I want it on record that I heard them before she did anything about it. A voice, male, unfamiliar, coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen table where she’d set up her laptop, laughing at something in a way that suggested he found himself very charming. I was on the floor at the time, minding my own considerable business, and I sat straight up like something had bitten me.
There is a protocol for unfamiliar voices in the house. I have never had to use it before, which tells you something about how rare this was. The protocol is: locate, assess, and if necessary, intimidate. I got as far as locate, which took me under the table, behind the curtain, and eventually nose-first against the laptop screen itself, where a small man in a gray shirt appeared to be talking directly at my human from somewhere both very close and impossibly far away.
She laughed and pulled me back by the scruff, gently, the way she does when I’ve committed to something before thinking it through. “That’s just Dave,” she said, to me, as though that explained anything. I do not know Dave. I have never smelled Dave. Dave, as far as I am concerned, does not have a scent, a shape, or a location, and yet here he was, apparently living somewhere in the flat metal box on the table, fully audible, fully opinionated, laughing at his own jokes with an ease that struck me as suspicious in itself.
I want to be clear that I did not panic. I conducted, calmly, a room-by-room search of the immediate area to determine whether Dave, or anyone associated with Dave, had somehow entered the house through a means I had failed to guard. I checked behind the couch. I checked the gap under the radiator where I keep the sock, on the theory that if intruders were going to hide anywhere useful they might as well look there first, since I do. Nothing. No smell of a stranger, no disturbed dust, no sign that anyone had walked through my territory uninvited. Which made the voice, if anything, more alarming, not less. A voice with no body is worse than a body with a voice. At least a body you can hiss at.
There were more of them as the morning went on. A woman’s voice, brisker than Dave’s, cutting in over him at one point in a way I found I approved of. Someone else, quieter, who mostly agreed with everyone. My human sat at the table with her coffee going cold beside her, nodding at the screen, occasionally saying words like “quarterly” and “bandwidth,” which meant nothing to me and which I chose to interpret as some kind of code, possibly for my benefit, possibly not.
At one point the little camera light on the top of the screen caught my eye — a small unblinking dot, green, watching. I did not like that. I have been on the receiving end of being watched my whole life and I know what it feels like from the other side, and I did not care for the idea that it might be happening to me without my consent, from a box, on the table, while I was simply attempting to walk past on my way to the water bowl. I gave the light a long look. It did not blink. Neither did I. We reached what I felt was an understanding, though I couldn’t tell you what it was.
I made one attempt at direct diplomacy. I got up on the table — a maneuver I am not, strictly, supposed to perform during what she calls “the meeting,” but which felt necessary given the security concerns — and sat myself squarely in front of the camera, positioning my face so that Dave, wherever and whatever he was, would have no choice but to look at me and understand that this house was under management. My human made a small strangled noise and there was a burst of laughter from the box, several voices at once, the brisk woman saying something about “your cat” in a tone I chose to receive as respectful. I held my position for as long as I judged useful, then allowed myself to be lifted down, my point made.
Later, once the box had gone quiet and the little green light had finally, mercifully, turned off, I went back and smelled the space in front of the screen very thoroughly, the way you’d check a spot where something significant had happened even if you couldn’t say exactly what. Nothing. No trace. Whatever had been in there — Dave, the brisk woman, the quiet agreeable one — had simply stopped, the way weather stops, without leaving behind so much as a hair.
I don’t fully trust the box. I want that on the record too. It sits there most of the day doing nothing, looking like any other flat useless object, and then without warning it fills up with people who have opinions about bandwidth and don’t smell like anything at all. My human tells me it’s “just work” and that I don’t need to worry about it, but she also tells me the vacuum cleaner is “just cleaning,” and I have not relaxed my position on that either.
What I’ve settled on, for now, is a policy of supervised tolerance. The box may continue to make its noises. I will continue to check the room afterward for signs of Dave. If he ever shows up in person, in this house, in the flesh, laughing that laugh where I can get a proper smell of him, we will have a different sort of conversation entirely. Until then I am keeping my distance from the little green light and letting her have her meetings, on the understanding that I remain, at all times, aware.