Skeletal integrity 80%

Internal organs 63%

Cyberbrain activity Muted

Magnetic Resonance field detected

Searching for Federation IFF signals

IFF NOT FOUND

Initializing wake sequence.

Horizon’s eyes shot open, she found herself surrounded on all sides by white lights and translucent curved walls. A dull droning irritated her ears, only adding to her growing feelings of claustrophobia. She reached a stiff hand out towards the nearest wall, provoking a sharp pain that caused her to cry out.

“She’s awake now?!” A high-pitched voice called out, she didn’t recognize it, but still it sounded somewhat familiar. The scuffling of feet approached her, making the raccoon all too aware of how badly she was still injured.

Despite the pain Horizon lifted a foot and found that the glowing cylinder that enclosed her was open below her knees. She started to slide out of the tube against the wishes of her aching muscles and burning bones. Whoever was out there, she was still a super soldier with the most advanced tech in the star system.

She slipped off a narrow table and slumped onto a cold tiled floor. As her eyes adjusted she blinked away tears and took in her apparent assailants. Red buttoned-up longcoats, polymer gloves and oronasal face masks, her shadow suggested a frontier biological containment team, but her own memories came up with an alternative evaluation.

“You’re Friendly Society Healers, aren’t you?” She gasped, clutching the side of the table she’d just fallen off of in an attempt to hold herself up.

The red-coated doctors nodded, one of them spoke up. “Mx. Loter, please, we’re trying to help you.”

Horizon cracked her neck to the side, she felt the burning she had come to associate with active leukosynths. “I’ll be fine, just let me rest a while longer.”

Somebody else ran up to the door. That almost familiar voice called out again. “Tanya, it’s okay!” She scanned the newcomer, phenotypically female, rodentia with stark white fur and tufted ears, hints of a long fluffy tail behind her. “It’s me,” she said, “Jenny, from school?”

Tanya’s eyes widened. “Jenyfer Ratufa? When did you change your fur?” The squirrel she remembered was maroon, brown, and yellow-furred, with several piercings in her ears.

Jenny came out from behind the FS Healers, now that she had a good look at her former classmate she could make out several patterns painted onto her fur, which was not only white but much thicker than she remembered. “Yeah, well, Surtur is a lot colder than Jord’s orbitals. We got spliced with arctic hares on the way here.” She was wearing a short black skirt and a t-shirt printed with anti-government slogans that only half-covered her rounded belly.

The raccoon grinned, Jenny might look superficially different, but clearly she was still the same rebel without a cause she’d known as a teenager. “So, what’ve you been up to all these years?” She asked, trying not to stare and failing.

“What’ve I been up to?” The arctic squirrel asked. “At the gs you were pulling we should have been draining soup out of that escape pod of yours! I mean, I’ve got some pretty extreme mods,” she slapped her stomach for emphasis. “But you’re something else.”

Horizon’s shadow took in visuals and sonographic data and calculated that whatever was making that bulge in Jenny’s waist, it wasn’t a normal fetus. A weight she hadn’t realized was gripping her heart was lifted in a millisecond. But before she asked, the cyborg raccoon tried to think of a way to deflect her suspicions. “I was a scrapper, we came across a cache of Fedtech that included some of their immortality nanobots.”

“I’ll say.” Jenny replied. “Among other things. I didn’t know they still plated skeletons.”

A twinge of paranoia arose in Horizon’s augmented brain. “What else do you know about my mods?”

One of the healers pulled out a tablet and scrolled along the screen. “We could tell just from lifting you onto a stretcher than your skeleton had been reinforced with some unidentified alloy. As we were trying to set what we thought were broken bones we encountered resistance from bent metal rods. Many of your soft tissues also felt spongy. Your post-recovery rate of healing was consistent with leukosynth activity and the blood samples we took contained metallic particles similar to deconstructed nanomachines.” He looked back up. “Though we’re wondering how your bones apparently fixed themselves.”

The posthuman raccoon considered it for a moment, there shouldn’t be too much harm letting them know about her skeleton. “Nickel-titanium, returns to a set shape after heat is applied.”

“Oh right, memory metal.” Another healer chimed in. “Would explain the fever. You have another implant in there for thermoregulation?”

Horizon gave half a nod. “It’s probably part of my BCI. I’d rather you not poke at it though, I don’t know what it would do.”

“Wait,” Jenny cut in. “You mean you put Fedtech in your brain? Don’t you know what could have happened?”

“Yes,” Tanya thought, thinking of Lift and MechRat, and everything they’d been through. “I do now, but I didn’t have much choice at the time. There were some drones in the cache we found, they activated and then…” She shrugged, she didn’t know how much more she wanted to say in front of these strangers. “Well there’s a reason I was the only one left on board that ship.”

“Oh, damn.” The white squirrel sidled up next to Tanya and carefully sat down, reaching out a comforting arm. “I’m sorry to hear that. I had no idea.”

The raccoon took the proffered arm and pulled herself up. “It’s not your fault. Like you said, you didn’t know.” She sat on the table she’d just fallen off of, feeling the cold metal against her fur.

“I know.” Jenny laid her arm over Tanya’s shoulder, hesitated for a second, then placed her hand carefully on her upper arm. “Would you like a gown or something?”

Tanya glanced down and it finally registered to her that she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. She’d been so preoccupied with the broken state of her body to register how exposed it was. Her bones had clearly straightened themselves out, but she could see many of them through her skin. Aside from her stomach, which protruded from under her ribs, she was practically skin and bones, she looked emaciated. “What… happened here?” She swept a hand down her front.

One of the healers approached, slowly, cautiously. “So far as we can tell your leukosynths cannibalized your muscle tissue to rebuild your vital organs. It’s not unheard of for the body to do that naturally but that usually takes weeks of starvation or coma, you’ve only been unconscious for four days.”

“Four days?” Horizon inquired. “What happened with Surt traffic control?”

“Not much.” Jenny replied. “They shot down a few of the big pieces of your ship that were getting too close, but they basically gave you up for dead. The Friendlies only grabbed your capsule because I asked them to.”

“Really?” Tanya was surprised. “You did that?”

“Yeah.” The squirrel nodded. “The Company here is pretty useless, we have to look out for each other.”

Horizon mentally reviewed what she knew about Surt’s government. Corporate structure, non-familial, tiered citizenship. At least half the population at any given time were estimated to be non-citizens from further in-system. She got the feeling there was something she was missing though. “Sounds like a long story.” She said. “Maybe we could talk about it someplace more comfortable, after I get some clothes?”

The healers nodded quickly and backed out of the doorway. One came back shortly after carrying a folded gown with floral prints, holding it out at arm’s length. Horizon accepted it and threw it on, letting her tail stick out the back. “There’s a cafeteria down the hall,” they said. “I suggest one of the high-protein shakes.” Then they left.

“Sheesh, rude.” Jenny commented. “It’s not like you’re a ghul or anything.”

Tanya staggered out into the hall, supported by her old friend. Five minutes later they made it into a room with two long tables in the middle and a row of vending machines along the wall. Jenny sat the raccoon down at one table and then grabbed a couple plastic cups from the drink dispenser, one she set under a nozzle that dispensed a thick brown fluid, the other she filled with a steaming liquid that smelled like tea with some sort of fruit. The squirrel set the two cups on the table in front of the raccoon, explaining that the thicker fluid was a protein shake, then she went over to another machine with a stylized wrap sandwich on the front panel and started entering something into the controls. As Jenny bent over Horizon’s eyes were unconsciously drawn up her tail, her mouth started to water… and then she consciously registered the smell of reheated meat and melted cheese.

Jenny walked over with a pair of wraps that were so wide they looked too large to hold in one hand. “Not sure if you can handle solid foods yet, I’ll eat the other one if you’re not up for it.”

Horizon slurped up a mouthful of the shake and cringed at the taste, chocolate with a strong metallic aftertaste. Quickly she grabbed a wrap and tore off a large chunk of it, she worked the morsel around in her mouth vigorously before swallowing. “I don’t care whether my stomach can digest it, I think I’ve suffered enough without tasting that.” She flicked the rim of the cup with her claw, then started digging into the rest of the wrap.

“Wow,” Jenny noted. “Guess you really were hungry. You remind me of myself just after I got my biocomputer seeded.”

“What?” Horizon asked, head cocked in confusion.

The squirrel leaned back and pointed down towards her abdomen. “This is not your run-of-the-mill pregnancy. There’s a cybernetic biocomputer in here, wired into my nervous system. Kind of a secondary brain.”

The raccoon’s mouth gaped open in surprise. Her sensory processing systems could tell that whatever was in her friend’s uterus wasn’t a fetus, but this was beyond thinkable. “Why would you do that?” She asked.

“It helps a lot with multi-tasking.” Jenny replied. “I’ve got a full BCI suite installed on both brains so I can do next to anything online if I want to. Though, it can take a while for me to make up my minds, it has to go through nearly double the average amount of gray matter. Honestly I’m a bit disappointed on that front.”

“Okay, but, why?” Horizon asked again. “Why would you go through the effort to do that?”

Jenny adopted a stern expression all of a sudden. “Okay,” she paused for several seconds, collecting her thoughts. “What do you know about transhumanism?”

“They’re a bunch of people who like to get as many augs as they can get their hands or mechanical digits on?” Horizon suggested. “I’ve never understood the name anyways, we’re not human.”

“We’re parahuman, nearly human.” Jenny interjected. “Even spacers share more than 98% of their DNA with ancient Terran plains apes, this fur, these ears, this tail.” She pointed out the organs in question as she spoke. “They account for little more than a few sentences worth of codons. Furthermore, we still think and act like humans. The “Federation” was just a Terran-style empire on a galactic scale, there were ancient polities on Terra that outlived it and they didn’t have leukosynths.”

“And transhumanists?” Horizon inquired.

“We seek to become not simply adjacent to humanity, but something much much more.” Jenny was starting to sound like some of the demagogues she remembered from Jord. “We seek to become smarter, faster, wiser than human so we can avoid making the same mistakes they did. We might even become posthuman someday.”

That last sentence elicited a snort from the raccoon. “Posthumans? What, like cyberliches, gestalts, and ghuls? They’re just myths.” But as the words left her lips Tanya felt her stomach tighten around the meal she’d just devoured, and the orb she’d hidden there. Jenny’s comment about the healers’ cautious approach to her, the stories she’d heard about parahumans risen from the dead with a cannibalistic appetite that drove them to terrorize their friends and families…

She directed her shadow to bring up any information her implants had on ghuls. In a split second she saw an article in her field of view.

Ghul: noun, slang. Term for a sufferer of Leukosynth Metastatic Autophagy (LMA).

Leukosynth Metastatic Autophagy: A condition resulting from a malfunction in leukosynths, usually as a result of software tampering and severe physical trauma. The patient’s leukosynths put their self-replication protocols into overdrive, replicating at an unsustainable rate and dismantling their host’s own tissues for raw materials. This often induces cravings for protein in the patient that may result in cannibalistic actions without proper memetic conditioning.

Leukosynth replication: INACTIVE.

The alert came up unprompted, but Horizon was glad of it. She let out a sigh of relief that interrupted Jenny’s ongoing spiel, she hadn’t been paying attention.

“...and after Lord Evlanche had been confirmed vaporized he, are you listening?” The squirrel paused, looking the raccoon over.

“Sorry,” Horizon started to explain. “My shadow just explained that no, I am not a ghul. It’s a real relief.”

“Oh don’t worry about the healers.” Jenny tried to reassure her. “They’re just a little wary of unknown Fedtech with miraculous properties.” She blinked as something else registered. “Wait, you’ve got an AI shadow? Is it Turing?”

“It’s kind of like an artificial subconscious.” Horizon replied. “Most of the time I don’t even notice it’s there. It just pops up information when I need it, and I suddenly have a lot of skills that I never had the time to learn the conventional way.” She snickered. “I am proficient in every martial art from Terran Kung Fu to Centauran filament fencing.”

“Oh wow!” Jenny leaned over the table, putting her snout less than a meter from Tanya’s muzzle. “That’s way more than anyone I know has accomplished. You might be the closest thing to posthuman I’ve ever seen. You’ve got to let me take a look at your augs!” She reached out for the raccoon’s face.

“No!” Horizon blurted out abruptly, reflexively grabbing the squirrel’s hand before it touched her furred cheeks. “I might not be a ghul, but they’re real. And they result from people messing with their leukosynths. Please don’t go poking around my brain.”

“Oh,” Jenny sounded quite disappointed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think of that. Could you at least tell me how your brain survived the deceleration from that blast? And, let go of my hand?”

Horizon realized she was gripping her old friend’s wrist a bit tightly, it was folded at an awkward angle that looked painful. “Sorry,” she released it and the squirrel pulled it back to inspect. The raccoon sent her shadow an inquiry about her brain, specifically how it was protected.

Cyberbrain composition: CLASSIFIED INSUFFICIENT CLEARANCE

“Sorry, can’t tell you about my brain.” Horizon apologized again. “It looks like my implants might not know how it’s built.”

“Wow, that’s weird.” Jenny cocked a tufted ear. “Where did you say you got these augs again?”

Horizon thought about it for a minute, then decided to tell a half-truth. “Some sort of automated medical center. An autodoc installed them, I was unconscious the whole time.”

“Huh.” Jenny considered the situation her school friend presented, then after a minute she got up. “I’ll get us some more wraps.” As the machine prepared her order she abruptly perked up and turned back to Horizon. “Any idea what you’ll do now?’

The raccoon shrugged. “None. I was planning to find a new crew and go back to the Belt, but my ship exploded so that plan’s scuttled.”

Jenny pulled three more wraps out of the machine and set them on the table. “Well, I might have taken you up on the offer, but there’s precious few others here who’ve managed to escape their employment contracts alive. And the Company doesn’t like private ship sales so I’m afraid it’s unlikely you can find a replacement ship.” She dug into one of her wraps.

Horizon chugged a mouthful of her shake and chased it with half a wrap. “So what do you do for a living?” She asked.

“Some consulting work.” Jenny replied sheepishly. “Mostly volunteer work with the Friendlies.” She smirked conspiratorially. “Some of it paid.”

Horizon thought as she chewed, it was starting to look like flying to Surt was a mistake, but it was too late for that now. Her possibilities weren’t great, it sounded like there was only one real choice. She swallowed. “Do the Friendlies need pilots by any chance?”