What is that? I hissed. It's a cat.

Gary, have you ever seen a cat? I asked it to make a cat.

Gary was a clever guy in some respects, but he struggled with the final point in life.

If you told him to make a battleship at a french fries, he'd work out how to do it.

But it never occurred to him to wonder why you probably shouldn't.

Whatever lay on the floor, crying and wretching beneath a vainly membrane of an amniotic sack

is most evidently not a cat.

What cards did you enter? I grumbled, snatching the several whole punch sheets of metal

that quivered in the flesh of the computer.

We were standing in the basement of, let's just call it, an undisclosed location.

But if you imagine a large empty room filled with the near infinite collection of filing cabinets, then you're

on the right track. Most of them contain relatively basic instructions like height,

blank foot, blank inches, weight, blank kilograms, material, wood, material, metal,

material, bone, etc, etc.

Others might be pre-made programs for something like Tree or U.S. currency, but whoever, or however they came into being is a secret long out of my reach, and they're all uselessly outdated.

There's one for entering certain dates for lottery numbers, and it's just about the only one I ever found of use.

Well, saying that, there are a few others.

Either way, I could see what Gary had been trying to do, bless him.

Material, flesh, mammalian, four Legs, Apex Predator.

Ah, damn Gary, I said, why did you have to have that last one?

Whatever was on the floor was now three feet in length and still growing.

Don't you remember what happened with a maternity ward?

...