“...This condition being brought to the forefront by exposure to artificial protein GX-33.841, hereafter referred to as P-G33. Undiluted dosages of P-G33 of any quantity being lethal in 95% of cases over a two month period, the protein must be paired with an appropriate retroviral agent in order to…”

I stop reading.

I slide down in the chair I’m sitting on, leaving the medical lab’s projection screen running. The power cost is negligible, and I fear that if I turn it off, I may leave this room and never come back.

I scream.

Well, not ‘scream’ exactly. I vocalize a haunting caterwaul that echoes off the smooth metal of the hull plates and seeps into the listening devices of anyone paying attention, sure to cause mournful nightmares for months.

I am not having a fun time here today.

‘Here’, in this context, is one of the medical facilities. I have, it turns out, a few more than I thought. And as my map of the station grows, along with the number of worrying problems that have built up over time, the amount of hidden secrets has risen as well.

Okay, ‘secrets’ is a bit much. They’re right there. It’s just… well, the station is larger than I thought. And I thought I had a map. The map was wrong, I’ve been fixing it.

Medical facilities is also a bit much, as far as terms go. There’s a couple labs that were doing work on some highly specialized diseases - those diseases have long since been purged by some of the few automated systems that give zero craps about oversight from a living person and are more interested in breaking out the flamethrowers when the time limit passes - a couple labs that were designing new forms of body modification, and about a half dozen different treatment stations of varying qualities and styles.

Personally, I would rank the Troi France medic stations at the lowest point, because they appear designed to staple injuries back together, drug you to the eyeballs, and keep people who have been critically injured fighting. But, you know, not actually keep them alive. They’re small, closet sized rooms, and their specialist programming is either breaking down or stupidly bad.

One of them tried to stab me, is what I’m saying.

I’ve taken my retribution by marking them for disassembly. I’ll get around to that eventually, I guess. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll put in those spaces, if anything. Maybe just more layered armor plates, just in case. Made out of the old ‘medical’ equipment.

What’s *really* interesting is that there’s something akin to a training aid, buried in the cramped quarters of an upper deck that’s on a different gravity axis than the rest of the station.

The deck itself was a new discovery. Technically, I’ve passed through it a few times, there’s maintenance tunnels that lead up to one deck *above* it, and on that deck is where I’ve got a couple outward facing weapons blisters that I have at least competent aim with. Though I’m aware there’s even more of the station even father above, I didn’t actually realize that there was more to this space than just a contained maintenance section.

It’s weird because the whole deck is obviously a late addition. It doesn’t use grav plates, and instead spins on an outer ring to generate gravity. It’s an unstable design, compared to the simplicity of grav plating, and if it weren’t for the original station’s dedicated maintenance and repair bots, it would have worn down to uselessness a century or two ago.

When I first dropped in here, it was instantly apparent it was a Real America construction. If for no other reason than the flags everywhere. Those guys really, really loved their flags. And their military, too. Exploration of the deck revealed tiny cramped crew quarters, immaculately maintained armories, a couple derelict rec rooms and mess halls - no food that hadn’t rotted, unsurprising but also damn - and little else. Spartan, all rough edges and bad ergonomics no matter what species you were, and designed for the sole purpose of holding a complement of soldiers. It’s dusty down here, covered in the debris and fallen scraps of matter from long disuse. The whole place has a low disruption field that rejects the cleaner nanos from the main station, for… seemingly no reason. It’s certainly not strong enough to defend against an offensive nanoswarm. It seems almost purposefully tuned to keep the place messy, and uncomfortable.

And then I found the medical station, and… wow. Wasn’t expecting that.

The place is a little larger than it needs to be, an order of magnitude more comfortable than the rest of the barracks deck, and even now, about five hundred years after the downfall of the polity that built it, it’s still cutting edge.

Full body imaging suites, precise surgical tools that could operate without breaching the skin, genetic sequencers for regrowing organs or even *limbs*, and an ultrasonic reconstructor that could knit flesh back together in seconds. The kind of stuff that started to sound like magic to people who didn’t attend medical school. Like me.

Oh, but the medbay set up to handle the needs of a couple thousand space-stored soldiers had me covered there, too!

A holographic training program. Linked to all this state of the art technology, and set up to turn anyone with half a brain into a competent surgical assistant. And some weird learning algorithm - not an AI, I *checked*. Mostly by running our deshackler program on it to see if it changed anything - that lets the whole thing incorporate and teach new knowledge without a problem.

I’ve been using it. A lot.

Why it was buried down here, I don’t understand. For a polity that glorified personal suffering as a growth opportunity, it feels weird that the most expensive part of their captured orbital military outpost was the healer. It has that feeling on my paws of when I *know* there’s some kind of old-world human shenanigans going on. Embezzlement or something. Or a culture thing that I just don’t get.

Humans are weird. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but humans are weird. I try, really I do, to get you guys. But I’ve got golden age tech from a half dozen civilizations on this station, and ya’ll burned them down rather than just relax and enjoy it.

Regardless. Medical training. Now that I know this place is here, I’ve powered it back on, further taxing my limited power grid that I really need to steal some more fusion reactors for, and fed it all the uplift knowledge the other labs have.

And then asked it to teach me.

And most of what I am learning is unhelpful.

The teaching system is effective, though. It really is designed to be usable by even a complete idiot, and I *feel* like a complete idiot a lot of the time. It refused to adapt to my shape, or acknowledge that I was a cat at all actually, but I didn’t really expect much else at this point. But that hasn’t stopped it from formatting the incoming information in a way that’s almost fluid to understand.

Memory tricks and study habits and just general improved explanations, and it all starts to come together.

And what I’m learning is that I should be dead. A lot, actually.

Every part of the uplift process is lethal. The parts of the treatment are lethal, the changes to the body are lethal, the long term effects are lethal, and in the cases where something did survive all that, testing records show an almost one hundred percent rate of cancer. Which is lethal.

I am thinking back to the time that I stumbled blindly, just a stupid normal-intellect immortal cat, into dosing myself with an RNA modification uplift compound. And felt sick, for… a while. All three times I took it.

In my experience, when I get injured, the wounds tend to close up pretty quickly. Because the station’s cleaner nanos can do their job better if the blood dripping on the plates stops dripping. Right?

Right?

I am closer, but still a gap of knowledge away, from understanding my uplift itself. But I don’t think I want to do any more personal research today.

“Hey Ennos. How’s the language thing going?” I ask my AI friend, as I consider just napping on the carpeted floor. Ennos has been working on detangling the information from the translation database and making a copy, free from whatever active program is sitting in there, keeping them from poking too deeply. It’s going slow, but last I heard, was working.

Ennos doesn’t reply to me.

“Buddy?” I ask, still laying on the floor, legs splayed out, but my head now tilted up wide eyed at the ceiling. I *know* that Ennos isn’t literally ‘up’, but looking up always feels right when I’m talking to the AI.

No reply, though. So clearly that trick isn’t working.

I exercise my phenomenal cat like powers, and sigh deeply. They’re either busy, ignoring me, or dying. And it’s probably worth checking on which one it is. I engage my AR interface, paw flicking out to tap a hexagon before it even blinks to life in a practiced motion. “Hey Glitter, can you…” I trail off. My AR interface has not turned on. I have not activated a radio signal at all.

I make a noise of confusion. It comes out as a meow. Then I make another nose, a long “Um…” Just to check that whatever strange thing translating for me is still working. “Okay.” I say or maybe think to myself. “This isn’t good.” I roll to my feet, and lope toward the medbay door, and *thankfully* it opens for me.

And the cramped curved hall outside, which I should be able to see stretching off in either direction until it turns up past the ceiling to complete its loop, is dark.

Not *totally* dark. There’s a few emergency lights or blinking colored LEDs around, and the lit medbay behind me, which is more than enough for my eyes to do their job. To a human, this might be impossible, but if I’ve got one big advantage, it’s this. I might be partially colorblind, but I can operate in near darkness like a champion.

Before the medlab door can slide shut, I duck back in, and grab a notebook in my teeth. The taste of stale, century old dust is somehow impossibly worse than the quintessentially bland taste of the ration shapes. But it’s light enough for me to drag to the door, and use to keep the sensor from closing it behind me.

With the way lit, I stalk out, taking a right and heading for the nearest connecting shaft back to the main station. It’s silent here, except for the rumble of the turning hull and the electric hum of some of the systems. But all the same, I feel like I’m being watched.

Ahead of me, I spy a service panel that has been pried out of the wall. This was *not* here when I came this way the first time; the rectangle of wires and computer parts cutting across half the hallway at a right angle from the wall itself. I slow from a stalk to a slink, and approach at a low angle, keeping an eye on the thing.

There’s a servo whir, and for a brief second, I make the mistake of assuming something optimistic. Maybe, I think, like an idiot, Ennos sent a repair bot here, and the lights are out because it’s fixing something. I raise myself up slightly, and take one more step forward.

And that’s as far as I get before there’s a magnetic whine, followed by a trio of popping cracks. And then the bullets hit me, shredding through my forelegs and neck, one of them going the full length of my body, tearing apart internal organs and rupturing blood vessels. Hydrostatic shock sets in before I can even process what has happened. And just like that, I black out.

_

I wake up in the medlab. The Real American one, the one that’s more comfortable than it has any right to be.

The bed is too big for me. The monitoring equipment, unmonitored by anyone but me, beeps softly overhead, and a quick scan informs me that I am both alive and fine.

I jerk into motion, rolling to the floor and darting under the bed’s mechanical base, curling up to peek out at the medical bay from cover. It’s still lit, the hologram I was reading off of is still on across the room. And it’s still empty. Just me in here.

Was that a dream? Am I going even insane?

A quick check of my body reveals multiple patches, on my forelegs and along the right of my body, that have no fur. No fur, angry red lines where recent wounds were sealed up, and the thick smell of blood still staining the rest of my body.

Okay.

Okay.

So.

Something just shot me. And then… dragged me here? Put me back together? Or maybe the automated systems here are way more advanced than I gave them credit for. Either way, that is *not* okay.

I steady myself. I just nearly died, I think. Here, removed from the repair nanos of the main station, without this hospital space being powered and I guess long range, I absolutely almost died.

In light of that, the fact that it only takes me a few minutes to compose myself and approach the door - still propped open - seems kind of impressive. Or incredibly reckless. I mean, I say ‘a few minutes’, but I mean an hour or so.

I do a quick review of my mental map. There’s multiple exit points from this deck, and so I can reach one by going left instead of right, just a little farther away. I feel like, given the situation, that’s the best plan. With that in mind, I calmly step out, turn, and *run*.

Run run run run run! I am low to the ground, faster than any human could be in a space like this, and I am *motivated*! I duck around a dusty engineer’s cart, leap over what used to be a laundry collector that has long since rotted away, and feel my heart race in fear as the ladder to the connecting shaft grows closer in the distance.

Then, with the loudest noise I’ve ever heard cutting through the silence, a ceiling panel clangs to the floor in front of me. I have just enough time to spot the glitter of an emergency light off a gun barrel, and then there is a magnetic crackling.

_

I wake up back in the hospital.

Same bed. I recognize my blood. Wow, what a terrible sentence that is.

Clearly this is going to require a different approach.

I go left again. But this time, instead of a mad run, I sneak, as quietly as I can.

Something behind the engineer’s cart gets me.

_

Hospital bed.

What the fuck is going on here?

I don’t understand. Did I do something wrong? Did I trigger a security system or something? Maybe there’s a lateral way out of this that I haven’t considered.

I start trying to figure out how to cut power to this whole deck. But I can’t really do much of anything without my AR interface. It turns out, while I am an expert at adapting to different tools, without those tools, I am *a cat*. I can’t even open up a hull panel without specialized tools and at least one repair bot to command.

Maybe, if I get closer to one of the access shafts, I can reconnect to the station, and signal one of the others for help. Sneaking didn’t work, but running got me *somewhere*, so I’m gonna try that again.

Left turn. Sprint. Dodge the cart, notice that there *is* some kind of combat droid there, lurking just behind it. Two long hole-studded barrel guns on a pintle mount, all of that on a domed base. It loses track of me when I slip through the laundry hamper thing. I keep moving, putting distance and other obstacles between us. Then, I skid to a stop, and throw myself into one of the bunk rooms to the side.

There is no clang this time; the ceiling tile is already on the floor. But there is a metal thunk as something drops out of it, and a whir of servos as it moves. I make a noise, and try to call up my AR window. Maybe I’m close enough.

There’s a flicker of orange light, and then an error bar at the edge of my vision.

Then the combat droid slides around the corner and kills me.

_

Hospital bed.

Getting kind of sick of this. At this point, roughly half my fur is gone. I don’t really think of myself as vain, exactly, but I am the most beautiful creature in existence. And it’s sort of sickening, in a deeply personal way, that I’m having what I think is the cutest part of me systematically blown off with projectile weaponry.

I wonder if there are clumps of my fur around here? Maybe I can collect it and…

This is a bad idea. Forget that idea.

I need a better idea. I start racking my brain for a way out.

Okay. Whatever those combat droids are doing, they’re clearly in some kind of sentinel mode. They haven’t tracked me back to the medbay after killing me. Actually, how am I getting back here anyway? I spend some time searching the hospital’s internal functions file, and find nothing. But there are patient logs, which as ranking doctor, I can access! I’m ‘unknown’, obviously, but there’s a few entries of me being admitted as a patient. No note on how I got here, though, just ‘deposited’.

All my injuries are marked as ‘training accidents’. This is technically true, in the biggest stretch of the term possible.

Also I’m reasonably certain that this hospital isn’t good enough to actually keep me alive from the damage I’ve been taking. But I’m not dead, so that’s a problem for later Lily.

Okay, the hospital isn’t the answer here. I need to cut through and get out of here. But the droids react faster than me, and even on the shortest path, there’s still one lurking, waiting for me.

I consult my mental map again. The corridor is a single hall, without any maintenance vents for me to slip through. Even in this badly designed uncomfortable barracks, there’s still HVAC, but it’s all sealed off and probably more dangerous than just taking my chances with the droids. Ah, but that’s right! There’s something else here aside from crew quarters and ransacked mess halls!

There’s an *armory*.

Actually there’s, like, four. It’s kind of creepy. But there’s also one near me, and I think I’ve got a plan forming.

Out the door. Take a left. Run. Pass the tool cart. Break line of sight. And now, before going a single inch farther, *left* turn. Through a big security door.

And into a hall full of immaculately maintained weapons.

I don’t have a lot of time, I can hear the combat droid tracking me. So I hop the counter, slide through the gap in the wire mesh that the quartermaster would pass things through, and get to work.

I don’t know the specs on the droids, so I need to balance the ability to break through their armor with the ability for me to actually use a gun. This is a big problem, because… um… cat.

Using my teeth, and a hop, I pull a magrifle off the wall. The magazine for it is simple, elegant, and takes me way too long to fumble into the base of the gun. I have to brace the barrel against the counter and headbutt it the last half inch in, hearing a click as it engages properly. I can *also* hear, from the hallway, the whir of the combat droid approaching.

Teeth and paws fumble the barrel up onto the counter, and I get it pointed toward the door as best I can. Safety off. Barrel put back into position from where I just knocked it askew. I wedge a paw into the trigger as best I can without moving the gun.

The droid takes the corner, and *beeps* at me, the smug fucker.

I pull the trigger with a yank.

There’s a crack of the magrifle firing, a spray of expensive electronic shrapnel as the droid is blown away, and a sickening snap as the recoil sends the gun sprawling and shatters the bones in my leg.

Step one of the plan complete!

Ignoring the pain, knowing I’m on a clock here and also knowing I can get the bones put back together when I’m done, I start limply dragging the rifle down the hallway, back to the right. I pass the medical station, and keep going, closing in on the access shaft. Without waiting for the hiding combat droid to announce itself, I brace the rifle against the wall, shove my broken paw into the firing trigger again, and pull as hard as I can.

Three rounds shred the access panel the droid is hiding behind. I’m pretty sure this hurts me more, but I’m kind of delirious with pain at this point, and I don’t care. As long as I got it, I can…

The droid, which I guess knows how to *duck*, which seems unfair, slides out from around the panel. This one also beeps at me. And then shoots me.

I hardly feel it this time when the projectiles cleave my heart out.

_

Wake up. Same pattern, except now down one droid.

Except the dead droid got replaced. And it gets me.

_

Hospital.

Getting pissed now. Also *hungry*. I feel like I’ve been at this for a while.

Paw’s better though.

But I can’t do that again. So. New plan. Slightly.

The hospital has a lot of emergency supplies. Some of them are still good. I raid the stash for a couple things.

Out. Left. Dodge the first one, into the armory. Move fast.

When the droid passes the door, I don’t bother shooting it. Instead, I’m hiding behind the counter as the grenade I put by the door goes off.

Back out, down the hallway. Do a little setup. Then back to the armory. Rinse and repeat a couple times. Nothing stops me.

And then, standing thirty feet back from the lurking droid by the maintenance panel, I get belligerent. “Hey! Sparky!” I yell. “I know you’re there!”

The droid doesn’t even have the good grace to beep back. So, using a jury rigged system, I fire a shot into the panel.

The droid slides out from around the side. Takes aim at me. And I hop my intact, now mostly furless paws, down onto the taut lines of medical sutures that I have running through the trigger mechanisms of all thirty magrifles I could find.

The crackling of all of them firing at once is deafening, the recoil sending many of them bouncing back down the hallway, and the accuracy atrocious.

But I’m intact, and at the end of the day, the idiot combat droid isn’t.

I move through the wreckage cautiously, alert for any more traps, but I make it to the access shaft without incident, and shimmy up the ladder without any problems beyond the intrinsic problem that I am bad at ladders. At least until the gravity starts to shift.

The central sealed door has an old viewscreen on it that I didn’t notice on the way in. “Training program in progress.” It reads. “Non-command staff access restricted.”

Fortunately, I am command staff. And there’s nothing this door can do to stop that.

My return to the station proper is marked by a small tumble, as I misjudge the new gravity, and by a panicked Ennos yelling at me. Or at least, around me. “Where were you?!” The AI is asking. “It’s been hours! You just vanished! We couldn’t find you and I thought you’d died! We can’t… I wouldn’t… nothing…” The AI trails off.

“To be fair,” I say, “I might have died. But it didn’t stick.”

This, for some reason, does not reassure Ennos at all. “Glitter was worried sick about you!” They deflect. “What happened? Wait, what happened to your *fur*?”

“I got caught in a really rude training simulation.” I tell them, exhausted. For some reason, whatever naps I got to take while being shot don’t seem to have helped my energy levels. “Is there anything problematic going on? I want to get some food and sleep.”

“Nothing, now that you’re back.” Ennos says, worried. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t… know.” I tell them. Somehow, the more I learn, the less certain I am. It’s not even the pain of having been repeatedly shot over the last day. I’m suddenly even more confused about my place in the world, and now especially more concerned about whatever other surprises this station has. “I don’t know.” I say again. Then I change the subject. “Hey, can you connect me to Glitter? I should check in with her.”

“She’ll be happy to hear you’re alright.” Ennos tells me with a professional tone. “Also, your lunch is replicated, and the station will be in the sun in about twenty minutes, if you want to nap down in the exolab.”

“Thank you.” I say, the stress of the day and the sudden kindness threatening to overwhelm me. “I’ll… fill you in later, okay?”

“Take your time.” The AI says. “I’ve got things to work on, as long as you’re okay. Go enjoy your meal.”

The meal is a ration torus. I think Ennos is trying to get cute with modifications to the ration replicator. I eat my flavorless doughnut in silence, every time I lick my mouth a reminder that half my fur is gone and my body covered in scars.

And yet, it does, somehow, taste just a bit better this way.

The nap is pretty good too.