"Medical bay 1 is prepped," the computer said.

"Right. Thanks," I muttered. "At least you can do something right."

Of course the computer would think of prepping the medbay but it wouldn't think of disabling the nasty surprises I had waiting in my dummy lab.

I really missed CORVAC and his ability to look at a situation and use some good old fashioned machine learning to extrapolate what he should be doing in the here and now based on past experience. And he could do it without pulling the villainous equivalent of painting a bunch of extra fingers that didn't belong.

There was no use crying over sapient supercomputers who'd developed a taste for overthrowing their masters though.

Medical bay 1 slid open as I stepped into the room. It was really more of a huge tank, think more Star Wars than the beds you see in Star Trek, but it used some of my antigrav tech to keep the injured party floating rather than some sort of fantastical magical healing goo.

Which was way more convenient. It meant I didn't have to worry about having a respirator attached the whole time, or potentially drowning if the respirator malfunctioned. Plus it was less messy than stepping out of a medbay and asking myself why I was dripping with goo.

I held her up and the antigrav took over. She floated in, her head lolling to the side before the antigrav moved her upright. She looked like an angel with her hair floating up as the glass tube came up around her and the computer ran its analysis.

At least I could rest assured that the medical side of things would go as planned. The diagnostics in the medbay were completely separate from the regular computer.

What can I say? This was one area where I'd kept even CORVAC completely separate. There was something about the idea of giving him access to me while I was potentially unconscious and unable to do anything to defend myself that gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies well before CORVAC showed any inclination towards turning on me.

"What are you seeing?" I asked, looking up at the monitor next to the medbay.

It was almost a relief to be working with the medical system. I could rely on it to work like it always did. It even spoke in the soothing but always slightly sarcastic and condescending tone of Robert Picardo.

That was my own little Star Trek in-joke tossed into my computer systems. The check he asked me to cut him was also a whole hell of a lot smaller than what the Roddenberry estate had been asking to have the Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx voice my computer.

"Running a diagnostic scan," the computer said. "Human nominal with…"

"No," I snapped.

I took back everything good I'd just thought about the medical computer. Stupid fucking computer.

"No, mistress?" the computer asked.

"Don't call me mistress," I snapped again. That reminded me too much of CORVAC. "And you need to run the xenodiagnostic suite on her. We're dealing with someone who's potentially from another world here, and I don't want to accidentally kill her because you're trying to medicate her the same as you would a regular human."

"Understood."

I waited for it to call me mistress again, but that moment never came. I wondered if that was a slip-up. Was CORVAC secretly living in the medical computer because my air gap between the medbay and the rest of the lab wasn't as good as I'd thought?

Was he a ghost in the machine somewhere in my lab? Or was I losing it seeing him everywhere he wasn't and that was his final middle finger to yours truly?

Not for the first time I seriously considered flying out to that warehouse where I'd vaporized Rex Roth. Digging deep and getting CORVAC out of mothballs. Sure I'd fried him with an EMP, but I figured with enough elbow grease I'd have no problem putting Humpty-Murdery back together again.

The real bitch was I wasn't sure if I wanted to resurrect him so I could kill him all over again, preferably slow enough that he would feel every microchip I destroyed, or if I wanted to put him to work for me again.

All it would take was a few kill switches in the right location. Maybe a couple of Kirk faults so I could destroy him with a logic bomb that only I knew about. Yeah, I could make him better. More pliable. More vulnerable to…

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As I always did when that thought occurred to me, I stomped down on it until it was well and truly out of my mind. The last time I thought I could control that asshole, after all, he'd ended up going on a rampage through downtown that ended with billions of dollars in damage and a few fatalities because it turns out a megalomaniacal supercomputer doesn't have the same concerns about collateral damage that I do.

"Are you getting anything from the scan?" I asked. "Come on. There has to be something from the teleporter log!"

"The teleporter log shows human normal," the medical computer said.

"No way," I said. "Run the scan again.

"Affirmative. Running scan again."

I stared at Fialux. This was the first time I'd been able to teleport her when I had a computer that could track what was going on. The only other time I'd teleported her had been when I was getting her out of my lab so we could fight CORVAC.

Unfortunately back then my computer had just left the building in a giant death robot, which meant there was no way to go back and access those records and see what it was that made Fialux tick.

Every time since then she'd insisted on flying herself because with her super speed she could be there almost as quickly as my teleporter could work. At least within the Starlight City limits.

Plus I had a sneaking suspicion there was a bit of vanity involved in her never using the teleporter.

It was a hell of a lot more impressive to come barreling in with that sonic boom that bounced off skyscrapers and played hell with the local bird population, after all.

Impressive, but it was frustrating that I'd never been able to get a good read on what made her tick at a molecular level.

"Anything?" I asked, tapping an impatient finger against my crossed arm.

"Working," the computer intoned. "Still showing

Hey, she might be my girlfriend, but that didn't mean I'd lost my scientific curiosity about what it was that made her so powerful. Even if I had been able to do some far more direct anatomical studies in the months we'd been together.

Wink and a nudge. Say. No. More.

"That's impossible," I said. "A ray like that wouldn't turn her human. She has to be alien. Two hearts. Green blood. Unusually thick facial hair and brown makeup that turns into forehead ridges when the makeup budget gets an upgrade. There has to be something that makes her different from humans!"

"Simply reporting results found," the computer said, and for a moment I wondered if it was getting testy with me or if it was merely a vestigial feeling from all my interactions with CORVAC.

That bastard could be downright sassy when he wanted.

"Run the scan again," I said. "There's something wrong if she's showing up as human normal. There's no way she can have human anatomy and still be able to pull off the stuff she pulled off."

Maybe the medical computer was looking at my teleportation log. As buggy as my AI had been lately, I can't say I'd be all that surprised if it turned it was looking at the wrong log. Every other computer in my life was fucking up lately, so why not the one I trusted to keep me alive when I was injured?

"I've already run the scan five times after your last request to rerun once, just to be certain," the computer said. "Would you like me to run it again?"

Okay, that was definitely some sass.

I stared at Fialux hanging in the light of the medical bay. It was impossible. She shouldn't be human. She couldn't be human. Rays of light did not change someone's entire anatomical structure.

Though hadn't I seen some equally impossible things already today? Hadn't I seen Dr. Lana's body being manipulated and changing as she healed from the sort of injury that should've immediately killed her? Hadn't I seen her die, teleport, and live again?

Hell, didn't I regularly scramble my molecules, convert them to energy, teleport in defiance of the laws of physics, and reconstitute them at huge distances with transmission tech that was essentially a fancy use of light?

Next to all the impossible shit I regularly got up to, the idea of a ray of light that somehow rearranged Fialux's internal structure so she was more human didn't seem all that farfetched.

It made a certain elegant sense. If you couldn't defeat someone because they were invulnerable to physical attacks then instead you hit them with some sort of ray that rearranged their insides to make them human. It wasn't how I'd do it, but I could see someone else trying that play if they had something that could do that.

From there it'd be easy enough to take them out at your leisure because humans have a hell of a lot more practice taking out other humans than they do taking out gods, or goddesses, from another world.

It was devious, but I had to admit that it had worked. Assuming that's what was going on here, but what other explanation was there? It galled me that it had worked. I hated that Dr. Lana had been able to come up with something that worked better than any of the plans I'd come up with to try and take Fialux out.

Back when I was in the business of taking Fialux out, that is.

I hesitated for a long moment. I knew it was a long moment Fialux didn't have, but I also didn't have much choice. I was going to have to make a judgment call here, and I hated making judgment calls with so little information.

"You're absolutely certain she's got one hundred percent human anatomy in there?" I asked. "Like if we start poking around in there using the human algorithms you're positive there's not some secret extra super power organ floating around that's going to blow up and take us all with it?"

"Affirmative. Confirm human normal. Multiple injuries registering including internal bleeding, ruptured kidney, several broken ribs, swelling in the…"

I waved a hand and the computer shut up. Good. There was nothing more annoying than a computer that didn't know when to shut the hell up.

I had ample unfortunate experience with AI that refused to shut the hell up when they were told. The last one refused to shut the hell up until I hit his central processing unit with an EMP that would've taken out most of the electronics on the Eastern Seaboard if I'd been high enough and set it to wide dispersal when it went off.

"How long does she have?" I asked.

"Repairs need to start immediately for a chance of recovery," the computer said.

A chance of recovery. Damn.

"I was afraid you were going to say that."

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