Kitten mews sound like babies crying. Never knew that. Then again, I’d never spent that much time around kittens until tonight.

They crawled over each other in an old Amazon box in my backseat. A chorus of confused, crying babies. I’d swiped a box with high enough sides that they couldn’t get over the edge easily, but it was only a matter of time, honestly. They were little furry balls of desire, hunting for food and water and clean sand.

Of course, they were balls of desire. They were all of… fuck, what, five months old? They probably wanted their mom. Or did they? How old did kittens have to be before they could be taken from their mothers?

I didn’t know a goddamn thing about kittens before I was hired to steal them, and I still didn’t.

The man in the checked jacket at Ernie’s Bar hadn’t been forthcoming with key details. Every time I asked a question, he just put another stack of bills on Ernie’s sticky bartop, next to his untouched whiskey tumbler. I should have been more persistent in my questioning, in retrospect.

But in truth, I couldn’t afford to be persistent or questioning. I was desperate.

THUMP.

I know. We’re all part of that shitty club these days, with the same shitty members-only t-shirts and dead looks in our eyes as we watch every shop and hospital and factory hollow out. But I wasn’t supposed to be desperate. I was supposed to be different.

“You’re gonna be one of the get-outs,” my teachers had said, admiration and hope shining in their eyes. I’d failed them in Math, History, English, Football (which was about as close to a mortal sin as a 10-year-old could get out here in the Boxes). But when they let me get my hands on the school computer?

Man, I came alive. The Reverend wasted years trying to pound the poetry of the Psalms into my thick skull. He could have saved us all some time and taken me to GitHub.

Clear logic gates,
Reality’s true instructions.
Is this how God sees?

I went from the loser who couldn’t spin a football to save his life to a source of hope for the teachers. A Get-Out. A student who could leave the Boxes. Who could make something of themself.

Who had a chance at being happy.

THUMP THUMP.

I glanced back at the kittens. How were they not more afraid? They were afraid, but they were more confused. Like the thumping meant nothing to them.

It meant everything to me. It’d followed me from the corpse of the data center where I’d found the kittens. It’d harried me through the dark Appalachian woods to my car. It’d sat there, tapping on the windows. Toying with me? Feeling out weaknesses?

Or, like a kitten, playing with its food because it didn’t know how to go for the quick kill?

Most of the Get-Outs who were boys thought about getting out to Nashville or wherever the NFL’d send them. Most of the girls thought about getting out by getting down the aisle. Preferably on the arm of one of the Football boys, but a doctor or an oil man would do quite nicely as well. Hell, in a pinch, bank managers make decent money. Decent enough to get you to a more respectable part of the South, where they still had businesses and industries.

Me? I confused them again. I got out to the most godless place imaginable: California. A place where they didn’t blame haints for crippling debt. Where they didn’t cough up their lungs poisoned by toxic metals, the companies left behind. Or look for miracle cures for those coughs from mountain witches with cat familiars draped around their shoulders.

I laughed out loud at that reccolection. A single year at Stanford had taught me the error of my arrogance. They had different names for haints (“The Universe” or “The Market”) and mountain witches (“Energy Healers” or “Biohacking Entrepenuers”), but they were just as superstitious and small and scared as us in the mountains.

Four years of Stanford was followed by a job offer at a big tech giant. You know the one. Tons of money, stock options, cushy office.

Two years on thethat was followed by an email from the Boxes. I almost didn’t open it. I’d worked too hard to wash the accent out of my mouth like a bad case of gingivitis.

But the ties to the Boxes still bound me, none stronger than blood. My dad has sacrificed a lot after Mom was led out of the Boxes by a man who flashed some money at Ernie’s and promised a way out.

I liked to think it was the same motherfucker who’d hired me at Ernie’s. Same checked jacket, some shit-eating grin. Same shitty undercut.

Still. I couldn’t with my Mom. I almost did the same thing. So desperate to get out of the Boxes. Hell, I thought I had.

Until I opened the email from my father.

Cancer.

THUMP THUMP SLAM!

The car was shaking now. The darkness whipcracked out at the windshield, and the glass spiderwebbed like the architecture of the websites I used to build.

Not long now. The thing out there was clearly getting bored playing with me, or had figured out how to kill me.

I tried the ignition again, just for kicks. I’d sold my old California car to help pay for Dad’s medical bills and taken some barely legal Frankencar. Frankencar ground over the ignition a few times before sputtering and dying, annoyed at me for trying something I knew wasn’t going to work.

“It’s okay,” my boss at the big tech giant had told me. An IV had snaked up to a plastic bag filled with a neon green liquid. The latest snake oil from whatever Mountain Witch had just hit their Schedule B. Might as well have been a cat familiar and a miracle cure made of moss and dead man’s ashes for all the good it did.

“In fact,” he continued, “it’s better than okay, this works out perfectly for us. You don’t know this yet – probably above your pay grade, but we just made a deal with the Governor to build a round of data centers out in… what did you call it?”

“The Boxes. It’s called Clifford Valley on the map, but the locals call it the Boxes.”

“See? This is why we need a local man on the ground. The AI revolution needs you.”

Oh, yeah, that was the other surprise. They weren’t godless out there either. They were building their God, and his name would be General Artificial Intelligence, Hosannah in the highest. It would judge its true and faithful servants and bring salvation and riches to those worthy, and cast those unworthy and replaceable into the pit of eternal joblessness.

Honestly, the Reverend’s poetry was starting to appeal.

“We’ll put you on the data center out there. Make sure they get built right. Their proper GPUs put in the proper configurations. Keep the locals on board and give them work.”

Keeping the AI happy and appeased, I had thought but did not say, just happy to keep the paycheck and not wishing to blaspheme.

So I went back home to the Boxes, the Reverend for a new God, not so different from the old God, and put the money towards keeping my father comfortable. The bugs in the underlying code of his system were terminal. Nothing left but to manage the decline.

Neither my father, the hospital that cared for him, nor the new God that paid for his care lasted the year. AI didn’t manifest, the money vanished, and the corpse of the half-built data center sat up on the mountain top, looming over the valley. Mocking us with the bright future that was almost ours.

Forgotten about until a man in a checked jacket paid me to sneak into it and steal a box of kittens.

I had gotten out. I had been pulled back in. No money left to move back to California, just an empty family home no sane person would buy from me.

I wasn’t sure if there’d even be a place for me out there, but anything was better than staying in the Boxes, I told myself. So when the man in the checked jacket sidled up to the bar and ordered a whiskey he didn’t drink, I said yes and didn’t ask too many questions.

But I think I get it now. I was never gonna get out of the Boxes, because California was the Boxes too. Everywhere is. Just more boxes we stuff ourselves into and think we’re free. We’re just… kittens climbing over each other, mewing like babies at things outside the box that we don’t understand.

I knew the first part, deep in my soul. I wasn’t actually getting outside the box. I was just getting into a bigger box.

The surprise was that there was an outside of the box. And there were things outside it looking in at us. Haints. Mountain Witches with their cat familiars draped over their shoulders. Gods. Maybe even the god we’d failed to build, the corpse of its temple rotting on the mountain. We could even see them sometimes, peering over the edge at us as we crawled and stumbled over each other.

The Mountain Witch that lived in the corpse of the Stillborn God lowered itself in front of the car, suspended by (Vines? Tentacles?) reaching off into the night. The cat familiar around its shoulders hissed at me, her eyes locked on her kittens in the back of my car.

The little familiars, the man in the checked jacket, the prophet of the Stillborn God, General Artificial Intelligence, was willing to pay enough to get me back into the big California box for. ]

The Mountain Witch’s face and form were shrouded in darkness, even in the full blast of my headlights.

The kittens mewed louder and louder in the box behind me. My only chance to get out. But out into what? Into another fucking box?

The Mountain Witch flowed closer like a liquid. Like a bad AI video rendering of a walk. Poorly fixed in our idea of space and time. It peered in through the windshield, distorted by the spiderweb of cracks.

I reached back, and I grabbed the box of kittens.

And I got out.