Ship cats are different from other cats. They are just as intelligent and just as self-centered as other uplifted cats, but they seem to have a deeper need to join our world. They enjoy being with us, enjoy working with us, and love to spend months or years in space with us. They are still indefinably cat, with alien thought processes that most of us don’t understand, but they are the original goal the gengineers sought. They are the primary link between our races.
The Peloran spent a century helping us learn to build better gravtech. We ran through what must have been thousands of years of technology in a mere century. We created new worlds with it, both physical and virtual, and many that blend the two. I love those worlds. Genetic humans can enjoy them too of course, with suitable interfaces. Thank God we got past haptic gloves and VR goggles. They were just too clumsy for real life. Or virtual life.
The Slave States saw the coming Republican majorities in the House and Senate as a threat to their way of life. They feared an outright abolition of Slavery, and the European branches of my family jumped on that fear. They promised that Europeans would support The South, since they could not live without King Cotton. My family is like that sometimes. Vicious backstabbers always angling for an advantage over the others. And so we finally slid into war.
Despite the differences, uplifted cats are hard to separate from normal cats. On the one hand, they don’t herd well. On the other, they blend in real good. And on the other hand (you counting hands yet?) they do not live their lives around getting approval from the rest of us. They are perfectly happy to live with normal cats, who completely understand the rules of feline society already, and don’t try to make them act civilized or wear ridiculous clothing.
The Peloran don’t actually give us much of anything. I know the common history is that they came and gave us a new generation of technology. Gravtech is the common name. I’m an example of that. The truth is that they provided us with examples of technology that were primitive by their standards, and then helped our best scientists reverse engineer them to our own tech base. We built the gravtech that made us a true interstellar power in the galaxy.
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