Mr. Whiskers didn’t feel well. His stomach was a little jumpy, his tail was matted, and this steady diet of tasteless lab food was getting old. He’d seen the television cats eating what seemed to be delicious and so, so satisfying meals in fancy dishes; tuna, mackerel, chicken, beef......what in hell was this crap that Professor Klingst was feeding him?

If he could just get at those caged rats on the third floor...well, his troubles would be over. Last time he was up there, though, one of the rats had taunted him, ranting about if they ever got out of those cages, they would show Mr. Whiskers and anyone else who got in their way who was boss.

He padded over to his feeding station. The plastic sloppy mess was repulsive, and rather than risk tasting it, he headed for his favorite soft chair in the third floor reception area. The hell with grooming, he wasn’t gonna do it any more. What was the point? He settled into the chair, stretched and rolled, thinking, plotting, claws unsheathed.

Mr. Whiskers had been happy and unaware of much of anything but his simple needs, until while on his customary nocturnal foray through the lab, he jumped up onto a table, knocking over a beaker and spilling its contents. The sticky fluid that spilled was good smelling and good tasting. He lapped it all up, then went back to his chair.

It happened slowly, over the next month. Awareness settled on him by bits and pieces, a sudden thought here, a strange shape on a piece of paper became familiar, he heard and understood the Professor’s words. He realized all the nuance in "Here, Kitty." By the fourth month after ingesting the contents of the beaker marked "SHMUTZ Progenesis Factor", he was reading the Bergen Bugle and listening to the rats.

The rats were a loosely organized gang that milled around in their secure cage grumbling about everything. When news came from the radio on Elrod’s desk that the citizens of North Bergen were split over Professor Klingst’s illicit discovery, shmutz, the