Week #42: Creative Writing Challenge – Cat Aliens Rule the World

House cats are aliens who have succeeded in their plan to rule the world. Discuss.

” On second thought, we’d rather chase mice than fry in the heat, and you’re all out of mice. Good luck with climate change. – Meow!”

That was what the note read. It had been found in the Lincoln Memorial, or what people thought they remembered as the Lincoln memorial. Lincoln was no where to be found. Instead of a founding father, the marble had been chipped and smoothed and worn into the figure of a cat sitting with its tail tucked around the front paws. It gazed out over the reflecting pool and toward the unchanged Washington Monument. The note was found under one of the cat’s claws, speared like a pickle from a deli.

A week before the note was found, there was general confusion among the populace. Not a single person anywhere on the Earth had any memory from the last five years, but the signs of time’s passage were apparent. Families were missing elder relatives. Young couples who didn’t know each other found themselves waking up next to strangers with rings that matched their own. Children playing with blocks found themselves as teenagers programming robots, while teenagers who’d hated homework were now excited about attending their college classes. There were new grey hairs in the world and new crying babies.

And then there were the cats. Well, there were images of cats, pieces of art in museums, statues, new parks with cat-themed playgrounds, and buildings that looked like cats. But there wasn’t a single, actual, living cat on the planet, as far as the ecologists could tell. There was also a scarcity of urban birds, chipmunks, and squirrels that couldn’t be explained.

There were lots of hypotheses about what could have happened. Everyone became an expert on the “phenomenon” in the week before the note was found. The simplest hypothesis was that cats had a wave of mass reproduction and then a deadly disease wiped them out. It explained everything biological that had been found. Psychologists and psychiatrists were attached to the idea that everyone on the planet suffered from mass delusions of cat grandeur, which explained the cultural and physical changes across the planet. Other hypotheses that didn’t gain a huge following included a plot by China and Russia to take over the planet and that a cat-loving cult actually managed to take over the world, both of which, governments rejected mostly out of sheer terror that something like that could actually happen.

Frankie Wright, a comedian, said at a live show, “It’s like an army of alien cats came to take over the world, ate what they wanted, and then decided, naah, this place kinda sucks. Let’s find some other planet to take over.” That was before they found the note.

The world collected its anthropologists and sociologists and psychologists and scientists and told them to figure out what had happened. Over the next three years, as experts gathered information, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere went up another 20 ppm, new subsidies on fossil fuels were implemented in multiple countries, and more than 30% of the coral reefs around the planet died. Frankie Wright started a new tour titled, “Take me with you, I’ll bring the mice”. It sold out in twenty four hours.

The closest the experts got over the next three years to an explanation of the phenomenon was the notion that cats were actually an alien species and had brainwashed the human population. Everyone promptly hushed them when the final report came out, and then revoked their funding. No one wanted to believe in the existence of aliens, let alone aliens that had been fuzzy human companions. No one wanted to think that maybe they’d been on Earth for millions of years, just waiting for the right time to strike. And no one wanted to admit that, maybe if there were cat aliens and they had taken over the Earth, and then decided that Earth really sucked and they didn’t want it, that maybe the cats were right.

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