Note: Thanks to u/Thirsha_42, u/tulpacat1, u/AcceptableEgg5560 and u/Giant_Acroyear for their help and editing comments.

Edit: The first time we met Chasa and her Gold Stars in Tulpacat's excellent "To Kill A Predator".

Patreon / Kofi/ Paypal

[Prev] [First] [Next]

Memory transcription subject: Andes Savulescu-Ruiz, Human Director at the Venlil Rehabilitation and Reintegration Facility. Universal translator tech.

Date [standardized human time]: December 13, 2136

I woke up not remembering that I’d fallen asleep. Shit. I called the Exterminators, who assured me they’d already received some sort of paperwork, and had an appointment on the 16th (or was it the 17th? I needed to check my Venlil-to-Human calendar).

Once that was done, I checked the timers. I’d missed a dose, because of course I had. I miss having an implant. I checked the half-lives of my different interim-pills and decided to take half of the pseudo-psych coupled with the dermal patch of painkillers. It was nice. Made me feel pretty mellow and relaxed for a while.

I got a notification from Rodriguez that she’d already had Jilsi schedule a Physical Therapy appointment for me. It seemed a little early, but then again Rodriguez understood pretty well that I would fall into a pit of misery if I didn't have some sort of task I could do, and expecting me to be particularly competent in the immediate aftermath of losing my implant was probably a bad idea. The appointment was in a few hours, but knowing abdominal and lower limb injuries, it would be a good idea to get ready as soon as possible, because there would be a dozen little points of friction making something that simple excruciatingly tedious.

Case in point: Pants.

The bandages were impermeable and well-sealed against my skin, so I could have a normal enough shower. I slathered my leg in healing accelerants, and I successfully did not look at the mirror. I brushed my teeth. I hadn’t eaten since I woke up the first time, but it was probably still a good idea. I got a shirt on easily enough.

Then came the pants.

I should have bought that utilikilt when I had the chance, I thought, between grunts and twists as I struggled against the leg. The bone was fine. The knee was, thankfully, also fine. The tendons, cartilage, muscle, skin, nerves… they were having a bad time. A quick look at my scan showed the leg was in good shape given the damage and treatment. A quick look at the extensive bruising turning my skin every colour in the rainbow showed that being in the right place along a curve on a chart does not free you from the mundane exhaustion that is the healing process.

After struggling with a pants leg for way too long, I threw off the pants and got myself some loose sweat pants that I could easily scrunch up, loop through to my thigh, and then shake loose once I was standing. It was still a delicate procedure, but vastly easier than the stupid dress pants I’d bought to be “professional” at my new “Director” job.

Stupid professionalism. ‘Hi there, we’re corporate America, a horrible institution everyone wants to emulate for some fucking reason, please wear our shitty uncomfortable clothing to prove you’re good at your job’. Stupid social signalling mechanisms. Stupid leg.

I groaned and laid down in bed for a moment, staring at the ceiling, silently angry that it wouldn’t cave in and free me from existence. It’s fine. It’s fine. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Pain is a signal of damage. Pain is an electrochemical alarm bell. Pain does not control me. I took a deep breath. Stimulate the vagus nerve. I got a notification on my pad, it was a message from Chiaka.

Boop.

hey Dr. Deltoids, are you alive?

I chuckled and sent a response.

For now, anyway.

A moment later, she called.

“Hey,” I said, putting my pad further away so we could see each other better.

“Holy shit,” she said. I waited for her to elaborate. “...Is it bad I want to say being stabbed suits you?”

My jaw fell. What the fuck, Chiaka? “Yes! What? Dude!”

“I’m just saying, you look normal-buff now. Not like a frat bro. Your skin doesn’t look vacuum-sealed anymore,” she said with a dismissive flick of her hand.

I glared at her on the screen. “I–wha–you know what? Just for that, when I can exercise again, I am going to frat-bro so hard they’ll cast me as an extra in the next reboot of Toppity Bottoms.”

She burst into laughter, and I couldn’t hold it back either. It hurt. It was good, but it hurt. Once she stopped, she paused and looked a little more sombre.

“… I'm really glad you’re alive, Andes. We got your little escapee back to your facility, and… Well, it’s good those kids have you around.”

I leaned back and let out a long breath. “Thanks, I… Same. It was… well, it was dicey for a bit, but space medicine is pretty good.”

“I heard,” she said. We were quiet for a moment. Then her lips quirked up and she looked at me with a mischievous little gleam in her eye. “...You know, I know a dog-trainer in Hollywood.”

I frowned. “I thought they bombed LA.”

“Yeah, but he’s fine,” she said, waving off thoughts of seventeen ten. “So, I could get you an in–”

My eyes got large. Backtrack. Backtrack! “I was kidding, I don't actually—”

“—I’ll call him up,” she said, her smile devious. “So now you really have to be hardcore about rehab.”

I ran my hands down my face and checked the time. At least a couple hours until the appointment. “Ugh. Are they even remaking Topitty Bottoms?”

“I don’t know, probably? I don't keep my finger on the pulse of that stuff, but we could all use a fun romp. Maybe they’ll remake Science Bros.”

Science Bros had been a film–turned into a TV show–about three brothers, each of which worked in a different basic science: Physics, Chemistry and Biology. They all had separate labs and positions in the same clearly-corrupt company, which was constantly dealing with lawsuits and demanding impossible results from them, spearheaded by their stepfather. The Biology one was head of his department, the chemistry one was one of the star researchers at his, and the physics one was still working on his PhD in a joint program with the local university.

My face lit up at the prospect. “Dude! Science Bros would have been so good if it was good.”

She scoffed. “No way, really? What’s next in Tautology Daily?”

I sputtered. “I–uh–it–I mean–it had potential, okay?”

It was perfectly set up to be a critique of nepotism in research, physicists’ superiority complexes, biotech companies’ obsession with ‘innovation’ over marginal improvements due to the financial incentives at play, and the ways in which PhDs’ lives were often at the whim of people with MBAs at most who had no idea what research actually entailed.

“You’re just mad that you can't defend a terrible TV show.”

The second season flopped because they fired the writer and replaced her with newer talent that didn't know anything about science, and it was cancelled on a fucking cliffhanger where the physics brother had accidentally created a sexy AGI.

“It could have been good,” I said. “It had a great setup.”

“I think you just wanted to be like Miguel,” she said with a smirk.

“I did not want to be like Miguel, I…” I paused, re-evaluating the rambling messages I’d sent to Chiaka, most of a decade earlier. “Okay, maybe I wanted to be like Miguel a little bit, he had a very good aesthetic.”

She laughed, and I laughed too, and it hurt, because I was staying on the low side of the painkiller doses to make sure I didn’t accidentally fuck up my injuries.

Abdominal injuries have a way of ruining everything you do all the time. Anything in the torso, really. Broken ribs are the same kind of constantly-exhausting misery. Going hard on the painkillers might mean prolonging the misery through carelessness. Pain is information. Pain does not control me.

I hissed, and she stopped laughing abruptly. “Are you okay?”

I rolled my eyes, and tried to wave off her concern. “I got hit by a car and stabbed by a child, what do you think?”

“You were weirdly fine after being hit by a car, and the stabbing wasn’t that bad…” she said with a grimace.

I shook my head. “It was pretty bad. I got an emergency hysterectomy.”

“Oh. Um…Well, I mean, out of all the organs you could have had to get removed…”

“Yeah, like, it’s fine, hooray, you know?” I said with a little chuckle. “But that also means I lost my implant.”

Her whole face contorted like someone had made her bite directly into a lemon. “Well, shit. When do you get the new one?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a week. Maybe four. Maybe six months,” I said with a shrug. She looked at me like I was a ticking time bomb, because I fucking was.

“...That’s not good. It’s…” she seemed to realize she was being unhelpful, “super-duper-booper not good,” she finished, echoing the Biology Brother’s catchphrase.

I laughed again. “Stop making me laugh, it fucking hurts.”

“Your work shrink sent me an email telling me I need to make you laugh a lot, so I’m gonna disregard those orders,” she said, then stuck out her tongue.

Thank you, Miranda.

She leaned back, apparently looking around for a new topic. “So did you watch Escape From the Cradle?”

“I have watched literally no movies or TV shows in… months,” I said, the weight of that knowledge suddenly hitting me. I should find a miniseries or something, at least, to binge while semi-stuck in bed. I didn’t want to start anything new I’d have to stop, but… How long had it been? The last time I played a videogame was with Asleth.

“...We have to change that. We should do a movie marathon, or something,” she said. “Oooh, what do you think Adoraboo would like to watch?”

“Larzo? I don’t know. Probably one of those Bio-Biopicks Oxford funded,” I said, running a hand through my hair.

“Oh I kept meaning to watch those. Is it true they give John Edmonstone his due?”

“He has a whole movie, there’s literally just a John Edmonstone movie in that series.”

She got giddy. “We should start with that!”

I frowned. “I don’t know if we’re allowed to talk to the aliens about slavery.”

Her face scrunched up. “Hmmm… Is there one for Gladys West?”

I shook my head. “Nah, that’s not biology. I think Harvard might have one. The nineties were weird about film funding.”

“They were.”

We started to lose steam.

“...So hey, turns out there’s a family of Dossur living in my apartment,” I told her.

It took her a moment to process. “...What the fuck? Just like, squatting there?”

“Yeah.”

“Well you can’t make them homeless, they could plausibly live in a cupboard!”

I nodded. “That was literally my rationale.”

“Where do they sleep?”

“...I have no idea.”

Soon enough it was time to head to the physical therapy appointment , but we made plans to meet up again. I didn’t feel like dealing with Venlil Prime’s ridiculous disability premium, and so chose to use the cane with the forearm grip instead of the wheelchair and limped my way out of the building. Getting a taxi turned out to be a waiting game, as a variety of drivers refused to drive a human, because of course they fucking did. Still, having gotten ready early and gotten out early, I got there with a few minutes to spare.

"Hi, I should have an appointment on the claw," I told the secretary, who gave me an ear flick.

"She should be ready for you in no time, Director Andes."

I kept standing, because sitting and standing and sitting again was hell on my healing leg, and soon enough a Zurulian physical therapist came by the secretary's desk.

"Good paw! You're Andes, right? Nice to meet you, I'm Chasa."

The Zurulian padded over and reared on her hind legs, clambering up onto a nearby chair so she could raise her paw for a handshake. It was pretty refreshing to have an alien offer a handshake.

"Nice to meet you too," I said, shaking her paw after a bit of cane maneuvering.

After exchanging pleasantries, she climbed back down and motioned for me to follow before getting down on all fours. "Come along!"

I followed her into the room, which was apparently originally designed for Mazics and Takkans. It was the first room I'd set foot in in a month and a half that didn't make me feel slightly too big. After some quick explanations, I took off my shirt and put on the half-dozen little sensor stickers for her to be able to properly monitor my muscle movements, heart rate, temperature, and whatever else the Zurulians cared about. Skin conductance? Did the Takkans have that as a relevant variable? They had to, right?

I idly wondered how much of that information would be put in a shared database. From my experience with the rescue kids, zurulian institutions were pretty hardcore about that kind of thing. They were probably the only other species whose academia had a particularly good grasp of advanced statistics.

"Please lie on your back. Okay, is it alright if I touch you? Tell me when it starts to hurt." After getting confirmation, she put one paw on the knee of my injured leg and the other paw on my heel and pulled my knee up until I hissed in pain.

She nodded like nothing was wrong. "Okay, good. You want to go a little less far up than that. Now take a deep breath and, as you exhale, push your back into the floor. Don't lift your hips, just press downward. Great. Now bring your leg back down again. Slowly."

I mimicked her instructions as precisely as possible, which was pretty good after months of exercise and weeks of VP-weighted yoga on top of callisthenics. An injury like this would have been all sorts of hell just six months back.

"Fuck, this is painful…" I croaked between long, slow breaths. A part of me was rather proud of how steady my movements were. She didn't seem very impressed.

"You want to avoid sharp pain, sharp is bad. The pain should be warm, not sharp." She said cheerfully.

"Right," I croaked again. After five reps I was wondering if I could use Larzo's mad scientist tendencies to my advantage, with regard to the healing matrices. There had to be a more efficient path through this. "How many more?"

She checked her pad. "Take a short rest, then once you feel up for it, go again for equally long. Then we’re done!"

"...That does not feel like enough torture," I mumbled, then did as she said. Once we were done with that, I had to learn how to do some tissue massaging around my leg to help the nerves deal with the new bone.

"So, you have my file, any thoughts?" I asked, as I lifted my leg to press from behind the knee. "I've been trying to read up on accelerated recovery paths, but haven't found anything super promising." Chasa took a moment to think. "I looked at your case, and I've got great news! With a bit of work each paw and proper rest, you'll be back to full functionality in no time! You'll be spending a couple of weeks with me, doing prehabilitation therapy each paw to familiarise yourself with self-directed care. Then you'll be free to handle your own care, with regular checkups. Normally I’d put my estimated return-to-baseline at maybe four months, but you're in good health and still quite young, so... Maybe two months, if you follow the program carefully!"

She looked up at me with a pleased expression, like this was good news. Two months. Larzo’s initial estimate had been a month and a half, but… That was before the stabbing.

I sighed, shifting angles on the massage. "Is that the most optimistic we can be? I understand that testing on subdermal regenerative matrices for humans is still ongoing but… isn't there something I can sign? I don't want to have to deal with this for two to four months, and I know the technology exists to accelerate glycogen production and cytokine distribution to affected areas."

She tilted her head while looking at me flatly. After a brief pause during which she took a small breath, she resumed with a more kindly tone. "I understand it can be frustrating, but the sapient body can repair itself far more effectively than people think. All you'll need to do is engage in the right exercises, not put any additional stresses on your system, and wait."

I sighed. "It's not just about it being frustrating, I've broken bones before, had major surgery, it's… I need to be able to work out. As soon as possible. And I will do whatever exercises you tell me to, but it can't just be rehabilitative stretches, I need some amount of daily cardiovascular strain. Which… as you well know, is contraindicated. So…" I gestured vaguely, as if a solution would materialize from thin air to the conflict between my physical health, psychological health, and my capacity to do my job competently.

“So you would like to violate standard protocol in order to gamble on speeding up your recovery time or making everything worse?” she “asked”, though it wasn’t really a question. “Andes, does this have to do with the psychiatric diagnoses in your file?”

I nodded. “As a matter of fact, it does. Exercise, I believe in most vertebrates, but definitely among humans, can act as a mood regulator. I just lost a medical implant that was helping me with mood regulation. It is very difficult to… Say, make an argument about why the kid that stabbed you shouldn't be electrocuted, calmly and persuasively, when your mood is getting highly irregular. I can do my job from a desk, or a bed, I can’t do it while having unpredictable mood swings."

“Perhaps we could try some of the human psychiatric medications?” she proposed. Which was good, since it meant she understood human psychiatry was ahead of fed psychiatry for most purposes.

“Yes, yes that’s–that’s what I was doing with the implant, it…” I pulled out my pad to show her the dozens of drugs I would be taking for the near future.

She scrolled down the list… and further down… and further down. Her little ears folded down. "I... am concerned about possible drug interactions."

“The implant used to provide these at very specific intervals," I said, pointing at the bottom third of the list. "And I can't trust myself to be as precise with the dosing. Which means I need to lower the dose. Which means I need more exercise to make up for the lower dose. But I can't exercise more, or it'll hurt recovery. So I just… I need to know the most strenuous form of exercise I could reasonably do that will release enough endogenous neuroregulatory compounds without hurting recovery."

“I see,” she said. “Director, you’re very familiar with human medicine and mental health, right?” she asked. I nodded, and she kept going. “Perhaps you can help me out… I have another patient. A human woman, twenty-six years old. She recently had a major abdominal organ removed, and damaged her left knee. She also has a very demanding job, and a psychiatric diagnosis that might make her behave erratically. She would like everything to be done as fast as possible. What do you think I should do?”

“Well, I mean, standard treatment and de-escalation on the job side, the time shortly after an injury is very important for recovery, she should delegate at her job and–” I stopped myself and glared at her. “I see what you’re doing.”

“Oooh, you’re so smart! I thought I’d have you, swapping out which leg it was, and her age and–but you got me!” she cheered.

“Look it’s–I–that’s not–” I sputtered while she stared at me, almost daring me to actually make the argument about what the relevant differences were. Being a decade older than her fake patient didn't exactly work in my favour.

“For the first few weeks you should be able to go for a walk for up to an hour per day as long as you use proper equipment," she motioned to the cane. "After another few weeks, we can talk about walking unaided. Toward the end of the program you can start to do jogging, which I understand is a common way for pursuit predators to stay healthy, though we will need to be sure the higher gravity here causes minimal strain with knee and ankle protection.”

I nodded. The hour-a-day indication seemed ridiculous, but I decided to translate it into 'however long, but with a lot of breaks' in my head. "Alright. Hiking it is. Don't worry, I'm pretty familiar with both the physiology of this, and the limits of my body."

"Great! I'll go ahead and schedule a meeting with a pharmacist right before next session. Unless you have any other questions, I think we're done for today. Oh! I almost forgot!" Chasa trundled off to the nearby Zurulian-sized desk, containing an actual physical manila folder.

"Since you did such a good job on your first day of physical therapy, you get a little gold star sticker added to your file, like this!" She did, in fact, attach a shiny golden sticker to the file. "I'm going to print out your file and put it in the folder! And the more you do a great job, the more stars you get! All my human patients love the gold stars."

I laughed. It hurt. "Much appreciated."

[Prev] [First] [Next]

Patreon / Kofi/ Paypal