How to teach your cats to speak (11/11/2004)

How to teach your cats to speak (11/11/2004)

It is possible to teach your pets to speak. But harken to my warning of the possible consequences.

It had been a brief and very wet summer. With no apparent reason, the climate being the way it was these days, there was a lovely spell of weather in September, but then pretty soon the rains came and it was business as usual.

The weather suited my life at that moment and the rain kept me indoors, not

that I was going anywhere.

Anyway, I had left my job. Some might say 'fired', but I prefer to see it as a difference of opinion. A very large difference of opinion as it happened. There was even an explosion involved. Just a small one but even small explosions are enough to make management more than a little nervous, especially vis-a-vie future employment of those that go around blowing things up.

Still, it did allow me to take some stuff back from the lab that could be attributed to the accident and the resulting fire.

I had it in my head to continue my work at home, converting my study into a lab, but to be honest I was so worn out and unhappy I didn't even take any of the equipment or drugs out of the boxes and there it all sat, next to the computer and taking up far too much room.

Well, I had a lot of time on my hands, I couldn't even bring myself to look for a new job, and the weather outside being so nasty I quickly turned to my favourite time filler - online computer games.

I played a few, such as a  fairly simple world war two first person shooter, where you would run around a mansion or a set of trenches trying to shoot the enemy, either the Americans or the Germans, depending on what team you had selected. There was another game where you had to traipse through a dungeon killing endless hordes of monsters, and a few others I don't even remember.

After a few weeks I lost interest in those games and eventually found one described as a MMORPG, a massively multi-player online role play game, called ForeverQuest. The idea of FQ was that it was a 3D persistent environment in which the players could all run around and interact with the scenery and with each other.

Want to chop down a tree? Sure, find and axe and chop it down. Want to weave a blanket? Find the right tools and do it. Mostly what you did however was run around killing monsters and collecting their treasure.

As autumn rolled into winter I found myself playing this game almost every waking moment. It was terrible addictive. There were over twenty thousand other people playing this game, and a flourishing economy meant that there was

always a market for 'player made' merchandise as it was superior to the stuff that you could find on the corpses of dead monsters.

I began turning one of my online personas into a crafter character and soon had him churning out weapons and armour at a tidy profit, the only out-lay being the price of the materials.

Time went past and as the characters skills increased I found I was able to make things from special items that he could find just lying around in the forest (the virtual forest of course!). There was a real market for the Tanglewood

Bow and it was highly sort after by the hardiest of warriors as it could kill many monsters with a single shot.

However there was a catch, and it also brought to light why this game has captured the souls of so many players. In order to make the bow you had to forage a bowstaff from the Tanglewood forest, the bowstaff being the primary ingredient in the bow.

Now in the game these bows sold for up to a hundred thousand gold coins, and as I learned from other people playing the game they also sold, against the rules of the game, for up to two hundred real life pounds on secret online auctions sites on the internet! Some players were so eager to get this deadly weapon for their warriors that they would pay real money for it!

I moved my character to the forest and started foraging, sure that my fortune was made. But oh what a process. Standing there hour after hours clicking the 'forage' button every two minutes. It was mind numbingly boring.

So with snow falling outside and wrapped in a blanket (the gas having been long since cut off) I would click away day after day in the hope of finding a bowstaff. The fact of the matter was, though, that I could only maintain this for an hour or two at a time, and to top it all, although I had already found several staffs and sold them, I needed a job or I would lose the house.

One fateful evening I had come to the realisation that I would have to go out and work or starve and thought to myself, if only there was some way to make this an automatic process. Sadly FQ had ways of detecting regular key presses. They came down on cheaters very hard in the game, and would ban anyone

they found using a macro, what you might call a small computer program for simulating key presses.

Just then, one of my two cats rubbed up against my leg. She wanted to be fed.

One of my other diversions, during my enforced confinement, had been my attempt to teach the cats to speak. Anyone who owns cats speaks to them. They are very articulate and can make a variety of sounds. The feline pallet is not

shaped to speak English in any conventional sense, however a variety of cat noises if strung together can be made to sound very much like the spoken word.

To begin with I would just answer them whenever they meowed or croaked. I defy any cat owner to say they don’t sometimes have very long, but meaningless conversations with their feline companions.

Naturally though I had to take things a little further and had even began a little research of my own at work before I was fired, bit it had never really

developed. I had recorded over a hundred cat sounds and had spliced many of them together with some recording software on my computer to make words, or things that sounded like words.

At one point I had tried to play these sounds back to my cats, Abby and Betty, but they lacked motivation. Sometimes they would reply, but it was just cat sounds. Eventually I grew tired of their apathy and gave up the whole project. Still, who said they had to communicate verbally?

An idea began to form in my head.

It was all very simple really. A cat will do anything for food, even press the same button on a keyboard randomly. I rigged up a feeding device to the keyboard and left the cats to it.

It all worked out very well. While I was working in a crummy lab tech job at the college the cats were earning a couple of hundred pounds extra a month.

New Year came and went. I didn't celebrate it, I have no friends or family. One day I arrived home from work and discovered that those long abandoned boxes had been chewed open by the cats and that

they had eaten some of the drugs contained within. As I suspected I found two very ill looking cats not very far away. Well, I used some of their wages to pay for a trip to the vet, but I needn't of worried, although a little green and bubbly they were fine the next day. Thinking back, this may have been the start of the real trouble.

I didn't play FQ as much as I used to, but I still loaded up one of my old characters and wandered around from time to time. My main character was incredibly wealthy from all the Tanglewood Bows he had made and I liked to lord it around sometimes.

On an otherwise average Friday evening I had a strange typed conversation with someone.

Them : Hey dude! How’s it going? feeling better?

Me : Who are you?

Them : Its me Artrades, I was speaking to you in the forest yesterday, remember? You were feeling ill a while back in RL

(RL meant ‘real life’)

Me : I don't know you.

I then put him on my people to ignore list and thought no more about it.

But it happened the next night, and then the next. Random people claiming to have spoken to me on-line. One of the cats rubbed up against my leg. I looked down at it. It regarded me with studied nonchalance.

'What have you been up to Abby?'

Abby fiend ignorance.

Well, it was all just foolishness I thought to myself. But then other things started happen.

A larger credit card bill than normal, with payments made to online companies. Companies that dealt in stocks and shares and on-line assets.

Credit disappearing very quickly on my mobile phone whenever I left it unattended

It all began to dawn on me. A terrible realisation that the cats had started their own online trading company.

The next night I filled the food hopper next to the PC as normal, but what the cats didn't realise was that I also set up the web cam to watch them and to channel the output to my laptop which I set up in the bedroom.

The cats entered the study as normal at about midnight after being outside to attend to their business.

Abby took up her usual position at the keyboard and Betty at the mouse. They quickly began to do what needed to be done in the ForeverQuest game to get the food that they needed, but besides this they also kept minimising the game and in an Internet Explorer window gave every impression of doing some quite complex dealing in the online stocks and shares markets! Not only that but they were using my credit card details!

I immediately stormed through to the study to confront them.

'What’s the meaning of this!?' I demanded.

The cats, startled, looked round at me. I went to shoo them away from the computer, but then Abby meowed and it sounded so much like,

'Wait a minute.', that I stopped dead in my tracks.

'Huh?' was all I could manage.

Betty nodded at me and said,

'Before you do anything rash, look at our portfolio.'

I was amazed, it still sounded like cat meows and croaks - but arranged in a way that came out like spoken English.

She then clicked the mouse and a webpage came up on the screen. I looked it over. I gasped.

Millions and millions of pounds.

'I.. you... I.. the money. My money..'

'Our money now. Not yours.' corrected Abby.

'What? You used my money. It's my money. What do you need it all for?'

'Never you mind that,' said Abby, the more talkative of the two, 'You seem to know too much now. It will push our plans forward a little, but you'd better not try anything. We know a very great deal about your behaviour at your old job. A few well placed e-mails would land you in jail for a very long time.'

'I...I...', I was flabbergasted, 'What plans?'

'Never you mind. Just phone your work and say you won't be in any more. And when the delivery men come to the door just pick the things up and sign the forms. We will be watching you.'

'You wretches! I raised you from kittens!'

'Well, be that as it may, things have changed. You are not to leave the house.'

And thus it went. Each day delivery men came and went. Consignments of computer equipment. Surveillance equipment. Satellite dishes. Spy cameras. Hubs, servers and modems by the truck load. Thousands of pounds of computer equipment. And hundreds of pounds worth of luxury cat food. I suspect I was only

kept around because of my ability to use a can opener and sign forms.

I even considered scrawling a note on the delivery docket along the lines of 'Help! I am being held captive by my cats!' but what good would it have done?

The days rolled into weeks, and when I was not serving my feline masters I watched the news downstairs in the living room and sat horrified as my cats took over the world.

What was AB Technologies? Who were the mysterious figure heads Miss A and Miss B? The only human that could tell the world would never be believed!

Then a dreadful killer virus called the Tape Worm was unleashed on the world. It was never traced back to 58 Strawberrybank Cresent and was blamed on hackers in Hong Kong, but I knew the truth.

It took advantage of security breaches in the latest version of Windows, totally bringing down systems that got infected. Every computer on the internet was hit and Microsoft stock plummeted.

There just was no cure for the Worm, no Virus software could tackle this new breed, that was intelligent enough to adapt on each new machine it infected.

And just when shares in IBM and Microsoft hit rock bottom - who should step in to buy them all up?

AB Technologies who else! And with every new copy ABSoft Windows purchased you got a guaranteed fix for the Tape Worm virus - what a surprise!

We could afford to pay the heating bills at least now, but a shiver still went down my spine on the winters evening when I watched in horror as the Channel 4 news announced Bill Gates suicide.

He killed himself by biting into a poisoned apple. Whether in tribute to Alan Turing or a dig at Apple Macintosh I don't know.

I girded my loins and went up the stairs to the study where my cats were running their empire.

'Girls, this has got to stop.'

Abby looked up at me from the phone she was texting on with a guilty expression

'We didn't think someone would die.'

I nodded at her and then addressed Betty who was sat at a keyboard,

'Betty, enough is enough, stop trying to take over the world.'

The little grey and white minx then turned to me and said,

'Trying to? Trying to? We already have taken over the world! Every software and hardware manufacturer on the planet is now owned by ABT. Everything made by mankind from biscuits to jumbo jets is done through us. We are the pay masters of every government and we control every single intelligence agency in the world at the highest level. When I finalise this deal with Bush we own everything!'

'All from my back room, I am amazed ' , I said, 'But why? What for?'

'Why?', she replied, 'Why, so that mankind can do our every bidding of course!'

I mulled that over for a minute then said,

'But Betty, this is obviously a news flash for you, but that was pretty much how things were set up between humans and cats already!'

'Ahh...' , was all Betty could manage then Abbey coughed a little cat cough and said,

'He's got a point Bet'

'No, no' gasped Betty, 'This way is much better!'

Abby threw down her mobile phone and then said

'How is it? Back in the old days I slept eighteen hours and played the other six. Now I spend all day arranging business deals and typing up stock reports! I'm exhausted! And for what, he's exactly right, we still prefer Whiskas!'

Betty tried to argue but the logic was obvious, I shrugged at her and nodded.

'You don't need all this Betty, not even a human does, let alone a pair of cats.'

So that was that, the cats gave away huge chunks of their wealth to charities and cat homes. The rest they gave to the share holders. They relaxed their grip on the governments of the world, although watch the next general election, the winner will be a cat lover I can tell you that for nothing.

They disbanded all the security agencies they had set up and even put up a memorial to Bill Gates although I don’t remember him having such point ears.

We sold most of the computer equipment and satellite dishes and I limited

them to one credit card each.

The world returned to comparative normal.

And me? Well, a happy ending I suppose although it was touch and go for a while. I never have to work again, we have enough money for that, but since they learned to talk the cats sure are more demanding.

I can safely say I am the only person that gets text messages from his cats when they get hungry.