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Three-phase Felines
Zach's Journal sheds light on his pets, or just plain sheds
by David Lytle

An Entry from Zach's Live Web Journal
Date: 8/1/02
Place: Somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere
Music: Best of Lalo Schifrin
Mood: Lousy. You would be too.

I can't tell you where I am. Even my lawyer doesn't want to know. He says he'd have to turn me in. All because of a little accident in an Icelandic dance club. But people want to hear from me, so I'm posting my journal on the Web.

I'm staying at a friend-of-a-friend's house. I haven't been home in two months and I miss my cat. The friend's friend doesn't have a cat or dog or anything. My first cat was named Nitten. She didn't like laser shows. She couldn't escape them. The living room was the studio: industrial shelving, bed sheet projection screen stretched between rooms, a boom box-sized American 60X argon with an exhaust fan that cooked the house.

Cats see better than humans. Moving images blur together after about 12 frames per second for humans; for cats it's three or four times that. The diffraction grating put Nitten over the edge. It's a piece of transparent film with holographically etched microprisms. One perfect laser beam goes into the grating; a circular array of 32 perfect laser beams comes out. Eye sugar.

I remember when Lloyd cranked the dials on the synth and whipsawed the laser beam between the mirrors of the GS138 scanners. At first, there was only a crisp dot of laser light projected on the bed sheet. After the scanners, the dot moved so fast it became a solid line of glowing light. Then a circle, then an ellipsoid. Then a half-finished cocoon woven from a web of aquamarine spaghetti strands. Something inside thrashed to get out.

We fed the pattern through a pair of counter-rotating diffraction gratings. The first grating projected 32 clockwise-rotating cocoons on the walls, floor and ceiling. We slapped a second grating millimeters in front of the first and motored it in the opposite direction. Another 1,024 writhing cocoons covered walls. Arcing lines of blue and green palpitated at speeds too fast for humans to perceive.

But not Nitten. It must have looked different to cat's eyes. Her back arched, her fur aligned heavenward, her throat hissed rage. She ran. A neighbor across the street took Nitten in. She never returned to the living room.

My new cat is Ellroy. He chews the insulation off electric cords and likes the low-voltage tingle that leaks through three-phase power cables. He bites my hand when he wants to play. Bites it hard enough to break skin. I like to play with Ellroy. Good kitty.