Memory Transcription Subject: Benwen, Nevok Intern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 26, 2137

  Arxur could have empathy? That went against everything I'd ever been taught. Years in the PD facility, that was practically the only constant in the lessons drilled into me by the doctors: Arxur never felt the tiniest ounce of kindness or caring towards anyone else, not even each other, and especially not towards prey creatures like me…

  I glanced back towards Zillis. She was head and shoulders taller than me, with muscles and teeth that could tear me apart with hardly any effort at all… but her posture was all awkward nerves, hunched over anxiously like she was trying to make herself look smaller. She'd also, moments prior, reacted to being shot at, not by returning fire or lunging at the attacker, but by pulling me out of the line of fire without hesitation. Her first thought had been for my safety. Even the Arxur Commander, Sifal, had walked into a cafe this morning and chased after precisely nobody, not a single fleeing person. She'd just ordered a tea and left, but only after giving me a few encouraging words out of the kindness of her heart.

  …I was starting to suspect that maybe the doctors had been full of shit.

  “Tika,” muttered Tippen, his face still buried into the top of his desk. “Please put Doctor Wylla on.” He spoke in the same testy yet firm monotone the doctors had used, as a first warning, on children who refused to stop playing pretend.

  Tika bristled. “What kind of reaction is that? This is the scientific discovery of the century on our hands!”

  “And it would be, hypothetically, if a real doctor could verify it,” Tippen said, a slight growl slipping into his otherwise level voice. “Please put Doctor Wylla on so we can do that.”

  “I beg your pardon!” Tika said, furious. She never shouted, but when roused to anger, she could really project. “I am a real doctor! I am the resident PD Specialist of this colony.”

  “You are a resident PD Patient of this colony!” Tippen snapped, before reeling his tone back in. He continued more icily, his voice dripping with scorn. “You were freed by one of the demands of the Arxur. ‘Empty all our PD Patients out onto the street’. It's cruel lunacy, same as asking for our firstborn children, or a few of our limbs to snack on. You think an Arxur’s order puts you back in good standing in society?” He scoffed. “What a joke.”

  Before I even realized what I was doing, I had a hand on Tippen’s shoulder, and the decades of therapy were the only thing keeping me from wringing his neck in a blind fury. The man had just insulted every person on the planet… no, not even on the planet. I had no one left off-world anymore. He’d just insulted every single person I cared about whatsoever, and me.

  “Tippen,” I said in soft warning. “I’m going to make you some tea. You have more sobering up to do.” I glanced at Miss Tika, over the call. To her, I tried to smile, however bleakly. “And it’s not a bad idea to let him do his little peer review. Makes your case more ironclad, doesn’t it?”

  Tika sighed, letting all the anger out of her lungs, and nodded. “A fair point. I’ll put her on.”

  I went to go make that cup of tea, but it had less to do with Tippen needing it, and more because I needed to do something with my paws to get them to stop shaking. I tried to steady my breathing like I’d been taught. It was hard. I’d… I’d never been angrier in my life. My heart was pounding. I kept twitching. I…

  I felt the steadying touch of a scaled paw on my shoulder, and a concerned-looking maw peeking out over into my peripheral vision. Zillis’s paw was very warm, and it felt nice, feeling her tousle my fur. I exhaled, and my paws steadied a bit. “Thank you,” I said softly.

  Zillis nodded, and watched me make tea with some curiosity, but her guard instincts were on full display: she stood off to the side in such a way that Tippen stayed visible to her in the background.

  Meanwhile, back at his desk, that old jerk with the scars was talking to some pretty older Nevok lady. Decade older than me, maybe around Debbin’s age? “Okay, from the top, Doctor Wylla?”

  Doctor Wylla shrugged. “Look, I’m in primary medicine, not Predator Disease, but I’m familiar enough with the intake diagnostics. It’s a fairly standard empathy test to screen for dangerous types of Predator Disease. Hook the patient up to a brain scan device, show them a set of stock images and videos to establish a baseline for emotions and cognition--how do they respond to natural beauty, or being complimented, that sort of thing. Then you show them the footage of harm and cruelty being done to sapients, and gauge their emotional response.”

  “And the subject’s response was?” asked Tippen.

  Wylla shook her head helplessly. “Within the acceptable range for normality.

  “Please tell me you understand, without being told, why I need you to be more specific than that,” Tippen groaned. “Any peculiarities, anything at all, anything that might suggest a threat or…”

  Wylla sighed. “I don’t know. I legitimately don’t know. Muted fear response by prey standards, but still perfectly capable of recognizing pain in others, and viscerally disturbed or disgusted by it. If you told me these results were from a Nevok, I’d assume it was a veteran getting discharged. Somebody who’d seen too much to ever be completely normal, but still perfectly safe to be reintegrated back into society.”

  “Yeah. Been there, doc,” Tippen said icily. He caught himself scratching at his old chest scars, which gave him pause. He stared at his paw like he was confused why it was doing that on its own. “And the test itself, no deviations from protocol? The Zurulian didn't put her paw on the scales?”

  Doctor Wylla propped Garruga’s holopad up on the counter for a moment while she quickly flipped through the report on her own. “One oddity, but it’s within standard testing protocols. Doctor Tika used the version of the test for uplifts for some reason?”

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  Tippen blinked. “What? Why? Wait, back up, why do we even have a variant test for uplifts?”

  “Because anybody extremely new to the galactic stage hasn’t spent enough time socializing with other species yet to necessarily empathize with them, or even to recognize who is or isn’t a person.” Wylla rubbed her eyes. “Like… look, here's a little story that made waves in medical journals. Twenty years ago, you’d show a Yotul an image of a Harchen, specifically, being harmed, and around half the time, they’d give no reaction at all. Do Yotuls lack empathy?”

  Tippen flinched back in surprise. “I should hope not!”

  Wylla nodded. “No, of course not. It turns out, Harchens look a lot like a giant version of a common Leirnian grain pest. It was just a primitive cultural bias against certain types of lizards that we hadn't stamped out of them yet. Even healthy-minded herbivores have a bit less empathy for harbingers of disease and famine! So, standard protocol is to administer the uplift version of the empathy test, which emphasizes checking for emotional distress at the sight of harm to other members of your own species. You get way fewer false positives for Predator Disease that way.”

  Tippen made an annoyed noise in his throat. “Arxur have been around for centuries, though. They’re not recent uplifts. They know who we are.”

  Tika’s face popped back into frame, direly out of focus because she was far too close to the camera. Probably walking around on the countertop. “They haven’t exactly been socializing with us, though, until yesterday. It’s barely been twenty-four hours! It’s perfectly reasonable to model them as a new species along those lines. A hypothetical ‘empathetic Arxur’ would, quite predictably, be most likely to see others of their own species as people.”

  Tippen’s face scrunched up in confusion. “So… wait, which species did this Arxur react positively towards?”

  “Not positive,” Tika clarified. “Double negative, really. Which species was he bothered by the most when seeing them come to harm.”

  Tippen snorted derisively. “I consider harm aversion to be extremely positive from a security standpoint. Which species?”

  Wylla flipped through the report. “His own, as well as humans, most prominently. Kind of fits the official narrative of predators respecting each other.”

  “That's technically enough for a passing grade already!” Tika said with pride.

  “Noted,” said Tippen, testily. “But you were just getting to the species with civilized diets?”

  Wylla shrugged. “The rest, I can’t see any pattern. Kolshians and Farsul elicited the weakest reactions, as did Krakotl. It's like he just didn't care if they lived or died. Gojids and Venlil elicited fairly muted responses as well. Nevoks and Fissans, he’s more positive towards, and he seemed oddly empathetic towards Yulpas, of all people. I mean, what’s the common thread, there? Hooves?”

  “It’s geopolitics, fuckwit!” came a low growl from the background.

  “Who is that?” said Tippen, sitting more upright in his chair. “Who’s talking?”

  Wylla groaned. “That would be Kitzz, the Arxur medical liaison. He is…” The Nevok clinician licked her lips idly as she searched for the words. “Not currently being considered for empathy testing.”

  The camera seemed to tilt on its own--in Tika’s paws, presumably--towards a heavily-scarred Arxur propped up on a bed in the background. “Yeah. Hi. You’re all fuckin’ idiots compared to me, so let me spell this out for you, slowly: the Kolshians and the Farsul fucked us Arxur over. The Krakotl fucked over Earth. And the rest… Yeah, Kloviss, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you’re from Chief Hunter Isif’s sector?”

  The other Arxur, partly out of frame, shrugged his giant shoulders. “Yeah? Were you not?”

  Kitzz snorted. “Chief Hunter Shaza, may she rest in pieces.” He paused like he’d made a joke, but Kloviss didn’t seem to care much, and none of the non-Arxur seemed to know what he was talking about. Kitzz sighed. “It’s funny because she was torn to shreds by--you know what, nevermind. My humor is wasted on you simpletons. The point is, aside from those first three, the rest of the entries on Kloviss's shitlist are all species from the general vicinity of Earth. The sector where he was posted?”

  There was a long pause for dramatic effect, or to see if anyone else could guess where he was going with this. I sighed. Half the people in this conversation seemed awful. Still, riding high on my recent wave of self-confidence, I tried to fill the silence with an answer. I was, after all, getting a lot of practice at seeing things from an Arxur’s point of view. “He cares the least about the people who hurt the Arxur, the people who hurt Humanity, and the people most likely to have personally shot at him in the past.”

  Kitzz gave a theatrical sigh. “Thank you! If I’m gonna be stuck working with you pathetic wretches for the foreseeable future, I’m glad to hear at least one of you is borderline sapient.” His arms were still tied to the bed, so he nodded to one side to beckon me over. “Lemme see ya.”

  I sighed. Normally any praise at all would have gone straight to my head, but all this talk today about discrimination and personhood--to say nothing of a drunken oaf waving a gun at my friend--was really starting to get under my skin. I brought Tippen’s tea over to the desk, and tugged Zillis’s paw insistently to get her to follow me. She had to duck down until she was practically resting her maw on the top of my head to get us both in frame. “I’m Benwen, Personal Assistant to the Chairman,” I said. I grinned. I wasn't really feeling it, but when things got bad like this, you had to put on a happy face. Or laugh. “And this is my friend Zillis.”

  Kitzz nearly choked, he was cackling so hard. “See? See? What did I fuckin’ tell you!? Only the crazy ones are worth the blood they’re born in.” He nodded towards Doctor Wylla. “This useless pile of fluff tried to tape a syringe to a fuckin’ broom handle because she’s too scared to come within a meter of me! How ‘bout you, Scars? Wanna come down here and see if you’ve got the stones?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Tippen growled.

  “How ‘bout you come down here and give me a hand with that?” Kitzz taunted. He nodded at the deep gashes some other Arxur had clawed into Tippen’s chest. “Don’t worry, I promise I’ll be gentler than the last guy.”

  Tippen ended the call abruptly, fuming. He reached for his tea, and nearly spilled it. His paws were shaking now. Much as I didn’t particularly like the guy, it was hard not to empathize. Nobody in the Federation liked the Arxur, and plenty of us had lost loved ones to them, but it was a rare person who’d been hurt personally by them and lived to tell the tale.

  “Hey,” I said softly. “Did you, um… did you wanna show us how to do the media blackout thingy?”

  Tippen shook his head. “Already did it,” he muttered, his nose and mouth buried in the teacup. “It’s like one button. It’s what comes afterwards that sucks.”

  Zillis and I glanced at each other in confusion. I tilted my head as I turned back to Tippen. “What comes afterwards?”

  Tippen sighed heavily, and took a deep breath back in, savoring the tea’s aromas. “On the one side, a shitload of bureaucratic work. All outgoing comms gotta go through security censors before they’re sent out. Normally I do the desk work, but with Garruga out of commission, that’s on her plate now. Me, I gotta do the really hard part, the part I usually delegate to her. She enjoys it more than I do.”

  “What hard part?” I asked.

  Tippen took another sip of his tea with a miserable twist to his mouth. “Cracking down on the inevitable riots and stampedes.”