Fiona Moore

“What’s an anti-vax movement?” The little girl reached out to stroke the small tortoiseshell cat sitting on the man’s lap in the armchair by the fire.

“Gently, Lucilla, gently,” the man replied, “She’s an old lady, and a very important person. You have to show her respect. An anti-vax movement is people who think vaccines are dangerous. So they refuse to be vaccinated. But, even more dangerously, they don’t let other people get vaccines who want them.”

“That’s mean.” Lucilla petted the cat’s head very carefully. The cat closed her eyes and purred.

“It’s more than mean. The pandemic would have been bad even without them, but maybe only thousands of people would have died. But the anti-vax movement got into most of the world’s governments, and because of that, the deaths were in the billions.”

The numbers didn’t mean a lot to Lucilla, but she nodded anyway, continuing to stroke the cat’s thin fur. “How did it get started?”

“It was a virus. Originally it infected dogs, but it was… you won’t know the word, but it was a virus that could go from infecting animals, to infecting different sorts of animals, and from there to infecting humans. You understand?”

Lucilla nodded. “Cross-species transmission. Or host jump.”

The man chuckled. “Okay, I shouldn’t make assumptions about your knowledge base just because you’re six.”

“I learn a lot from talking to Mum.”

“As you should. Your Mum is a very clever and very brave lady.”

“So why didn’t we die in the pandemic? If the anti-vax movement wouldn’t let people get vaccinated?”

“Well, you were okay, you weren’t born yet.”

“Don’t be silly. You know what I mean.”

“I do, I do. I’ll stop being silly. It’s because of some very brave people, who kept on working on the problem.”

“Was one of them Mum?”

“You know she was. Anyway, these people had a brilliant idea. What if we could make a kind of, well, anti-virus, that could be transmitted like the disease could?”

“So, like, you could infect someone with a cure, not a disease?”

“That’s exactly the principle. You’d infect someone with the cure, and they wouldn’t just be cured. For a while, at least, they’d be able to go out into crowds and infect other people with the cure.”

“So that’s how they stopped the pandemic!”

“Not exactly. You see, the anti-vax movement found out about it. And they forbade the brave people from infecting people with this anti-disease, and arrested the people they knew had it. They put them in… well, like dungeons. Away from other people.”

“Concentration camps,” Lucilla said matter-of-factly.

“Now I know your mother shouldn’t have been telling you about those.”

“It wasn’t Mum, it was Deepak in my class at school. His Mum and Dad got put in one. It’s why they’re so nervous and weird.”

“Lucilla, you shouldn’t say people are weird.”

“I won’t. I promise. So, how come we didn’t die?”

The man was quiet, stroking the cat and feeling her purr. “Remember how I told you the virus was able to jump from animals to humans?”

Lucilla’s eyes widened as she made the connection. “So you give the anti-virus to animals! And it’ll jump to humans?”

“That was the theory, yes. So the people worked on it, and they found a way to do this. But the question was, which animals to use? What do you think they used?”

“Dogs.” Lucilla said firmly.

“Good guess, since the original virus was from dogs. But that meant there weren’t very many dogs around by that point. Try again.”

“Piggies?”

“Also a good guess, but back then pigs were mostly kept on something called a factory farm, which was far away from people. They didn’t roam around like they do now. Shall I give you a hint?”

“Okay.”

“What animal is good at getting in any place it wants? What animal is really good at hiding? Roams around, but makes friends? Likes to live with people, and people like to live with them?”

“Cats!” Lucilla shrieked in triumph. The tortoiseshell opened her eyes, seeming offended by the noise.

“That’s right, cats. Cats can go anywhere, and they will go anywhere they want. They communicate with each other. And they’re so cute and funny that people love them, and love to listen to them purr.” The man stroked the tortoiseshell apologetically, and she settled down again.

“So, cats saved us all from going extinct like dinosaurs?”

“Even better. Although a lot of people had died, and a lot of things had collapsed, that meant there was a lower population to support, and a willingness to change things for the better. So it’s thanks to them that we’ve got our lovely solar array, and our food that’s not full of syrups and sugars, and forests full of piggies, and you can go to school and I can stay home and look after you in the mornings and afternoons.”

“Cats did all that!”

“Well, one particular cat, at first.” The man looked down affectionately. “And that’s why she deserves to be shown respect. She’s an old lady, and a very important person.”

What Fiona said about the prompt:
I live with a tortoiseshell cat who is bent on world domination and a snowshoe cat who isn’t that bothered. My tortie is seventeen years old, grew up on the streets, and is the direct inspiration for the cat in the story.

Fiona Moore is a BSFA Award-winning, WFA-shortlisted queer Canadian writer whose short fiction has appeared in Escape Pod, Clarkesworld, Interzone and six consecutive editions of The Best of British SF. Her most recent longer works are Management Lessons from Game of Thrones and the BSFA Award-shortlisted novel Rabbit in the Moon.
Professional Website: https://www.fiona-moore.com/ Social Media: X, Bluesky