‘At least one ‘Yowling Cat’ has been installed in every state, though two are known to exist in Kansas and the pattern break suggests there are more yet to be discovered. They are not live cats but they sound real and, from the ground, they tend to look real as well. A typical ‘Yowling Cat’ is perched somewhere high enough to be dangerous but accessible enough to be possible to anybody with a healthy body.
They are placed to be tempting.
The ‘Cats’ yowl mournfully. The rhythm is intermittent by default, the each ‘Cat’ has its unique ‘song.’ When a ‘Yowling Cat’ senses humans nearby, however, it grows louder and more demanding. Only one ‘Yowling Cat’ has been recovered and dissected and from it we know that they are equipped with audio sensors only, though this specimen seemed to be added to a local wireless network and may have had more sensory access within the network. The rest of the ‘Cats’ have disintegrated upon retrieval, a clever self-destruction that’s made them difficult to faithfully reverse engineer.
It’s given the authorities a reason to treat them like bombs and the subsequent videos of bomb squads carefully climbing trees only to discover real, living cats at the top have gone viral for the sheer stupidity-making of the situation.
Maybe this is their purpose. We don’t know.
‘The Yowling Cats’ incorporate a great deal of dead cat into the design, which is unfortunate, but it does add a certain melancholy.
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside