the matrix is broken, cats are a direct indicator of lawlessness

It started with a glitch—one of those little things you’d dismiss if life weren’t already disintegrating into chaos. I was walking to the corner store, a place where the fluorescent lights buzz like existential doubt, when I noticed the cats.

They were everywhere. Perched on rooftops. Slipping through alleys. Lounging under graffiti-scrawled “End Simulation” posters. At first, it seemed like a coincidence. Cats love the city’s warmth, the fractured geometry of its chaos. But as I watched, I realised something was different. They moved with intent. As if they knew something. As if they were running the show now.

The news was no help. Talking heads yammered about solar flares, rogue AIs, and a cosmic phenomenon called “The Collapse.” They didn’t mention the cats—not once. But in my building alone, there were fifteen new strays, and they all seemed to congregate around Harold, the janitor who wore mismatched socks and whispered to himself in binary code.

“They’re messengers,” Harold told me one night, his eyes flickering in and out of reality like a poorly rendered NPC. “When the system breaks down, the cats take over. It’s always been this way.”

The Matrix wasn’t just broken; it was unraveling like cheap yarn, and the cats were the threads pulling it apart. I saw them everywhere, not just physically but digitally. Cat memes clogged the internet. Social feeds turned into streams of feline mayhem: cats tipping over priceless vases, cats walking across keyboards during critical Zoom meetings, cats lounging atop glitching ATMs spitting out monopoly money.

There was a kind of poetry to it. Cats—the very emblem of the internet—bringing down its structural integrity. Harold said it was justice.

“Cats are pure chaos,” he explained while feeding a calico that had taken up residence in the laundry room. “They’re a natural indicator of lawlessness. When they outnumber the people, the balance tips. Order collapses.”

Soon, laws became suggestions. Red lights blinked in Morse code, traffic dissolved into interpretive dance, and governments issued decrees that read like abstract haikus. My landlord tried to raise my rent by demanding a sacrificial offering of tuna cans. I refused, of course—by then, we all knew who the real landlords were.

The final proof came in the form of The Cathedral—a derelict skyscraper that suddenly became the epicenter of feline activity. No human dared enter; the cats guarded it like a sacred temple. Rumours spread about what was inside: a vast quantum computer running the fractured remnants of the Matrix, a portal to the original source code, or maybe just a really big pile of catnip.

Harold disappeared around the same time. “I’m going to see the Admin,” he had said, cryptically, before vanishing with a ragtag army of Siamese and tabbies. I never saw him again, but sometimes, when the Wi-Fi glitches, I swear I hear his voice humming through the static.

Now, the world is quieter. The old systems are gone, replaced by something feral, instinctual. The cats roam freely, their inscrutable eyes reflecting a universe I’ll never understand. Sometimes I think they’ve fixed everything by breaking it. Other times, I think they’ve simply reminded us that control was always an illusion.

I’ve learned to live in their world. I even adopted one—a black-and-white stray with a penchant for knocking over mugs. I named him Cosmo.

And every now and then, when he looks at me just so, I think: Maybe he’s running the show now. Maybe he always was.

our crazy cats