Audio Recording Available:
NIA HALBERD:
For the record, can you state your role during the early phase of the kitten distribution initiative?
INTERVIEWEE:
I was with the logistics cell. We weren’t called Schrödingers yet. That came later, when everyone started naming
themselves like sects. Back then, we were just trying to get cats to doorsteps before they clawed through the
packaging or each other. It was chaos in the early weeks. Like someone had opened every adoption center and
yelled "Go!"
NIA:
So the logistics-first mindset was already there?
INTERVIEWEE:
Definitely. Look, the moment cold fusion hit and kitten distribution became technically feasible, our inboxes
exploded. Every engineer wanted in. You had shipping people, food safety people, drone jockeys, network
architects—everyone with a niche obsession thought they had the answer. But none of the big brains were talking
to each other. That’s how the splits happened. Not from ideology. From overload. People picked lanes because
they didn’t have the bandwidth to compare notes.
NIA:
And yet ideology came. Fast.
INTERVIEWEE:
It always does. Humans need stories more than they need solutions. The Schrödingers, what we eventually got
called, wanted clean systems, decentralized routing, zero-waste delivery. Not because we were dogmatic, but
because the world had just learned what uncoordinated abundance looks like. Our mantra became: "If it can't
route itself, it doesn't scale."
NIA:
And the Meweugenics Society?
INTERVIEWEE:
The breeders. Yeah. They saw the whole infrastructure effort as overcomplicated. To them, logistics was a patch
on a biological failure. They believed kittens should be born perfect. Pre-calibrated for temperament, litter
size, immune resistance, shedding frequency. They were... committed. You walked into one of their facilities, it
smelled like cedar and destiny. They didn't want to ship kittens—they wanted to grow the solution.
INTERVIEWEE:
They were also obsessed with something they called "dimorphic design." The idea was to create a genetically
dominant 'queen cat', larger, longer-lived, hyper-fertile, engineered for nonstop gestation. They saw her as the
biological keystone of the entire project. Most of us found it unsettling. Some called it a fertility engine.
Some people romanticized it as a maternal marvel; others, more critically, saw it as industrialized biology
taken too far.
NIA:
And the Copy Cats?
INTERVIEWEE:
Honestly, we thought they were a joke at first. They showed up with these iso-tanks and gene templates, acting
like they'd solved it all. Their pitch was seductive: no delivery networks, no breeding cycles, just print what
you need. Plug and purr. But their cats didn’t act right. The first batch looked fine, but something was... off.
People noticed. They didn't play, or they played too much. They were either too quiet or never stopped meowing.
Still, efficiency talks louder than ethics, and they had charts.
NIA:
Was there ever a real attempt to unify the three models?
INTERVIEWEE:
(Laughs.) You mean, before the bombings? Barely. There was one summit in Brussels. Two days in, someone spliced
a breeder cat with a Copy Cat line to prove a point. Technically, it worked. But the kitten came out cross-eyed
and aggressive. Bit a delegate. Footage leaked. Went viral. That was the end of the summit. After that, even
suggesting collaboration got you blackballed.
NIA:
So you’re saying it was less about science, and more about... cultural identity?
INTERVIEWEE:
Culture, yes. Pride, even more. It stopped being about kittens, and started being about who had the
right vision of humanity. Schrödingers thought we were saving the future from logistical collapse.
Meweugenics believed they were perfecting nature. Copy Cats saw themselves as post-biological pioneers. No one
wanted to admit someone else's method might be more viable. And every month that passed, each group hardened its
story. We weren’t solving the kitten problem anymore. We were fighting over who got to define it.
NIA:
If you could go back, would you have done anything differently?
INTERVIEWEE:
Yeah. I’d have ignored the mandate and just adopted a stray. Would’ve saved the planet a lot of trouble. Maybe
that’s what we forgot. The whole point was never kittens in every home. It was that kittens made us feel
something. Loved, maybe. Or needed. We automated the supply but never modeled the feeling. That’s where we lost
the thread.
[Transcript Ends]