#spacecat time

[dead-dove-moment]

One of my favorite fancomics about PMMM was a little 21-page ditty from Pixiv, about Kyubey noticing something that changes his perspective a little.

Kurage Modoki’s pixiv page has it in the original Japanese [part 1, part 2, part 3].

An English translation is also available.

Even all these years later, the story sticks with me, in particular the narration of the last couple pages.

The new Kyubey cleaning up the remains of the old, going through his corpse’s memories, and - without inheriting his old self’s feelings - pondering what those feelings must have been like.

“What a strange flavor.”

[dead-dove-moment]

I have so many headcanons about spacecat society though

like okay first off I tend to assume they have only a soft hivemind (like a psychic link network kind of thing) rather than literally just being one consciousness with a species worth of bodies, because you get more intricacy that way and it’s more interesting to talk about a species that instinctually values the group over the self, rather than just “well of course kyubey only cares about the species as a whole if he himself is the species as a whole“.

so I imagine, like, if a society like that produces an albert einstein or a pt barnum. you have braintapes and hot backup clones. so you don’t even have to settle for one of them. so now albert einstein or pt barnum becomes one of your “standard models“, and you decant a new copy of them with all their experiences up to then every time you need another one (up to the limit of what the society can support, of course).

but then, that’s a great recipe for stagnation if that’s the only place that new people come from. you need new perspectives to react to new situations, right? so they’ve got to still have some kind of gene pool, some allowance of spacecats who are still coming from simulated interbreeding with targeted experimental mutations, who are still getting some kind of highly accelerated virtualized "childhood”. and sometimes the folks from that end up the next einstein or the next barnum. and sometimes there’s folks who live for a while and then get sent as cannon fodder, only to get a backup decanted centuries later because Central Planning realizes that they had a skill that’s needed now.

etc etc