“Good, you’re here.” Doctor Laurie did seem pleased to see me, in their subtle way. It had been two weeks since they’d fitted my cast, and according to their message it was time for a check in.

  “Listen Doctor,” I began awkwardly. “I know injuries like these take a while to heal, and I don’t exactly have a lot of wiggle room in my budget right now.”

  They scoffed, and waved a robotic hand dismissively. “I am familiar with your financial situation. The cost to you will be miniscule, you have my word.”

  I begrudgingly surrendered myself to one of the exam tables, opening the finance application on my Comm. I was already twenty thousand in the red, and at pay rate of Nine hundred and ninety five credits per week, I had a credit limit of around fifty grand before I could be reassigned. I wasn’t left with much spare debt capacity, especially if I had to keep paying medical bills.

  My situation was made worse by the fact that I still had expenses to pay, which meant that the tiny dents I was making barely outpaced the interest.

  Laurie’s metallic fingers sparked as they clicked in my face. “You can worry about it later. Give me your arm.”

  I switched off the display and passed my arm over to the doctor. “Is this going to take long? I need to pick up some overtime today.”

  “Is that what’s been keeping you from assisting me as promised?” They asked flatly. Their right pointer finger split open along a hidden seam, revealing an attached scalpel. “Hold very still,” they warned. “This is as cheap as my services get.”

  I whimpered, and squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t feel any pain as the cast fell away, but then again, I was still taking those crazy effective painkillers every morning. I opened my eyes just in time to see Laurie gearing up to prod my broken wrist. I snatched the hand back to my chest, clutching it protectively. “Don’t just poke it, it’s broken!”

  I didn’t know it was possible for Laurie to look more unamused than usual, but they pulled it off. “You seem to be fine,” they observed.

  I slowly looked down at my two perfectly straight and painless arms. “Oh. What happened?”

  “Good question,” Laurie said thoughtfully. “I’ll further discount your appointment if you consent to a few more tests.”

  I gritted my teeth as I considered the offer. Whatever they had in mind couldn’t be pleasant, but I needed the money. “Yeah, alright. What do you want me to do?”

  “I’d like a blood sample,” Laurie began counting their demands on their fingers as they continued. “A skin sample, a urine sample, a few quick scans, and I’d like to make a small incision and observe the healing process.”

  “How much of a discount can I expect?” I asked.

  “I can comp this visit as part of my experiment,” Laurie replied with a smug grin.

  “Fine, I consent. Hey, ow!” I had barely finished speaking when Laurie slashed their scalpel finger across my palm. “At least give me some warning!”

  They ignored me, of course, and began mumbling into their communicator. They wrested my damaged palm away from my protective embrace, and stared wide-eyed at the wound.

  I rolled my eyes, and looked around the medical bay boredly. Cabinets and drawers were left open, their contents spilled out onto the floor. The counter was cluttered with equipment, aside for in a small clearing. It didn’t seem right for someone as focused as Laurie to be this messy. I decided it was better for my health not to comment on it.

  The experiment didn’t take much longer, and they finished up by wrapping my hand sparingly with gauze. While they were working, their tail was digging through a pile of tools on the floor. Soon, it retrieved an electric hair trimmer.

  “What’s that for?” I asked warily.

  “Blood draw,” Laurie replied simply, then without waiting for further consent they buzzed a strip of fur along my inner elbow. It was impressive to witness the dexterity of their extra appendage, even if what it was doing raised my blood pressure.

  I gritted my teeth, but remained silent as they wiped down the patch of bare flesh with disinfectant, then poked around for a vein. I didn’t see the needle until, with a pinch, it was inside my arm. Laurie’s hands were uncannily steady as they attached a vial to the end of a short rubber hose.

  “Why do you think my bones healed so quickly?” I asked again, trying to distract myself from the rather large vial slowly filling with blood. “Didn’t you say that it could take the better part of a quarter?”

  Laurie hummed thoughtfully as they inspected my blood. “My current hypothesis is that you have some augmentation that accelerates your healing.”

  I shook my head. “Nah, that can’t be right. I’m a regular bast, totally unmodified.”

  “You asked for my best guess, and I provided.” The doctor withdrew the needle quickly, then pressed a gauze square to my inner elbow. “Further testing should reveal the truth. Hold pressure here please.”

  A sudden stabbing pain flared in my deltoid, and I looked down in time to see their tail, holding a gun-shaped device, darting away. I tried to look on the bright side as I flexed the wounded muscle. “There’s three down, right?” I asked hopefully.

  “Correct,” they answered. They handed off the tissue sampling device to a waiting palm, then passed me a lidded plastic cup with their tail.

  “Is there a restroom?” I asked.

  “In the corner,” they replied, and gestured to a drawer with a picture of a toilet on it.

  I curiously opened it to find a pull-out toilet. “Is there a... curtain or something?” I asked awkwardly.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “I have no interest in your genitals,” Laurie said. I believed them.

  I sat down awkwardly on the stowable toilet, and held the plastic cup between my thighs. “How much do you need?” I awkwardly called across the room.

  “Honestly, none,” Laurie admitted. “The blood sample is enough for my purposes.”

  “Are you kidding–dang it!” I growled in frustration as urine splashed my hand.

  “No, you’re just a poor negotiator,” they shot back.

  I stood up and fixed my jumpsuit, then wiped my hand on a pant leg aggressively before storming over to where they were studying one of my samples on the only tidy patch of counter. I set the cup down gently, as much as I wanted to spill it to spite them. “Well, don’t let it go to waste, I guess. Am I done now? I should get back to work.”

  Laurie waved me away dismissively without looking up.

  I narrowed my eyes, my fists clenching with irritation. “You know what, no. If you’re gonna put me through extra tests for no reason, you’ve gotta give me something in return,” I demanded, folding my arms resolutely.

  Laurie barely looked up from the sample. “The words are ‘going to’ and ‘must’.”

  My tail swished angrily through the air. “I’m beginning to see why nobody likes you.”

  They sighed loudly. “Fine. I will tell you a story if, and only if, you help me clean this place up.”

  “A story? What am I, one?”

  “And now I’m beginning to see why noone likes you,” they retorted.

  “Plenty of people love me,” I insisted. “They just... aren’t here right now.”

  “All your adoring fans?” They asked dryly.

  That was a little too close to the truth for my liking. I shrugged the suggestion off. “What’s the story gonna be about, anyway?” I asked.

  “Your progenitors,” Laurie replied. “The first basts. You can start over in that corner, by the way.”

  I didn’t feel bad for being curt with them per se, though I did feel a bit silly. I absolutely wanted to hear that story. I obediently took a seat on the floor beside a pile of pill bottles, and began sorting them by size.

  “It was centuries ago, before the fall of Terra and the rise of the Board. We lack perfect records from that time, of course, but Xenolife made an attempt to preserve the documents regarding your genotype’s creation. I don’t have access to the archives as a result of our being disconnected from the internet, but I memorized most of the relevant data,” they began, a hint of pride entering their tone towards the end. “Of the few officially recognized alternate genotypes, the bast were the first.”

  I had begun to neatly stack the bottles in one of the cabinets when they paused long enough to imply that I should say something. “I didn’t know that we were first. I thought the titans were.”

  “Humanity’s first Titan colonization mission was decades after the bast came to be,” Laurie explained, happy to correct me. “However, your ancestors were kept a secret from the general public until after the first titans were unveiled.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s actually pretty interesting.”

  “Actually?” the apertures of their artificial eyes mimicked the raising of an eyebrow. “Did you expect this topic to be boring?”

  “You don’t strike me as a great storyteller,” I admitted.

  The doctor’s lips tightened briefly before they turned back to their sample. “It was a small team of scientists under the employ of a visionary patron that first sequenced the DNA that made you into the little shit you are today. Their official aim was not to hybridize human and feline genes, as many believe today, but to create a new subspecies of human using whatever DNA produced the most desirable results. In addition to human DNA, you possess traits taken from over thirty seven terran species, less than half of which are feline.”

  I ran a hand through the fur on my arm, wondering which animal it came from.

  “Mink,” they said, as if sensing my question. “Altered significantly, of course, but as synthetic DNA was more resource intensive to design and produce back then, an effort was made to use natural sources as a base.”

  “What’s a mink?” I asked.

  “A mustelid once prized for its soft, water-resistant fur.”

  “Neat...” I mumbled. I moved on to the next pile of equipment, and spotted the hair trimmer on top of the heap. “Hey, do you mind if I use this real quick?” I asked.

  “Just clean up after you’re done. Save whatever fur you remove.” They spoke a little louder over the soft whirring of the electric trimmer. “Unlike titans, and the majority of alternate genotypes, the first of your kind were grown from artificial embryos rather than by injecting foreign genetic material into an extant human embryo. One could argue that this makes you less human.”

  I rolled my eyes. “A lot of people argue that I’m less human for a lot of reasons,” I pointed out. “The fact of the matter is that the social definition of ‘human’ is deeply tied to our sense of unity as a species. Historically, attempts by one group to label another as less human have lead to-”

  “I only meant scientifically less human,” Laurie interrupted. “I have no interest in social issues.”

  I ran a hand over my scalp, collecting the last of the pink strands. “That much is clear,” I grumbled, strolling over to place them next to where they were working. “Here’s your hair.”

  “Thank you,” they said simply. “Regarding the question of your humanity, your progenitors were very much not considered human. They were kept in captivity for generations, and trained in much the same way that apes were, first with sign language, then moving on to verbal communication. The test subjects rapidly grew in intellectual capacity due to their curious nature, and by the third generation, they began to escape their enclosure.”

  “Good for them!” I cheered.

  “Don’t you have cleaning to be doing?”

  I sheepishly got down on my knees and began to sort through a second pile. “Alright, alright. Keep going, it’s getting good!”

  “The scientists proposed more stringent security measures to keep them contained, while their patron, growing increasingly impatient to interact with his expensive creations, proposed that they be given free reign of the facility. It didn’t take them long to access a computer, and use it to learn about the outside world. They made their escape through a combination of guile and charm, stealing only what wouldn’t be missed, and offering favors to guards and scientists strategically. There are even reports of test subjects using blackmail.”

  I winced inwardly at the mention of their methods. My parents had gotten ahead the same way. Well, minus the stealing and blackmail part. I hoped. “So there’s just a group of basts out and about at this point?” I asked.

  “Correct. Before they could be found and recaptured, the media caught wind of it. Camera drones descended upon their forest hideaway, and they were instantly famous. A cover story for their origin was created, one that minimized the legal culpability of their creators, and they became the second genotype to be officially recognized by the Terran Federation.”

  “You mean, the Frontier Federation?” I clarified.

  “No, they didn’t exist yet,” Laurie explained. “The Terran Federation ruled Earth and its colonies before its collapse lead to the destruction of the Earth.”

  “I don’t remember learning it that way,” I protested.

  “The events are fuzzy,” Laurie admitted. “With the prevalence of algorithm-based text generators around that time, true history is hard to separate from fiction.” They stretched widely, and turned away from their sample. “Alright, that’s enough for now.”

  I pouted. “It was just getting good though!”

  “You’re welcome back another day, if you’re willing to work. I actually enjoyed this interaction.”

  “Actually,” I rolled my eyes, though a smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. “Thanks for that. I hope you find what you’re looking for in my samples.”

  Laurie nodded curtly, and the door to the medical bay opened, as if responding to their thought. “See you next time.”