Memory Transcription Subject: Chairman Debbin, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 25, 2137

  This may come as no surprise, but as it turns out, it’s far easier to read someone when they're a member of your own species. Thus, I was at a bit of an advantage when sussing out what Benwen, the younger Nevok, was thinking. Not that it was a particularly difficult guess. He was huddled in the part of the room furthest from the door, furthest from Sifal and Laza, and was shaking uncontrollably without breaking eye contact with them. See, now that was probably the socially-acceptable level of terror that an upstanding member of the Federation ought to be experiencing around an Arxur. The Predator Disease patient had a better grasp of social conformity than I did.

  I glanced down at my holopad while Jodi and Tika helped clean the kid up. I say “kid” in a relative sense: Benwen was probably around twenty, ready to start his first internship. Amusingly, this wasn’t the first time I’d seen a younger Nevok throw up from nerves right before a job interview with me, either. Poor Maddilly over in Operations had a fear response that would make a Venlil look brave. She was worth her weight in gold around spreadsheets, but she was probably going to shit herself the first time she had a meeting with our new board members.

  I flipped through social media some more while I waited for Benwen to be officially declared barf-free. This Chiri woman caught my interest. I mean, dating a predator? I was very curious how she made it work. Even living on Earth alone… to hear Federation dogma, the whole planet should have been a festering swamp of predator disease. And even if that was a Kolshian lie, what kind of person was bold enough to test that theory?

  My paws froze as I found an image of her tending bar, mixing drinks together into some kind of fruity fizzy concoction. Trying to replicate a taste from her family’s winery… Garnet Orchards.

  I sighed, and shook my head. There was our lost little scion, and if she was willing and able to thrive on the savage predator homeworld, she'd probably been infected for a while now. That was the final stitch in the tapestry, wasn't it? Either predator disease was a myth based on bad pseudoscience… or it wasn't, and I'd been drinking Chiri's old family recipe for predator disease juice for years at this point. Not much point in trying to avoid it if I was already contaminated, was there? It was kind of freeing, in its own way, really. One less thing to worry about while hanging around Arxur. I could stay focused on more mundane matters like making money and not being devoured the moment one of these fine ladies got bored or annoyed with me.

  I rubbed my eyes. One step at a time. “Sifal, if you don’t mind, could you and your second wait in the hall for a few moments? I don’t think Benwen’s going to want to talk while there are Arxur in his line of sight.”

  Sifal stared at Benwen in confusion. She slowly, tentatively, held a vicious claw out towards the younger Nevok, who flinched from the other side of the room, far out of Sifal’s reach. She let her hand drop back down, and Benwen relaxed slightly. Sifal thought for a moment, then yawned softly, a harmless gesture that nevertheless showed off her teeth, and Benwen tensed right back up again. The Arxur sighed. “Yeah, you’re right, this is probably not going to work,” she said, as Benwen continued to flinch every time she opened her mouth to talk. Sifal gestured towards the door, and Laza led the way back outside. “I’ll be back in my office. Let me know when you’re done.”

  The door closed behind her, and Benwen let out a sigh of relief. He turned towards me, and gave me a bleak smile. “Are you alright, sir?” he asked.

  I chuckled. What a polite young herbivore, worrying about others in the herd before himself. “Better than I could have imagined, worse than I’d ever feared,” I said. “What about you, kid? How are you holding up?”

  He hugged his knees up to his chest as he huddled in the corner. “My mom just fought an Arxur with a sword and won,” he mumbled into his legs.

  I glanced over at Jodi with a raised eyebrow. She shrugged. “It’s hardly formalized, but I’ve been looking out for him, yes. Someone had to.”

  “No birth parents?” I asked. I hadn’t called mine in a while, but they were doing alright, last I’d heard. Enjoying their retirement. Lucky them.

  “Stopped visiting a while ago,” Benwen muttered, tearing up a little. He nodded forcefully, repeatedly. It reminded me of the way my leg might tap away on its own while I was bored. Little weird, but hardly deranged, right? “I wasn’t getting better. It made the family look bad. So… so I had to go. So I wouldn’t be an embarrassment to my parents anymore.” He shook his head sadly before his head started jerkily nodding again on its own. With the Arxur gone, I was getting a better idea of which of his movements were flinches, and which were the peculiar convulsions from his disease. Tourette’s Syndrome, they’d called it? Unless his idle paws were plotting to twitch their way around my neck, it certainly seemed harmless. “I want to be useful to the herd,” Benwen continued, “but I don’t know how. I’m sorry.”

  I found myself wanting a cigarette, but I tried very hard not to smoke more than one per day. Besides, if I pulled one out now, custom dictated that I’d have to share. “Look… Benwen was it? If you want to be the face of helping people, maybe you’d like to tag along with Doctor Tika here? Extra set of hands over in med bay? It doesn’t take much to be an orderly, and maybe you’ll pick up some useful skills.”

  Benwen looked like he wanted to throw up again. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don't… I don't want to. I’ve been in Predator Disease facilities since I was seven. If I never see the inside of a hospital again, it will be a life well-lived.”

  I shrugged, at a loss for ideas. “Well, what are you good at? Do you have any marketable skills?”

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  Benwen said nothing, and shrank further down into the corner in shame. Jodi answered on his behalf. “Debbin… what kind of education do you imagine PD patients receive?” the Yotul veteran asked, incredulously. “Benwen’s barely had anything of the sort for more than half his life. I’m frankly impressed that he can even read.”

  Of course a Yotul would find literacy impressive, but I kept that comment to myself. No sense in angering an insurrectionary primitive. Gotta keep everyone’s egos fluffed up so I could wheedle a favor out of them later if I needed one. “Any hobbies, then?” I tried, hopefully.

  Benwen shook his head. “Haven't really gotten a chance to try any.”

  Ancestors spare me, that was grim. Alright. There had to be an angle here. How did I get started in my career? Aside from the flagrant nepotism, I mean. Hrm. Well, more specifically, at least, Benwen just needed his parents to arrange a plum internship for him. The kind where he can tag along and apprentice under someone more experienced, maybe see what careers felt right to him. But Benwen’s parents had abandoned him. Which made him a ward of the state. But I owned the planet. Which made me the state. So… that made Benwen my ward?

  The gears clicked into place, into a configuration that made something not entirely unlike sense. The kid lived on my land, so he was my responsibility. It was practically a matter of honoring guest right. Normally, that only extended to things like food and shelter, but it always looked good to be a lavishly gracious host, and if what the younger man needed the most was career mentorship… well, if Sifal was going to be handling a lot of the day-to-day operations, it stood to reason that I had extra time on my hands. “Alright, well, how about I take you on as a personal assistant, then?” I said. “I can show you all about how to be a proper upstanding member of Nevok society.”

  The way the younger man’s eyes lit up was almost worth the effort on its own. “Yes! Thank you so much! I won't let you down, sir!”

  I flicked my tail politely in acceptance. It was going to be tricky, remembering to nod and smile around the Arxur, but still use tail language around other herbivores. “Excellent. Now, uh, can you…” I took a deep breath. “Can you stay calm around an Arxur?”

  Benwen blanched. “I… umm… is this a trick question?”

  I tilted my head, confused. “No? We're doing business with Arxur for the foreseeable future. Can you keep your wits about you while we're at it?”

  Benwen looked like he was terrified of me now. “I, umm… I don't… I'm sorry, what's the correct answer?”

  Tika, the Zurulian PD expert, interjected this time. “Standard Predator Disease treatment procedures can include administering electroshocks to reinforce proper preylike behaviors,” she said, pinching the top of her snout with a paw. She sounded exasperated. “You may recall that ‘proper preylike behaviors’ may include, for example, having an appropriately severe fear of Arxur.”

  “Oh,” I said, taking that in. Was that why Benwen was so polite? Had a little conformity zapped into him? “Does it work?” I asked aloud.

  Tika’s jaw dropped. “Does it..!? Yes! Yes, in fact, humans have actually studied this phenomenon extensively. It turns out, you can reinforce all sorts of behaviors and beliefs this way. It doesn’t even need to be electroshocks, either: most forms of torture are pretty interchangeable!”

  “Ah, right,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll double-check with our new management, but I think we’re still pretty steady on our ‘no torture’ rules.”

  Jodi gestured forcefully at Benwen the PD patient and Tika the PD specialist while staring at me in disbelief.

  “Yes, precisely,” I said, a little too glibly. “Sifal removed the PD exemption to our ban on slavery. I imagine the ‘no torture except when prescribed by a doctor’ rule will be amended next.”

  Tika stared at me bemused. “I’d like to amend it now,” she said. “Are there any PD specialists on this planet who might plausibly hold seniority over me?”

  I wracked my brain. I’d never really gotten around to hiring one. Partly because we were still a small outpost, and partly because I was covering my own ass. Business was predatory, after all, plus someone I didn’t know might mistake my harmless predilections for a deep-rooted problem. In absence of a PD expert… I think Garruga, as the seniormost Yulpa security officer, technically had some relevant authority as a de facto head of the Exterminator’s Guild in lieu of a formal regional headquarters, but that wasn’t quite the same thing, and I’d need to double-check the colonial charter in any event just to be sure of the wording for the relevant bylaws--

  “If you’d like the torture exemption to remain on the books,” said Tika quietly, “I have a few tests I’d like to run on you. With sufficiently intensive negative operant conditioning, I think I could convince you that you are an Arxur. Have you tried their rations yet?”

  I choked on my own spit. “Nope, no, no need for any experiments. As Chairman, I hereby abolish that rule we were just talking about. No more torturing patients. It’s off the table, it’s gone, forever. I’ll have it in writing tomorrow morning.”

  Tika preened with a nearly motherly pride in me for making such an excellent decision. “How magnanimous and forward-thinking of you, Chairman.”

  I rubbed my eyes with one paw, exhausted already. “Splendid. We’ll set you all up with quarters. We can start you at your new roles tomorrow.”

  Tika smiled. She’d picked that up quickly. “Actually, I’d very much like to get myself situated in medbay tonight, if that’s alright with you.”

  I flicked my tail in assent. “Yup, you go do whatever you want.” The Zurulian bobbed her head smugly and plodded out. “You two, get yourselves settled in, and we’ll get you into onboarding first thing tomorrow morning. And Benwen?” The younger Nevok perked up. “No one is going to hurt you anymore.” He looked positively thrilled to hear this, so I kept going. “Especially not for working with Arxur. No more need to worry about getting punished for not being afraid enough of predators.”

  Benwen looked… somewhat less thrilled to hear that. He turned his head like he was straining to see the gray-scaled reptiles through the walls. “But… but I was really afraid of them before my treatment.”

  Well, rub it in my predator-diseased face, why doesn’t he?!