Memory Transcription Subject: Deputy Security Director Garruga, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 25, 2137

  My legs hurt. My head hurt. My soul hurt. I'd lost so much blood. I'd drunk blood. What percentage of me was an Arxur now? Was I even a real herbivore anymore? Could I ever go back to my homeworld again? Or was this far-flung colony all there was left for me? This… this fetid purgatory, far from paradise, far from perdition. Far from everything. Just the blank ceiling of the medical ward, the awkwardly threadbare bedding favored by bipeds, and the intrusive morphine-laced snoring of the enemy.

  That was the ultimate irony. I could see that filthy fucking creature in my periphery, snoozing away, but with all four of my legs mangled and bandaged in rigid plaster, I had nothing I could use to end him. Or his, and I cannot stress this enough, ‘perfect mimicry of an industrial drill’ SNORING. The creature had been called Kitzz. As a predator, it barely merited a name, but scripture taught that its self-awareness made it a valuable sacrifice. Perhaps its death would aid me along my path towards atonement, but without my legs, and without a weapon I could wield with my tongue alone, I was powerless.

  So instead, I did everything I could to pursue my mission: I stared at the featureless ceiling and fumed.

  The door to the medical ward opened, and someone who very much resembled a night shift doctor plodded in. But everyone in the Federation knew that particular ochre-furred shape as the face of salvation, and I knew, as the second in command of security for the whole planet, that Seaglass couldn’t afford a Zurulian for a doctor. We’d barely stocked enough bone foam and bio-absorbable lattices for six legs--four of mine, two of that Beast’s, with only drips and drabs left for any miners who might get crushed by falling rocks. The day shift medic was just another Nevok, like half the planet, and there was no night shift medic.

  “Who are you?” I asked the Zurulian, by way of accusation.

  Even through the translator chip, her voice was lilting and soft. Soothing. “I’m Doctor Tika. I’m the new Predator Disease specialist for this colony.” She glanced over at me, and her eyes, at least, seemed properly protective and motherly. “Oh dear. You're certainly in a state. I’m hardly a surgeon, but I can at least take a look over your vitals.”

  My vitals immediately spiked. I was… some percent contaminated predator blood. Obviously, the expert was going to find me out. My heart raced as the little woman pawed through my medical chart, and glanced at the instruments attached to my bed. “So far so good,” Tika said, skimming through the main doctor’s notes. “Surgery was a success, at least. Little early to say if it’s healing, but aside from an elevated heart rate, you’re doing alright. Throwing a clot can be a worry with injuries like yours, if I’m not mistaken.” She glanced up at me. “Can you blink one eye, then the other, for me?” I did so. “Good. Your motor control is still healthy. I’d ask you to raise your limbs as well, but given the nature of your injuries… best not.”

  I fidgeted in my bed, feeling uncomfortable. Nerves, but I also just didn’t particularly care for lying on my back like this, hooves in the air and helpless. I couldn’t exactly crouch down on mangled legs, though. “Am I… Am I going to be alright, doctor?” I asked, my mouth suddenly dry again.

  Tika tilted her head quizzically. “I believe I’ve answered that: it’s too early to tell, but you look as well as you can be, given the circumstances.” She glanced back down at my vitals. My heart still raced, and I worried my face was flushed and darkening. “Is there something else on your mind?” she asked. For the first time since she entered the med bay, Tika seemed to acknowledge the predator in the room. “I’m sorry, is the Arxur bothering you?”

  “What? No!” I protested. “I mean, yes, obviously, but…”

  “But there’s something else,” Tika said, licking her paws idly. “Talk to me. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  I sighed, and gave in to the pressure of her weird motherly vibes. The road to recovery wouldn’t be fun, but a Zurulian Predator Disease specialist probably gave me the best possible odds of becoming a whole person again. “I drank Arxur blood,” I muttered miserably.

  Tika looked back up at me quizzically. “That’s weird. What’d you do that for?”

  I choked on nothing out of pure shock. “What do you mean, weird?! It’s vile! It’s the sort of thing only a vicious and diseased wretch would do!”

  “Alright, it’s vile, then, if you like,” said Tika softly. “Why’d you do it?”

  Why was she being so flippantly indulgent of me? “I don’t know… it made sense at the time!” I protested.

  “Sure, let’s suppose it did,” Tika said, noncommittally. “Walk me through what your thought process was, then.”

  I tried to retrace my steps, mentally. “The Arxur commander came to interrogate me. She offered me water, and then…” I shook my head, trying to unjumble the events. “She started asking me about spices.”

  “Spices?” Tika repeated.

  “Yes!” I said, leaning towards her. “It was crazy. I didn’t know what to say. Predators only think about food, but she kept saying she didn’t want to eat me. But she… she wanted advice on how to season the food she already had?” My ears pinned themselves back. “It was like she was acting civilized. What the fuck was she… I couldn’t figure out what her goal was. Nothing was making sense.”

  Tika flicked an ear in acknowledgment. “I see. And then what happened?”

  I coughed. It was so dry in this room. “You know how those, uh, those human predators kept trying to pretend they were just like us? This Arxur, she does the opposite. She said I was like her. She said the work we Yulpas do tracking down predators was hunting. She said we were predatory and cruel like the Arxur.”

  “I see,” said Tika. “And how did that make you feel?”

  “How the fuck do you think it made me feel?!” I shouted. “The enemy, the great evil, the fucking blight upon the stars themselves, says she’s a big fan of the work I do?! If my legs had worked, I would have trampled her!”

  “Oh my,” Tika said. “Why such a violent response?”

  I blinked, confused. “She… she was an Arxur,” I repeated. “They’re the enemy. They eat people!”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “You’d prefer if they stopped eating people?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes! Obviously!” I shouted. “But the only way they’ll stop is death!”

  “What makes you say that?”

  My train of thought had a five-car derailment. “You’re asking nonsense. It’s tautological. No, wait… ontological? Fuck, what do I know about philosophy! It’s part of the definition of a predator that they eat flesh, continuously, and have no capacity for civilized thought,” I growled. “That Arxur woman had to have been tricking me. Had to have been!”

  Tika tapped the holopad with my vitals on it, idly, thinking. “To what end, though? So far, it sounds like she was asking you about how to be civilized, and even inviting you to join her herd, so to speak. Do you think her offer was genuine?”

  Another crash inside my head. “No, she… she couldn’t have been. What the fuck? It was probably a ruse to get me somewhere else so she could eat me.”

  “It sounds an awful lot like she could have eaten you right then and there,” Tika pointed out.

  I wracked my brain. “Some long con, then, whatever! Saving me for later!”

  “That would still suggest a level of self-restraint and long-term planning that’s uncharacteristic of predators,” Tika observed.

  “Whatever! She’s not a person!” I shouted. “She’s an Arxur!”

  “Really? You’ve been using gendered pronouns for Commander Sifal since I walked in the room,” Tika said.

  My eyes went wide, and one of the instruments began beeping its distress alongside my own.

  “Deep breaths, Garruga.” Tika pawed at her muzzle, thinking. “Listen, we tend to react with hostility when deeply-held beliefs are challenged. It sounds like you encountered some evidence that might suggest that Arxur are people. Or that they’re, at the very least, trying to become proper civilized people. Wasn’t that our intention when the Federation first attempted to uplift them? Should we turn them away now, if they’re looking to rejoin our herd, or invite us to theirs?”

  My mouth dried up. “They… they can’t. They’ve never… in nearly three centuries, the Arxur have never once sought forgiveness, or civilization, or integration into the herd. Why now?!”

  Tika flicked her tail to signal ignorance. “Who knows? Humanity changed a great deal for the Federation. Broke us. To hear the Arxur tell it, humanity may have broken them, too.”

  That was a bitter pill to swallow. The vicious battle apes, risen from nuclear ashes twice over--their own, and then our antimatter--were so devious and infectious that even the Arxur had been bewitched by their wiles? “Like a second-wave pandemic,” I muttered. “The second wave is always less deadly, more insidious. It evolves to better avoid killing its host. So it can spread further.”

  “But for Predator Disease, in this case,” Tika amended. “Which version do you think you have, drinker of Arxur blood?”

  My blood pressure spiked again. “I don’t know,” I lied.

  “You didn’t quite get to that part of the story,” said Tika. “When and why did you drink Arxur blood?”

  I dryly swallowed nothing. “She called me an omnivore,” I said. “One of those… crypto-predator vermin infesting our perfect society.” Tika politely coughed or chuckled, and I couldn’t quite tell which. “I denied it. My people are proud of their devotion to the Federation. Calling us hunters because we took the problem of predation seriously was a vile insult.” My ears sank back down, deflated, as I realized where the rest of my story had to go. “So… so she pointed out that an omnivore would die on the spot if they ingested blood. And then…” I choked up a little, remembering the trauma of it all. “She offered her own, freely. How could I refuse? She challenged my honor. She challenged the sacraments of the Spirit of Life itself. I had to stand up for my beliefs.”

  “So you drank Sifal's blood to prove a point,” finished Tika. “How did it taste?”

  I recoiled. “Metallic,” I muttered. “Viscous. Like warm, rusty pond scum. Not like food, if that's your concern.”

  Tika tilted her head. “Was that your concern?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe? I can't deny that some part of me was worried. Worried that I'd enjoy it, and then start choking. It was a horrible thing, imagining those being my last thoughts.” I exhaled with a shudder. “I didn't die, though. I'm an herbivore. I know that for a fact now. Or… I was an herbivore.”

  “You think that’s changed?” Tika asked.

  “I…” I trailed off. “I don’t know. Drinking blood is predatory. Drinking predator blood… wouldn’t that have exposed me to their disease?”

  Tika tapped the holopad again, thinking. “I was a researcher back on Colia,” she began. “Mostly lab work, you see. In all the centuries the Zurulians have spent investigating, do you know how many times the pathogen responsible for Predator Disease has been successfully isolated from a blood sample?”

  I didn’t. “Three? Couple hundred? Millions?”

  “Zero,” said Tika. “Zero times. Hundreds of years of searching by some of the finest medical minds the Federation has to offer, and the physical pathogen has never been identified. Not a single virus, not a single bacterium, nothing.”

  My breath caught. “So what does that mean for me?”

  Tika’s tail flicked again, signaling ignorance. “Well, in my professional opinion, it means that you’re likely uncontaminated by your attempts to ingest a blood sample. Whatever it is that causes Predator Disease, it’s never been found in blood.”

  This was more puzzling than reassuring. “Wait, if literal predator blood doesn’t spread predator disease, then what does?”

  Tika licked her paws. “I can only speculate. Frankly, given the speed at which humanity’s ideas have spread through and corrupted the Federation, one might even infer that there’s a memetic component to Predator Disease. Imagine that: a literally contagious idea.”

  I tried to wrap my head around such a bizarre notion. “That almost sounds spiritual. Like… like the act of feasting on flesh is more malignant than anything in the flesh itself.”

  Tika dipped her head modestly. “It’s only my speculation as a doctor.”

  “Useless shitstain of a doctor…” came a low, slurred growl from the other bed.

  Both our heads whipped around to the Arxur in the room. He was awake?! Only barely, though, and the medical restraints were strong enough to hold a Mazic in place. “Fuck you,” I spat. “Tika’s an exceptional doctor.”

  “Garbage doctor,” Kitzz muttered, rousing ever so slightly. His horrible eyes weren’t even open. “Fucking… memetic disease? Are you stupid? Superstitious quackery.”

  “Oh?” said Tika calmly. “Do you have a better suggestion for why nothing from either of the two major bloodborne pathogen categories have been detected in Predator Disease patients?”

  “Three,” Kitzz growled quietly.

  Tika raised an eyebrow, skeptically. “Bacterial, viral, and…?”

  “Prion,” Kitzz mumbled. “Malformed proteins. Don’t show up on standard pathogen tests. Too fucking small.”

  Tika blinked. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “Because you’re stupid, and you don’t eat meat,” he growled. “It’s spread by ingesting infected flesh from a creature with a similar neurology to yours. Cannibalism, especially. S’why we only eat other species.” Kitzz groaned, and tried to scratch at a wound on his chest, but his arm was bandaged up and tied down. “Causes erratic behavior, degenerative neurological damage. No cure. Have to test for it, then incinerate the contaminated meat before anyone tries to eat it.”

  Tika and I looked at each other with the same expression of dread. Avoid predators, incinerate them to purge the taint before it spread. That all sounded astonishingly like how the Exterminators operated. Did… did the Arxur of all people know about this the whole time?

  “Why are you telling us this?” I asked aloud.

  “Juss ta prove ya wrong,” Kitzz snickered and slurred, as the automatic morphine drip blinked. “I’m the best at doctorin’!” he mumbled, and rolled back over in a haze, leaving the two of us herbivores to fret about what to do with this new dangerous information.