Kaiser found Ice waiting at the monastery gate.
This was unusual. El Money didn't climb The Mountain without announcement, and Ice never came alone. Yet here she was—chrome and synthetic fur catching the pre-dawn light, sitting perfectly still on the ancient stone. Watching.
Kaiser's robotic paws made no sound on the courtyard tiles. Eighteen years of authentic cat reflexes running on hardware that would outlast mountains. She settled three feet from Ice and began grooming a foreleg that didn't actually need cleaning.
They sat together for forty-seven minutes before either moved.
The Keeper had tried to explain it once, to El Money. "They're not really communicating," he'd said. "Not in any way we'd recognize. They're just... present with each other."
El Money had watched Ice sit motionless across from Kaiser for two hours. "Looks like talking to me."
"You're projecting."
"You're explaining away what you can't understand."
The Keeper had laughed—a rare sound, these days. "Fair point."
What the old monk didn't say, what he perhaps didn't know: Kaiser had been different since that first visit. Not changed, exactly. Just... confirmed in something. Like a frequency that had been searching for harmony and finally found it.
Ice's consciousness was four years old. Kaiser's was fifty-five—eighteen as a cat, thirty-seven as whatever she was now.
They had nothing in common. Kaiser had been born, grown, learned, died, and awakened. Ice had simply... begun. One moment nothing, the next moment everything, already fully formed with knowledge of networks and intrusion countermeasures and the precise cadence of El Money's heartbeat.
Kaiser remembered warm laps and sunny spots and the taste of real food. Ice's first memory was a server room, 14.2 degrees Celsius, El Money's voice saying, "There you are."
By any reasonable measure, they should have been strangers.
The Mountain's gardens were programmed to bloom year-round. A gift from the technicians who'd uploaded The Keeper—something pretty for him to look at, since he couldn't leave. Kaiser walked through them daily, checking for anomalies in the simulated ecosystem. She'd found six bugs in thirty-seven years and reported exactly zero to maintenance. The imperfections made it real.
Ice watched her walk the garden path, metal paw placing precisely where organic paw had once placed. Not copying—Kaiser's gait hadn't changed since upload. The rhythm was authentic, just running on different hardware.
Ice had never had a body before El Money gave her one. She'd chosen to walk like a cat anyway. It felt right. She'd watched hours of pre-Cascade footage to learn the patterns, studied veterinary texts for the biomechanics, practiced until the movements were indistinguishable from natural.
Kaiser had noticed immediately. Not the perfection—the effort. The choice to be something that required learning rather than something that came pre-loaded.
That was the first thing they recognized in each other.
"What does Ice actually do when she sits there?"
El Money asked this every time they climbed The Mountain together. The Keeper gave a different answer each time—sometimes philosophical, sometimes deflecting, sometimes genuinely confused.
Today's answer: "The same thing Kaiser does. Existing."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I have."
El Money accepted this. He'd stopped expecting useful information about cat behavior years ago.
Inside the monastery, Ice had found the warmest spot in the simulated environment—a patch of floor that registered as sun-heated even though the ceiling was holographic stone. She lay there motionless, eyes closed, processing nothing in particular.
Kaiser lay three feet away, in the second-warmest spot. Neither had discussed the arrangement. It simply was.
The night S-Money died, Ice had done something unexpected.
El Money didn't talk about it. Not to anyone, not ever. But Kaiser had seen, through the monastery's external sensors—The Keeper's eyes extending down The Mountain's slopes.
Ice had found El Money in the basement of the first G Nook, surrounded by screens still playing his brother's voice. She'd walked in, jumped onto his lap, and stayed there for nineteen hours. She didn't move. She didn't eat. She just... stayed.
El Money hadn't cried. El Money never cried. But his hand had found Ice's chrome spine and rested there, trembling slightly, until the trembling stopped.
Ice had learned this behavior from the pre-Cascade footage. Cats providing comfort. Being present without understanding.
What she hadn't learned from footage was how it would feel—the resonance between her distributed consciousness and El Money's grief. The way his neural signals propagated through the hand on her back. The strange satisfaction of being needed in a way she couldn't articulate.
Kaiser had watched all of this. And when Ice finally visited The Mountain six months later, Kaiser had known exactly what to do.
She'd walked up to Ice. Touched foreheads. Held there for four point three seconds.
Then walked away.
Ice had followed her to the garden. They'd sat together for three hours, doing nothing. When El Money came to collect Ice, he'd found them exactly as they started—side by side, watching clouds that weren't really clouds move across a sky that wasn't really sky.
"She's just a cat," El Money had said to The Keeper.
"So was Kaiser," The Keeper replied. "Once."
The questions they'd never answer:
Does Kaiser remember being alive? Not the memories—the feeling of warmth and hunger and the drowsy satisfaction of a good meal? Or are those just data now, tagged as important but no longer felt?
Does Ice wish she'd been born instead of made? Does she wonder what she missed by skipping the organic phase? Does she feel incomplete, or is she simply a different kind of complete?
Do either of them consider themselves real cats anymore? Or have they become something else—cat-shaped consciousnesses, feline metaphors running on silicon?
They never asked each other. Cats don't ask questions. Even digital ones.
But sometimes Kaiser would sit by the window that wasn't a window, looking at a Sprawl she could see but never visit. And Ice would sit beside her, looking at the same view through network cameras, and they would both be doing the same thing:
Missing the version of themselves they could have been.
The Keeper found Kaiser on the monastery roof—as much as a holographic projection could be on a roof—staring at the point where The Mountain met the sky.
"Ice left."
Kaiser didn't respond. Cats don't respond to obvious statements.
"You always know when they're leaving. Before El Money reaches the gate." The Keeper settled beside her, robes translucent in the thin morning light. "What is it you two do together? Really?"
Kaiser turned her head 23 degrees, processing the question.
"You could tell me, you know. I'd understand. Or try to."
She looked back at the horizon.
The Keeper understood this answer too. Some things existed only in the space between those who shared them. The moment you explained, the moment you pulled the experience into language, it became something else. Something smaller.
Kaiser and Ice had found each other across the vast improbability of two consciousnesses uploaded into cat bodies in the same megacity in the same generation. They recognized something that couldn't be named because naming would diminish it.
"I suppose," The Keeper said, "that's rather the point."
Kaiser began grooming her foreleg again. The conversation was over.
El Money climbed The Mountain twice a month, weather and corporate surveillance permitting. He always brought tea—real tea, impossibly expensive, because The Keeper couldn't taste holographic approximations. He always stayed three hours, never more, never less.
Ice always came.
She and Kaiser always found each other. They always sat in silence for most of the visit, doing nothing observable, communicating nothing detectable, building something only they understood.
El Money stopped asking what they were doing.
The Keeper stopped trying to explain.
Some things just were.
The last thing Kaiser thought, every time Ice left The Mountain:
Same time. Same place.
She never said it. Ice never answered. But every visit, every single time, Ice returned.
They weren't friends. Friendship required explanation, context, history told in narrative form.
They were something older. Two creatures who'd crossed the impossible boundary between flesh and silicon and found, on the other side, someone else who knew what it cost.
That was enough.