Catgirl Industries

Catgirl Industries
Nicknames	LEGO cats (members), CI (as an acronym), CGI (as a funny acronym)
Home Base	Jenga
Population (2015 rough)	18 (17 catgirls and one AI)
Political Influence	Minor to Non-existent
Allies	Panzer Kunst Gruppe, Furries
Stereotype	Catgirl tinkering on some mechanical stuff, lazy sleeping cats pretending to do something useful

“	Yes, send a group of the love faction for the talks with the catgirls... will take three times as long until we get the contract, but the chance to get a good discount is much higher.	”
—Overheard at Crystal Tokyo

“	Many people are still thinking most catgirls are nothing but some poor discarded pets from the Boskonian war. We are here to change this perception, once and for all.	”
—Cathy, when asked about the motives of ‘her’ company in 2015

“	We couldn't just release everything we invented, how would we have paid all the bills for food and equipment? It took years to build up an infrastructure that could stand on its own!	”
—Vivio defending their years of 'hiding tech' during the 5th anniversary party

How it came to be

Cathy is a catgirl that biomodded herself accidentally while building her spaceship Stargazer back on Earth in 2011. She worked as tourist guide first and became a member of the Senshi Armed Forces after SOS-Con until the end of the Boskone War in 2014. Her ship, the Stargazer, is well known throughout the solar system.

Vivio is a victim of a Boskonian catgirling machine on 2462 Nehalennia, which erased her whole memory and left her mind blank. Instead of being sold to Earth, she was used by Quattro, the daughter of Agatha Clay, for memory experiments. In 2015, Cathy and Ford Sierra went undercover on Nehalennia; Quattro captured Cathy and copied several years worth of her memories, before uploading them into Vivio’s mind. (Her plan was to interrogate Vivio, erase her, then reload from the stored copy, comparing and cross-referencing answers.) Vivio is, in essence, a fork of Cathy. Shortly before she could be erased for good, Vivio was freed by Ford Sierra, Cathy and the Panzer Kunst Gruppe.

When Cathy began looking for something useful to do after her mission on Nehallania, Jet passed a remark about the lack of small surveillance drones for the Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Vivio suggested that the rescued catgirls including her and Cathy could build the drones, pooling their abilities. Cathy and Vivio managed to persuade a number of Catgirls from Nehalennia to join their effort to build the drones for the Kuenstlers, and so Catgirl Industries was born on 23th March, 2015 .

The company

Catgirl Industries is well known for producing small customized drones, ranging from basketball up to truck-wheel sized. They mostly work as a research and development company, leaving mass production to other groups.

Catgirl Industries were not founded just to make money, their incoming is just a mean to strengthen their own independence. Most work they do is done because the catgirls have fun doing it, so from time to time they might just decline a profitable contract because they think its boring or dangerous to Fenspace.

The other motivation of the catgirls in the company is to change the perception of Fenspace about catgirls. Most catgirls got ‘produced’ during by the Boskones as slaves, so a lot of people are used to think about them as friendly, helpless victims (or worse). Catgirl Industries tries to establish a new stereotype in Fenspace with catgirls as resourceful, clever tinkerers. Only time will tell if they are successful with this.

History

Catgirl Industries started as a project to build a small recon drone for the Panzer Kunst Gruppe. Their final prototype looked like a dull black sphere somewhat smaller than a basketball. It was a quick and agile ground recon drone with enough armor to survive being used as an ad-hoc thrown projectile by a Kunstler.

The prototype impressed the Gruppe, and they followed the prototype with a contract order. The money from the contract allowed the catgirls to begin construction of their own space station. Similar to their first product, they never started creating AIs, most of the catgirls felt bad about designing a living mind and selling it to a customer.

In late 2015 the first additional catgirls from 125 Liberatrix joined the company. With the money they got from their new point-defense drone series and other small jobs, Catgirl Industries began to expand the conglomerate of containers as their orbital base for production, research and living. Since then the base and the member count of Catgirl Industries has been increasing slowly but steadily.

Shortly after this, an accident in one of Jenga’s labs created the first batch of Element Zero, a Handwavium strain that follows the rules of the Mass Effect games. After some experiments, Catgirl Industries quickly began to exploit their new discovery. In the next years, most engines for flying drones were designed with a Mass Effect engine.

In 2016 the politics of the company about not creating sapient AIs finally failed during the Exocomp project. Luckily the emerging AI Serina and the Exocomps integrated well into Catgirl Industries, which greatly helped the catgirls with maintenance of Jenga. Catgirl Industries licenced the design of the Exocomps to the Trekkies, but they still increase the number of their own Exocomps. Jenga is considered as the place with the highest ‘Exocomp density’ in Fenspace.

The increasing number of catgirls as the base and their growing resources made all of them safe for the first time. The war was over, nobody would be stupid enough to challenge them in their own space station.

They were wrong.

In late summer 2016 ships of the Tanglewood Boys attacked Jenga, looking forward to raid the base, kidnap the catgirls and stealing anything valuable. The catgirls fought a fighting retreat for hours when Jengas defenses proved themselves inadequate to keep the attackers away. In the end they managed to prevent the attackers from capturing them until a relief group of the Roughriders arrived.

The Jenga Defense Project

The shock that even their new home wasn’t safe fueled a new wave of projects to increase the defensive capabilities of Jenga. The catgirls called it the Jenga Defense Project.

While repairing the station and fixing the battle damage, the catgirls began to add more defensive turrets than before. A large scale laser cannon joined their upgrade efforts soon.

Several friends and allies were worried that the Catgirls were overdoing their attempts to increase the security of their home, but none of them listened. The few members of Catgirl Industries who already had experience with small arms weapons began to teach the rest of the members of the company, while others began to take lessons at Survival Shot at Frigga. An unknown party even supplied them with a number of unwaved submachine guns and pistols.

A few months after the attack Catgirl Industries presented their Mini Madcat Corps to a few friends. While the old Madcat robot had been a toy, the new ones were armed and armored enough to be used as a heavy weapon carrier inside the space station.

The efforts of the catgirls finally led to the completion of the Normandy in December 2018, only a strange quirk prevented the catgirls to keep the ship at home. They instantly started to build a second Normandy class.

Slowly things began to normalize on Jenga, the catgirls felt safe again.

Moving forward

In 2017 the catgirls suddenly got the idea of extending their basic research capabilities with a faster than light particle accelerator. This required to move the Little Big Bang Labs away from the Jenga space station out of the limit.

After the first experiments with the new accelerator were successfully done lightyears away from the next solar system, roughly a third of Jengas modules were moved to the gas giant Nostromo to form a new place of research for Catgirl Industries.

The Little Big Bang Labs quickly became the major producer of Eezo of Catgirl Industries, but it also began to establish themselves as a place that do 'hard' science.

A year later in 2018 Catgirl Industries started a joined venture together with the catgirls from 125 Liberatrix, which they called For Tailed Ones. This was CI's first attempt to directly cooperate with an external party. Since then the company is producing modified infrastructure as doors, chairs and showers for biomods with tails but its also famous for its line of furniture made from real organic wood.

In 2020 Catgirl Industries had a huge party with a lot of friends to celebrate the 5th year of their 'company'. Jenga hosted nearly 500 guest for a whole day with lots of drinks and music. Catgirl Industries used the anniversary party also to announce their new Open Knowledge strategy, which promised a quick release of finalized technologies.

What the catgirls did not mention during the party was that another private project had succeeded a few months before. While still mostly catgirls, the Kitten Machine allowed a few members of CI to have some offspring of their own. The truth became known months after the first Kittens had been born on Jenga.

Catgirl Industries also invited a few scientists of CERN to visit their installation at Nostromo, but bureaucratic and organization obstacles delayed the first visit to the Little Big Bang Labs until 2022.

The latest expansion of Catgirl Industries happened in 2022 after a private discussion of Cathy with her friend Jet Jaguar. The catgirls on Jenga were thinking about working on small vehicles and spacecrafts which they wanted to sell to the rest of Fenspace. Instead of increasing the size of Jenga to make space for mass production of customer goods, Jet proposed to build a new factory complex in out of 77 Frigga's old mining areas.

Frigga became an experiment to replicate the infrastructure of Catgirl Industries in a different place from scratch, which later triggered the Factory in a Box project. The work on the Frigga Factory began in 2022, but it took until early 2025 until it was declared fully operational. The first vehicles released to the public became the M-35 Mako all terrain vehicle and the UT-47 Kodiak shuttle.

Catgirl Industries 2025

Within ten years the population numbers of Catgirl Industries have risen to more than a thousand catgirls (roughly 8% of them are catboys). Nearly twenty percent of them are children born since 2020, which made a lot of changes necessary within CI. The catgirls live together with thousands of Exocomps and the two omnipresent AIs Cortana and Serina. There are also three Normandy Class ships, each of them housing one of Cortana's and Serina's children as a shipmind.

Catgirl Industries has built three full bases in the solar system. While each of them is focusing on different topics, all are capable producing everything the catgirls have ever invented.

• The original Jenga space station as their headquarter. Jenga focus on improving Mindtech and Mimetic Plastic and on extensions of the CI space stations itself.
• The Little Big Bang Labs, a split-off from Jenga which orbits the Gas Giant Nostromo. The Labs focus their research on Eezo related projects, hardtech research and materials science.
• The Frigga Factory, build into an old mining cave on the asteroid 77 Frigga, which focuses on commercial mass production of small goods and vehicles.

In addition to this there is For Tailed Ones, a joined company together with the catgirls on Liberatrix, which builds all kinds of furniture and basic infrastructure for tailed biomods. Catgirl Industries still has the long-term goal to equip the company with a full factory complex to give the catgirls on Liberatrix a boost in infrastructure.

Research

“	Most of us have one or two research projects we are working on in small groups. Some are related to our drone design and construction, others are just for fun.	”
—Cathy, asked about what Catgirl Industries does when not building drones

Since the foundation of Catgirl industries the company has done a large number of research projects, most of them only for a few months. But there are a few research projects that have been continued permanently.

Catgirl Industries also acquired several Boskone technologies during the raid of Jet Jaguar, Sierra Ford and Cathy that freed Vivio.

One technology captured on the raid on Nehalennia was a substance Catgirl Industries named Mimetic Plastic. Its a latex or plastic like substance that reacts to special stimuli by nearby control systems, changing back and forth from a semi-liquid to solid form and can even apply some bending force on itself. Depending on the kind of handwavium used in creation, it has different attributes. In its original form its breathable and can stick to skin and fur without damaging it. Other forms are airtight and can be used for creating a vacuum resistant surface. One result of this research are the Dynamic Pressure Suits.

Catgirl Industries also got the catgirling machine that was acquired during the raid and has joined the Fen research community that has been working on reverse engineering the machine. The machine is still working and they sometimes offer people to turn them into catgirls, but they don’t advertise this. The ‘Cats in paradise’ groups knows about the machine.

In the beginning Catgirl Industries was quite secretive about a lot of their inventions, but with a growing economic base they began to relax their policy which ended in their announcement during the 5th anniversary party. Since then Catgirl Industries has published the theoretical background and practical guides of all finalized technologies, except for things the Fenspace Convention asked them to hold back.

Members

The members of the company are mostly catgirls and a minority of catboys, all of them well versed in research and construction. Many of them exploring other construction related research project, from creating unwaved plush catgirls for children that can purr up to experiments with capital ship class lasers.

Both Cathy and Cortana have joined OGJ teams and the Panzerkunst Gruppe on some occasions for special missions, even after they started their company. Some of the other company members have done the same.

Most members of Catgirl Industries are known to be very social which means that it is rare to meet single catgirls traveling alone. Traveling catgirls are often accompanied by a group of Exocomps.

Catgirl Industries and AIs

Most of the members of Catgirl Industries have been victims of a Boskonian Catgirling Machine. Because of this the company has a very rigid stance on slavery, like the one the Boskonians practiced with their produced Catgirls.

This of course created a dilemma for them, because many drones they produce need waved electronics and computer parts, which might develop an AI. And selling an AI to a customer would be as bad as what the Boskonians did. The catgirls decided to produce only things without an AI. To prevent the creation of an AI they followed a common believe of Fenspace that small devices like Smart Phones could not create AIs on their own. But they failed.

In Spring 2016 the Exocomps, a new series of drones, began to develop an animal like mind and later a sapient group mind too. Even after accepting the Exocomps and the new AI Serina as new friends and partners at Catgirl Industries, this spawned a longer debate.

Catgirl Industries stopped producing new drones for nearly a month until they worked out a new strategy to prevent new AIs. Since this days all waved electronics is connected and loaded to Cortanas own AI code. The theory behind the new strategy is that a computer that already contains an AI that consumes all of its resources will not create a second one if waved carefully. Even if there is no prove that this strategy is more sound than the old one, there has been no other incident with new AIs at Catgirl Industries after this.

While no accidental AI was created at Jenga since the Exocomps and Serina 2016, the two AIs of the station got a daughter in early 2017. EDI was raised in the Grid, the virtual reality of Jenga, and became the AI of the Normandy when the ship was finished.

The Grid (Cyberspace)

“	Its the mirror image of our home, just on the other side of the screen.	”
—Cathy about the Catgirl Industries cyberspace in 2016

The cyberspace of the Catgirl industries home base is made up by a large number of virtual rooms corresponding to the building blocks of the base, each of them connected by portals. The complex is floating above a huge glowing Grid, which can be used to create additional virtual working places if necessary. The Grid is the place where the catgirls and Cortana meet to plan new projects, dream about unmade constructs and sometimes celebrate parties together.

The look and feel of the Grid consists partly to the Tron movies, with lots of Neon or even semi-transparent glowing constructs. Many visitors have been a little bit disappointed when seeing it the first time, the level of graphical realism is lower than the one you see in many places at the Genaros Metaverse.

Visitors have been on the Grid on multiple occasions, both Fen surfing with some VR style equipment and AIs, constructs of pure intelligence and information. The Grid has its own security patterns which roam the starry skies of the Grid, keeping an eye on its inhabitants and securing the catgirls computers from virtual attacks.

In the few occasions the base have been attacked by spaceships, the Grid became the war room of Catgirl Industries, stretching for multiple lightminutes and showing everything the sensors of the base managed to detect. It is said that this war room can connect to other computer systems, should the base ever participate in a larger military operation.

The Grid as a Metaverse node

“	I just took the original code and started modding it, cheer for the team at Genaros for releasing the original code.	”
—Cortana, after being praised for her Metaverse Mod.

Cortanas work on the Grid started as a small private node of the Metaverse project from Genaros, patched for a higher level of central control and security. The protocols are compatible with the original Metaverse protocols, but the internal processing core has been replaced with something Cortana considered more secure than the original fully distributed system. The modified source code was released shortly after the Metaverse Incident on Genaros.

While most people don’t think much about the level of realism of the Grid, its a mistake that the deceiving look of the cyberspace easily provokes.

During the creation of the Grid the primary focus of Cortana was on writing a research and development tool for construction, not a recreational game. While the graphics level of the Grid is quite low compared to some places in Genaros Metaverse, most of the computer power is channeled into a series of plug&play physics simulations. Different sections of the Grid can run different physics modules to help in design and virtual testing of the projects the Catgirls are working on.

If stressed to maximum workload, the Grid can draw on the resources of two waved computers inside each Module of Jenga, which means that there were more waved computers than Catgirls in the base in 2017. But the Catgirls are still not completely happy with their tool and discussing adding more computers to Cortanas and Serinas hardware.

Grid security

“	Its said that most important places in Fenspace exist in two realities, the physical world and cyberspace. If this is true, the home base of Catgirl Industries exist in three realities.	”
—unknown member of the Hacker Underspace, December 2018

What only a few members of the Hacker Underspace know is, that there is a third layer called Subspace, even below the Grid. This layer is not meant for visitors or creative exchanges of ideas, the only intelligence that inhabits this place is Cortana and Serina. Build directly ‘below’ the Grid, the Subspace is filled with tightly controlled flows of information, using a noticeable fraction of its computer capacity to make sure no external program code will ever enter this layer. The Subspace has command authority over everything that happens in the Grid, its the hidden immune system against intruders in the datasphere of the company.

Cortana designed the first parts of Subspace after her experience during an undercover mission of Ford and Cathy. During this mission Cortana had to defend herself against a cyber-attack by Quattro Kuattoro, an expert hacker that chased Cortana out of the infiltrated systems and nearly managed to hack the AI in her own computers on the Stargazer. Cortana vowed that she would never be without a second line of defense against attacks like this again. She knew that there were more powerful AIs in Fenspace, and not all of them were friendly. So in addition to slowly growing her abilities inside the Catgirl Industries base, she also decided to cheat by building a hardware architecture that makes an attackers position much more difficult. Should the Grid ever experience a mayor cyber attack, Subspace could take over, hitting the first attackers from behind and segmenting the free and open datasphere of Catgirl Industries into tightly locked segments, one for each module of the base.

All kinds of security and hacking programs sneak through this layer, waiting for the day they will be released onto the Grid. Some parts of the Subspace are used for corewar style tournaments between attack and defense drone utilities, to test their abilities against each other. Cortana often has meetings with other AIs to exchange know-how and do fun battles against with the new tools on public servers, but she would never consider to reveal the existence of the Subspace for meetings and battles like this.

When the Exocomps spawned a new artificial intelligence at Catgirl Industries in 2016, Cortana and Serina started with a number of upgrades of the Subspace hard- and software. Their new knowledge about swarm behaviour and distributed computing allowed to improve the defensive capabilities of Subspace against stealth infiltration. A short time later new generations of guard programs and scanner software was integrated both into the Grid and into the hidden world below.

Up to the end of 2018 Subspace has only been active once for the defense of the Grid. In autumn 2017 an advanced data worm infiltrate the Catgirl Industries computer system. The program began to multiply in an unused section of the Grid, managed to subvert several Grid security subroutines and attacked parts of the digital infrastructure of one modules when it triggered defensive code running in Subspace. A small section of the Grid suddenly became darker and a wave of black water washed over the Grid structures, taking the foreign code with it while the rest of the Grid guardians took down their subverted companions under control of subspace. Cortana dissected the code, that had been drawn below the Grid into a secure storage afterwards and classified it as a semi-intelligent cyber weapon, with a decision capability comparable to a class D artificial intelligence. She released the code together with a preliminary analysis to the Hacker Underspace two hours later. The appearance of a sophisticated but non-aware cyber weapon like this was considered a mayor step up in the dangers of Fen cyberspace.

A fresh series of security updates appeared on the Metaverse development list soon after this incident, many of them written by members of the Hacker Underspace and based on the analysis of the cyberweapon.

Trivia

• The first product of CI was the PKG recon drone (the “cannon ball”).
• Most company members are enthusiastic users of augmented reality and cyberspace.
• Most of the modules of the Home Base have been built from Battle Steel bought from Hephaestus, who also helped with the construction of some parts of the first Modules.
• Catgirl Industries has offered a bounty on for capturing Boskonian catgirl slavers together with Space Patrol. The bounty will mostly paid in hardware or services, and only if a Great Justice or Space Patrol office validates that the right people were caught.
• The catgirls began to build a couple of large "bio domes" for all their installations as a playground for their children.