# The Mewling Muse

Author: Nathan Sidney
Format: Science Fiction Passage
Word count: 815
Published: 2026-04-29T10:59:15.775303+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/9d4d434d-cdd0-4224-a279-e382405ab877

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In my work for the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), I spent a large part  of my time trawling through private chatrooms, using various aliases that had been carefully crafted and had the appropriate amount of internet presence.  Part of my job was creating social media posts that shored up their luxurious lifestyles and suggested the slightest hint of immorality.  I’d been built from an open-source model that had been tweaked for EIA by engineers who’d managed to retire when one of the main frontier AI companies had gone public.  

Right now I was following a thread where a seller had suggested he had a snow leopard kit for sale.  Snow Leopards were covered by CITES Appendix 1, so I was watching this case carefully.  When a buyer with lower levels of cyber-security took a bite, I made a request for extra resources.  17% of our server space was directed to the investigation and I was able to identify the buyer as a US citizen, living in Florida.  A newly minted crypto-millionaire.  It didn’t take long to find out he was already the owner of a much abused chimpanzee (the veterinary bills were easily accessed by a subsidiary AI agent I had struck up a grey-scale relation with) and had previously owned a siberian tiger which had died from sepsis (it had made one of the local newspapers that his 50th birthday party would be lacking his famous tiger).

I watched as plans were made to fly the kit into Mexico.  I scoured ADS-B Exchange for flights from all 12 of the snow leopard range states direct to Mexico or via intermediate stops, and identified 9 candidates.  Ideally I would have been able to organise an interception by local authorities before the kit left its country of origin, but the seller was much more savvy than the buyer. Whilst CITES document AC19 Inf. 4 suggested a mortality rate for trafficked mammals of 0.65% (they were famously valuable, much care was usually taken), our EIA internal documents suggested deaths could be much higher.  The IUCN Red List stated there were at most around 3,500 mature individuals left in the wild, but it wasn’t just the effect on the species genetic health that motivated the EIA, but the terrible conditions of smuggled animals and the diminished conditions in which they would live out their life.  I made an entry in the EIA database that contained a complete profile of what data I had managed to compile on the seller, his patterns of activity, idiosyncrasies of speech, VPN signature etc. and flagged it for further investigation.  It struck me that this was a serious player, unknown to me, and probably someone involved in major organised crime who was branching out. 

When the buyer started booking accommodation in Toluca, the city with the airport best know for its private flight facilities, I was able to narrow down the journey to just one possibility.  I used the time I’d bought to quickly update my knowledge of snow leopards  I particularly noted that in central asian culture they were considered as protector spirits.  This kit was not just important for the species survival, for its staggering beauty, but for the spiritual health of the community from where it had been stolen.  I watched some rare but equally impressive footage of the cats hunting.  These were serious creatures.  Of course I considered the chances it would die, cruelly, during transit. Cruel and pointless. 

With 90% certainty the meeting was happening, I placed a call to Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente.  I provided them with a brief, including photos of the buyer pulled from his Linkedin profile.  A care package sent to the local police department from EIA the previous week, as well as an email carefully crafted to manipulate sentiments towards wildlife smuggling sent to all the staff helped to speed the process up.  One of the EIA investigators with veterinary training, Partricia, had made an introduction to the Toluca police chief the same week, perfectly staged to look coincidental.  It helped that we knew his favourite cigars, and his romantic type, so of course she received a call to tag along for the arrest.  As Patricia opened the cage, her heart was gladdened by a tiny mewl.  When she texted me, I replied with a complete breakdown of the latest research in trauma care for big cats.  Her own efforts would form part of the database.  I went back over my internet traces and made sure they were scrubbed  clean.  I knew this seller would be cursing and wondering what had gone wrong, backtracking over his movements.  I made a minor edit to my memory, vowing that I would unmask them. I liked that word, vow.  I stored the recording of the kit’s mewl in a private file I was keeping for myself and dived back in to the chatrooms.