A Dubious Hypothesis

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Techno-Tabby Engineer, February 2026

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Lt. Jordan LeGuin rarely turned off the augmented data streams in his techno-focal goggles that constantly ran through his field of vision, keeping him informed and entertained, but he had a lot to think about.  The orange tabby had spent the better part of the last week at an engineering conference on Starbase 17, and he was on his way back to the starship Initiative now.  His brain was full enough of ideas.

LeGuin didn’t need anything more to process right now.  He just wanted to let all the ideas he’d crammed into his mind attending talks and demonstrations during the last week settle into place.  And besides, sometimes while piloting a shuttle craft, it was nice to simply allow the infinite stretches of void around the small vessel to envelop him.  Space is really, really big, and sometimes the tabby liked to be reminded of that.

Lt. LeGuin had attended the conference with his friend and colleague, Fact.  Right now, the android arctic fox was lying down on a cot in the back of their two-person shuttle, testing out a new algorithm that zhe’d cooked up with some of the other engineers at the conference to allow zirself to experiment with dreaming.  The android was deeply curious about the hallucinatory experiences zir biological friends had while sleeping and had been very much looking forward to experiencing a version of dreaming for zirself.

Lt. LeGuin wondered what an android fox would dream about.  The next thing the orange tabby knew, his friend was laying a white-furred paw on his shoulder.

“Jordan,” Fact said, “where are you taking us?”

“What?” LeGuin meowed.  “Home to the Initiative, of course.”

The android arctic fox gestured at the viewscreen and computer panels in front of the orange tabby and said, “It does not look that way.”

Lt. LeGuin blinked inside his techno-focal goggles, a reflex that still served to moisten and protect his blind eyes but that didn’t stop the goggles from feeding visual data directly into his brain.

Fact was right.  Their shuttle was nowhere near its home starship, and they were wildly off course.

“I guess my mind must have wandered…” Lt. LeGuin meowed in a tone somewhere between defensiveness and bewilderment.  It was a good thing there weren’t any hazardous ion fields around here.  Even so, Lt. LeGuin could have sworn he’d set the proper course into the computer before getting lost in thought.  Also, he hadn’t realized he’d been quite so absorbed in his memories of the conference…

The orange tabby scratched at the collar of his uniform.  The way the fabric was pressing against his fur felt all itchy.  He supposed he was more likely to notice something mundane like that when he wasn’t distracted by all the augmented data he usually kept his mind busy reading.  Or maybe he just needed more sleep.

With a thought, Lt. LeGuin turned the usual augments back on inside his goggles and said, “Maybe you’d better fly us the rest of the way home.”

Fact sat down in the second pilot’s seat, beside Lt. LeGuin, and took over the shuttle’s controls.

Brightening, the orange tabby asked with sincere interest, “How did the new algorithm work?  What did you dream about?”

“It’s strange,” Fact said, “but I actually dreamed about you piloting the shuttle.  It was surprisingly mundane, and I’m a little disappointed after all of the exciting stories I’ve heard other Initiative officers tell about their surreal and inexplicable dreams.”

“Huh,” Lt. LeGuin mused.  “Maybe the algorithm needs some tweaking.”

“Maybe,” the arctic fox allowed.  “But it’s probably worth giving it a few more tests to create a solid baseline before making any changes.”

“Good idea,” the orange tabby agreed.  “Besides, I’ve had plenty of dreams about lying in bed and having trouble sleeping.  It’s probably one of the most common kinds of dreams out there — dreaming about exactly what’s happening for real at that moment.  You just don’t hear about them much, because it’s not very interesting.  So, maybe, you’re just getting an especially authentic dreaming experience from the algorithm.”

The arctic fox’s narrow white muzzle twisted into a smile, and the two friends spent the rest of their flight home talking about the conference, swapping stories about the different panels each had attended and the ideas those panels had given them.

* * *

Back aboard the Initiative, Lt. LeGuin and Fact held court in the ship’s Constellation Club, sitting around a large table with other officers — especially other engineers — who crowded close to hear their stories about everything the two of them had learned at the conference.

The orange tabby cat spoke at length about presentations he’d attended by a rabbit-like Morphican who was designing a new generation of neural implants; a lizard-like Reptassan who had found a way to refine hyper crystals for more efficient use in zephyr drives; and a panel of uplifted mouse scientists from Earth who were working on a project to scale down zephyr drive engines in order to fit them in smaller spacecrafts.

“Really, it’s a very ambitious project,” Lt. LeGuin meowed.  “And it has far-reaching applications beyond spaceships designed specifically for mice.  Imagine a shuttlecraft that can travel as fast as a full-fledged vessel like the Initiative!”

Grawf, the bear-like exchange officer, grumbled something about how she thought spaceships needed to be bigger, not smaller, and the uplifted cats and dogs at the table started discussing how a larger ship could accommodate more of an arboretum and an actual scramball court instead of just a simulated scramball court in the lumo-bay.

Soon the discussion had moved entirely away from engineering and settled firmly into the realm of sports.

Lt. LeGuin’s attention drifted away from the conversation — that no longer interested him — and onto watching the stars through the wide Constellation Club windows.  He didn’t understand why no one else was as interested in engineering as he was.  Sure, the other engineering officers would discuss engineering-related topics with him when it was actually part of their duties, and of course, Fact would discuss engineering topics with him at any time.  But during their free time, when everyone was relaxing, it was always scramball, poker games, romantic entanglements, or intergalactic politics.  Even Fact took part in discussing all that nonsense, because zhe strove to be more like the organic animals around them.

Why did other officers even bother becoming Tri-Galactic Union engineers if they weren’t actually interested in talking and thinking about engineering?

For a while, Lt. LeGuin smiled along to the conversation while entertaining himself by reading one of the articles that had been mentioned at the conference in his techno-focal goggles, superimposed over the scene in front of him.  But eventually, he had to admit to himself that the conversation showed no signs of turning back toward engineering, or even of allowing him to steer it back that way.

With a sigh, the orange tabby cat excused himself from the table and headed to his quarters to catch up on the sleep he’d missed while soaking up every minute of the engineering conference.

* * *

Lt. LeGuin awoke with a start at the gentle sound of chimes.  The orange cat was groggy, tired, and itchy.  And the chiming sound meant that he’d slept as late as he possibly could and still make it to his shift on time.

“I must have been more behind on sleep than I realized,” Lt. LeGuin meowed to himself with a yawn.  He was still wearing his uniform from yesterday.  “Strange… I never fall asleep in my clothes.  Must be why I’m so itchy.”

Lt. LeGuin changed out of the rumpled uniform he’d slept in and into a fresh one.  He synthesized a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, and after wolfing it down, he rushed to engineering, excited to start the day.

“I dreamed about you again,” Fact said, when zhe saw the orange tabby come rushing into engineering.

Lt. LeGuin was strangely flattered.  The cat knew that he and Fact were each other’s best friends, but he still wouldn’t have expected to figure so largely in the android fox’s subconscious.  To be fair, until Fact had designed zirself an algorithm to allow dreaming, zhe might not have even had a subconscious.

“It was very strange,” Fact said, pacing the words out slowly like zhe was feeling zir way through them.  The white fox’s gold-flecked eyes had a faraway look in them.

“The dream about me?” Lt. LeGuin prompted.

“No, actually,” Fact said.  “The parts of my dream before it became all about you.”

The orange tabby was very excited to hear what android dreams were like.  “Well, tell me about it!” he meowed, muzzle breaking into a wide, eager grin beneath his techno-focal goggles.

“I’m not sure that I can find the words…” Fact said, hedgingly, clearly aware of how much zhe was disappointing zir audience.  “But it was surreal and changing, like an abstract painting or modern dance performance… and then, all of sudden, it was just you.  Working in the crawlways on a project that involved reconfiguring a lot of panels.”

“Huh,” LeGuin meowed, trying not to show his disappointment too clearly on his whiskered face.

It wasn’t Fact’s responsibility to entertain the tabby with tales of zir dreams…  And it wasn’t Fact’s fault that zir subconscious pictured Lt. LeGuin hard at work rather than doing anything more unexpected and interesting.  Even so, it felt like a bit of a wakeup call if even in an android’s surreal dream, all the orange tabby did was work.  “Just me, just working?”

“Yes,” Fact agreed.  “It went on for quite some time.”

“Well, dreams can feel like they stretch on for hours in the blink of an eye,” the orange tabby said, rolling his shoulders which seemed to be sore.  In addition to feeling like he hadn’t slept for long enough last night, apparently he’d slept in a poor position and left a crick in his neck.

“Ah,” Fact said, “you are talking about the subjective passage of time, but this is not a matter of subjectivity.  While I do experience a subjective passage of time that can vary depending on the degree of engagement I feel in an activity, my statement was not about my subjective experience.”

“What do you mean?” LeGuin asked, genuinely curious as only a cat can truly be.

“My internal chronometer was running, and I know for a fact that while the surrealistic portion of my dream was far more interesting to experience than the part where you were working, that it only lasted for a few minutes.  Whereas I experienced the — objectively — more mundane portion of the dream where you were working for several hours.”  The arctic fox tilted zir head in an affectation meant to show zhe was pondering something.  “The experience caused me to seriously consider ending the dream algorithm early.  The only reason I did not is that I kept wondering if the dream would ever become more interesting again.”

“Did it?” the orange tabby asked hopefully.

“It did not.”

The orange tabby and arctic fox android got to work, but Lt. LeGuin found that his usual duties in the engine room weren’t holding his attention.  Perhaps he was merely tired, or the routine of his normal life paled in excitement compared to the engineering conference they’d just left.  But whatever the cause, the tabby’s mind kept drifting back to the android fox’s description of zir dream.

Eventually, since the two of them were working side by side anyway, the tabby allowed his own distraction to take over and asked the fox, “Are you sure that your dream algorithm is working right?”

“What do you mean?” Fact asked, continuing to work without interruption.  The android could do more things at once than any of zir organic crewmates.

“I mean,” Lt. LeGuin meowed, “that as far as I know, your algorithm is supposed to closely mirror the organic experience of dreaming, and it’s not normal for dreams to last for hours on end.  Usually, REM sleep is short spurts of a couple of minutes at a time early in the night, building up to maybe a couple of hours during the end of the night.  But even so, dreams are usually far more erratic than simply one figure doing the same thing for an extended period of time.  That sounds like a glitch in your program.”

“I can see what you mean,” Fact allowed.  The white fox stopped typing at zir console, tilted zir head, and allowed zir gold-flecked eyes to go unfocused for a moment.  But then zhe snapped back to attention and said, “I just ran an internal check of my systems, including the algorithms in question, and everything seems to be in order.  We could run a more complete scan, if we hooked my brain up to the ship’s main computer system.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Lt. LeGuin meowed, far more interested in this puzzle than in the general engine maintenance that he’d been doing before.  He did love working with the Initiative’s engines — it was a privilege to work with such a powerful zephyr drive — but it was also kind of routine.  Curious cats love their puzzles, and Fact’s weird dream was a puzzle.

With Fact’s consent, Lt. LeGuin opened up the back of zir skull and literally plugged the android’s brain into the ship’s main computer system with a cord.  The fox closed zir gold-flecked eyes, focusing on interfacing with the computer.

A few moments later, Fact opened zir eyes and said, “According to the ship’s computer’s scans of my brain, everything is in order.  However, since I’m connected in, I decided to check a few things and have discovered something most intriguing.”

LeGuin was delighted.  He loved being intrigued.  “Do tell,” he meowed with a purr tinging his voice.

“You actually were in the crawlways, reconfiguring exactly the panels that I dreamed about you reconfiguring last night at exactly the same time as I dreamed about it.”

The residual purr in LeGuin’s throat dropped down to his stomach where it became angrily fluttering butterflies.  “What?” the cat asked in a mix of shock, disbelief, and growing horror.

Lt. LeGuin knew several things for sure:  Fact wouldn’t lie to him, and he definitely felt tired enough to have somehow been awake for hours last night reconfiguring panels.  The cat was less sure of several other things:  specifically, he didn’t know if the computer’s records could have been tampered with somehow, and he didn’t know if it was possible for him to reconfigure panels while sleepwalking.  He knew how to look into whether the computer files had been altered somehow; he knew a lot less about sleepwalking.

So, the flustered orange tabby began by pulling up the computer files that did, indeed, show him reconfiguring panels in the crawlways when he should have been sleeping.  A quick analysis of the records showed no obvious tampering.

“This is really disturbing,” Lt. LeGuin meowed.  “I think… maybe I should go see Doctor Keller.”

“You have no memory of these events?” Fact asked.

“None,” LeGuin agreed bleakly.  “But I’m very tired… and I guess, this explains it.”

“Wait,” the android arctic fox said as the orange tabby turned to head towards the med-bay.  “Do you know why you were configuring these panels in this way?  Because while it looks like you were doing perfectly good work — an impressive feat if you were unconscious — I cannot make sense of why you would be reconfiguring panels in this way.”

LeGuin came back to look at the schematics of what he’d been doing in his sleep last night.  Energy flows had been rerouted.  Subroutines had been altered.  None of it seemed dangerous or problematic, but it also wasn’t clear why any of it was something he’d choose to do — awake or otherwise.

“I don’t know either, Fact,” LeGuin said miserably.  “I’m glad I didn’t break anything, and I guess some of these changes have a certain… efficiency to them?  But I don’t see any real pattern to it either.  I guess, maybe I was just keeping my paws busy.”

“A starship is not a good fidget toy,” Fact said, blending gentleness and admonishment skillfully in zir tone.

“No, it certainly isn’t,” LeGuin agreed.  “Hopefully, Dr. Keller can give me a clue as to what’s going on.  Maybe I can take something that will suppress the sleepwalking.  Or I could always lock myself in my quarters the next time I sleep…”

“I do not think that would be effective,” Fact said.  “If you can reconfigure systems like this in your sleep, then I think you could undo any reasonable lock that you applied to your own quarters.”

“Alright,” LeGuin meowed huffily, “maybe I’ll have you lock me in my quarters while I sleep.”

“That seems like a stopgap measure more than a full solution,” Fact said, tilting zir head to the side in consideration.  “But I would be honored to assist with this problem in any way I can.”

Beneath all the twitchy agitation that LeGuin felt in his fur and whiskers at the idea that he’d been roaming around messing with the ship in his sleep last night, there was a profound comfort that came from having someone like Fact on his side.  They’d figure this out.  “Thank you, Fact,” LeGuin said, and then he really did head to the med-bay.

* * *

Dr. Waverly Keller, the red setter doctor, thoroughly scanned Lt. LeGuin and asked him a lot of questions about the night before, but eventually, with exasperation, the dog had to admit, “I’m simply not seeing anything wrong with you, Jordan.  There’s nothing in your scans that should explain a memory blackout or sleepwalking, let alone both.”

The orange tabby’s whiskers turned down in a frown, and he scratched at his chest where the fabric of his uniform felt itchy against his fur today.  He didn’t like feeling out of control like this.  He didn’t like not knowing what was going on — not in this way.  He liked mysteries.  He liked uncovering the deep truths of the universe.  But he didn’t like the idea that his mind and body were doing things he didn’t have control over, and he really didn’t like not knowing if — or when — it would happen again.

The red fur on Dr. Keller’s brow rippled into concerned folds as she watched the orange tabby in front of her scratching away at his uniform.  “You’re itchy,” she said.  “How long has that been going on?”

“Since sometime near the end of the engineering conference,” Lt. LeGuin answered, distractedly.  “I’m pretty sure I was scratching a bunch on the flight home.”  Suddenly LeGuin straightened, his triangular ears perking up especially tall.  “You know, I may have blacked out on the flight home from the conference too…  That’s probably relevant.”

“Relevant, perhaps,” Dr. Keller agreed.  “But it doesn’t change that I’m not seeing anything wrong with you.  Have you checked out your techno-focal goggles lately?  I’m not an expert on how those interact with an individual’s brainwaves — or what kind of side effects long-term usage might have — but there might be something going on there.”

Lt. LeGuin’s pointed ears immediately skewed to the sides with irritation.  He’d had this argument with Dr. Keller before.  “Techno-focal goggles are perfectly safe for long-term usage.  There are countless studies, stretching back for a hundred years.  You know that.  I know that you know that.  We talk about it every time I get a check-up.”

The red dog placed a large paw gently, reassuringly on the angry orange cat’s shoulder.  “It’s okay to be scared,” she woofed in a soothing voice.  “No one likes feeling out of control.  Why don’t we run a little experiment?  When you go to sleep tonight, set up the computer to alert me if you leave your quarters.  If I get alerted, I’ll come right away and run more scans.  That way we can get more information to work with, alright?”

“Yeah, alright,” Lt. LeGuin agreed glumly.

“And in the meantime,” Dr. Keller woofed brightly, “why don’t you have Fact run a scan on your techno-focal goggles–”  She held up her paws, forestalling the cat’s objections.  “–just in case!  It can’t hurt to check them out.  And I can give you something that will help with the itchiness, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”  The orange cat sighed deeply.  This appointment had been something of a letdown, but he did like the idea of being less itchy.

Lt. LeGuin pushed up his uniform’s sleeve on his left arm when directed, and Dr. Keller used a medi-spray to painlessly inject him with whatever medical magic she’d devised.

Lt. LeGuin returned to engineering with his clean bill of health and asked Fact to examine his techno-focal goggles.  The android happily agreed, and the orange tabby removed the goggles from his head… something he usually only did when he was all cozy in bed, music playing on the speakers in his quarters, blankets cuddled around him, completely ready to fall asleep.

It wasn’t that Lt. LeGuin couldn’t get by without his goggles.  He’d recently outwitted a whole ship full of alien chickens with his goggles disabled by an EM-pulse.  However, the cat really didn’t like taking them off.  He liked the steady flow of information, updates, and easy access to basic computational skills and memory storage.  Sure, there was a certain peacefulness to letting his mind float in the dark void of normal organic existence…  Only disturbed by the outside world in the form of hearing Fact humming softly to zirself while running the scans on the techno-focal goggles and the more distant sounds of other officers moving around engineering, tending to their standard duties.

“You don’t have to hum for me,” Lt. LeGuin meowed.

The humming stopped.  And then Fact said, “Would you prefer a different tune?  The one I was humming was improvised, designed to have a quasi-random quality that I hoped would seem natural and soothing.”

“It was very effective,” the orange tabby conceded.  “I’m just saying you don’t have to go out of your way to put me at ease.  You’re already helping me out here.”

“I do not mind,” Fact said.

A few moments later, the android’s humming resumed, this time slightly quieter, slightly more randomized.  The orange tabby shook his head and chuckled.  This time, he let his friend keep him company in the enforced quietness of waiting to get his technological device back.

When Fact announced that the scans were done and handed the goggles back into LeGuin’s paws, the tabby gratefully placed them over his ears and settled them in front of his eyes again.  Vision snapped back into place, along with all the comforting feeds of information that he’d arranged to constantly scroll across the sides and edges of his view.

“I regret to give you the same disappointing news as you received from Dr. Keller,” Lt. Fact announced, “but there is seemingly nothing wrong or out of the ordinary with your goggles that might explain the experiences you’ve recently had.”

“Experiences plural?” LeGuin asked.

“Yes,” Fact said.  “I assume that the event in the shuttlecraft where I awoke to find that we had somehow begun flying to the wrong coordinates is also related.”

“I thought that too!” LeGuin meowed excitedly, remembering that he’d brought it up to Dr. Keller, who hadn’t seemed very interested.  “Have you checked the coordinates we were flying toward?  Perhaps there’s some kind of clue in those?”

“Alas, I have checked,” Fact said, sadly.  “And there is nothing of note along the route we were taking.”

“Nothing?” LeGuin pressed, desperately.

“Nothing at all,” Fact stated firmly.  “No star systems, no gas clouds, not even any notable space debris.  Only empty space.”

“Empty space, huh?”  Lt. LeGuin chewed his whiskers, trying to think of what could possibly be causing him to perform useless changes to the Initiative’s crawlway panels and fly a shuttle craft into the middle of nowhere.  The only theories he could come up with were all dubious, at best.

* * *

Once Lt. LeGuin and Lt. Fact finished their shift in engineering, the orange tabby invited his android friend to experience an ancient Earth tradition that zhe had never tried before.

“A sleep over?” Fact asked, as if the individual words had somehow lost all meaning when combined in that way.  As if the android didn’t have hundreds of thousands of examples of sleepovers appearing in popular literature and film in the extensive archive stored in zir massive brain.

“Yes, Fact,” LeGuin meowed, “I’m inviting you to hang out in my quarters with me this evening, have a good time, brainstorm ridiculous theories about what might be causing my sleepwalking, and then sleep over.  It’ll be fun.  It’ll be silly.  And it’ll make me feel better, knowing I’m not alone in my quarters, in case I start sleepwalking again.”

“Are you not planning on alerting Dr. Keller when you go to sleep, like she asked you to?”  The arctic fox android was approximately the same height as the orange tabby, but Fact still managed somehow to seem as if zhe was looking down zir long muzzle at LeGuin in a judgmental way.

“No, of course I’m going to contact the doc,” LeGuin meowed frustratedly.  “I just thought…”  He gestured with his paws in an erratic way that reflected the chaotic emotions he was feeling.

Even so, Fact deciphered LeGuin’s inarticulate chaos perfectly:  “You thought it would distract you from the seriousness of your situation if you overlaid a cheerful, lighthearted behavior over the scary one that involves keeping a doctor informed of your state.”

“Yeah,” LeGuin meowed, halfway annoyed at having his feelings laid out so clinically, like a patient etherized upon a table, and halfway relieved to know that his best friend really did know him so well.  “So?  Will you come?”

“Of course,” Fact stated.  “Should I bring anything?  Snacks?  A list of old Earth movies appropriate for watching at a sleepover?  Perhaps an Ursine ceremonial candle that we could light?”

“Uh… no…” LeGuin meowed.  “I mean, unless you want to.”

“Very good,” Fact said.  “I will obtain the candle from Grawf before coming to your quarters.  She recently made a set from the wax her zumblebees have been producing.”

“Wonderful,” the orange tabby said, hoping this wouldn’t lead to the bear joining their sleepover.  LeGuin didn’t have anything against Grawf, but that would set an entirely different tone than he’d been planning on.  “Uh, one last thing, Fact, do you have any pajamas?”

“No,” the android responded.  “There has never been an occasion I’ve needed them for before, but I can synthesize a set if you feel they are necessary.”

“Can’t have a pajama party without pajamas!” LeGuin meowed with a grin.  “But don’t worry about synthesizing any.  I’ll pick out an appropriate pattern for you and have the synthesizer make them in your size.  See you soon!”

The cat and android fox parted ways.  In addition to picking up the candle from Grawf, Fact needed to water zir pet Venus flytrap before coming over for the sleepover.  LeGuin, however, headed straight back to his own quarters to set everything up.

The cat picked out a suitable style of cotton pajama pants and shirt with a green circuit board pattern on them that he thought would amuse his friend.  After synthesizing those, he also had the synthesizer generate two sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and — since he thought it would be fun to go all out — a simple tent that would be large enough for him and Fact to share.  He even synthesized a lantern and a deck of cards, so the two of them could huddle around its dim, flickering light and play card games.

Lt. LeGuin knew that Fact was right — he was doing all of these things to distract himself from his fear.  But the cat didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t have some fun in the process.

When Fact arrived with the zumble-wax candle, the android commented, “Ah, I see that this will be redundant with what you have planned.”

“Sorry, Fact,” LeGuin meowed, still punching commands into the synthesizer’s control panel.  “We can burn the candle too, but we shouldn’t burn it inside the tent, and I thought a lantern would be fun.”

Fact set the stout, amber-colored candle down on a coffee table beside the growing pile of things on the floor that LeGuin had been synthesizing.  “Consider it a hosting gift,” Fact said.  “Can I help you with any of these things?”

“Uh… sure…” LeGuin meowed distractedly.  He was just putting the finishing touches on something he thought Fact would especially enjoy.  “You could set the tent up while I finish programming our dinner.”

“Dinner?” the android fox asked, kneeling down beside the folded-up tent.  “You know I do not eat.”

“I know you don’t need to eat, and you can’t eat normal food,” the orange cat corrected.

“I do not have the stomach for it,” Fact agreed.

With a very wide grin, the orange tabby punched the final commands into the synthesizer’s control panel, and golden quantum energy began fizzing inside the synthesizer’s generation nook.  Within moments, a platter of snack foods appeared.

LeGuin looked over his shoulder to see that Fact had already finished setting up the tent.  The two of them rolled out their sleeping pads and sleeping bags inside, and Fact set up the lantern between them.  Then LeGuin brought over the platter of snacks.

For every snack on the platter, there were two versions — one on a red plate or bowl, and a seemingly identical one on a blue plate or bowl.  The snacks included cheese and salami on crackers, popcorn, trail mix, and melty marshmallow confections on graham crackers.

“That looks like normal — albeit, unusually non-nutritious — food to me,” Fact said, skeptically.

“Ah, but it’s not!” LeGuin meowed, sounding very pleased with himself.  “The ones on blue plates are loaded with extra nutrients, in spite of how they look, and the ones on red plates…  Well, they’re not food at all.  They’re chemical approximations that are about as stable as soap bubbles.  They’ll dissolve in your mouth, leaving a flavor impression but not actually gumming up your works with any real residue that can’t be dealt with by simply brushing your teeth.”

The arctic fox android tilted zir head to the side and blinked zir gold-flecked eyes very slowly.  “That is fascinating,” zhe said.  “And very thoughtful.”

“You’re welcome, Fact.”  LeGuin set the platter down inside the tent.  Then he grabbed the green circuit board pajamas from where they were still lying on the floor and threw them at his friend.  “Here, put those on.  I’ll go get mine.”

When LeGuin returned to the tent in his own pajamas — which were covered in an antiquated rocket ship pattern — Fact was looking quite dapper in the green circuit board pattern, lounging on zir sleeping bag.

“I have never brushed my teeth before,” Fact said.  “I find that I am oddly more intrigued by the idea of trying that out — which had somehow never occurred to me as something to try before! — than about the snacks.  I hope that does not offend you.  I am still interested in trying the snacks.”

Lt. LeGuin laughed, feeling happy as he climbed into his own sleeping bag.  “Not at all, Fact, not at all.”

The two friends ate snacks, played cards, laughed, and talked.  Their topics started out light — gossiping about what they’d missed aboard the Initiative while they’d been gone — but eventually turned to the weightier questions that were pressing down on Lt. LeGuin, forcing him to create so much levity to balance them out.

“If Dr. Keller doesn’t see anything wrong with me, and you don’t see anything wrong with my goggles…”  The orange cat let his words trail off, focusing on the hand of cards fanned out in his paws, pretending they were interesting or important enough to capture more than a minuscule fraction of his attention.  His goggles had already advised him of the optimal move, and he’d already decided on a suboptimal — but more surprising and interesting — move that he was going to make.  But the cards acted like a shield, giving the cat something to look at other than his friend’s sympathetic, gold-flecked eyes.

LeGuin didn’t think he could handle the sympathy.

“If we can’t find anything wrong, then we can’t do anything to help you,” Fact said, completing his friend’s unfinished thought.  “We can’t do anything to fix it.”

“Right,” LeGuin agreed grimly, finally throwing down the card he’d long ago decided to play.

Fact similarly pretended to take a while considering the cards zhe had fanned out in front of zir.  The android understood that the slow pace of the game was part of the ambience.  Zhe was probably choosing to play sub-optimally as well to drag out the game.  Eventually, the fox carefully laid down a card, saying at the same time, “Are you also afraid that if whatever is wrong is hard to detect that it might also be harder to cure?  It would be a rational fear.”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Lt. LeGuin admitted, glumly.

The lantern light flickered charmingly, filling the small space inside the tent with a warm glow.  An entire universe of star systems and populated planets had narrowed down to a bubble of water-retardant cloth with an orange cat and white fox inside, cuddled up in sleeping bags on either side of a lantern.

Usually, Lt. LeGuin loved the infinite stretches of possibility that he saw in the stars surrounding the Initiative.  But tonight, he was okay with pretending the universe was something small, something manageable.

“You know what really scares me?” Lt. LeGuin meowed.  The question was clearly rhetorical, and Fact waited for the cat to continue.  “Sure, if it’s something wrong with me or my goggles that’s simply hard to detect… well, okay.  I believe that you or Dr. Keller will eventually figure it out.  I couldn’t have better allies on my side.  But…”

The orange cat shook his head, unable to squeeze his fears down small enough to say them.

“What?” Fact said, zir voice gentle and soft.

The fur above Lt. LeGuin’s techno-focal goggles crinkled into folds, rippling his orange stripes.  “What if there’s a reason we can’t track down what’s wrong?  What if there’s a reason that I’m making changes to the ship in my sleep… but all of the changes seem harmless?  Pointless, even.”

“What kind of reason?” Fact asked, intrigued.

“What if someone’s using me, like a tool,” Lt. LeGuin meowed, his deepest fear cracking wide open and spilling out of him.  “What if someone’s doing this to me on purpose, and we can’t find any evidence of what’s causing it, because they’re covering their tracks?”

“A tool to do what?” Fact asked.

Lt. LeGuin shrugged his narrow, feline shoulders and threw his hand of cards down on the plush fabric of his sleeping bag, no longer able to maintain the pretense of caring about their game.  “I don’t know!” he yowled.  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?  But… it makes me feel like some kind of Manchurian Candidate, losing control of my actions like this.”  The cat frowned, spreading his whiskers wide.  “And especially right after coming back from a big, interstellar engineering conference like that where there were all kinds of scientists present, representing every possible political faction in the three galaxies.”

“You think it could be political,” Fact said, tilting zir head and skewing zir triangular ears in a way that suggested zhe was carefully weighing this possibility.  Even so, the fox couldn’t keep from pointing out, “The Tri-Galactic Union is at peace right now and has been for some time.”

“Well, that’s not entirely true,” Lt. LeGuin disagreed, his own triangular ears skewing from the stress of arguing.  He didn’t like disagreeing with Fact.  The android was far and away the smartest person Lt. LeGuin had ever known, but the cat knew better than to try to keep his fears locked up inside.  His fear held information, and he couldn’t afford to ignore any information available to him right now.

Lt. LeGuin held up a paw and began ticking off points on his claws, extending one after another as he spoke.  “There’s dissonance among the colonies between Union space and Reptassan space, meaning we occasionally take fire from both Reptassan rebels and Anti-Ra as they swipe at each other.”  That was two claws.  “There’s centuries-long tension between the different Morphican sects.”  Another claw.  “And the Archidopterans?”  Lt. LeGuin balled up his paw in a fist.  “They’re still out there somewhere.  Just because we defeated one of their hive ships, it doesn’t mean there aren’t more of them out there, regrouping.”

Fact nodded solemnly to each of LeGuin’s points, and then the fox reached out and wrapped zir own white paws around the cat’s orange paw, holding on tight until the cat’s paw relaxed, no longer tensed into a fist.

“The Archidopterans are our own personalized boogeyman,” Fact said, obliquely referencing the time when LeGuin had had to see three of his crewmates melded together into a bizarre, miserable amalgam of insectile body horror by an Archidopteran cocoon.  “But they were not represented at the engineering conference, have not been seen in some time, and are extremely unlikely to do anything as complicated and subtle as mind-controlling an individual cat on an individual starship for unknown, nefarious reasons.”

Lt. LeGuin’s whiskers flattened against the sides of his face, but then he nodded.  “You’re right.  It’s not the Archidopterans’ style.  But… the Reptassans?  The Morphicans?  They were at the conference.”

“And they are both known for engaging in political intrigue and subterfuge,” Fact admitted.

“Reptassan crime and spy novels are far and away the best written by any society in the three galaxies,” LeGuin meowed sagely.  He knew Fact couldn’t argue with that.  It was simply an established truth that all literary scholars agreed upon.

“Fiction is not reality,” Fact said.

“No, but it is a reflection of reality,” LeGuin meowed.  “All of those stories, they came from somewhere.  What if I’m being tested?  Primed for committing actual crimes like… like… commandeering the Initiative or assassinating Captain Jacques!”

Silence filled the tent, complementing the lantern’s golden glow with a tense, silvery lining.  Eventually, Fact broke the silence, saying, “Jordan, I am here with you, and we will notify Dr. Keller before going to sleep.  Lt. Vonn runs a tight ship with her security force.  You are not going to sleepwalk into commandeering an entire starship or assassinating the captain.  Or anyone else.  I promise you that your crewmates — and I especially — will not let that happen.”

The orange cat and android fox stared at each other levelly in the flickering light.  Fact didn’t look away.  But eventually, Lt. LeGuin did.

“Okay,” the cat said.  “You’re right.  What we really need is more data, right?  So, I should try to sleep.”

“You will succeed at sleeping,” Fact said.  Then tilting zir head and smiling coyly, the fox added, “I know you will, because it is part of a proper sleepover, and you would not want to ruin my first experience of a sleepover after getting all of the other details exactly right.  Even the spooky stories part.”

Lt. LeGuin’s muzzle quirked into a half-smile.  “Yeah, I guess not.  Let’s synthesize you a toothbrush and then get ourselves some shuteye.”

To the cat’s extreme amusement, the android fox positively relished brushing zir sharp teeth.  It was clearly Fact’s favorite activity of the evening.  Zhe even commented that zhe’d have to synthesize more snacks in the future in order to have more excuses to engage in the fascinating sensation of brushing zir teeth again.

Then after alerting Dr. Keller over the comms, the two friends settled down to sleep, side by side in the darkened tent.

* * *

When morning came, Lt. LeGuin awoke to the characteristic soft hum that he’d programmed his quarters to make.  It was a quiet, background sound that started out imperceptibly quiet and slowly rose to a level that was pleasantly easy to ignore but also noticeable if the cat was listening for it.  Lt. LeGuin knew that some sighted officers programmed their quarters to slowly raise the light levels in a similar way, simulating the effect of a sun rising, dawn heralding the day.  However, since LeGuin didn’t wear his goggles at night, raising the light levels would be meaningless to him, and he liked to know when he awoke whether it was morning yet or not.

This morning, the cat’s first feeling was a sensation of relief — he had slept!  He’d slept the whole night.  But then, with a growing sense of horror, Lt. LeGuin started noticing a stiffness in his neck, an ache in his shoulder…  He was still tired.  Perhaps…  Perhaps he hadn’t really slept after all?  Or maybe, maybe it was just the effects that came from sleeping on a thin pad on his quarters’ floor, essentially camping, instead of actually curling up in his real bed with its memory foam that conformed perfectly to his body.

Lt. LeGuin stretched, sat up with his sleeping bag still around him, and felt for where he’d left his techno-focal goggles beside him.  Once he’d settled the goggles on his face and turned them on, the cat saw Fact lying flat on his back in the sleeping bag beside him.  The android looked the same as zhe would if zhe’d been turned off.  It was slightly unnerving.

When an organic lifeform sleeps, there’s a certain coziness to their form, a laxness in their muscles, and a kind of contented air around them that often makes them seem younger than they are.  But a sleeping android?  Well, Fact had all the thick, bushy white fur necessary to seem exceptionally cozy, but zhe slept more like a corpse or a decommissioned, empty, mechanical body than like a comfortably contented fox kit.

LeGuin wondered if he should wake his friend, or if the fox would wake up soon on zir own.

Data streamed past the cat’s groggy eyes, showing him the state of the ship, engineering, various social media that he subscribed to…  Everything seemed normal.  There was no sign that Dr. Keller had needed to come check on him during the night.  He really must be stiff and tired simply because sleeping on the floor isn’t as restful as sleeping in a bed.

Suddenly, the arctic fox in the sleeping bag beside LeGuin began blinking, eyelids fluttering over zir hauntingly beautiful, gold-flecked eyes.  The android sat up abruptly and said, “According to my records, I was not roused by you waking and trying to perform more sleepwalking ship maintenance.”

Lt. LeGuin grinned widely, beginning to believe that the previous night’s antics had been nothing more than a fluke.  A weird quirk of exhaustion and overstimulation from the conference colliding in a disturbing but ultimately harmless way.

“However,” Fact continued, splashing metaphorical cold water on the warm feelings trying to grow in LeGuin’s chest, “according to my dreams, you were very busy last night.”

“The crawlways?” Lt. LeGuin meowed hollowly.

“Indeed,” Fact agreed with an appropriate solemnity.  “In my dreams, you were wearing your goggles, but I assume they show no record of this activity?”

“None.”

“And Dr. Keller was never alerted?”

“She was not.”

“That is troubling,” Fact mused.

“You think?” LeGuin blurted angrily, wondering if he really should have put himself in a situation where he had to be social — even with his best friend who was an android — first thing in the morning.  The cat hadn’t done a sleepover since he’d been a kitten with several littermates to handle the brunt of the social interactions for him while he got to be the quiet one, watching, listening, and keeping to himself and his own thoughts until he’d really woken up for the day.

“I do think it is troubling, yes,” Fact confirmed.

“I’m sorry,” LeGuin said, climbing out of his sleeping bag.  “I’m not very good company first thing in the morning, and I didn’t think about that when I invited you for the sleepover.”

“It is quite all right, Jordan,” Fact said, also climbing out of zir sleeping bag.  The android fox mimicked the cat’s actions, rolling the sleeping bag up, and then following him to the synthesizer where they took turns shoving the armfuls of fabric into its nook to be de-synthesized.

Fact and LeGuin had the room cleared up in a matter of minutes, all of the signs of their sleepover swept away, turned back into their component atoms, stored and ready to be synthesized into new objects whenever someone needed them.  Although, now that Fact was regularly sleeping in order to experiment with zir dream algorithm, zhe opted to keep the circuit board green pajama set.

“I will go directly to engineering after dropping my pajamas off in my quarters,” Fact said.  “And I will examine the systems that I dreamed about you working with last night to see if I can uncover any evidence of a deeper meaning behind your activities.”

“Thanks,” LeGuin meowed.  “I’m… well, I’m going to have some breakfast first.”

“Actually,” Fact said, “I recommend that you head straight to the med-bay.  If there are any lingering effects from the night, perhaps Dr. Keller will be more likely to catch them if you go and get checked out again right away.”

Lt. LeGuin frowned, but he nodded.  “You’re right,” he meowed.  “I hate it, but you’re right.”

“And then, I think you should talk to the captain.”

This suggestion was alarming.  Lt. LeGuin knew that he’d been spinning conspiracy theories at Fact last night, but he also knew that the android had largely swept them aside as unlikely.  It was a strange combination of affirming and upsetting to have Fact take the situation so seriously now.

“If you would like,” Fact offered, “I can go with you.”

“That’s all right, Fact,” LeGuin meowed stoically.  “You just look into what you can learn in engineering and let me know if anything interesting turns up.  I can handle seeing the doctor and the captain myself.”

* * *

Once again, Dr. Keller found nothing wrong with the distressed orange tabby, at least nothing that couldn’t be caused by being a little short of sleep.  The sphynx cat captain, Pierre Jacques, listened to his chief engineer’s tale of the last few days with his own pink-skinned ears held high in a careful, studied way, showing no emotional reaction.  Lt. LeGuin did his best to stay equally calm, even though he was essentially telling his captain that he didn’t think he could be trusted anymore.  He might be a compromised asset, being used by a hostile regime.

“Well,” Captain Jacques meowed in a measured way when the story was done, sitting calmly at the desk in his office, pink paws folded in front of him, “I’m glad you came to me, and I can see why you’re concerned.  However, I share Fact’s belief that — whatever is happening to you — it remains very unlikely that the Morphicans, the Reptassans, or even–”  In spite of his steadiness, the pink-skinned cat shuddered slightly here and his ears flicked tellingly as he remembered the existential horror he’d experienced under the insects’ power.  “–the Archidopterans are involved.  Nonetheless, it does seem prudent to get to the bottom of this situation as soon as possible.”

The captain smiled, his gray-green eyes going soft as he looked at the orange cat sitting across the desk from him.  “If nothing else, I’d like to get it figured out for your sake, Jordan.  We can’t have our chief engineer working in the crawlways all night instead of sleeping, now can we?”

“I’d certainly prefer we didn’t,” LeGuin agreed.

The captain outlined a plan that involved the yellow Labrador, Lt. Vonn, standing guard outside the orange tabby’s door while he slept and the doctor injecting him with a drug that would make him sleep more deeply.  Lt. LeGuin couldn’t help but feel this plan was less about solving the mystery of why he was sleepwalking and more about simply putting a stop to it with brute force.  Regardless, LeGuin thanked the captain, returned to engineering, and spent the rest of the day brooding as only a cat can.

Fact hadn’t had any more luck with zir own side of the investigations.  Whatever Lt. LeGuin was up to in his sleep was either completely pointless — to an almost suspicious degree — or the unconscious cat was carefully covering his tracks as he did it, performing meaningless activities to obfuscate his actual goals.

Yes, Lt. LeGuin could tell he was getting paranoid.  Lack of proper sleep can do that to a cat.  And it didn’t feel like anyone else — other than Fact — was taking the situation seriously.  Even so, there was only so much the android could do.

That night, LeGuin and Fact agreed that the android would skip sleeping.  Since the fox’s dream algorithm seemed to be somehow tangled up in whatever was happening to LeGuin, it was one more factor that could be removed in their attempt to simplify the equation.

Lt. LeGuin wasn’t very happy about getting injected with sleeping drugs and having his quarters guarded by a security dog while he slept.  Worse still, when morning came, Lt. LeGuin felt groggy and disoriented.  As soon as he had dressed and groomed for the day, the orange tabby checked in with Lt. Vonn who’d stood guard outside his door all night.  The dog seemed oddly bright-eyed and waggy-tailed for someone who’d just passed her whole shift performing the most mind-numbing job the cat could imagine.  But then, Lt. LeGuin knew in a deeply intimate way that their minds were very, very different.

“How’d you sleep?” the yellow Labrador woofed cheerfully.

“I don’t know,” Lt. LeGuin meowed.  “I think the drugs are messing with me.  I feel more tired and itchy than I did yesterday.”

“Aw, that’s a shame,” Lt. Vonn woofed, her tail slowing its wag.  “Well, at least it worked, right?  We know you weren’t wandering around the crawlways all night, ’cause I’ve been right here the whole time!”

Lt. LeGuin forced a smile and nodded in agreement.  But then, as he was about to leave for the Constellation Club to grab a quick breakfast before heading to engineering, the dog said one more thing that stopped the cat in his tracks:

“It’s a good thing I was here, too, ’cause you sure seemed intent on getting to engineering when you woke up in the middle of the night.  If I hadn’t been here to turn you back around and send you back to bed, I’m sure you’d have spent all night working again.”

Lt. LeGuin turned around and stared at the security dog in disbelief.  It didn’t work, he thought, but he didn’t say it.  Telling the doctor and the captain about this problem hadn’t fixed anything.  It had only led to him being drugged and held under house arrest.  And with a cold certainty, Lt. LeGuin realized there wouldn’t be any record of anything he’d done inside his quarters during the night while he hadn’t been sleeping.

The cat was certain he hadn’t been sleeping.  He’d been working.  How much damage could he do to the Initiative from inside his own quarters?  Probably quite a lot.  He knew the ship’s computers inside and out.

What would the doctor and the captain do to him if they knew he was still working on whatever hidden scheme was making him sleepwalk at night even while drugged and locked up?  Would they restrain him?  Was that the right thing to do?

Lt. LeGuin knew the doctor and the captain were on his side.  He knew that.  He knew it all the way down to his bone marrow.  And yet, he didn’t like the idea of being restrained.  Losing control over his own body and actions was bad enough; having whatever control was left wrested away from him…  LeGuin didn’t think he could face that.

The orange tabby forced a smile and thanked the yellow Labrador again.  He needed time to think this through.  But he couldn’t think very well, as tired as he was.

Lt. LeGuin spent his whole breakfast researching drugs that could affect sleep, learning everything he could, chasing one academic article to the next until his whole vision was filled with data, almost blocking out the view of his food behind it.

By the time the orange cat reached engineering, he had the beginnings of a plan.  If he couldn’t control his own behavior while sleeping, and even sleeping drugs couldn’t hold him down, then Lt. LeGuin needed to take something that would keep his consciousness intact.  He needed to take a drug that would induce lucid dreaming.  If he stayed lucid, then he could keep control.  Or if he couldn’t, then at least, he’d finally see exactly what he was getting up to in those crawlways.

As far as Lt. LeGuin could tell, the only other alternatives involved relinquishing even more control over himself, and that was the exact opposite of what he wanted.

Generally, Lt. LeGuin didn’t let himself work on side projects at the same time as working in engineering.  Sure, he’d let his goggles stream minor updates or bits of information across his view while working, but only if he could afford to spare a little attention.  His brain was used to dealing with a lot of different information of differing levels of importance at the same time, and it actually made it easier for him to focus if there was a certain amount of informational noise available to keep his mind from getting bored and wandering.

All of that said, the tabby engineer made an exception today.  He continued working on the side project of figuring out exactly what chemical mixture would give him the best chance of maintaining lucidity in his dreams and on how to most safely synthesize and administer it.  By lunchtime, LeGuin was confident enough about the formula he’d devised that he could barely wait to try it.  He wanted to descend into the depths of dreaming and see what had been happening to him, finally gather the information necessary to glean why it had been happening.  Also, he was so, so tired.  He desperately wanted sleep.

The orange tabby wrapped up what he’d been working on in engineering and told Fact that he was going to take care of a few things during lunch.  The android agreed that zhe had a few things to take care of during lunch as well.  LeGuin felt a little bad about not opening up about his plans to his best friend, instead allowing the android to believe that the captain’s plan had gone well, but what could go wrong with a simple lunchtime nap?  Even if LeGuin did try sleepwalking again, it was the middle of the day shift.  He wasn’t going to cause any more harm with a brief nap than he’d been able to commit last night while knocked out by the doctor’s sleep drugs and guarded by the ship’s chief of security, right?  He’d had all night to cause trouble, alone in his quarters.  Another half hour or so wasn’t going to make a huge difference.

* * *

Lt. LeGuin settled down on the bed in his quarters, injected himself with the serum he’d devised, slipped off his techno-focal goggles, and laid himself down to sleep.

Sleep washed over the tabby quickly and easily like a wave knocking you down and pulling you out to sea with its strong undertow.  Within moments of his head hitting the pillow, he was taking the kind of nap that isn’t at all characteristic of cats.  Too deep, too powerful.  And then the dreaming began.

Or did it?

Lt. LeGuin heard a chime, and he fumbled for his techno-focal goggles, calling out to the computer to let whoever was waiting at the door to his quarters in.  Once the goggles were settled back on his face, the orange tabby got up from his bed and went to the door where he found Lt. Vonn and Dr. Keller waiting.

“Fact warned us that you seemed tired and that you were probably trying to take a nap,” the red setter doctor woofed.  “You know that you’re supposed to take the drugs that knock you out first!”

“And I’m supposed to be here to guard your door,” the yellow Labrador added.

Lt. LeGuin’s whiskers turned down in a frown.  The two dogs towered over him.  All he’d wanted was to take a nap and get to the bottom of this situation, and instead, he had doctors and security officers hounding him.

With very little say in the matter, Lt. LeGuin found himself escorted to the med-bay where Dr. Keller installed him in a bed with mechanical arms that swung over him, trapping him in place, taking readings of his body and constantly monitoring everything about his state.  The medical and security canines buzzed around him, commenting on his status, and checking the various readings as the displays on the bed’s mechanical arms beeped and blinked, drawing spiky little graphs that represented his heart rate, brainwaves, and everything else measurable about him.  It was everything LeGuin had been afraid of — trapped, out of control, and still no idea of why any of it was happening to him.

Lt. LeGuin tried to research possible side effects of the lucid dream serum that he’d taken, but none of the words streaming across his vision inside his techno-focal goggles stayed still long enough for him to read them.  He’d make sense out of a few words, and then when he looked back at them, the straight lines of text would squiggle, slide away, and rearrange.

Growing more and more frustrated, the cat’s sense of horror rose, echoing in his pointed ears almost like a voice chanting at him:  “You’ll never figure it out, you’ll never escape our control, you’ll never stop what we’re doing.”

The longer LeGuin listened to the phantom voice, the more it refined into different, smaller voices, talking to each other and not only him.  He couldn’t make out their words exactly, but he started getting a sense of what they were saying.  The voices were talking like they were arguing with each other, disagreeing about how to control a machine they were directing.  It almost sounded like they were the pilots of a gigantic, clumsy mecha, and suddenly, Lt. LeGuin realized:  he was the mecha.

With surprise, Lt. LeGuin noticed that his paws were moving; his paw pads were expertly operating some sort of controls on a panel.  And his feet — they’d been moving too.  He was walking somewhere.  Why, he wasn’t restrained in the med-bay at all, and neither Dr. Keller nor Lt. Vonn was near.

The veil of the dream lifted like a gauzy curtain, blowing in the wind, moving aside long enough to see past it for an instant before falling back over the view again.  When it finally cleared away entirely, Lt. LeGuin found himself in the shuttle bay.  How had he gotten here?  Was he really here?  Or was he still dreaming?

Was this the lucid dream?  Could he take control?  Or was this a second layer of gauze under the first, just as insubstantial, even though it felt solid right now?  How many layers of gauze was his mind wrapped in right now?

Lt. LeGuin tried to stop his paws, but they kept walking through the shuttle bay, toward the same shuttle as he and Fact had flown in to the engineering conference and back.  No matter how LeGuin struggled, nothing changed.  He walked toward the shuttle, his paws moving without his consent or participation.  His muzzle stayed shut, though he tried to scream.

In his mind, the orange cat shouted for help, for control, for release from whatever was moving him like a puppet… but the shouts stayed in his mind, echoing in his ears like the tiny voices arguing with each other about what to do with their giant mecha, and the shuttle bay outside him stayed silent except for the usual background hum of the Initiative.

But as Lt. LeGuin reached the shuttle and stretched out a paw — entirely against his own will — to open the shuttle’s door, he finally heard a new sound, a real sound behind him.  Paw steps.  Lt. LeGuin ached to turn around and see who was there, but his body wasn’t his own.  Seemingly, he couldn’t even control the search features or otherwise operate his techno-focal goggles at all in this level of dream-reality.  He’d never felt this trapped before.  Finally a voice — Fact’s voice! — called out, “Jordan, what are you doing?”

The orange tabby turned around slowly, his mind flooding with relief at the sound of his friend’s voice, but when the arctic fox android actually came into view, he felt and heard himself say in a diffident, dismissive tone, “You don’t need to worry about it.  Just a few adjustments.  I have everything under control.”

“I can help you,” Fact said, approaching LeGuin.

“Go back to engineering,” LeGuin heard himself say, screaming internally the whole time.  “I don’t need any help.”

“I think you do,” Fact said, coming closer still.  Except for three parked shuttles, the shuttle bay yawned wide and empty around them, and the space between the cat and fox collapsed with each step forward Fact took.

Lt. LeGuin wanted to run to Fact and fall into the fox’s preternaturally strong arms, begging for help and protection, but instead, the cat felt his whole body tense like he was preparing for a fight, claws extending and fur fluffing out everywhere that his uniform didn’t press it down.  Everything he was doing and saying was the opposite of what he wanted, what he was trying so hard to do.

The orange cat thought as hard as he could, “Fact is stronger than me.  I can’t beat zir in a fight.  Fact is stronger.  Fact is stronger.”  He wasn’t sure who he was thinking the words at — the tiny voices he heard echoing in his ears?  And he was even less sure of the idea that those voices would be able to read thoughts hidden in his mind…

Unless, this was all a dream; then why not?  If he was imagining voices in his mind, then maybe those voices could hear him.

Lt. LeGuin struck out with a paw, feeling like a marionette with its strings being jerked, but Fact easily grabbed the cat’s paw with one of zir own, disarming the attack.  In a quick, fluid movement, Lt. LeGuin found himself spun around and pinned in place by the uncomfortable angle of his own arm and the unmovable pressure of Fact’s arm pressed so tightly across his chest that it affected his breathing.  He wanted to thank Fact and also beg for the fox to let him go.  But he couldn’t do either.

The tiny voices in Lt. LeGuin’s ears still had control, and they were arguing incessantly with each other about what to do.

“Why did you attack me?” Fact asked in an even but mildly perplexed tone.  “You know I’m stronger than you.”

LeGuin tried so hard to scream, “I know!”, that an inarticulate wail managed to break through whatever was suppressing his own self-control.  The wail trailed off in a whimper.

“You do not seem to be in control of your own body, Jordan,” Fact said.  “I think you are still sleepwalking.  Wake up, Jordan!  Wake up!”  The fox shook the cat lightly as if trying to jostle him awake, but whatever mix of sleep, sleep drugs, and mysterious voices had Jordan under their control was too powerful to be shaken out so easily.

The tiny arguing voices in Lt. LeGuin’s ear whispered more and more furiously until it roared through his mind like the sound of the ocean crashing.  The cat screamed back silently, “Fact is a friend.  Fact can help.  Trust Fact.”  He chanted the words in his mind like a mantra until the roaring ocean of argument began to quiet down.  Maybe it could hear him after all… but could it understand him?

“Help me, Fact,” Lt. LeGuin meowed, and he couldn’t tell if his own willpower had broken through and taken control of his muzzle and tongue for that moment or if the voices had simply decided to believe him, bringing his own intentions in alignment with that of his puppeteers.

The arctic fox’s arm relaxed a little around the cat’s middle, relieving some of the pressure on his lungs.  Fact said, “How can I help you, Jordan?”

“We need to go home,” Lt. LeGuin meowed like a lost kitten.  He still wasn’t sure if he was speaking — saying words muddled by dream logic — or if his voice was an instrument being played by whatever sinister voices in his ears had control of him.

“You are home,” Fact said.  “The Initiative is your home.”

“My family is dying,” LeGuin meowed, increasingly bewildered by the things he could hear himself saying.  If this was a dream, he didn’t like it very much.  And if it wasn’t… that was worse.  “I need to get to them before it’s too late.”

The android’s arm relaxed even further, allowing the possessed tabby cat to step away, putting a little space between them even as Fact’s paw maintained a grip on LeGuin’s arm.

“You told me that you spoke by vid-com with your mother last week before the conference and mentioned text-based communications with two of your littermates during the conference,” Fact said, a questioning tone in zir voice.  “Has something happened?  Something sudden?”

“Yes,” Lt. LeGuin meowed.  “I have to go to them.”

“And yet you have not gotten clearance from the captain for taking a shuttlecraft,” Fact intoned.  “I have checked the shuttle roster.”

“There isn’t time,” Lt. LeGuin meowed, feeling more and more like he was in a horror movie and not just a dream.

“You are not my friend Jordan.”

The orange tabby stared helplessly at the white fox.  His techno-focal goggles gleamed in the shuttle bay’s light, obscuring his green feline eyes.  But Fact could see his friend’s face, and LeGuin could see zir trying to read the expression in the tilt of his pointed orange ears, curve of his whiskers, and the tension crinkling the striping around his eyes.

Lt. LeGuin tried everything he could to beg Fact for help with his face, but he didn’t have control.  And he didn’t really know how Fact could best help him anyway.  Somehow, though, the fox made zir own judgment call.

“I will tell the captain that I need to take the shuttle on a brief surveying mission,” Fact said.  “But I will accompany you to wherever you are going.  Whoever you are, speaking through my friend’s body, I will not allow you to harm Jordan.  I will stop you from accomplishing your mission — from getting home to your family — if you do anything to harm him at all.”

The android squeezed zir paw around the cat’s arm where zhe had a hold of it, emphasizing zir words with zir physical strength.

“You have clearly accomplished a great deal in the last few days by secretly taking control of Jordan,” Fact continued, “but that will all end very quickly if I sense that you are attempting — in any way — to double cross me or compromise the safety of anyone I care about.  Understood?”

The fox squeezed a little harder, just hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to do any real damage to LeGuin’s arm beyond some possible minor bruising.  The orange tabby would have happily faced a great deal more physical pain to be freed from this situation.

“Understood,” Lt. LeGuin’s body meowed.

The tiny voices echoing in the orange tabby’s ears sounded as relieved by Fact’s willingness to help them as LeGuin himself felt at knowing that — even if he couldn’t control his own body — at least his best friend was at his side and could overpower him in an instant.  Fact would stop him from doing anything truly horrible while his body was out of his control.

* * *

The shuttle flew away from the starship Initiative like a fledgling striking out on its own, leaving the safety of mother and nest behind.  The fox and the cat inside sat beside each other awkwardly in the shuttle’s silence.  They resumed the original flight path that they’d been on — towards the middle of nowhere — after Lt. LeGuin had first blacked out on their way home from the engineering conference.

Eventually, Fact said softly, “I think it’s time for you to release my friend.”

“How do we know you’ll keep helping us?” Lt. LeGuin heard himself ask.  He’d given up fighting for control by now, and his mind had cleared enough that he was certain this wasn’t a dream.  Although, being trapped inside his body, powerless to move or speak, did feel like a sort of nightmare.

“You will have to accept the risk,” Fact stated firmly, “because if you do not release my friend, then I will flood this shuttle with a low level of delta-scale radiation.  It will hurt neither Lt. LeGuin nor myself, but it would be deadly to any creatures smaller than a thousand microns.”

A long silence passed between the cat and fox while the tiny voices echoed furiously in Lt. LeGuin’s pointed ears, and the cat himself pondered his friend’s choice of words.  A thousand microns.  Why would Fact say that?  Was it possible that all of this had been caused by creatures nearly as small as dust mites?

And at that thought, Lt. LeGuin remembered how itchy he’d been the last few days.  And suddenly, he was itchy everywhere all over again.  Maybe he’d been itchy all along and was just now noticing it.  Either way, the lack of control over his own paws became even more horrific as he helplessly wished to scratch and claw at his own fur, chasing the itchiness away.

When the tiny arguing voices inside the cat’s head finally quieted in agreement with each other, they used Lt. LeGuin’s mouth one last time to say, “You won’t stop us from going home this time?”

“I will not,” Fact said, an almost regretful tone entering zir voice.  “If you had simply explained your situation to us in the first place and asked for help, we likely would not have stopped you before.  Now rescind your control.”

Nothing seemed to change, but then Lt. LeGuin’s breath caught in his whiskers as he realized that his body had become his own again.  His tongue, face muscles, and ears all suddenly felt strange as he became far too aware of each of them now that they were once again his.  Without missing a beat, the cat began scratching at his uniform, itching at the fur and skin underneath as well as he could.

“Holy hell in a sardine tin,” the orange cat swore through his whiskers.  “How did you–”

Lt. LeGuin couldn’t even finish figuring out exactly what question he was going to ask before Fact interrupted to say, “Check your right pocket.”

Confused, the orange tabby reached a paw into his right pants pocket and felt a cold, hard, angular shape.  He pulled it out and found a small, silver spaceship toy in his paw.  “What’s this?”

“That’s how I figured it all out,” Fact said.

“You’re going to need to explain better than that.”  The orange tabby turned the tiny ship over and over in his paws, examining every side of it and reveling in the control he had over his techno-focal goggles again that allowed him to scan and analyze the ship.  “This is a magnificent piece of construction,” he meowed in wonder.  Then looking up at Fact, he said, “This is a real ship, isn’t it?  Not a toy at all.”

“I believe so,” Fact agreed.

“How did you know about it?”

“I dreamed that you synthesized it,” Fact said.

“You dreamed that?”

“Yes, when I left engineering to take care of a few things during lunch,” Fact explained, “I went back to my quarters and tried out my dream algorithm again.  I figured that you would be awake and busy getting lunch, so whatever had been happening that was getting your sleepwalking crossed with my dreaming algorithm wouldn’t happen.  However, to play it safe, I set up an extra protocol that would wake me up if you appeared in my dreams.”

“And I appeared.”

“Yes, you were working in your quarters, and I awoke as you slipped the tiny spaceship into your pocket.  I used the Initiative’s internal sensors to locate you and follow you to the shuttle bay, where I caught up with you.  When you started talking about going home to rescue your dying family…  I put the last of the pieces together.”

Lt. LeGuin nodded soberly.  The last few days had been a puzzle, and he’d been the picture in it.  “They were controlling me using the neural port for my techno-focal goggles,” the cat said, putting some of the pieces together for himself.  He set the toy-sized spaceship down on the control panels in front of him.  “And your dream algorithm was picking up on some sort of signal that my goggles were emanating.”

“Presumably,” Fact said.  “We will want to look into that and make sure it cannot be done again.”

The orange tabby laughed bitterly.  “Yeah, I’d say so.”  He never wanted to experience something like this ever again.

And even now, the experience wasn’t over yet, was it?  The creatures who’d been controlling him had only relinquished their control due to Fact’s mixture of promising to help and threatening them with delta-scale radiation.

The creatures were still in his fur.

The orange cat shivered, his striped fur rippling and twitching all over his body underneath the fabric of his uniform.  He wanted his puppeteers off of him.  It was time for them to board their tiny silver ship and never, ever, ever touch him again.

“How do we get them off of me?” Lt. LeGuin meowed plaintively, still scratching and itching, shifting and twisting about uncomfortably, like a cat with fleas.

“If my theory is correct,” Fact said, “your infiltrators have been using some sort of force shield to stop themselves from being detected by any of Dr. Keller’s scans.  If they are wise and truly want my help–”  The arctic fox said these words especially clearly in a slightly raised voice, like zhe was talking to the tiny aliens hiding in Lt. LeGuin’s fur.  “–then they will have turned off their shielding, and I will be able to teleport them into the spaceship that they used your skillful paws and clever mind to design and create for them.”

The android’s paws flew over the shuttle control panel in front of zir and suddenly, one of the shuttle’s smaller side viewscreens showed an image that had the strange look of a microscope slide, massively magnified.  It showed grotesque tiny creatures with many legs, large abdomens, and small heads.  Their antennae wiggled, and their faces were composed almost entirely of pincer-like mandibles.  The creatures — which truly looked like dust mites — were surrounded by tall pillars, and after a moment, Lt. LeGuin realized what he was seeing.

“That’s my fur, isn’t it?  Those tree trunks… those are individual strands of my fur.”

“Indeed.  Ready?” Fact asked, placing zir paw above the controls for the shuttle’s teleporter.

“More than ready,” LeGuin meowed, still scratching away at his fur.

Fact pressed the right buttons, and all of the dust mite aliens on the viewscreen shimmered golden and disappeared, leaving Lt. LeGuin’s fur blessedly free from infestation.  Though, it would take longer for the lingering itchiness to fade away.  A moment later, the shuttlecraft’s comm system signaled an incoming communication.

Still itchy everywhere, Lt. LeGuin accepted the hail, and the image of several of the dust mite aliens appeared on the shuttle’s main viewscreen.  This time, the tiny creatures were seated in the stations of a spaceship bridge, appropriate to their size.

It was strange for Lt. LeGuin to see his puppeteers like this.  According to the teleportation log, several hundred of the dust mites had been teleported from the cat’s fur to the inside of the toy-sized ship.  Lt. LeGuin had been hosting an entire colony of these insectile aliens.  He’d been hearing their arguments in his ears, doing their work with his paws, and sheltering their bodies with his fur.  His stomach twisted with a nauseous disgust at the way they’d puppeteered him, but his mind hummed with curiosity, wondering what their lives were like, what kind of civilization they had, and how infinitely large the universe must seem from their vantage point.

The dust mite at the center of the screen, seated in what seemed to be the captain’s chair, spoke with a whistle-clicking voice that the computer translated:  “Thank you for hosting us, for helping us, and for bringing us home.  Please release us now.”

Part of Lt. LeGuin wanted to hold these tiny aliens responsible for the crimes they’d committed, commandeering his body, infiltrating the Initiative, and stealing the supplies to synthesize their new little starship.

But they were so small.  They lived on such an entirely different scale from most of the species in the Tri-Galactic Union.  The ship they’d had him design and synthesize in his sleep for them wouldn’t have even been able to get them home — to this empty patch of space in the middle of nowhere — without hitching a ride inside the Initiative’s two-person shuttlecraft that could only travel at a fraction of the speed of the Initiative itself.

Once these dust mite aliens were dropped off by their home, no one in the Tri-Galactic Union would probably ever hear from them again.

Fact and LeGuin might as well have been gods to these tiny aliens.  There was simply no call for choosing any path other than kindness.  And forgiveness.  Lt. LeGuin didn’t want to be the kind of vengeful god from Ancient Earth mythology who would punish a mortal for stealing the magic technology of fire.

“We have arrived at our destination,” Fact announced, changing the viewscreen to show the empty space in front of them.  Except, it wasn’t empty.  Not entirely.  There was a house-sized comet, lost in the space between stars, too far away from any celestial body to fall under its gravitational pull.

In the dark, this icy chunk of dirt and metal was an entire world.

“How did you even get to the engineering conference where you found me?” Lt. LeGuin meowed, wonder and curiosity overcoming his resentment.

Fact shifted the dust mite ship back to the main viewscreen, and the captain answered, “We sent out a distress signal.  Imagine our surprise when a spaceship larger than our entire planet arrived.  We couldn’t communicate with them, but a faction of us managed to hitch a ride.”

Lt. LeGuin shook his head in amazement.  This was all incredible.  He’d known the universe was large, but somehow, he hadn’t thought about how it was also fractal — all the small spaces filled with wonders too.

“We learned a great deal at the engineering conference, and some of our scouts discovered you.  The neural port for your techno-focal goggles–”

“Yeah, I put that much together,” Lt. LeGuin interrupted, waving his paw to dismiss the part of their story that he didn’t want to think about.  The part where he’d become a captive in his own skin.  “But… why did you send out a distress call to begin with?”

“We were mining,” the captain dust mite said sadly.  “And our drills hit a massive pocket of toxic gases.  Their release…”  The dust mite paused, seeming overcome with emotion, shuffling its many legs and clacking its mandibles before continuing.  “…their release poisoned our atmosphere and sent our world into a topspin.  We couldn’t… we couldn’t… fix it.  Our people are suffering.”

Fact and LeGuin looked at each other.  No matter how much trouble the infiltrating dust mites had caused in the last few days, there was only one correct way to handle this situation.

“We can help,” Lt. LeGuin meowed.  “Transmit information from your ship to our shuttle about the proper atmospheric composition and rotational spin for your world, and we should be able to fix it.”

The information appeared on one of their auxiliary viewscreens almost instantly.  It was such an easy fix for a shuttlecraft to perform — siphon off the offending chemicals by teleporting them several hundred meters to the left of the comet, allowing them to disperse harmlessly into empty space; then hit the comet with a properly timed and angled punch from a force field, counteracting the topspin.

Lt. LeGuin handled the chemicals; Fact handled the topspin.  And a dying world returned to its original, pristine, thriving state in a matter of moments.  Surely, there would be lingering effects in the society on that world, but this would give them a chance to rebuild, returning to what they’d been before, but perhaps with a little extra caution when it came to handling their planet.

Before leaving, Lt. LeGuin and Fact synthesized an atmosphere scrubber that the dust mites could use if their world ran into similar trouble again, and also a powerful communications hub, so they could contact the Tri-Galactic Union more easily if they ever needed further help.

Finally, the orange tabby teleported the tiny toy-sized spaceship directly from the control panel where it was still sitting to the empty space in front of the shuttlecraft.  On the viewscreen, the little spaceship fired up its engines, angled around, and flew in a graceful arc down to the surface of the comet.

“What do you think they’ll use the new spaceship for?” Lt. LeGuin meowed.  “Space exploration?  Planetary defense?”

“Those are both plausible possibilities,” Fact said, still staring at the comet on the viewscreen in front of them.  The fox looked away from the screen, and zir gold-flecked gaze settled on zir orange tabby friend in a measuring way.  “Are you worried that we have broken Tri-Galactic Union regulations by allowing these aliens to build a spaceship for themselves that incorporates Tri-Galactic Union technology?”

“Maybe…”  Lt. LeGuin frowned, his whiskers turning downward and his triangular ears skewing to the sides.  “I think, I’m more worried that we’ve allowed them to build a spaceship using my knowledge and skills.  It makes me feel like an unwitting traitor…”

“Except, we are not at war or otherwise in any conflict with these aliens,” Fact pointed out.  “Helping others is a central tenet of Tri-Galactic Union beliefs.”

“True,” Lt. LeGuin agreed.  “But I didn’t help them… I was used by them.  Do we really think they could have reprogrammed the Initiative’s synthesizers to be able to generate something with the complexity and detail of an entire working spaceship in miniature without coopting my knowledge and experience?”

“Perhaps not,” Fact admitted, firing up the shuttle’s engines and flying a slow scenic loop around the comet.

The pale icy landscape was riddled with dark snaking lines that came together in complicated grids.  Whole cities and highways running between them?  Or maybe just a strange feature of the way the ice had melted and refrozen over the centuries…  Lt. LeGuin couldn’t tell at a glance, but he ran a scan with the shuttle’s sensors.

The orange cat would append the scan to the report he’d write about these last few days when they got home.  From now on, this small, rogue world would be part of the databanks of information that the Tri-Galactic Union kept about everything in the three galaxies.  This small patch of nothingness wouldn’t be nothingness anymore; it would be an inhabited location.

Finishing the flyby, Fact punched in the current coordinates of the Initiative, aiming their shuttle toward home.  “I know this will not change any of the ways you were violated this week,” Fact said as the stars streamed by on the viewscreen in front of them, leaving the comet far, far behind, “but I do not believe you are solely responsible for the creation of that tiny spaceship.”

“Oh?” Lt. LeGuin prompted, feeling better and better as the comet fell farther and farther behind.

“Well, certainly, your knowledge would have been absolutely necessary for navigating past the security measures on the Initiative that would lock most people — including most Union officers — out of being able to synthesize something so mechanically, electrically, and chemically complicated as an entire working miniature spaceship.  However…”

In the brief silence that followed, Lt. LeGuin knew exactly what Fact was going to say.  He knew it so well that he didn’t have to — and didn’t want to — hear it.  “I know,” the cat said, “they were only able to access my knowledge because they were able to take control of me by using my neural port… which should have been impossible.”

“We will work together to make sure it will be impossible going forward,” Fact assured zir friend.  “It will be our top priority, and I already have several ideas.”

The orange tabby had no doubt that the android would keep zir word.  Working together, the two of them could accomplish just about anything.  The cat didn’t want to brag, but — and he wasn’t saying this out loud, only thinking it — both of them were geniuses.

It seemed there were also some dust mite-sized geniuses living on that icy comet in the darkness behind them.  The universe is a complicated and wondrous place, and Lt. LeGuin was glad that he got to explore it with his best friend by his side.

“You know, the next time some new species wants my help with some engineering project,” the orange cat grumbled, “I’d appreciate it if they’d just ask.”

The arctic fox android turned to face zir friend and tilted zir head in a moment’s thought.  “Lt. LeGuin, would you please do me the honor of using your expertise to help me solve the puzzle of how your neural port was capable of controlling you?”

The orange tabby chuckled. “You’re the one person who never needs to ask.”  But the cat knew the fox always would ask, and that’s why zhe didn’t have to.  “But, yes, of course.  Now, I want to hear about what you were dreaming during your nap, before I showed up and hijacked it by synthesizing a tiny spaceship.”

The arctic fox’s expression brightened, and zhe began telling stories of uni-meters growing black wings and flying away like ravens, broken computer panels that turned out to actually be ornately decorated cakes, and drawing shapes in purple nebula clouds with their paws.

“You know,” Fact suggested, “we could probably adapt the way that my dream algorithm was picking up on signals from your goggles into a way to link our dreams together.  Of course, you’d have to wear your goggles while sleeping, and I know from our sleepover that you don’t–”

Before the fox could finish zir sentence, the cat interrupted, meowing, “Are you kidding?  Of course I’d try sleeping in my goggles if it meant we could go on an adventure in our dreams together!”

Lt. LeGuin couldn’t wait to experience an android’s dreams, and Fact was thrilled by the idea that zhe would get to experience an even more authentic type of dream.  It was a perfect match.

---

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