25th August
Mutch is a good name for this cat. He sits on me and purrs and purrs. I have never had a pet before. This is nice.
My flat has a porch. I noticed people here don't go into the hallways and open their doors, they just jump or climb up to their porches. It's pretty amazing to watch cats jump from porch to porch, over several intervening porches.
Yesterday in our Lunar Living class they told us about Lab Rats. Apparently, every department that uses lab rats uses a different color of rat. This way if a rat gets loose you know who to tell about it. They put some color genes from reptiles in them, so there are green rats and red rats and blue rats too. Since a lot of experiments involve deliberately letting rats loose for some reason, they told us if we see one to leave it alone unless it's obviously sick or hurt. Cats don't bother them, mostly. Rats fight back, unlike mice.
Also, today the class had a visit from Ranger. Ranger is the humanoid robot who is the MC of Off-WorldCon. He looks like a really smooth human, and his "skin" is silver. He can make it mirror-shiny or dull somehow, and he can do it in an instant. When he's mirrored he's really hard to see and when the class started to look like they weren't paying attention he'd do it and not stop until we were all paying attention again.
He was there to tell us that he takes care of things that go wrong outside the domes, which is why he is silver, to reflect away all the sunlight during the day. He said, "Before anyone has a chance to ask, yes, we have a laser to take out things likely to hit the dome. And no, the dome has never been breached except once under highly controlled circumstances.
And that's all he told us, really. I guess he was just called in so we could get used to what he looked like and at least one person in the class got nauseous when he changed to mirror, so maybe that's why.
You have to get used to a lot of strange things around here. There are a whole group of people who've had genes added to give themselves stripes or leopard spots or make their hair glow in the dark.
Next week they're going to teach us how to round up all the animals in case the domes need to be evacuated.
Tonight they are showing movies from a century ago, in the Amphitheatre. They're showing The Maltese Falcon and The Magnificent Seven. I never heard of any of the people in them. Then the next night they're showing "Night of the Living Dead" and "North By Northwest."
I heard there was a meeting of all the Freshmen in one of the auditoriums tonight, I don't know what it's about and I don't want to go but since I'm new here I guess I better go. Apparently there is a project about to go on and every year is doing their own. Could be interesting, I suppose.
I woke up this morning and Mutch was sitting on my chest staring into my eyes. He is a nice cat.
I met one of my neighbors. Her name is Tillie and she is a senior majoring in astronautics and she's working on her senior thesis. Every now and then I hear her out on her porch sobbing. I went to the councillor and told him about it. He was concerned until I said she was a senior and stuff, and then he said, "Oh, they're all like that." This is what I have to look forward to? At least it's years and years away.
To Be Continued.