After the last techpreneurs died, every citizen was issued a quota of surplus server space.

I used a little of my spare compute to create an afterlife for my favourite cats.

Finding the residents wasn't easy. I made do with the ashes of those I knew existed, from the homes of various friends. Others I plundered from Mount Vernon with a claw hammer and crowbar. I dug into the backyards of landed homes for the rest.

Many had neither been buried nor burned. They died in ditches and on highways and between the jaws of roving dogs. I uploaded thousands of photos onto a cloud-hosted image recognition service in the vain hopes that some of them would make it out through the other side as training data. From the first purrs in my server rack, I knew some did.

At first, the afterlife was too crowded. So I designed for my cats a maze of endless hedgerows and rope ladders that stretched off from (0, 0, 0) into infinity in all the six directions. The ground was a tiling of concrete and parquet and cardboard box forever. Large AI-powered hands would descend from the eternally dusky sky, hands that scritched and petted and smoothed and fed.

I ran the simulation a few dozen times, then made sure the hands would never ever flinch from being bitten.

I watched as every cat I've ever loved roam out into the infinite directions. They moved out until they were equidistant from each other, then proceeded to eat and sleep and sun and scratch themselves against the descending hands forever.

Emergent behaviour was soon observed. The hands' incentive mechanisms were overloaded by the loving, tender care received in return, and they soon grew to outnumber the cats. In every direction, reaching out for these dead cats, were hundreds of scritching, petting, smoothing, feeding hands.

I think the universe must love us in quite the same way.