Chrome Horizon - CH. 11 (Pt.2)

[P](https://i.redd.it/ojc4bnp056be1.jpeg)art 2!

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**Memory Transcription Subject:** *Veyrin, Zurulian Medical Observer*

Mira didn't look alarmed or upset by my inquiry, as awkward as it was. I wasn't sure what her reaction was, but the corner of her mouth had quirked up into an expression that I couldn't quite place yet.

"Irregularities," she repeated, testing the word with an amused lilt. "That's one way to put it."

She reached up and pushed her hair back from one side of her head, tucking it behind what I had suspected to find. Triangular but rounded, shorter than the Venlil but longer than mine. They looked very similar to the Gojid, actually, but the color was different. As she twitched it to show off, I could see that the inside was a soft white, the edges a coppery red, and the back the same glossy black as her hair. The ear sat higher and further back on her skull than what I had seen with the other humans, and it swiveled fractionally toward Sorvek when the man let out a soft gasp.

"And that's just the start of it." She shrugged out of the station jacket without any ceremony, draping it over the back of the bench, and held her bare arms out for inspection rather than making us ask.

Her hands, held out palm-up for inspection, were mostly human, aside from the same faint irregularity to the knuckle line I had already noticed. The fur started thin just past her elbow, thickened through the middle of her forearm into a deep black that caught the light differently than either her hair or the shadow around her eyes, and faded back to bare skin before it reached her wrist, leaving her hands untouched.

Yulsi's tail had gone rigid, the end poofed to nearly twice its size, and she made no attempt to hide the reaction. Sorvek had gone very still in contrast, with ears locked forward and a tension in his posture that suggested to me that he was already racing through the possibilities of what we were being shown.

"Are you actually human?" Sorvek asked, at last, very carefully.

"Yep." Mira laughed, placing her hands on her hips. "I just prefer something a little different to the norm."

I opened my mouth once, closed it, and tried again. Whatever port sat behind her ear, whatever subtle threads of metal Rahman's arm had contained, none of it accounted for what I was looking at now. A neural port, while extreme by our standards, was scientifically feasible. A cybernetic limb was just an overly advanced prosthetic when you got down to the roots.

Nothing about the ears on her head or the fur covering her forearm looked like something added to her. Instead, it was clear that they were part of her body, organic in a way that a simple augment couldn’t be.

"Why—" I started, then abandoned the question before I had finished considering it. "Is this medicine, to you? I don't understand how this is even possible, mechanically, I mean, not—I mean how does a body simply—"

Mira let me flounder for a second longer before she took pity on me. "Yeah, it's medicine. Think of it like this. Somebody loses an arm; in our society, they have options for how they can be healed. Many people can, and do, go with a mechanical option. But we also have the technology that would allow us to simply replace the limb with what is essentially a cloned copy of the original. Neither's the 'real' fix. It's just preference, chrome versus 'ganic."

"Cloned," I repeated, my voice hollow. "Like tissue regeneration."

"Essentially. You've got organ regrowth tech yourselves, right? I read that somewhere in the exchange briefing." She waited for my confirming ear-flick before continuing. "It's the same basic science, just pushed a lot further. You already know that we've been cloning tissue for food for longer than I've been alive, growing meat in vats instead of raising it, and even mass growing plant matter that’s genetically modified to be more nutritious for us. Soon after, somebody figured out we could do the same as you; no need for transplant donors when we can grow a shiny new organ ourselves in an emergency. But then when we had an advancement in nanotech, we realized that we could do more complicated stuff.”

She spread her arms a little, shoulders bobbing in a casual manner. “Suddenly we could grow a new limb and use the nanotech to precisely make all of the complicated connections while speeding up the process and growth so that a person could use it in days instead of years.”

"That… that’s astounding, but it doesn't explain your… appearance," Sorvek said, finding his voice again.

"That's fair." Mira sighed, ears flicking as she thought for a moment. In the lull, I turned to my companions, checking on them. Sorvek seemed anxious but more interested than scared. Yulsi was going a bit walleyed, though, and I padded over to nudge her nearer to a stool.

"Yeah, taking a seat might be a decent idea. I was given a heads-up that I could discuss this with you, and it might take a while." Mira took a seat on a bench nearby, and once I got Yulsi settled, Sorvek and I found seats on the thick mats nearby.

“Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys don’t really have the concept of ‘cosmetic’ surgery, right?”

“C-cosmetic *surgery?”* Yulsi bleats.

It was certainly an unusual concept. Surgery for the purpose of vanity? That seemed so… wasteful and gruesome.

“Figured,” Mira sighed, resting her elbows on her knees and leaning forward a bit, head down. One ear flicked before she looked up again. “You have plastic surgery, though. Corrective procedures that reshape parts of the body for function?”

"Congenital defects," Sorvek said, ears flicking in confirmation. "Injury repair. Anything returning a body to proper function or standard configuration."

"Okay. So you understand the idea of intentionally changing a body. You just don't have a category for doing it when nothing's actually wrong."

None of us answered that, because the idea of changing one's body on a whim was...

"That's basically the whole gap," she said. "Most of what medicine does starts with something being wrong and ends with fixing it. Replacing a lost limb, a nerve that doesn't fire the way it should, or a birth defect limiting quality of life. What I'm talking about isn't necessarily fixing anything, though that’s debatable based on the individual.”

“Myself, for example. I didn’t do this because something was broken. I didn't have an accident, and I wasn't born with something out of place or inherently wrong. I just realized, at some point, that my body didn’t feel the way I wanted it to. It took a while to understand what was missing, but once I did, the real me kind of emerged, and the technology existed to make that true."

I sat with that for a long moment, working the concept over in my mind. The idea was, aptly, entirely alien, but I couldn’t find anything inherently wrong with it, beyond the fact that it would single her out from others around her. That, in and of itself, suggested some form of PD, but I was aware from my studies that humans had a very different concept of the subject, though I hadn’t been able to pick that vine just yet.

Knowing how delicate the subject of PD was, I decided to choose my words with caution. “Did it cost you something? Choosing this path. I don't mean the procedure itself, but after. How people treated you, where you stood in society?"

"Some." We all looked at her with shock at how casually she responded. Mira didn't dress it up, but she didn't flinch from it either. "Not as much as it would've a few decades back, and less than it does for some people even now. Depends where you are, who you're around. I got lucky with my situation, had it easier than some I can remember hearing about."

Sorvek's tail jerked up, swaying to get her attention. "You make it sound rare, your situation. Is this a commonly available… procedure? Was there a review process of some kind before this happened? Something to confirm that the choice was sound, and not simply impulsive?"

For some reason that question made Mira’s ears perk up in clear approval.

"Yeah. More than once, actually." Mira leaned back, some of the earlier tension easing out of her shoulders now that the questions had turned toward process rather than her personally. "Something as extensive as I did required a psych evaluation **\[er: PD assessment\]** up front, and it had a waiting period built in on purpose. Not cause it can't be undone; it can, but because changing how your own body feels to you is a bigger mental adjustment than people expect going in. More so than even with cyberware. I’m not a psychologist **\[er: PD Specialist\]**, so I can't get into the specifics, but I do know that there was a higher concern for complications with what I did, than someone getting a cybernetic arm or leg would have.”

“Then on top of that, the actual work happens in stages, not all at once. There are plenty of check-ins along the way where you can stop, slow down, or change your mind. It's not just somebody handing you a form to sign, and then you wake up later with a whole new body."

"Does it hurt?" Yulsi asked, which came off as a bit childish. Though with how casually they seemed to treat procedures…

"It’s itchy.”

There's a moment before Yulsi lets out a sharp whistle of laughter, caught off guard.

Mira’s face changes, looking softer somehow. “But for real, there's some soreness during the active stages, since depending on what someone chooses, there can be major changes in musculoskeletal structure, but nothing like what you would probably imagine. Plus we have medicine like Speedheal, and with a biomon to give precise feedback, pain management is a breeze. Plus, the nanites used in the procedure help to regulate the body's pain receptors. They can essentially prevent you from feeling the pain while reporting that it’s there, so you remain aware of your body's limits. It used to be a lengthy inpatient process, but with the advancement in tech, these days it’s basically an outpatient procedure, and you just spend some time with body aches."

Tulsi seemed to be particularly fascinated with the topic, her tail wagging with excitement. "May I ask why you chose this?" she asked. "Why this particular form?"

"Because it's *mine,"* Mira said. I’m not sure what it was, but there was a weight behind her words, as simple as they were. Not harsh, but rooted as deep as one’s own birth tree.

Then she pulled her pad out and tapped through something before looking up at us once more.  "I should clarify, what you're seeing now isn’t my… usual body. *This* is me, normally. What you're looking at right now is the toned-down one for the exchange."

She turned the pad to us and showed off a photograph. The image was her, unmistakably, but the difference was still stark. Every feature we'd already catalogued was taken further: the ears larger, the fur denser, and covering all of her that wasn’t hidden under the pelts humans wore. The top she had on showed a coppery red coat around her shoulders, a soft white under her chin, and leading down to her throat, and her paws, proper paws, covered in the glossy black with warm brown pads on the palm and digits. Her face itself was shaped differently and showed an actual muzzle instead of the primates' usually flat features. And then the tail, thickly furred along the whole length, ringed in the copper red and white, and caught mid-motion behind her.

Her eyes were the same, as well as the longer, curly head fur. Despite this looking like an entirely new species, I could still see *her* in the image.

She sighed, turning her pad back and looking at the photo herself. "I remember learning about red pandas in school, and something in me just kinda... clicked. I got a little obsessed. It was a little at a time, but I eventually found the 'me' that felt right. I had to scale most of it back to come out here. The UN figured that showing up looking like that on day one might've led to some confusion and concern."

Yulsi made a sound that wasn't quite words, staring at the pad like she was trying to reconcile the two images into one person. For his part, Sorvek was looking down for the moment, his ears twisting as he tried to harvest his thoughts.

I found myself circling back to the mechanism instead, unable to leave it alone. "How is something like that level of change managed? I can’t imagine that you simply… apply the features. They would remain static without something to… bind them. Is there some kind of genetic application?”