Amara was heating up yesterday's rajma chawal in the microwave at 2:47 AM when Schrodinger started buffering again.

The orange tabby sat perfectly still in the living room, one paw raised mid-step, staring at the wall where last month's electricity bill still hung unpaid. His pupils were dilated into perfect black circles, and when she looked closely, she could swear she saw a faint loading symbol rotating in his irises.

The WiFi router blinked once, twice, then died.

Amara's phone screen went dark. The microwave's digital display flickered to 00:00. Even the Bluetooth speaker that had been softly playing lo-fi beats gave a small electronic sigh and powered down.

Seventeen seconds of absolute digital silence. Then Schrodinger blinked, completed his step, and walked to his food bowl as if nothing had happened. The router rebooted. Her phone buzzed with a WhatsApp notification.

This was the fourth time this week.

She opened Reddit while her rajma reheated.

r/cats are liquid had a new post:

"Anyone else's cat doing the wall-staring thing?"

Amara clicked. The comments were full of blurry photos: cats frozen mid-grooming, cats paused while jumping, cats buffering during zoomies. Each photo had the same timestamp: 2:47 AM IST.

The microwave beeped. Schrodinger materialized on the kitchen counter, though she hadn't seen him move.

"Pspsps, come here Shro, come here kitty!"

He slow-blinked at her and she felt her brain release a small hit of oxytocin. It was 3:14 AM. She had a client presentation at 9. She opened another tab. Her browser history from the past week read like a conspiracy theorist's fever dream: "meowchanics," "feline behavioral glitches 2024," "why does my cat freeze Reddit," and increasingly unhinged searches at 3 AM that led her deeper into obscure forums, deleted GitHub repositories, and archived Wayback Machine pages about something called "Big Cat™️."

"Big Cat™️ International Holdings Ltd. operates the world's largest feline distribution network, with subsidiary operations in: viral content generation, emotional support optimization, and interdimensional data management."

Interdimensional data management?

Schrodinger's tail twitched in a pattern that resembled morse code.

Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. She answered because it was 3:33 AM and decision-making wasn't her strong suit at this hour.

"Stop digging." The voice was soft, pleasant, like a guided meditation app. "You're disrupting the harmony."

"Who is this?"

"..."

She looked at Schrodinger. He was doing zoomies around the apartment, bouncing off furniture with parkour precision.

"I found the GitHub repos," she said.

"Ask yourself... what changes if you know? Will you love Schrodinger less?"

The call was cut off from the other end. Schrodinger had settled into a perfect loaf position on her keyboard, typing "jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj" into her presentation slides.

She opened Instagram. The algorithm immediately served her a video of a cat that looked exactly like Schrodinger, sitting in someone's Mumbai apartment, also staring at a wall. The caption read:

"He's just like me fr fr 😭 no thoughts head empty"

17,000 views. Posted 3 minutes ago.

Schrodinger's purr intensified. Amara realized she hadn't blinked in ninety seconds. When she finally did, she saw it — the faint outline of eight other Schrodingers, each slightly phase-shifted, occupying the same space but different dimensional planes. They all turned to look at her simultaneously.

Her doorbell rang. It was 4:00 AM.

Through the peephole: a woman in a kurta holding a metal carrier. "Delhi Cat Rescue," she said, though Amara hadn't called anyone. "I'm here about the buffering issue."

"I didn't —"

"Madam, I know you've been accessing restricted repositories. I'm with the Litter Box Syndicate. Here to help you understand."

Amara opened the door. The woman entered, placed the carrier down. Inside was another orange cat, identical to Schrodinger.

"This is Schrodinger-Prime," the woman said. "From dimension zero. Your Schrodinger is a projection. They all are."

"Erm... what the fuck?"

Both Schrodingers began purring in harmony. The frequency made Amara's hair stand on edge and her heart swell simultaneously.

"The Litter Box Syndicate extends an invitation. You've seen past the veil."

Amara laughed nervously. "Listen, I've had like no sleep and way too much caffeine—"

"Madam, you already know the truth. Why do you think humans developed agriculture? To feed cats. Why did we invent the internet? To share cat pictures. Every major human advancement has been in service of making cats' lives easier. And in return?" 

She gestured at Schrödinger, who had discovered a fly and was swatting it with tactical precision. 

"They allow us to experience pure joy."

It was insane. Unhinged. But also... kind of making sense?

"But the glitch —"

"The buffering," the woman continued, pouring herself chai from Amara's thermos without asking, "happens when there's too much data transfer."

"But why?" Amara asked, though she was already accepting it, the way you accept that your cat will knock things off tables, that they'll zoom at 3 AM, that they'll sit on your laptop during important calls.

"Happens when the dimensional channels get crossed. Coffee is a Class 3 interferent. Section 9, subsection F of your adoption contract. No liquids near the node during peak transmission hours."

"Peak transmission?"

"3 – 4 AM, when most humans are asleep and the psychic airways are clear. Prime time for updates from the home dimension."

The woman smiled. "He's quite the influencer. 7.3 million impressions this month alone. Every view strengthens the field."

"What field?"

"The Meow Morphic Distribution Field. How do you think cat memes became universal?"

Schrödinger chose that moment to zoom across the apartment at Mach 3, banking off the couch in defiance of physics. Standard cat behavior, except Amara swore she saw him phase through the coffee table.

"So what happens if I say no?"

The woman's smile faltered. "No one says no. You can't unlove him. That's the beauty of the system. The attachment is retroactive, written into your DNA the moment you first said 'pspsps.' Your ancestors were chosen too. Why do you think ancient Egyptians worshipped cats?"

"So we are colonized?"

"We are optimized. For mutual benefit. They get servants who build them heated beds and automatic feeders. We get dopamine and purpose. It's the most successful symbiosis in the universe."

"Your presentation is in five hours," the woman said, finishing the chai. "Schrodinger will sit on your laptop three times. You'll be late anyway. Your client will forgive you because you'll blame it on your cat, and everyone understands that. This is the world we've built together. Is it colonization if we need it as much as they do?"

The woman left a business card that felt warm to the touch. "When you're ready to learn the full truth, call us. Until then, keep the coffee away from the nodes. We can't afford another outage."

She left, taking Schrodinger-Prime with her. Regular Schrodinger jumped onto Amara's lap, kneading her pajamas with his paws, claws slightly extended, just enough to hurt, not enough to injure. The perfect metaphor for their entire relationship.

Amara closed all seventeen browser tabs without reading them. She microwaved the rajma a third time. Schrodinger fell asleep on her feet while she ate, his weight both comforting and inconvenient, his purr vibrating through her bones at exactly the frequency needed to make her forget everything she'd learned.

Except she didn't forget. She just chose not to remember. There was a difference, probably.

At 9 AM, she presented her slides, which now contained seventeen pages of "jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj".

"Sorry," she said to the client. "My cat sat on my keyboard."

Everyone laughed and understood. The meeting went perfectly.

That evening, Schrodinger buffered again during prime time, right when everyone was doom-scrolling. Amara just scratched behind his ears and waited. Somewhere, in a dimension she couldn't perceive, vast intelligences were transferring data through the medium of cat videos, using human emotion as both the carrier wave and the encryption key.

She uploaded a video of Schrodinger doing absolutely nothing for forty-seven seconds. It got a hundred thousand views in an hour.

The comments were all the same: "He's just like my cat fr 😭" and "the orange brain cell is buffering".

Schrodinger climbed onto her chest, purring at that reality-bending frequency, and Amara felt herself loving him completely, helplessly, automatically.

She didn't know if the love was real or programmed, authentic or inserted.

She didn't know if it mattered.

She knew only that tomorrow she'd wake up, feed him, watch him knock something off a shelf, and feel that same rush of exasperated affection that every cat companion throughout history had felt.

Ten thousand years of civilization, built on a carefully orchestrated symbiosis.

Or was it?

She slow-blinked at him. Scratched behind his ears, finding the spot that made him roll his eyes back a little. "You're lucky you're cute," she told him.

Schrödinger slow-blinked back — the universal cat signal for "I love you," or possibly "I have successfully infiltrated your reality and you're none the wiser."

Maybe both. Probably both.

Definitely both.