Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of the cryo-chamber.

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This was one of those days. The planetary assault ship had just exited the portal when...it detected an object in it's path.

There would be a collision in microseconds...even for the lightning quick reactions of the navigation computers there was no way to avoid it.

This is known as The Breaks of the Game .

Exiting a hyperspace wormhole was done at extremely high speeds. .. perhaps not relativistic speeds but very high speeds none the less.

Exiting a wormhole near a planet isn’t the safest thing to do either. However, being 'safe' and invading a planet don't go together in the same sentence. Popping out of a wormhole “in-their-face” gave the planetary inhabits less warning. Less warning meant less chance of the invading force being blown to atoms

Didn’t help. They got blown to atoms anyway, most of them.

Oops..what were the odds?

The locals were just entering the atomic age and were still testing thermo-nukes in space. As luck would have it the invader had exited the wormhole right in the path of their latest test nuke….a big one. There would be a very big bang...... in a very few microseconds.

The Planetary invasion insertion controller tried, it tried hard, to salvage the mission. It failed. Only one attack shuttle was ejected in time to survive the explosion and it didn’t escape unscathed.



The nuke's electromagnetic pulse wiped out it’s mission program kernel. The cyborg attack units were unprogramed.

There had been billions and billions of attack cyborgs on the assault ship. In one eye watering flash the invasion was reduced to mere thousands on the single remaining, badly damaged, drop shuttle….and they were basically clueless.
When it rains it pours. The sole surviving attack craft neared the planetary surface and discovered the hard way that it was attempting to land in a war zone. The hard way is to receive an artillery shell right up it's tail pipe

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Ooops.

Dumb luck.

What were the odds.

The war zone was over Israel. The Palestinians had been frisky lately. In the last few hours all of Israel's neighbors had sneak attacked. The Israelis , unfazed, were calmly and efficiently kicking their ass. The alien shuttle was just one more hinney that got spanked.

Nothing much survived of the drop shuttle. The fireball of it’s destruction wasn't particularly noticed. It was just another fireball among hundreds. Some junk fell out of the sky. A few more pieces of burnt and twisted metal in the desert..

Only one tiny micro pod made it to the ground intact. It was all that was left of the hundred giga-ton invasion craft with it's millions of drop shuttles and it's billions of attack cyborgs.

Only one cyborg survived.

Even that tiny pod was damaged. It landed on the roof of the hotel a little hard. It bounced ....did a two cushion bank shot off the walls in a corner...rolled… bounced and landed in the cat’s water bowl….and splashed the cat in the face. Precious had been daintily taking a drink.

She was not amused.

The micro-attack-pod was kinda bent. The sole occupant of the attack craft managed, thru Herculean effort to egress it's tiny craft. Precious helped the tiny organism get free.... then ate it.

Ooops. Dumb luck.

What were the odds.

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The cat...a barn cat that had deigned to lower itself to family pet status, delicately finished eating the small creature. The cat then returned to what it had been doing earlier, before it had been so rudely interrupted while taking a drink.

Sleeping.….and shedding hair.

Over the course of time the cleaning staff removed all evidence of the attacker's existence. It's small landing canister had, in fact, looked very similar to a crumpled tin foil candy wrapper. Perhaps from a chocolate carelessly dropped during a party. “Bahut daam ka” , the cat, was known to collect “shineys”.

Inside the barn cat.. things were progressing according to plan. Billions of tiny , engineered biological robots were swarming the cat’s internal systems. Millions ot the tiny nanobots were destroyed one way or another. They met their doom by corrosive stomach acid, savage white blood cells, and the cat’s immune system in general. If it wasn’t one thing it was another, it took a toll.

Some survived.

Enough survived.

The cat’s brain was altered. It’s neurological network was modified...massively. A cat has 300 million neurons in it’s brain. The neurological cognitive restructure took quite some time. While it was in progress the NRI (Non Resident Indian) family that Bahut daam ka owned had returned to India. They had been to Israel to visit relatives. The mapping process was completed one night after they family returned to their home. They lived on a large estate owned by an ancient family. Bahut daam ka was a part time house pet. He was in the stables when the restructuring process was completed.

A cat has a cognitive network sufficient to allow the emergent property known as self awareness. It should be a perfect host.

It wasn’t.

Epic Fail.

300 million neurons wasn't enough.

The cat’s neurological system was insufficient. Time for plan B. The cat was now a ticking time bomb...neurologically speaking. It was primed to attack the first creature larger than itself that it encountered. The tactic being that a larger animal would have a larger brain.

“ If at first you don’t succeed, try try again”

A youngster picked it up………….