a hook and it wriggled some more before it was dropped into the water.

“You monsters!” Possessed Louie screeched.

The cat started to shift and shake. Well then. I’d gotten enough of an emotional response out of this asshole alien that it was actually overcoming some of Louie’s natural lazy instincts. Slightly.

Not enough to get the cat to move his fat ass, but it was impressive.

“Yeah, on this world we use worms like you for bait to catch our food,” I said.

I’d had CORVAC run through quite a bit of footage on this show to get just the right video to send the right message.

No sooner had the unfortunate worm hit the water than a reasonably sized fish leapt up and devoured the thing.

“What kind of sick society are you running?” Possessed Louie hissed.

“The kind of sick society that produced me. I’m considered pretty bad even by the standards of this sick society, and I’m going to take you on a fishing trip if you don’t tell me exactly what I want to know,” I said.

I held my hand out. A fishing rod materialized in my hand. I smiled, and once again the worm’s raw emotion seemed to be overcoming Fat Louie’s natural tendency towards laziness just a little.

Only this time the massive cat was trying to move away from me. Good. We were finally getting somewhere with these assholes.

Sorry for not getting more out last week. Suffered from a bout of multi-day insomnia that knocked me on my ass for most of the week. Feeling better now.