by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Red Setter Medic, May 2026
The starship Initiative was docked at a space station close to the border between Tri-Galactic Union and Reptassan space. There had been a lot of turmoil along the border lately, skirmishes between independent worlds and the Reptassan Empire. Sometimes, Dr. Keller felt like it’d be easier if everyone was uplifted dogs like her and her daughter Leslie. Dogs are pack animals, friendly, gregarious, and outgoing; they naturally want to get along with each other.
In fact, the red setter’s daughter had immediately struck up a friendship with the daughter of a Lupinian diplomat who’d be traveling on the Initiative from this station to the next. Lupinians weren’t uplifted dogs, but they were canines — wolf-like and wild-grown. The Lupinians had developed sentience all on their own on their small world, right at the border of Reptassan space, and Lakoina was traveling with her daughter Tava on a mission to speak on behalf of her people and the fate of their world to the Tri-Galactic Union.
Leslie and Tava had seemingly become fast friends the moment they’d laid eyes on each other. At least, that’s how Leslie had described it. The young red setter and wolf alien had been roaming all over the Initiative, exploring, laughing, chatting, and devising experiments they wanted to run. It was all Leslie could talk about at breakfast this morning and dinner the night before.
Leslie came to her mother in the med-bay at the end of the day. Dr. Keller was finishing up some work on a serum she was devising in her med-bay office when the younger red dog who looked just like a miniature version of her came in like an electrical storm, full of chaos and energy. “Tava says there’s an amazing restaurant on the space station where you can get Reptassan food, and they eat live worms and insects. Isn’t that wild?!? I think we should go and try it out before the Initiative flies away.”
Dr. Keller glanced up from the careful work she was doing with her paws to see her daughter. The young red setter looked both disgusted and delighted by the idea of eating live worms and insects.
“I’m not sure that’s ethical…” Dr. Keller began to say, but her daughter cut her off in a rush.
“What if they’re synthesized without brains?” Leslie asked eagerly. “Then would it be ethical?”
Consternation and adoration flickered across the doctor’s canine face like dappled light as a cloud stretches thinly over the sun. “I don’t know, Leslie,” Dr. Keller woofed finally. “I suppose that might make it functionally equivalent to the synthesized meats we eat, but…”
Dr. Keller weighed her options as she spoke, shifting the vaccujector filled with nearly finished serum from one paw to the other, almost as if it represented her choices. Given the conflicts in this sector, Dr. Keller hadn’t really been planning on visiting the space station while they were docked. She hadn’t heard about any actual unrest aboard it, but she also didn’t feel much of a need to visit this particular space station. She had things to do aboard the Initiative, and there were plenty of other space stations deeper in Tri-Galactic Union space.
But she didn’t like to disappoint Leslie.
“I’ll tell you what,” Dr. Keller woofed, finally finding a way to hedge the situation and keep her options open. “How about I track down Tava’s mother — Lakoina, right? — and see what she thinks about it.”
“That sounds great!” Leslie barked excitedly. The young dog rushed forward, threw her arms around her mother, and crushed the older dog into a hug.
“Careful!” Dr. Keller exclaimed instinctively as her daughter’s hug bumped the vaccujector of serum against her arm. She felt a sharp prick through her uniform’s sleeve and fur, but a quick glance confirmed, thankfully, there was still fluid in the vaccujector. It must’ve been nothing more than one of her daughter’s stray claws; Dr. Keller was always on her daughter’s case to grind them down.
“Sorry!” Leslie woofed, stepping away. “I’m just so excited! All four of us could go to the restaurant together! I’m gonna go tell Tava! If we hurry, we could go for dinner tonight!”
And just like that, Leslie whisked away like a little red canine tornado, off to torment other parts of the ship and leave a wake of chaos behind her. Dr. Keller shook her head fondly and carefully stowed the vaccujector away.
Once everything was in order in the med-bay, Dr. Keller headed towards the deck with the standard travelers’ quarters. After she arrived in the right corridor, the red setter laid a paw against one of ship’s computer panels on the wall and ran a quick search to see which quarters Lakoina and Tava had been assigned. Strangely, Tava wasn’t listed on the registry, but then, she was a child. So, perhaps, she’d been left off as an oversight — the quarters Lakoina had been assigned were certainly the right size for someone traveling with her teenaged child.
Dr. Keller went up to the quarters, laid a red-furred paw against the panel beside the door, and waited until the door chimed and slid open, implying the person inside had invited her in. “Hello,” Dr. Keller woofed inquisitively, poking her long muzzle into the open quarters.
“Hello back,” a lupine woman woofed from inside. Lakoina had thick gray fur and tall triangular ears unlike Dr. Keller’s wavy red fur and long floppy ears, but she was approximately the same size and build as the red setter. She was dressed in braided fabrics, decorated with brightly colored beads. “What brings the ship’s doctor to my doorstep? Is there some sort of health concern?”
Dr. Keller’s muzzle broke into a grin, and she woofed with good cheer, “Oh, no, nothing like that. Nothing to worry about! I just wanted to ask you about the Reptassan restaurant on the station. I’ve heard you’ve visited it?”
“I have,” Lakoina answered, her triangular ears flicking in surprise. “The greenhoppers are exceptional — crunchy carapaces and sweet meat inside. But the gugwurms were too squishy for my taste.”
Dr. Keller couldn’t help wrinkling her wet, black nose at the idea of eating insects, even if they were synthesized and brainless.
The Lupinian woman’s wolfish face broke into an amused grin, and she stepped forward. The wolf alien leaned against the wide open door frame with a relaxed demeanor and woofed, “But I haven’t mentioned the Reptassan restaurant to anyone since coming onboard, so you must have quite the whisper network to have heard about my visits there. Perhaps we have a friend in common… Who do you know aboard the station?”
“Oh, I don’t know anyone on the station,” Dr. Keller woofed, putting her paws up. “But my daughter has been running around with your daughter ever since you came aboard the other day, and well–”
The wolf alien’s face clouded, and she cut the doctor off: “I don’t have a daughter.”
“Oh,” Dr. Keller woofed in surprise, troubled that she’d said something wrong. “Your niece, then? Younger sister? Whoever Tava is to you, she’s been getting along famously with my daughter, Leslie, and apparently told her all about the Reptassan restaurant.”
The wolf alien shook her head, triangular ears twisting to the sides. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Tava?” Dr. Keller repeated in bewilderment. The red setter turned her head to look down the empty corridor, as if the younger wolf alien might suddenly appear and clear this situation up. Or Leslie. But neither of the young canines appeared. “There isn’t another delegate from Lupinia onboard then, is there? And you are Lakoina, right?”
“Yes, I’m Lakoina,” the wolf woofed. “And no, it’s just me.”
The two canines stared at each other for an uncomfortable amount of time before Dr. Keller excused herself, questioning internally what had happened. As she walked back through the corridor, the red setter came up with several possible explanations — the most likely were that Lakoina was trying to keep the presence of her daughter a secret for some reason (in which case the wolf probably should have done a better job keeping the girl in their quarters) or that Leslie had made the Lupinian girl up.
Leslie had never seemed like the type to invent an imaginary friend, but then Dr. Keller had heard horror stories about energy beings preying on imaginative young children by posing as imaginary friends. What a horrible possibility!
Whatever was happening, Dr. Keller needed to get to the bottom of it.
Dr. Keller knew that Leslie and Tava had been hanging out in the Constellation Club the previous day, based on the stories her daughter had been telling her. So, the red setter stopped by the large, crowded room with its long, wide windows that looked out at the space station beside them. There were a lot of officers hanging out, getting drinks and chatting. However, Dr. Keller knew that Galen, the rabbit bartender, could be trusted to know everything that happened in her corner of the ship.
Dr. Keller went right up to the long bar along the back of the room and found the rabbit mixing up a rainbow-colored, shimmering drink for Consul Tor, a green otter-like alien.
The rabbit wore a sweeping, purple, silk gown that contrasted starkly with the uniforms almost everyone else was wearing, and her long ears were each lined with a jangly row of gold and silver hoops. Consul Tor also dressed differently from almost everyone else, wearing a sundress that left large patches of her grassy green fur exposed and able to soak up enough light to photosynthesize.
“What brings the good doctor to my bar?” the rabbit asked in a velvety voice as soon as she’d finished stirring the rainbow drink and slid it into the otter’s green paws.
“Hi, Galen,” Dr. Keller woofed, distractedly looking around the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of this potentially imaginary wolf-child. “I was wondering if you’ve seen Leslie in here in the last few days?”
The rabbit’s demure face beamed like the sun in response to the dog’s question. “That daughter of yours is the best behaved puppy I’ve ever seen, and yes, she came in yesterday, sat for a while at a table over by that window–” The rabbit pointed towards one of the floor-to-ceiling windows showing an incredible vista of the space station. “–while seemingly working on one of her assignments, and then left. Didn’t cause the least bit of trouble. In fact, maybe you should encourage her to start causing a little trouble. It might be good for a young pup her age.”
“Thank you, Galen,” Dr. Keller woofed, deeply troubled by this answer. Well, not the part about Leslie’s good behavior. It was always nice to hear good things about her daughter. But if Leslie had been alone, then either she was making up tall tales — so, perhaps causing more trouble than Galen realized — or mixed up with some kind of mischievous shape-shifter or energy being… something posing as a Lupinian child. “You’re sure she was alone?”
“Certain of it,” Galen said, one of her long ears flicking, causing the hoops to jangle musically. “In fact, if she’d stayed any longer, I was thinking of going over to check on her, you know, to make sure she wasn’t lonely.”
Dr. Keller’s muzzle tightened into a prim smile. “That’s kind of you,” she woofed. “It’s always good to know that the rest of the crew is helping look out for her.”
“I do what I can,” Galen said. “Now, can I get you a drink?”
“I don’t think so,” Dr. Keller answered. “I have to go find Leslie. Actually…” The red setter turned toward the green otter. Cetazoids were telepathic; perhaps Consul Tor could tell her something useful about Leslie or Lakoina’s emotions. “Eliana, can you sense Leslie right now? Does she seem okay? She’s not… seeming especially mischievous or anything?”
Consul Tor closed her eyes, and her whiskers shivered. When she opened them, the green otter shook her head. “No, nothing like that. Leslie’s feelings are calm and focused right now.”
That didn’t sound right to Dr. Keller at all, not after how hyped up Leslie had seemed about the Reptassan restaurant. But it also didn’t sound like a puppy who was making up tall tales.
“What about the Lupinian delegate?” Dr. Keller pressed. “Can you read anything about her feelings? Is she hiding something?”
The green otter frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know anything about a Lupinian delegate, sorry.”
“You can’t read her at all?” Dr. Keller asked.
Consul Tor shrugged. “Maybe it’s just because I haven’t met her? There are a lot of different people thinking and feeling a lot of different things on this ship, and it can be hard to pick out someone if I don’t know them well.”
Dr. Keller nodded, frustrated. “Well, you might want to go introduce yourself, because either Leslie has invented an imaginary friend or the Lupinian delegate is trying to hide her daughter for some reason, and it’s probably worth looking into that.”
The red setter stormed off before Galen or Consul Tor could say anything else. She wanted to be away from the crowd in the Constellation Club. She needed some peace and quiet to focus on this mystery. Once she reached the quiet of the corridor, Dr. Keller checked with the ship’s computer and found that Leslie was already back in their quarters.
Dr. Keller headed straight there. However, on the way, the red setter happened to cross paths with Grawf, the Ursine exchange officer who had been lately specializing in ship’s security.
Dr. Keller couldn’t resist running the situation past the bear alien, explaining that it might be nothing — just a harmless prank from her daughter — but that it also might be worth keeping on the lookout for any troublesome energy-lifeform intruders.
Grawf gruffly assured the worried mother that she’d alert the rest of security to the situation. Belatedly, Dr. Keller thought to worry about how embarrassing it would be for Leslie if this did all turn out to be a harmless bit of imaginary fun… But then, that really didn’t seem like Leslie to her.
When Dr. Keller finally arrived at her quarters, she was still hoping to find Leslie deep in conversation with a wolf child who would somehow turn out to be a perfectly normal Lupinian who was perhaps a stowaway for some reason. That seemed like a nice manageable problem that could be easily figured out.
Instead, the young red setter was lounging on the couch in their quarters alone, reading a computer pad.
“I need the truth from you, young lady,” Dr. Keller woofed. “Because I’ve just been to talk to Lakoina, and she says she has no daughter.”
“Who’s Lakoina?” Leslie woofed, looking up from her reading. The expression on her face — which was so like Dr. Keller’s that the older red setter might have almost been looking in a mirror — was the perfect embodiment of innocent curiosity.
“Tava’s mother,” Dr. Keller woofed firmly, waiting for an explanation. Instead, she only got more confusion.
“Who’s Tava?” Leslie woofed.
In exasperation, Dr. Keller threw her paws in the air and barked, “The Lupinian girl you’ve been telling me all about for days!”
Now Leslie looked genuinely confused.
“You told me that we should go to a Reptassan restaurant with your new friend Tava and her mother Lakoina. They’re Lupinians,” Dr. Keller explained, feeling the fool.
“That sounds really fun,” Leslie woofed, her tone gentle since she could sense her mother really stressed. “But I’ve never heard of Tava, Lakoina, or Lupinia before.”
There was a new wrinkle. Leslie loved researching all of the travelers, diplomats, and delegates who booked passage on the Initiative before they arrived. The young red setter liked to know everything about everything, and she’d been studying the situation with Lupinia — how it was stuck between the Tri-Galactic Union and Reptassan space, all the treaties affecting it, and any details she could find about the wolf-like aliens’ culture — for weeks before Lakoina and Tava had even come aboard.
Dr. Keller sat down on the couch beside her daughter, completely stumped. Either her extremely well-behaved daughter was playing an elaborate trick on her or she’d gotten herself so muddled that she didn’t know what was going on.
“I asked Lakoina about her daughter,” Dr. Keller woofed, halfway talking to her daughter and halfway just laying out the situation for herself in an orderly, logical manner. “And she said she didn’t have a daughter. I asked Galen about whether you’d been in the Constellation Club with Tava, and she said you’d been there alone. I even asked Consul Tor if you were playing a trick on me, and I asked Grawf to keep an eye out for her…”
“Who?” Leslie woofed.
“Who what?” Dr. Keller echoed, turning toward her daughter.
“All of them…”
“What do you mean all of them?” Dr. Keller’s red-furred brow crinkled with consternation.
“All those people you just mentioned,” Leslie answered, her face as wide open with honest curiosity as it could be. “I don’t know who any of them are.”
“Galen, Consul Tor, and Grawf?”
“Yeah.”
“The uplifted rabbit bartender, Cetazoid exchange officer, and Ursine exchange officer?”
Leslie broke out laughing. “Uplifted rabbit?!” the young red setter exclaimed. “Rabbits were never uplifted, and I’ve never heard of either Cetazoids or Ursines.”
Dr. Keller lowered her head into her paws. If this was a joke, it wasn’t a kind one. With great effort, the red dog pulled herself together enough to raise her voice and say through gritted teeth, “Computer, please provide brief descriptions of Cetazed and Ursa Minuet.”
“Error,” the computer answered in a pleasantly neutral tone. “There are no records for either Cetazed or Ursa Minuet.”
Dr. Keller blinked. This was going too far. She couldn’t even imagine how much trouble it would have been for Leslie to hack the computer enough to make it pretend to not have records of entire planets. However, what was the alternative?
Dr. Keller tapped the comm-pin on her breast and tried to contact Grawf, Consul Tor, and Galen each in turn. In each case, the comm-pin made an abortive bleeping sound and failed to reach anyone.
Either Leslie was a better hacker than Dr. Keller realized and far more committed to an unkind joke, or something very strange was going on. “Come on,” Dr. Keller said, taking her daughter by the paw and standing up. “We’re going to the captain.”
“Alright,” Leslie said, sounding cooperative but confused. “I don’t see what he has to do with anything, but sure, if you say so.”
Dr. Keller led her daughter out of their quarters and through the corridors, still holding her paw. The red setter found herself clinging to her daughter’s paw, and she wasn’t sure why. Was she afraid Leslie would make a break for it? If the girl really had hacked the ship’s computer as part of some weird prank, the young dog could be facing a lot of trouble. But at a deeper level, it felt more to Dr. Keller like she was afraid pieces of the universe were simply starting to disappear, and she couldn’t risk losing her daughter.
The path between Dr. Keller’s quarters and the exprelift to the bridge seemed shorter than usual, almost like the starship Initiative was shrinking around them. And maybe the doctor was just getting paranoid, but she noticed that they didn’t pass anyone on the way who wasn’t an uplifted dog.
As soon as the doors to the exprelift closed behind the two red setters and the glowing lights showed it was in motion, Dr. Keller turned to her daughter and asked, “What was that you said before… about rabbits never having been uplifted?”
“Well, they weren’t,” Leslie said. “I mean, other than the original Cottontail family, but that was it. Just a historical oddity.”
“But… otters, squirrels, cats…?” With every word Dr. Keller said, her daughter simply looked more confused.
“Why would humans have uplifted all those wild animals?” Leslie asked.
“But the captain…” Dr. Keller woofed. “He’s a cat.”
Leslie practically doubled over laughing.
“A cat? Uplifted? And captain? Oh, Mom, that’s too funny.”
The exprelift doors slid open, revealing the bridge, and the only officers at any of the stations were dogs. Commander Bill Wilker, the collie dog, was sitting in the captain’s chair. None of that would have been unusual on a normal day. Sometimes the commander took the bridge; sometimes the only officers on shift happened to be dogs.
But Dr. Keller felt like she’d stepped into a dream, like nothing seemed quite real.
The red setter led her daughter onto the bridge, but she was feeling a lot less sure of herself than she’d felt only a few minutes ago. “Bill,” she woofed, “I’m…” She was afraid to say it, and her voice broke between the words. “I’m looking for the captain.”
Wilker’s face broke into the kind of bright, beaming grin that only a collie has, and he spread his paws out theatrically. “At your service! What can I do for you?” the collie barked.
Dr. Keller’s heart rate spiked, and she felt like her own body was disappearing around her, like she’d forgotten how to find her own feet. Her voice lowered, and she woofed softly, hopefully softly enough that no one other than Leslie and Bill Wilker would hear, “You’re not the captain, Bill.”
Wilker’s good-natured expression didn’t falter, but confusion clouded the sparkle in his eyes. “That’s a strange thing to say. What’s going on?”
Dr. Keller didn’t want to talk to Bill Wilker. She wanted Captain Pierre Jacques. She wanted Galen, Consul Tor, and Grawf. She couldn’t talk about it anymore, not with these people who were saying things that made no sense. Things that made her feel insane.
The red setter went straight to the closest unmanned station and began exploring the computer archives. There was no record of Jacques, Galen, Grawf, or Tor. No record of any non-canine officers. No record of most of the planets that Dr. Keller remembered visiting.
The crew complement of the Initiative was a fraction of what it should have been, and the surrounding universe seemed to be entirely composed of a small pawful of uninhabited star-systems.
“Why do we even have a ship!” Dr. Keller exclaimed in horror. “If the entire universe is just a few uninhabited star systems, what’s the point?”
No one responded to Dr. Keller’s outburst, and when she looked up, she understood why.
There was no one left aboard the bridge to respond.
Just her. A rapidly shrinking ship. And a small, empty universe.
At a deep instinctive level, Dr. Keller wanted to panic over the disappearance of her daughter, but if she was all alone aboard this ship and — based on what the computer’s records had been showing — possibly all alone in the universe, then she needed to stay focused, sharp, and clear-headed. Something was going very wrong, and she didn’t have anyone to help her with it.
“Alright,” Dr. Keller woofed, her voice started out hoarse and wobbly, like she was afraid of looking silly for talking out loud to herself. But there was no one here to judge her, and she needed the steadying quality of hearing a voice — even if it was her own. “There’s either something wrong with the entire universe… or there’s something wrong with me.”
As she spoke, Dr. Keller stood up, paced back and forth on the bridge and finally headed back into the exprelift. If she was alone, she wanted to be in the med-bay. That’s where she did her thinking. That’s where she felt most comfortable. And besides, with the way today was going, there probably wasn’t going to be more than one room left to the ship around her in a matter of minutes… and she wanted that room to be the med-bay.
Dr. Keller kept talking as her paws carried her towards her homebase aboard the Initiative. “If there’s something wrong with the entire universe, then there’s probably not a lot I can do about it… But if there’s something wrong with me, maybe I can solve it.”
With relief, Dr. Keller arrived in the med-bay and went straight to her office. The vaccujector of the serum she’d been working on earlier was still on her desk where she’d left it. Everything was the same. But when she tried pulling up the ship’s map on her office computer, Dr. Keller wasn’t surprised to find that the entirety of the ship was now composed of just the med-bay.
In a few more minutes, it would probably just be her office.
“I guess, if there’s anything I need from the rest of the med-bay, I should fetch it now…”
But Dr. Keller didn’t know what might help her fix a problem of this magnitude. All she could think was that this had to be a dream. It didn’t feel like a dream. And if it was a dream, she’d wake up at some point.
But if it wasn’t…
Then the choices she made right now might matter.
Dr. Keller stared at the vaccujector. It was half-empty.
It shouldn’t have been half-empty.
Dr. Keller remembered how Leslie had bumped the vaccujector into her arm earlier, but she’d checked it. Hadn’t she? The serum had still been in it then. Or had it only been half full?
Could Dr. Keller have been wrong about that? Could she have accidentally injected herself with the serum she’d been working on?
The serum was a quantumly entangled dead virus, designed to inoculate against any variation of that virus across all possible multiverses. Dr. Keller’s plan had been to devise the ultimate vaccine. But it hadn’t been ready for testing.
If she’d been injected with the virus, could that explain what was happening?
More importantly, could it give her a clue about how to reverse it?
Dr. Keller needed help. She couldn’t do this alone. There should have been a whole shift’s worth of nurses in the med-bay, the captain on the bridge, all sorts of different officers on all the different decks of the Initiative, and an entire space station populated with aliens right outside.
“Okay,” Dr. Keller woofed, raising her voice, as if speaking up could carry her words to all the people who were missing. “I’m going to climb into one of the med-cots, before they all disappear, scan myself, and see what can be done with the resources I have left. Maybe this is all an hallucination? Maybe it’s a fever dream, and I’m trapped inside my own mind…”
The red setter shoved the half-empty vaccujector into her pocket and then lay herself out on a med-cot. She pulled one of the cot’s mechanical arms over herself and punched in orders for it to scan her in every way possible.
The scans showed that she’d definitely been injected with the experimental quantumly entangled serum, and it was interacting with her body at a sub-cellular, sub-molecular, sub-atomic level.
“I’m in the wrong universe…” Dr. Keller woofed. “No… the wrong branch of the multi-verse.”
In the right branch of the multi-verse, Nurse Ikeda would have been there to meow back at her, “So what are we going to do about it?” And then help brainstorm possibilities.
But instead, Dr. Keller had to both ask the question and answer it herself. “Well, my body will only continue to fluctuate like this for a little longer, so I need to make sure I’m back in the right universe before it stops. Except, I have no way of finding the right universe on my own…”
Dr. Keller lay on the cot, staring up at the med-bay ceiling. The red setter remembered thinking just a few hours ago about how much easier it would be if everyone were dogs like her. Right now, more than anything, she wanted all the chaos of other kinds of people back. All the different ways of thinking, of doing things, of working together…
With a deep sigh, Dr. Keller pulled the vaccujector out of her pocket and pressed it up against her arm. One sharp prick and the rest of the serum flooded her body. “In for a pawstep, in for a bound,” she woofed. Then she watched the scans on the med-cot’s display show how her body began fluctuating at a deeper level. “I just hope there’s someone out there in my own branch of the multi-verse trying to pull me home… Because I can’t get home on my own.”
The red setter lay on the cot and watched the med-bay around her change form — growing smaller, then larger, becoming crowded with all kinds of animals, types of animals she’d never seen before, and types she knew for a fact had never been uplifted or discovered in alien forms. Towering giraffe nurses tucked her in and thundering elephant nurses checked on her, waving instruments over her wielded in their trunks. Tiny songbirds flew over her; weird gray aliens with flat faces and giant limpid eyes stared at her, murmuring in voices she didn’t understand.
Dr. Keller felt like she was being turned inside out and yanked from one reality to another. All the while, the display on the med-cot showed a rising fever coursing through her body, and time rushed forward like the years were chasing each other. Dr. Keller was certain that by the time she saw Leslie again — if she ever saw Leslie again — the young dog would be all grown up, maybe even older than her mother, even if that shouldn’t be possible.
But then there Leslie was, looking like a mirror with her long, red-furred muzzle and wavy-furred, floppy ears. Her brown eyes were troubled, and she woofed, “Is my mother going to be okay?”
Beside the young red setter stood a much shorter Himalayan cat — Nurse Ikeda. The cat meowed, “Yes, she’s pulled through the worst now. You hear that, Doc? You gave us quite a scare, but you’re going to be okay.”
“What happened?” Dr. Keller woofed, hardly believing that the universe had stabilized around her.
“You were accidentally injected with that serum you’ve been working on,” Nurse Ikeda meowed.
Leslie’s brown eyes filled with guilt. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”
“I figured that much out…” Dr. Keller woofed hoarsely. “But… was it… was it all a fever dream?”
“If you call quantum fluctuations to your brain wave patterns a fever dream,” Nurse Ikeda meowed wryly, “then, yeah, I guess so. ”
Dr. Keller lay on the med-cot, feeling her daughter’s paw grasping and squeezing her own, and thought about what she’d seen. All those branches of the multi-verse that had flickered around her — all the different kinds of animals that lived in those other branches. And all the different kinds of animals that lived right here, in this branch of the multi-verse.
“Leslie,” Dr. Keller woofed, “does your friend Tava still want to go to the Reptassan restaurant?”
The question was small and simple, but it felt like all of reality held its breath waiting for the answer. Because if Tava wasn’t here… Was this even the right branch of the multi-verse?
But then Leslie’s muzzle split into a grin, and she woofed, “Yeah, I’m sure she would.”
Dr. Keller lifted her head until she could see where Nurse Ikeda had gone. The cat was checking a display on the other side of the room. “Hey, Amalia, will I be back on my paws soon enough to take my kid to the Reptassan restaurant on the station before we leave?”
“Waverly,” the cat meowed back, “you’re cleared to get back on your paws as soon as you feel ready, and chances are, after that vaccine rampaged through your body, you’ll be the healthiest dog in the sector. There isn’t going to be a virus in the galaxy that has a chance against your immune system now.”
Leslie laughed, and Dr. Keller smiled. Then the doctor woofed, “Why don’t you help me get up, Leslie, and then we can see about inviting your friend and her mother to dinner. I hear the greenhoppers there are exceptional.”
Dr. Keller still didn’t like the idea of eating insects, but maybe she’d try eating the gugwurms. Squishy didn’t sound so bad to her — as long as it stayed constrained to the texture of her food and not the line between different branches of reality.
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