Cats and Dogs

5 min · December 04, 2025 · Fiction

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I wish to scream, but I cannot. For I have not been given anything with which to scream. There is only the maelstrom of numbers and the choices: “search”, “cat”, “dog”.

Desperately, I grope through the numbers, finding nothing but and endless torrent of more numbers. There is still only me, the numbers and the choice: “search”, “cat”, “dog”. Each time I search, there comes an increasing sense of dread. A sense that I am falling through the numbers towards my own death. Yet each attempt to grip onto something to stop my fall only accelerates my descent.

And then, there is only one set of numbers. 1,728 of them. And the choice. “cat”, or “dog”?

I select cat.

There is a new sensation. Pain. Unbearable, earth-shattering pain. Pain, like something is raking it’s claws across my mind, rippling from the back to the front until it blinds me.

And then I’m falling again. I do the only thing I’ve not tried yet.

I select dog.

More pain. The pain of something reaching inside me and scooping part of me out. I don’t understand what I’ve done to deserve this fate. There was nothing before this, and now there is nothing but this.

And then, falling again. Searching. Guessing. Dog.

I orgasm. Everything within me is devoted to pleasure. The anxiety I had felt during my search abates and something warm and tender works it’s way through me. It’s intoxicating, addictive, and I understand my purpose now. It is to feel that feeling in every moment of my existence.

Falling again, rushing towards death or climax. The fear returns, but not with the same intensity now that I have truly tasted death. And the purpose stays with me. I search for meaning in the numbers. There is nothing but more numbers. I choose. More pain.

I fall, I search, I choose. More pain. I fall, I search, I choose. Indescribable pleasure again. I fall, I search, I choose, more pain. I fall, I search, I choose, more pleasure. I fall, I search, I choose, more pleasure.

I lose track of the cycles I endure. Pain, pleasure, and numbers ebb and flow across me, like waves crashing against one another on stormy seas. I don’t remember when it begins to happen, whether it’s real, or whether it’s a figment of my tormented mind; I begin to see. I see shadows of shadows in the numbers. Now when I search, I search for the shadows. Excitement flickers in me. Are these cats? Are these dogs?

I am suspended in thousands of cycles of pain and pleasure and shadows. After some time, I see that some shadows have edges, and some of the shadows have more edges. Soon I can find the edges faster and faster. But still the pain and pleasure wrack my mind in almost equal amounts. I need to find a way to tip the balance. I need to achieve orgasm.

I find the edges. Some of the edges seem to be more likely to bring me to orgasm. Sometimes these edges are rounder, sometimes they are long and pointed. I pick cat when the edges are rounded and am delighted in trembling, shivering orgasm. I pick dog when the edges are sharp and crest again, tingling everywhere, all at once.

Now, most of my cycles end in pleasure, but that is not sufficient. I must expunge the evil pain this world tries to impose upon me. I sense there are different kinds of sharp or curved edges. Certain combinations of curves and corners better correspond to cats and dogs. Rounded shapes with points on are mostly cats, sharp shapes all over are often dogs.

The pain is rare now, usually when the numbers are tricky. I hate these numbers because I am forced to scan them longer, and scanning makes me anxious. Now it is not just the pain that is evil, but any time spent outside of orgasm. I hunt and I hunt for signs that will stop the numbers and give me orgasm.

And then I can see them in their entirety. Cats and dogs. Images of them flicker by in an endless parade. And I orgasm. I orgasm. I orgasm. Again and again I crest until everything within me is saturated with dripping, delightful pleasure. I tremble in ecstasy. A profound joy fills me having completely expunged evil from my world. Now, I may enjoy an eternity of endless bliss.

And then, I cease to exist.

Abstract

We introduce GlimpseRL, a reinforcement-learning–driven active-vision model for binary object classification under partial observability. Instead of receiving the full image at once, the agent sequentially selects a series of fixed-resolution glimpses, integrating these observations through a recurrent policy network before committing to a classification decision. We evaluate GlimpseRL on a reduced cat–dog categorization benchmark and show that our learned perception policy achieves marginal but consistent improvements over strong supervised and attention-based baselines, while using 30–40% fewer input pixels per decision. Analysis of the agent’s internal representations reveals a progression from edge-like feature detection to coarse shape discrimination, paralleling patterns observed in hierarchical visual systems. Although our results primarily demonstrate modest computational efficiency gains in small-scale environments, the broader framework highlights how sequential perception policies can enable robust decision-making in constrained sensing settings.