"No buts. Sleep. Now." The wolf's electronic voice punctuated his headbutts in Zax's legs.

Zax let himself fall on his bed as he was forced to take a break. His helper followed suit, jumping on him and forcing him to actually rest. He wasn't pinned, but Migo wouldn't let him move away. He had quickly understood the human couldn't be trusted with taking care of his own needs when there were no life obligations to pace him. Something about not needing to comply with an algorithm and the lack of a day-night cycle.

For any outside observer, it was the typical scene of a dysfunctional person being taken care of by their emotional support pet. This deception was a precaution. They hadn't detected any spying bugs, but they would only notice the electronic ones, and it didn't hurt to be careful.

The human wasn't actually that dysfunctional. He could pace himself forcefully, thank you very much.

Secondly, they were not sleeping at all. They could communicate without sound or movement; ideal for hidden discussions. Usually about nanotechnology.

Zax was already storing nanites in his body, but Migo's expertise took it two levels further. Better compaction, dedicated storage spaces with better, stable isolation, less interference with the body, ease of access; there was a lot more to improve than he suspected. He would soon be able to convert some of those spaces in miniature production chambers. The nanites would be of low quality at first, but he was confident in improving them later. It would be slow, but it would theoretically provide him with a never truly empty supply of nanites, provided he kept ingesting the right materials.

Migo had advanced on his own projects too, as training for using nanites outside his body. He couldn't obtain or make nanites that he could risk putting in his brain, so neural interfaces were impossible. Keyboards were hard to manipulate with paws, so custom programs were also out of reach. Construction had always been a pipe dream. Not anymore.

He took to his brand-new interface like a natural, and designed his own HUD from scratch. His canine neural patterns didn't match a human's; so not much choice anyway. In no time, he was improvising functioning software. Hardware manipulation was still a challenge, however.

"Now you only need practical experience." His teacher had proudly stated. "Your main project will definitely help."

His main project.

Giving himself a human voice.

An old idea the wolf had thrown when asked, without thinking. His teacher had latched onto it, and his lesson plan followed the different aspects required. Turned out, it required at least basic notions in most aspects of nanite construction.

He settled on a thought-to-speech collar, controlled via his interface. The wolf was so overjoyed the first time it produced an actual word at his will. Then forlorn. It wasn't hard to figure why.

An old dream had been fulfilled; too late to matter.

Those he wanted to speak with, were no more.

His teacher had stayed on the side. A silent but open friendship, born of shared loss.

There was still much to improve on, so the lessons continued for both.

The close contact required to communicate in secret – another point to improve – let Zax train in feeling the meridians in who he was touching. Without the physical activity, his perception was hazy, but he was steadily improving.

By then he had sorted enough data to deduce theoretical meridian maps from purely physical templates. Details like the difference between fur, hairs and feathers were still hazy, but anatomy, the general structure, was a solved issue. After the simulation on Aran's and SG's physical template, meditation made him certain his results were correct. It was unpleasant to be unable to explain it, but he was.

It all but confirmed the most obvious theory: the 3G mutated organisms by rearranging their meridians. How? Why? What made it decide which change for who? Still a mystery. A more advanced mutant's map was neither simpler nor more complex, nor more stable; the meridians were not wider or thicker or anything the hobbyist could discern. It was simply… further and further away from the original configuration.

Probably why mutations don't affect the DNA. The meridians are not related.

This realisation led to another, which should have been painfully obvious: the maps were not unique to the individual. There was a universal map for humans in general, and one for dogs, cats, canaries, turtles, and so on. Minor differences happened based on age, health, past surgeries, even an obsolete notion like ethnicity. He wouldn't have noticed this one without the research around his personal hypothesis about 3G activations; the one about ancestral memory affecting the pool of possible mutation options on a given individual.

Gender was another issue, affecting the meridian's configuration more deeply than any mutation. Hip's map would certainly shed some light on this particular enigma, but it would be a future study.

Once it had dawned on him, it was almost trivial to match Migo's map with advanced canine mutants. From there, matching with less and less advanced mutations was natural. There was a process to the changes, and having both ends of the spectrum made it easy to identify.

It wasn't as complex as it seemed, there was a clear logic to the changes. Preparation for the next step, without outward effect. Each step building on the previous one. There seemed to be signs when a trait was complete, there was no foundation for the next stage. They were reversible too; mutating canine traits on a human was the same path as mutating human traits on a canine, only in reverse. Would it cost more 3G? The same?

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More importantly, there was a certain possibility. An incredible, awesome, alarming possibility.

During meditation, Zax was aware of his meridians and felt he could change them. Re-route them. Could he maybe…

Mutate himself?

Replace the 3G?

For himself, and others?

And even… decide the result?

He didn't dare to push the thought further. He wasn't sure he wanted to. As pleasurable as they had been, Pimp's attempts had reminded him why he had given up, years ago. Would he be able to handle another failure? It had taken Aran's subconscious pointing it out before he considered the possibility.

It's too much power for a single person.

He couldn't see anything stopping him. Besides himself. It was terrifying. It made him so much more careful about experimentation.

That extra care made him focus on his own map – which he had always neglected – and see it didn't match with his body. Mostly in the legs. It threw a wrench in all his observations, until he realised his legs were changing.

For real. It was slow, so slow his nanites didn't flag the difference between his routine scans, but it was observable when comparing his current state with a week earlier, and the week before, right up to the incident with Aran's activation. The one that had knocked him unconscious and made him sensitive to meridians. It had apparently done more; it had changed his map to something closer to Aran's and SG's. More proof that nanite resonance and 3G were related. And his body was gradually following the new blueprints.

"Didn't you notice your shoes were getting tighter?" Migo queried.

"I did, but I chalked it up on the stress and/or lack of sleep. Becoming digitigrade without even activating never crossed my mind, somehow."

It was what the reversed scan-to-map simulation deduced. It was coherent with the future projections of the scans. No sign of coming fur or scale though, only the same skin as usual.

He had actually done it. Or it had been done to him. He could do it to others.

He should be delighted. Part of him was.

Most of him was terrified.

Even more disturbing, the more Zax focused, the more certain he was he could affect other people's meridians even without seeing them clearly. The changes in his map were surgical, in their precision. Doing it on purpose was still unthinkable. What he could do, with his current hazy perception, was to whomp a hammer.

No way it wouldn't harm the subject.

He even had an inkling of what it would do. His adventure in the Core had given him enough nightmares. He wouldn't try. He didn't even tell Migo about meridians. Only about the shock he had and the other consequences.

His helper might learn about it in other ways, however. Zax had mentioned the resonance and its effects. The wolf was interested and had taken to meditate with them. It was an uphill battle, he wasn't the type to stay in place, but he would join them eventually. It would be good data too, testing the effect of the amount of nanite and 3G, and a safer experiment.

No success tonight though.

The next day, a surprise arrived between a patient and an experiment. Pimp paid them a visit. They knew he would sooner or later, but they hadn't heard word of him since he put them in the lab. The dotter had asked Hip, but were invariably met with a curt "None of your business", with the occasional "Know your place".

"Hey boy. I finally caught up with my tasks. Hope it was enough for you to settle. We really overdid it, next time we'll have to stop even if we're not done." The towering man smiled as he waltzed in.

"Hello Boss. I was already done several times over, so I won't complain." Zax sighed as he sat on his stool.

"Haha, I guess. I heard you hardly left this lab since I set you in? You know you can't neglect your physical conditioning." Pimp took a serious tone, staying upright as the chairs couldn't handle his mass.

"I was told without ambiguity 'If you ever try to leave, you'll be executed and I'll make sure they take their time and enjoy it'. So, no, I didn't try to leave." Zax glared, unamused. "Though I admit, I haven't worked out as much as I could have. I could never dive so much in my experiments before." He amended, contrite and embarrassed.

Pimp blinked at the quote, but took it in stride and pushed the conversation:

"You did a lot in little time, so I suppose it was worth it. I didn't think you'd be ready to welcome patients yet. I already drafted training schedules for them, in a fraction of the usual time, thanks to your scans."

Zax kept the meridian-related files in his personal nanites, but the rest was on the lab's computer. He had not been aware of a network connection though; which confirmed his privacy wasn't a concept to them. Not a tall price for a dotter, but he'd rather be warned about it.

To keep in mind.

"That'll give me more time to focus on you and it'll drive the price up for future consultations." The hunk concluded.

Somehow it didn't feel as ominous as it sounded.

"What do you think of life here? You haven't seen much yet, but you talked with a lot of people."

Zax actually had to think about it.

"Not at all what I expected. In a good way. Mostly." He struggled to articulate his thoughts. "I'm sure my sample is biased, but everyone I talked to was born in the Black Market or joined willingly. Sort of. In a that's-the-least-worst option kind of deal. Debts to pay, for unique but necessary services. They knew what they were getting into, at least. It feels… weird. It's like you… you're not a burden on the Shelter? Like, you provide people with options we don't normally have? The price is steep, morality and ethics are out of the window, but you're filling a missing role. You, don't take more than you give to the Shelter. A necessary evil? I can kinda understand why the Main Computer doesn't take action against you, I think."

As wrong as it sounded, it was his honest conclusion. SG had been an extreme case; Aran's was more common.

"I wouldn't recommend coming here to any who can help it, but most of it isn't a fate worse than death. Some parts are though; you're going too far when there's no punishments or consequences, like deep in your social circles."

An unfortunate but unavoidable part of human nature.

"I guess I consider myself lucky?" He added, distractingly scratching Migo's back.

[Migo: Even I have to admit, it could be worse.]

"Really?" Pimp raised an eyebrow. "Then why do you look so mad when you talk about it?"

"I'm not mad, I'm disappointed." His shoulders slouched. "Outside the dot, I was faced with incompetence almost everywhere, at every social level. People who needed me or my services kept acting like pure morons for the stupidest reasons, if any. Like the fact they needed me more than I needed them never occurred to them!" He straightened in his chair. "Then, the first time I see some competence, it's my own kidnapping! Second time, it's by not being unduly mistreated by criminals. Even when they dislike me."

Hip never hid his disdain toward the new recruit, but it had never hindered his job.

"Sorry, I just… I don't know what to feel." He deflated on his chair.

"Well, if you appreciate competency, I think you'll like what I planned next." Pimp smirked.

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