It’s funny, ‘cos I never really liked cats. Well, of course, I used to look after them and all but, well, that was my job. Now, when I look at Snowy, it’s hard to remember how I used to look at her, like she was just, you know, a dumb animal, something beneath me, something to be used and discarded. I could say that it was working at the lab that made me like that, hardened me, or something, but that wouldn’t be right. If I’m really honest with myself, I was already that way when I started. It’s the way most of us are, don’t you think?

And, to be fair, Snowy was nothing special in those days, just another laboratory animal like all the others. Professor Nichols had hundreds of them. Rats mostly but there were a dozen or so cats and even four little capuchin monkeys. Cute little chaps. Like little old men. You’d swear they were human sometimes. Funny that, looking back. Two of the capuchins died when Nichols was practicing getting the implants right. That’s why he started on the cats. He said the monkeys were no good ‘cos their brains weren’t regular enough for the stereotaxis equipment. It didn’t seem to me that the cats were any better ‘cos he lost five of them too before he got it right with old Snowy.

I remember the day it happened like it was yesterday. Nichols was all excited in that irritating, twitchy way he has and all his hand-maidens were running about like headless chickens. Me and Dan were running about too. As usual, we were the only ones actually doing any work and not flapping about fussing and fretting. Dan was OK. He was just a young lad but he had his head screwed on the right way and he knew how to get the job done despite all the nonsense he got from the Professor and the hand-maidens. I tell you, for people who were supposed to be the best and brightest in the land, they were a bunch of complete nerds. In all my years as a lab technician, I’d never seen such a bunch of hopeless cases - and, believe me, you see a lot in this job. Mostly I put it down to old Nichols choosing his research assistants more for their sex-appeal than their IQs but then, he was just as bad in his own way.

I was the one who got to pick Snowy. "Get me a cat, Bob," said Nichols, "and make sure it’s a good, big, healthy one this time." That was his little joke. He kept saying all the other animals had died because I’d been giving him the little, skinny cats so I could keep the big fat ones for myself. I told him a hundred times I didn’t even like cats but he just went on and on with it. Sometimes I think that if it wasn’t for the academic staff, being a lab technician could be a really nice job. So I got him Snowy. She was the biggest and fattest and pure white too. That’s why the hand-maidens had given her that stupid name. They were always naming the animals and treating them like pets. I even caught Jill Stevenson feeding scraps to one of the monkeys through its bars. I ask you, what is the point of them specifying strict feeding regimes if they’re going to sneak in and mess it all up like that? They’re just like a bunch of kids really.

I asked her, if she likes the animals so much, how can she bring herself to go chopping them up and messing about with their brains and killing them and all that? She gave me a load of waffle about how we need to keep our minds on the great benefits that would come in the end and that it was worth sacrificing a few dumb animals to move human understanding further forward. Some such rubbish. "Sacrificing", of course, is what they say when they mean "killing". I didn’t argue with her. What’s the point? They’re all so stuck up about how wonderfully brainy they all are that they don’t listen to a word you say and, anyway, when you finally work you’re way through the great cloud of fancy words they throw up, you find they haven’t said anything worth the trouble of deciphering in the first place. She was a looker, though, young Jill. The kind of woman you notice even in a crowd. When she walked into the lab, me and Dan and old Nichols would all look up and watch her like a pride of lions watching a tasty little gazelle walking by. Mind you, we all did that for most of the hand-maidens if truth be known.

I anaesthetised the cat and brought it over to the operating table. They never looked so cute when they were out cold. They looked like dead rabbits, like meat waiting to be skinned and gutted. Anyway, none of the hand-maidens went "oh, poor thing" or anything like that. I don’t suppose they’d have dared anyway with Nichols there. He didn’t like that kind of soppiness. Very businesslike he was. I don’t think he had a scruple in his whole body.

Dan and I got the cat’s head shaved and then bolted it into the equipment. It was the biggest, fanciest head-clamp you’ve ever seen and it bristled like a hedgehog with all its tools and probes and whatnot. The calibration took forever and Nichols insisted on redoing it after I’d finished. "No offence, Bob, but I just want to be absolutely certain everything’s just perfect." What the Hell. He invented the thing. All I thought was, if he wanted to do it himself, why hadn’t he just got on with it instead of making me waste all that time first? Mostly he kept out of my way though because he was off tending the brains in the other lab.

Now I’ve been in this game since I left school and that’s quite a few years now. In that time I’ve seen some pretty gruesome things. You name it and I’ve seen it cut up, poked about and binned after it twitched its last twitch - everything from earthworms to human babies. Sometimes I’ve wondered how I could stand it anymore but I kept at it somehow - though some nights I’ve gone down the pub and had a few stiff ones - sometimes a good few! Yet I’ve never seen anything that spooked me as much as Nichols’ brains. That was so creepy I don’t know how I stuck it. I really don’t

He had these tanks, you see, just fish tanks that I got for him from the local pet shop, and he grew brains in them. They were filled with fluids that we had to keep at just the right temperature and concentrations. We pumped blood through them, up into their arteries and then out into the conditioning plant where we actually cleaned it with real human kidneys and oxidated it in artificial lungs and dripped nutrients into it. It was delicate work. Everything had to be kept just so. I only joined the lab after it had been going for a couple of years but I gather that Nichols had lost a Hell of a lot of brains before he got the life support system to work. And where did he get the brains from? I hear you ask. He got them out of babies - little aborted babies. He did the abortions himself to make sure the brain was fresh and alive and not damaged in any way. All perfectly legal, he said, but I wonder what some of those little girls would have thought if they’d known what had become of their kids. Maybe they wouldn’t have cared - but I can’t help wondering. It’s strange but one day in that room with all those brains in tanks as I was seeing to the drips and checking the gauges, I suddenly got to thinking about all those little babies and it made me think of those ugly lumps in the tanks and what they might have been and maybe what they were and what they might be thinking or feeling in a world with no eyes or ears or hands or bodies. Suddenly I had tears all down my face. I wasn’t exactly crying but, I’ll tell you, I left the lab as soon as I could and sat by myself in my office for a long time just staring at the floor with my mind sort of blank. Well, I mean, for God’s sake: human brains! You’d have to be made of stone not to have some kind of reaction. I’m not ashamed of it at all.

All his brains had wires in them, mostly into the frontal lobes, hundreds and hundreds of hair-thin wires and he was always, always fiddling with them, moving them in and out by fractions of a millimetre, adding new ones, taking ones out, charting his results on mile after mile of electro-encephalogram paper. Scores of students and research assistants must have messed about with the programs that read the outputs and manipulated the inputs. I’ll bet they got a whole bunch of PhDs out of it all. And do you know what it was all for? It was all for that day when they operated on poor Snowy.

Professor Nichols took off the top of Snowy’s skull and gave it to a couple of the hand-maidens who drilled a hole in it and attached a neat little radio transceiver. While the girls were doing this, Nichols used his fancy head-clamp to push a mass of tiny wires into the cat’s exposed brain. He’d poke them in and watch the readouts on the computer screens and then tweak them a bit until the pictures he saw made him happy, then he’d poke in a few more and adjust them too. The whole thing took hours. As usual, Dan and I got the whole thing on video. I think Nichols had some idea he was making history in that creepy little room. Who knows, maybe he was. Maybe we all were. In the end, he connected all the wires onto a kind of flat plate that he’d had specially made by a chum of his at MIT and clipped the plate into the piece of skull with the transceiver on it. Then he put the skull back together and sewed the skin-flap back over it, leaving the radio gear sticking out of the cat’s head like a little black cap.

They kept Snowy out for a long time and the poor little thing was covered in sensors, reading her heartbeat and temperature and blood chemistry. Meanwhile Nichols and the hand-maidens spent most of their time in the other lab watching the computers - and the brains. Jill Stevenson was the only one who seemed to pay any attention to the cat. She’d come in every hour or so and check the sensors. They were reading the outputs on their computer screens so her coming in was just to check that the tubes and wires were still in place. I wasn’t complaining though. Dan and I would lean up against the food store door opposite with big grins on our faces and drink her in while she bent over the cage fiddling and checking.

I could have spent all day like that, she was so beautiful. She had such high, round buttocks that my hands almost ached to touch them. Watching her my emotions were completely out of bounds. One minute I’d be taught and tense, trying to suck her up with my eyes, wanting her with an intensity that felt like fury, like burning rage, then she’d move - one of her high, round buttocks would pull her skirt taught or a deep breath would stretch her blouse across her small, firm breasts - and I’d sag, suddenly weak with a feeling like despair. In a way, it was torture. In a way, it was bliss. I’m sure you know what I mean.

"How’s it going?" I’d ask when she was finished, reluctant to let her go.

"No reaction to the implants so far. Everything looks good."

"Better than last time anyway."

"Yeah, the cat was dead by this time last time." That was Dan. I said he was OK. I didn’t say he was bright.

"Snowy’s going to be alright," said Jill. "If the brain link works, she’s going to be more than alright!"

"What’s it gonna do then, this brain link?" Dan again.

"Well, the thing that makes people so different from the rest of the animals is the size of our brains. In particular, it’s the size of our cortex." Jill was lecturing, educating us poor dumb grunts in that nauseating way that they all have. I didn’t care a bit. I watched her perfect mouth and wished, wished. "What we’ve done is to create a high-bandwidth link between Snowy’s primitive cortical structures and the fully developed cortex of a human brain."

"The one in the green tank?" asked Dan. I think he was playing up to her, probably for the same reasons I used to.

"That’s right. We’ve got connections into that brain from the computers and the computers are talking by radio to Snowy’s brain. It’s all very complicated" she gave a little smile just to let us know she understood how hard it was for us to keep up, "but the effect should be just as though that little cat there was walking around with a full-sized human cortex in its head." It didn’t really dawn on me at the time what she’d said but it came back to me later alright.

Snowy was a bit poorly for quite a while after the operation. Well you would be, wouldn’t you? But it wasn’t just that she was ill, it was that she was sort of dopey and disoriented. I had to help her out quite a lot. I took to feeding her bits of meat with my fingers ‘cos she didn’t seem up to feeding herself and she was getting thinner all the time. She forgot all about her personal hygiene too. Most of the time in those first few weeks, she was a mess. I would have complained about it too, having to clean her up and all that, but she got so upset when she had one of her accidents and you could see she didn’t really mean it. I felt more sorry for her than cross. She got the hang of it again after a while, thank God.

I don’t know quite when but after some time - weeks maybe, or months - she stopped behaving like a cat. She took to sitting with her head on one side watching me like I was some enormous puzzle. She’d do this for maybe half an hour then she’d walk up to the mesh of her cage and start mewling and chirruping for all the world like she was trying to have a conversation with me. Many’s the day I pulled up a stool and sat next to her chattering away. I must have told that cat my whole life story! She was such a good listener and would have sat there chatting all day if I’d had the time to spend.

Meanwhile Nichols and the handmaidens had come out of the brain room and were starting to spend more time with Snowy. They had me pile up a load of computer equipment around her cage and the video camera was to be set up constantly with a fresh film in it. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what they were doing but they were obviously trying to teach her things. That’s nothing new of course. In these labs they spend their whole lives teaching the animals to do little tricks for them then chopping them up to see what difference it made. All for the greater good, of course, as Jill had said.

Nichols couldn’t spend so much time in the lab once the new term started and he had lectures to give and tutorials and what not but the handmaidens kept up the vigil. A couple of them left and a couple more joined. Jill was still there I was pleased to note. I was worried that Nichols would try something funny with her and she’d clear off - it wouldn’t be the first time, not by a long way - but either he managed to keep his hormones under control for a change, or she didn’t mind. It would have been a pity if Jill had gone. This job can be pretty dull and a nice bit of rump helps stave off the boredom.

Then Christmas came and went and then another term. It must have been near enough nine months from the day of the operation to the day Nichols called me over to Snowy’s cage. I could tell that something was up. There was a gaggle of handmaidens and they were all on the edge of giggles. Even Nichols could barely keep himself in check. "Come over here, Bob. I want to show you something." I went, even though I knew it was going to be some kind of stupid joke. He was the boss after all. The handmaidens were practically weeing themselves by the time I got to the cage. I looked Nichols square in the eyes and said "yes?". If this went too far, I was going to talk to the union. I wasn’t going to be made a laughing stock. "It’s Snowy, Bob," said Nichols. "I think she’d like a word with you." I carried on staring at him but he’d turned round to face the cage. I looked about. All the handmaidens were staring at the cage too: waiting for something. So I turned and looked.

Snowy was standing at the mesh and looking up at me. She was staring straight into me in that way she’d developed of late and I thought I saw nervousness there in her shiny black eyes, maybe even fear. I glanced about at the crowd surrounding her cage and felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the poor little bugger. What it must be like to have that lot round you all day poking and probing! "Hello Snowy," I said in a kind sort of voice, to put her at her ease. She opened her mouth as though she was going to mewl at me as usual but no sound came from her. Instead, a voice came from off to one side. "Hello Bob," it said and a cheer went up from the girls.

There was one hell of a party that night. They were all high as kites even before they started drinking but, by the time they’d had a few they were shouting and dancing about like they’d just been let out of school. The party was in the college bar and most of the Department turned up plus a dozen or two others that I didn’t know. Nichols was playing court to a small group of the great and the good. Even the Vice Chancellor turned up for a while, before the worst of the rowdiness really started, and I could hear Nichols shouting things to him about patents and IPR.

I sort of hung about on the edge of things. To be honest, I wasn’t at all in a party mood. Ever since that damned cat spoke to me, I’d been feeling pretty strange and I couldn’t really say why. I remembered what Jill had said about the brain link and how it was like Snowy was walking about with a whole human brain in its head and every time I thought about it it seemed more and more creepy. Did it mean the cat would have human feelings? Or would it still have cat feelings? Or both? What did it matter? If it could talk and think like a person, how could it be right to keep it in a cage and do experiments on it? I could see the staggering importance of what Nichols had done. Well, I could see how everyone would think it was so bloody important. But I could see how sick and wrong it all was too. And, on reflection, and probably a couple of pints too many, maybe I couldn’t see what was so bloody, staggeringly important about it after all.

"So what’s so great about sticking a brain on the end of a radio link?" I asked the grinning youth sitting next to me. He was one of the students who’d been programming the pile of computers around Snowy’s cage. He looked slowly round at me. His gaze was a bit unfocused and his grin was a bit on the wild side. "What’s that going to do for the world? Is that going to stop poverty? Is it going to end war? Will it cure the common cold?"

"Whassamatter?"

I looked into his grin. "Never mind."

"It’s the biggest fucking thing since penicillin. That’s all!" The rest of his body turned to join his grin in facing me. "It’s not the fucking cat, you know."

"What?"

"It’s the link, man. That’s the big thing." I must have looked as confused as I felt. "The link! Look. Now we’ve got a brain in a tank and a cat connected up so they can act as one brain. Yeah?" I nodded. "Now imagine it was two human brains in tanks. That’s next on the agenda. Then two human brains in live subjects. Then three. Then hundreds." He made a grand gesture with one arm, knocking someone’s shoulder and sending their beer slopping about. He didn’t seem to notice though. "Imagine the whole fucking world connected together brain to brain." He leaned forward, his grin gone. "Would that stop poverty, do you think? Would that stop war?"

"Jesus Christ that’s sick," I said.

The student was clearly shocked by my reaction. "The end of war is sick? The whole world in harmony is sick? Are you hard to please or what!"

"I’m just someone who wants to keep my own mind and not share it with everyone else. I like being me. OK? I don’t want to be a billionth part of some super-brain."

The grin was back. "Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it."

I don’t know. Maybe it was the drink. Maybe I was just so scared by what he’d said. After all, these pimply little kids sit at their computer screens substituting countless hours of hacking code for any kind of social interaction, they use their bright, shiny little brains to solve things and build things but it’s all a game to them, the academic kudos, the careers to be made, the intellectual satisfaction, the thrill of cracking the code. They don’t think about what some slimy politician or grasping entrepreneur is going to turn their new toy into in a few years’ time. Some of them don’t think. Some of them don’t want to think. Anyway, the thought of people like this grinning idiot, like Nichols and his giggling handmaidens, people you wouldn’t trust to tie their own shoelaces, the thought of them turning up stuff like this and then patting themselves on the back for being such clever little kiddies made my stomach turn. I told the bloke he was a bloody prat. That wiped the smile off his face. He looked at me with a dumb, confused expression as if to say; "Why are you being nasty to me? I haven’t done anything." I told him he was a complete and total bastard and that I’d like to shove my glass right down his throat. Without another word, the bloke stood up and walked away.

I got up myself then, too, downed the rest of my pint, pushed my way through the shouting, laughing people and escaped into the cool, Spring evening. I was a bit drunk and still angry. I didn’t even think about going home. I just walked around the campus waiting to cool down.

By no coincidence, I went by the Department, thinking maybe I’d look in on Snowy. The lights were on and as I mounted the stairs to the lab I could hear loud voices. There were several of them, male and female, and they were laughing and joking. As I opened the door, they stopped and turned to face me. They were gathered around Snowy’s cage. Jill Stevenson was one of them but I didn’t recognise any of the others. "Oh, it’s alright," she said, "it’s only Bob." "Hello Bob!" shouted one of the blokes with her. "D’you wanna drink, Bob?" asked a blonde girl with a bottle of whisky. They were all very drunk.

"What do you think you’re doing here?" I demanded and crossed the room to look at Snowy.

"We’ve got every right to be here," Jill bristled.

Snowy was sitting at the back of her cage watching us with wide-eyed anxiety. "Come on Jill," said one of them. "The stupid cat’s not going to talk to us anyway."

"No," said Jill. "It’s not his lab. He can’t make us go." She rounded on me. "Who do you think you are?"

I’d been crouching by the cage. Now I stood up and looked her in the eye. "Why don’t you go back and join the party?"

"Yeah, come on. Let’s join the party!" They were already moving off, leaving Jill behind.

She took no notice, she was so angry. She stood just inches from me, swaying slightly. "Why don’t you clear off? You’re just a jumped-up little technician, you know. A nobody. A cipher. A zero. Why don’t you go and wire something up or clean something out?"

"Ji-ill," someone whined from the door. "Come on." But she continued to ignore them and, grumbling and giggling, they disappeared along the corridor.

"All your little friends have gone to play elsewhere, Jill. Shouldn’t you join them?"

"I’ll go where I damned well please."

"This isn’t just a toy to show off to your friends with, you know."

"How would you know? You haven’t got a clue what this is. I doubt that you could even begin to understand what we’ve done here."

All of a sudden, I wasn’t angry anymore, just sort of heavy and depressed. You know. Like when you’ve worked all day at putting something together and then it falls down in a heap and you have to start it all again from the beginning. "Yes. Alright. You’re going to save the world. You and that puffed-up little creep Nichols and your girlie friends and those grinning louts that toady round him." I took a stool from one of the benches and brought it over to the cage. Then I ran up the equipment and switched on Snowy’s voice box. "Hiya Snowy," I said to the cat, ignoring Jill’s spluttering and fuming and how-dare-you-ing.

Snowy had been watching me carefully all the time. Now she pushed her head a little forward and twitched her nostrils. "You smell funny," she said.

"I’m sorry honey. I’ve been drinking. I’ll be OK again in the morning."

"You smell funny," she said again, moving forward to get a closer sniff. I put my fingers through the mesh and she rubbed herself up against them. "Nice," she said and again; "Nice." Her fur was the softest thing I had ever felt. Beneath it, I felt her taught, strong muscles. As her head wiped again and again across my fingers, I felt the little black box and the scar tissue around it.

"There," I said. "That’s better, eh?"

"Better," she said. "Nice."

After a while, I heard Jill’s footsteps cross the lab then tap away along the corridor. "Why does someone with a body like that have to be such a stupid cow?" I asked Snowy but I doubt that she understood much in those days.

I was late in to work the next day but, then again, so were a lot of people. I half expected to get a bollocking from Nichols but he was just his usual self. Obviously our Jill had decided not to make a fuss about my switching on Snowy’s gear last night. Maybe she didn’t want to have to explain what she’d been doing there with half-a-dozen drunks when I’d arrived. I saw her once or twice, briefly, but she just acted like nothing had happened. I thought this was fair enough. I hate having rows at work, especially with stupid, naive people who don’t know when to stop. Maybe she was pretending that she couldn’t remember anything ‘cos she was so drunk. Maybe she was hoping that I wouldn’t remember anything! Whatever nonsense she had in that lovely head of hers, I was quite happy to go along with it.

The next few months were just silly. It seemed like every day Nichols had some new gang of reporters or industrial bigwigs or academic bigwigs nosing around, asking the same awful questions. "Does it still eat cat food?" "Can you mass produce it?" "What would happen if you cut the link?" There was even one very fat philosopher who marched up to the cage and asked Snowy if she believed in a god! It was a circus. Even the bloody Duke of Kent made an appearance.

We upgraded the equipment too. The money was starting to pour in you see so Nichols could afford better stuff. A specialist French company made a combination transceiver, amp and speaker that fitted on Snowy’s head and wasn’t hardly any bigger than the original black box. It was a lot prettier too. This meant that Snowy’s voice came from her head now instead of a speaker off to one side. It also meant that I could take her out of her cage and chat to her, let her wander around the lab at night when no-one was there. I even talked Nichols into letting me take her outside. I built a huge pen. Just a timber frame with wire netting over it. Snowy was petrified at first but, after a while, she loved it and it became a regular part of her daily routine to go down to the pen and romp about. I put radio repeater stations all over the place so that Snowy could go almost wherever she wanted on the campus. I explained to her about walking on a lead. She didn’t like the collar at all but once she’d grasped the fact that it gave her so much more freedom, she wore it gladly. Pretty soon, Snowy and I became campus celebrities and were greeted by everybody as we wandered about the place chatting to one another.

I got to like Snowy a lot during this time. She was a friendly, open creature. As her vocabulary grew and her experience broadened, she became an interesting and amusing companion. It must seem funny if you’ve never met her. Yes, she was a cat and she did all the things cats do, licked herself, buried her shit, hissed when she was frightened and all that, but she was also human. She could think and talk and feel just like any other person. Better than most. Of course she led a very sheltered life and, in her ‘neurally augmented’ form (as Nichols took to calling it) she’d only been around for a year or so but I think that added to her charm.

It was sometimes hard to understand her though. Sometimes, I think she found it hard to understand herself. I tried to say something like this to Nichols one day and he went off all pompous and said things like "I think it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who said...". I hate it when they do that. If I ruled the world, I’d have them all locked in rooms with headphones on and make them all listen over and over to the stupid things they say. It must be that they don’t listen to themselves. They can’t really think it’s good to talk like that, can they? Anyway, this Wittgenstein chap must have been alright because what he said was something like even if you could teach a lion how to talk English, you still wouldn’t understand what it said; meaning, I think, that the life of a lion would be so different to our own lives that we’d have almost nothing in common and we’d see the world in such different ways. Well, having spent so much time with Snowy, I think I can vouch for that. Take that business about birds.

Practically on our first time out of the lab, Snowy began noticing the birds. It’s only natural, of course, and I didn’t pay it any attention at first. As birds flew past, they’d catch her eye and she’d go all still and stare after them. If she saw one in a tree or on the ground, her ears would prick up and she’d go over to the edge of her enclosure and stare and stare at them. Sometimes her mouth would open and her jaw would tremble like she was making little biting movements. It was pretty obvious that she wanted those birds really badly. In fact, the more she saw of them, the more of an obsession it became with her.

I suppose I should have expected what happened but I didn’t. One day when we were out strolling around the campus, down by the artificial lake where it’s quiet, I found a bench to sit on and Snowy jumped up and sat by me. I don’t remember what we were talking about, the weather, the new mural on the senate building, the shapes the clouds made, it could have been any of those. Suddenly Snowy leapt off the bench and shot across the grass, body low to the ground, her tail and the lead I should have been holding snaking along behind her. I jumped up with a "Hey!" and started after her but she went under some shrubs and I lost her for a moment. I was down on my knees in a flash, trying to get myself under the bushes with her. If I didn’t get that damned cat back and quick, I’d better start thinking about finding another job!

I couldn’t get to her through the bushes but I could see her some way off around the other side. So up I got and legged it round the corner. She was crouching down, busy with something and didn’t seem to notice me until I was quite close. Then she suddenly whipped her head round to look at me, her legs and claws splayed ready to run for it. Her eyes were wide and round and crazy and in her mouth was a blackbird, its head dangling on a limp neck. I slammed on the brakes and came to a teetering halt. If I scared her now and she bolted, I might never catch her. "Snowy," I said, trying to sound calm. "Hi. I thought you’d run off. What you got there?" I edged a little closer and the little bugger hissed at me and began to creep backwards. "Snowy!" I said, sounding hurt. "It’s only me. Bob. What’s the matter honey?" In fact, I was a bit hurt, well, shocked, really. I’d never seen Snowy like this. She seemed just like some kind of wild animal. "Snowy?" I edged a little further forward and she broke and ran. Driven by even more panic than the cat probably felt, I threw myself after her and, in a flying tackle that would have made the All Blacks weep, managed to get my hand onto the lead. At the other end Snowy almost had her head yanked off as the lead snapped taught.

I scrabbled to my feet and reeled her in. She fought me all the way and it took me about half an hour of talking and wheedling to calm her down and to get that damned bird off her. For ages she stood her ground and growled at me. I’ll never forget the look of her as she crouched over that bird. It was mad and frightened alright but it was something else too. I’ll swear I saw guilt and shame in the way she ducked her head and averted her eyes. I couldn’t understand it and, to be honest, I didn’t really care much at the time. I just wanted to get the bird off her and get her back into her cage without Nichols finding out. It came back to me later though, again and again.

I didn’t take Snowy out again for several days. I wasn’t punishing her or anything. I just didn’t want to take the risk. Snowy sulked for a while and then she started whining. When that didn’t work, she went back to sulking. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her but I just couldn’t face the chance that she’d do another runner. And, to be honest, I think there was something more to it as well. The sight of her with that bird in her mouth had really upset me. After all, Snowy was my friend. We chatted. We’d got to know each other. I thought we were close. But to think of her killing that bird and then trying to hang onto it so she could rip it open and eat it... Well, it was a side of Snowy I’d never seen before and one I never wanted to see again.

In the end, I made her a special lead. It had a harness at one end that went around her shoulders and a thick strap at the other end so I could fasten her to my wrist. She wasn’t going to run away from me again!

"What’s the matter with her?" Jill asked. I was trying out the new lead, just around the lab, and Snowy was sulking and digging her heels in. It was late and I’d thought we were alone.

"Oh she’s just being a bit stubborn." I gave her an experimental tug and she tried to bite the lead.

Jill watched me for a while, probably trying to think of something witty to say and then went to sit at one of the lab benches, typing into one of the PCs. I watched her working. She sat so pertly, with her back straight and her lovely breasts pushed out. I imagined standing behind her, cupping those breasts in my hands. I imagined her head falling back against my chest, her mouth opening...

"Bob?" It was Snowy, looking up at me. I jumped, startled and guilty. "Are you alright?" Without looking, I could feel Jill turn to see what the cat was saying.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Bob?"

"Yes?"

"Do you want to eat Jill?"

I was gobsmacked. "Now why in the world would you think that?" Behind me, I could hear Jill coming over.

"You looked at her the way I look at the birds - the little fluttery ones that make me want to bite them and tear them."

Jill was standing right next to me, looking at me, not the cat. I felt hemmed in and got at. "You're imagining things," I snapped. "Of course I don't want to eat ... anybody!" I pushed the lead into Jill's hand and stomped off, flustered and irritated.

I apologised to Snowy later and tried to explain what I had been feeling about Jill. I suppose it's lucky I never had kids because my 'explanation' came out sounding like a lame 'birds and the bees' ramble from some awful sit-com. I gave up completely in a tangle of false starts when it became obvious that Snowy hadn't a clue what I was trying to say.

Jill, on the other hand, had understood completely. Judging by the whispering and snickering among the handmaidens every time I walked into the lab, she had shared her understanding liberally with the rest of the staff. It was galling but hardly the end of the world.

My real concern was for Snowy. She was getting more and more withdrawn. I'm no psychologist but it seemed to me she was becoming seriously depressed. Take the time just a day or two after she embarrassed me with the eating Jill thing. I was putting on her harness to take her for a walk when she made a run for it. She's slippery as an eel when she wants to be and she had no problem getting free. I didn't chase her. I ran around the lab making sure the windows and doors were shut and locked. Only when I was satisfied she couldn't get out did I start searching for her.

Finding Snowy was not like finding any of the other lab animals. She was just as clever as a human teenager and she knew how to open some of the cupboards and to go to places I couldn't easily get to or see into. However, this time it was dead easy because she wasn't hiding at all. She was just sitting on a bench-top staring at the brain tanks - at one brain in particular.

She didn't move as I came up to her but I knew she was aware of me because one ear had swivelled in my direction. "What're you doing, honey?" I asked, moving up slowly, trying not to alarm her. She didn't answer me. She just kept staring at the tank. "Honey?" I prompted, starting to feel more concerned about what was going on in her head than whether I'd catch her.

She sighed, such an un-catlike thing to do. "Do you ever think about marrying a cat, Bob?"

I shook my head in exasperation. "Snowy, who have you been talking to?"

"You don't, do you?"

"Is this something Jill has said?"

"Do you?" she insisted, looking at me at last.

Now it was my turn to sigh. "No, Snowy, I don't think about that."

She gave a little nod, as if I'd confirmed something she already knew, and looked back at the tank.

"What's this all about, Hon? Don't you want to come out for a run?"

There was another long silence and then she said; "I'm a prisoner here, aren't I?"

I looked at her little white body and I felt the weight of sadness her tiny frame was carrying. I reached out and stroked her and she didn't pull away. "It's not like that, honey. It's more like you're a patient in a hospital. No. More like you're a precious work of art, so valuable that you have to be protected and watched over night and day."

She looked at me again with round unfathomable eyes. "Would you like to be me?" she asked.

I couldn't answer her for the lump in my throat. So I just shook my head. Without another word, she climbed into my arms and I held her and stroked her while I tried to get my breathing back under control.

"I tell you she's seriously depressed!" I was losing my temper already and I'd only been in his office for thirty seconds.

Nichols watched me passively, a silly, patronising smile on his face. "No-one else on the team has noticed a problem, Bob. We have three doctors of psychology working with us. Professor Williams is probably this country's top man." He spread his hands. His face wore a "Don't you think you're overreacting a little bit?" expression. I could have thumped him.

"I've seen what Williams and the others do with Snowy. They get her to name pictures as fast as she can. They have her saying which object is the odd one out, or trying to remember all the stuff on a tray they showed her. It's all memory and cognition stuff, language skills, learning ability. No one is talking to her about how she feels!"

His face took on an "I hear what you say," expression. He nodded his head. He steepled his fingers. "I'll have a word with Professor Williams," he said. "Thanks for your concern, Bob."

Useless prat!

I made a point of spending more time with Snowy over the next few days, trying to distract her, to break her mood. I even tried to enlist Jill's help, fighting down my embarrassment so I could explain to her how worried I was. "What do you mean?" she said. Then; "Is this some kind of chat-up line?"

I tell myself I did what I could but I still lie awake in the small hours sometimes going over and over everything, right back to that day that Nichols joked about getting him a good, big, healthy one. Sometimes I just go back to the events of that last day, tormenting myself with 'what ifs'. There were a hundred things that could have happened differently and I'll never know if any of them would have changed the way things turned out. All I really know is what actually happened.

I came into work early and spent some time with Snowy. She didn't say much and I didn't press her. I did my chores and then took her out for her morning walk. On the way back, she started to talk. The voice box made it hard to tell much from her tone of voice but I thought I heard a tremulous anger. "It's not fair," she said.

"Pardon?" She'd taken me by surprise.

"People shouldn't be allowed to just make monsters."

I was as careful as I knew how. "You're not a monster, honey. You're my favourite little girl."

"Girl?"

There was another long silence before she went on. "What's going to happen to me Bob?"

"Nothing, honey. What do you mean?"

"I mean when I grow up. What will happen?"

I tried to sound nonchalant. "When you grow up you'll be twice as beautiful, ten times as smart and a hundred times more precious to us all."

We were entering the lab and I thought about taking her back out again so we could go on talking. She looked at me and was about to speak when Nichols came into the corridor. He saw us and made a bee-line for us.

"Ah Bob, I have an urgent mission for you. Here. Let me." He took Snowy's lead and explained how there had been an accident. One of the handmaidens had dropped the last bottle of one of the nutrients they fed into the brain tanks. Now he wanted me to drive out to the supplier and get some more. I think I would have told him to send the silly girl who'd broken it except I felt guilty -- if I hadn't been so preoccupied with Snowy lately, I'd have had good stocks of all the essential supplies. It was my fault we were so low that one bottle made a difference.

So I went.

I got back within an hour and I headed straight for the lab. I heard the scream from out in the corridor followed by an almighty crash. I knew something terrible had happened but I couldn't work it out until I burst through the door to find the place in an uproar. The brain tank -- the big one which held Snowy's brain and the towering mass of electronics on top of it had been knocked off the lab bench and was a ruined tangle of wires on the floor. Lying among the broken glass and the spilt fluids, what had been Snowy's brain was a smear of red and grey pulp. Two of the handmaidens were there. One was staring at the mess and sobbing. The other spun round at the sound of my entrance. "I couldn't help it," she cried, distraught. "She was perfectly fine, just normal, then she jumped right at the wiring, at the top. It wouldn't have all gone over if she hadn't hit it so high up. No-one could have stopped her."

I scanned the room quickly, trying to find her, knowing what I'd see, and there she was, my poor Snowy, lying wet and draggled under one of the benches. She looked dead but as I splashed over to her, I could see her chest was still moving as she breathed. I touched her, examined her. There were no cuts or, as far as was obvious, broken bones. I lifted her limp, wet body and found a towel to wrap her in. Other people had started to arrive and the handmaiden was going through her "It wasn't my fault" routine. I wanted to get Snowy to a vet but Nichols came bursting in just then shouting "Oh my God!" and ordering people to clear out so he could "assess the situation here". I ignored him and headed for the door.

"Bob! Bob!" I stopped and looked at him. "What the hell has been going on here? How did this happen?"

I didn't have time to waste on him just then. I said; "I'll be back later," and left. He shouted after me, his reedy voice going from astonished to indignant then to apoplectic but I hardly heard him.

The University had its own veterinary department but I drove several miles off-campus to find a vet that I could trust not to call Nichols. Snowy was in a bad way, barely breathing and trembling in long spasms. She hadn't regained consciousness at all and she really looked like she wouldn't make it. The vet was pretty stunned and examined Snowy in silence before she spoke.

"This is the cat from the University isn't it?"

Of course everyone knew about Snowy. "There was an accident," I told her. "The brain she was hooked up to got smashed."

She looked up at me. "Did you do it?"

I shook my head. "No. She did it herself."

The vet frowned at me, not knowing whether to believe me. "There's nothing wrong with this cat. Nothing I know how to cure anyway. Perhaps you had better take her back to the University. Professor Nichols would..."

"Professor Nichols would kill her then chop her brain up to see how well the implants had worked."

There was a long silence. Then she said; "I'm sorry. I can make her more comfortable but I really don't know what to do for her."

"Can you keep her here just a short while?" I asked and, when she nodded, I left.

I found Jill in the Senior Common Room sitting in a huddle with the other handmaidens. They fell silent as I entered the room. I came straight to the point. "Jill, I need your help." One of her friends giggled.

Jill looked suitably amazed. "If you think I'm going to talk to the Prof about you getting your job back..."

I blinked. So the little creep had sacked me. I bit down on my anger. "Can we go somewhere where we can talk?"

"And he wants the cat's body back. She is dead isn't she?"

I blinked again, this conversation was full of surprises, but I didn't let my face give me away.. "Oh she's dead alright and buried where Nichols will never find her. Look, can we talk or what?"

Reluctantly, she got up and came with me. I led her to the car park and over to my car. The idea that I wanted to drive her somewhere seemed to unnerve her.

"OK Bob, what is this? You know you've been acting really weird lately, don't you?"

"Snowy's alive," I said. My turn to hand out surprises.

"What?"

"She's alive but she's sick. I want you to remove her implant."

Her amazement reached new heights. "You're joking!" She looked around theatrically, as if to share her astonishment with an audience. "If Snowy's alive, you've got to bring her back to the lab. We need to examine her. We need to..."

"Kill her?"

"No! We'd..."

"You'd kill her." She started to deny it again but then she realised it was true and she stopped talking and just looked at me. "You knew Snowy, Jill. She trusted you. She thought you were her friend. Don't you remember what a sweet little thing she was? We can't just let Nichols cut her up. "

Incredibly, I seemed to have got through to her. Her voice, when she spoke, was almost tender. "She won't be the same, Bob," she told me. "The human part of her is dead. She's just a cat now. You understand, don't you?"

"All I know is that she was like a child, a small, helpless, confused little girl." I struggled for the words as usual. " It was so wrong what we all did to her!" I felt tears sliding down my cheeks. Another surprise. "She was like my own child, Jill, and I loved her." And it was true, I realised. I brushed at the tears angrily. "And I want that damned box off her head and I want her as far away from this place as possible." I opened the car door. "So are you going to help me or not?"

She looked at me for just a moment, her face completely blank, and then she gave me a tiny little nod and we both got into the car.

The vet had sent her receptionist home and shut up shop by the time we arrived. She let us in herself and took us through to her consulting room. Snowy was still unconscious in a large wire cage but now she was almost dry and the convulsions had stopped. I introduced Jill, noticing that the vet had laid out a set of surgical instruments beside the stainless-steel table. Jill saw them too.

"I don't know if I can do this," she told the vet. The vet looked at me.

"You'll help her, won't you?" I said.

She looked back at Jill who swallowed hard. "Bob," she said, not looking at me. "I'll need you to rig some kind of stereotaxis frame. You've got thirty minutes while we're prepping the patient." She turned to face me. "Can you do that?" I beamed at her with all the relief and happiness and gratitude I felt and she couldn't help but smile back.

It was all so long ago now that Snowy's slow recovery seems hardly long at all. Yet the season had changed before she was up and about again. I didn't find another job straight away. I stayed home, looked after Snowy and tried to make some sense of it all. I saw a lot of Jill for a while. We even slept together a few times - although that's hard to believe too from this distance. She took a job overseas and we don't even write anymore.

Snowy just lay around a lot for those first few months. She could eat, she could use her litter tray but she didn't seem to connect to the world in any other way. Then one day she got up and walked to the window and looked out. I sat in a chair behind her, noticing the way her head followed movements and her ears reacted to sounds. It was like she'd suddenly awoken from a trance.

After a few minutes, she turned and saw me watching her. "Hello honey," I said, softly. "I've been missing you."

She didn't move or make a sound, just looked at me with her head on one side. And then she began to purr.