Software engineers on the planet Iroshar had a certain reputation - they liked to make things flexible. Or at least that's how they saw it. Users on other planets tended to see it as complicated and confusing.

The Rootstock was an transport ship owned by General Interplanetary, based in North Wind City on Iroshar, and it had a "flexible" alert management system. You could do all sorts of absurd things with it if you wanted:

Automatically inherit alerts from alien servers

Create status updates that would expire and then come back into effect later on

Distribute update notifications via subspace communication, local radio, hologram messenger, telepathy, or printed letter

This is why it didn't surprise Ashley when she woke up from her nap, checked the datapad next to her bed, and saw a very unusual alert: it had "high" severity for almost everyone else, but "informational" (with notifications suppressed) for anyone who was 100% human and a member of the crew - a group that, right now, only included herself. It also didn't surprise her that her crewmate Pyrite, who had a tendency to overthink things, would get so incredibly specific with the parameters.

What did surprise Ashley was why.

The Rootstock only had five permanent crew members, and none of them were born on Iroshar. Ashley was from Earth, the de facto capital of the United Federation of Planets, and the others' homeworlds were either Federation members or in the process of joining. (General Interplanetary's CEO had done this deliberately, so she'd always have a ship available to send to places that refused to work with Iroshans, or the Ferengi Alliance that Iroshar was a member of.) However, the company assigned additional "floating" crew members to the ship on a regular basis - most of whom were zhrs, the insect-like humanoid species native to Iroshar. Most of the passengers tended to be zhrs as well. Iroshar had a substantial human population, but that didn't mean you'd normally expect to see twenty humans in the same room on an Iroshan transport ship.

It was a good thing Ashley read the alert on her datapad before she got to the medical bay.

"Next time everyone on the ship turns into humans," she asked, "can you please wake me up for it?"

Deb Morrison, the ship's doctor, briefly peeked out of a privacy curtain at the other corner of the room, her lilac complexion and big black eyes creating a bold contrast against the curtain's drab off-white color. She wasn't a permanent crew member, but her experience in Starfleet (outside of Iroshan space) meant she spent more time on the Rootstock than any of the company's other ships. "I suppose you haven't seen Misam yet," she told Ashley. "It was his idea not to wake you - we figured it'd be best if someone on this ship got some shut-eye."

Ashley groaned. She knew there wasn't much she could do to help, not when she didn't even have a proper 24th century education like her co-workers, but she felt like she should be doing something. "Is Sheleth all right?"

"Too early to tell - she hasn't regained consciousness since changing species. Pyrite's running the ship for now, but she'd be the first to admit that she's not an ideal captain, so we'll need you alert if anything comes up. The zhrs all seem to be stable, though - it could have been a lot worse."

"What about you? How come you still look the same?"

"Well," Deb said, "most of my body's still human. Everything underneath this outer layer, really, including the whole brain and spine. Whatever changed everyone into human beings, it must've decided that I was already human and skipped past me."

"Or it just didn't recognize the purple stuff as part of your body."

"Could be. It didn't do anything to you, did it?"

"No. Well, I hope not. I look the same as before, right? Because if it changed how I look, I do not want to be walking around-"

Deb held up a hand. "Don't worry, Ashley, you look fine. Besides your shirt. I think you might be one off on the buttons." She glanced over at the door as someone else walked into the room. "Most of us weren't so lucky."

Ashley turned to look at the newcomer.

"Leaf?"

"That is exactly what I was hoping to hear." Ashley's crewmate, Leaf, jogged over and gave her a hug. Leaf came from a planet of creatures with magical powers that called themselves "monsters", and any other day he would have fit the description, at least in the warm, cuddly sense: a humanoid covered in beige fur, with soft pointy ears and a scruffy tail. But the face that looked at her now was unmistakably human, with a broad nose and deep brown skin - Ashley could only recognize him from his voice and the messy, fluffy hair on top of his head.

"Did you... bleach your hair?" asked Ashley. "I mean, I get why, but that must have taken a while."

"I couldn't leave my quarters without it," Leaf told her. "I know it must seem vain, but how can I let other people see me in the corridor when I can't even see myself in the mirror?" He sighed. "This body, it's... it's not who I am. Even though I've spent my life around humans, I'm not one of them. I never will be."

"Looks are important," Ashley said. "Not just to other people, but to you - you want to look the way you want to look, right? That's one of the reasons I spend so much time off-world. Surround myself with enough non-humans, and everyone leaves me alone, because to them I'm just Alien Number 3."

The two of them looked around the room. Leaf seemed as surprised as she was about how many of the patients had opened their privacy curtains. Maybe these Iroshans had a different culture about this sort of thing... or maybe they were just claustrophobic. "This is probably a silly question," he said, taking a seat and looking up at Deb, "but my brain is human too, right?"

"As far as I can tell from the scan we took earlier, it is. And your brain activity didn't look all that unusual, either."

"How's that possible?" Ashley asked him. "You're a magical shapeshifter. How can your mind fit in a human brain?"

"It's not as crazy as it might sound," Leaf told her. "Ever since us monsters arrived on the planet where I was born, we've been acting more and more human with each generation. My mind might not be neurotypical, but I guess it's still within the realm of what a human brain can do." He looked down at his hands. "As for being magic? I'm not so sure about that anymore."

For a ship that was technically still flying through deep space, the halls looked awfully empty. Leaf had gone off to help Pyrite at the helm; they didn't need any more help from her, and neither did anyone in the medical bay.

Ashley looked over the manifest again as she made her way down the corridor. There were only supposed to be three actual humans on the ship: her, Deb Morrison (technically), and one of Deb's patients: Tyler Wade Russell, a short, skinny, introverted guy from a colony planet who was probably even younger than Ashley was. He'd been following Deb around for about a month, apparently as part of some sort of medical monitoring; Ashley had never asked, but it seemed like Tyler had some sort of chronic illness. In any case, treating him had been her priority as of late, and General Interplanetary had agreed to let him ride free on the ship if it meant they could keep Deb around as well.

"You were human before, right?"

Ashley turned around to see Tyler walking up to her. His pale greenish tint and uneasy look were gone completely, and he seemed to have a certain calm energy that she'd never seen from him before. "Yeah," she told him. "Born on Earth. Suriname, 1989, kind of skipped a few hundred years after secondary school. You need anything?"

"I was going to ask the same thing of you. I figured I didn't need to be taking up space in the medbay."

"Are you sure? You aren't going to need some sort of attention?"

"Honestly? Ever since this morning, I feel fine. Better than before I got here. Besides, it was never anything life threatening to begin with."

Ashley shrugged. "All right. I'm going to the holodeck to see if Misam is there."

"Can I come with?"

"Sure."

The two of them approached the door of the Rootstock's main holographic simulation room. Ashley reached down and tapped the doorbell button, and a few seconds later, the door opened to a dimly lit chamber built of stone, with two dozen rows of wooden benches.

"This doesn't look very Caitian," Tyler said.

"It's not," Ashley told him. "It's a church."

Sharona Misam, a bipedal felinid about ten years her senior who served as the Rootstock's biologist, was sitting in the otherwise empty pews; he turned around to face them. His new human form had given him a very pale complexion. His hair remained just as orange as ever, but Ashley didn't think he was the type to spend much time on his appearance - he had probably just gotten lucky.

"You okay?" Ashley asked.

"I don't know." Misam sighed. "Physically, I'm fine. But I don't know if I'm in the right mental state to really contribute." He looked up at the cross above the altar. "Times like this are when I really lean on my faith. I was born on a starship, so I never really had a homeworld, and the church is the only place that's ever made me feel like I was on solid ground. You know the basics, right?"

Tyler put his hands in his pockets. "I, uh... kinda forgot."

"It's a monotheistic faith," Misam explained, "and one of the fundamental beliefs most Christians hold is that Jesus of Nazareth - the prophet - was of one essence with God the Father, but at the same time fully human. I've read and studied his teachings for the last twenty years, but now taking human form myself, well... I can't help but wonder whether he ever felt the way I do now." He stood up and tugged lightly on his shirt with both hands. "How's Leaf doing?"

"About the same as you," Ashley said. "He's acting like himself. Deb says his brain scan looks like a normal human, though."

"Huh." Misam paused for a moment. "I guess I would expect a scan to look more or less 'normal' on my own brain; it never was much different from yours. But when you put a mind of a magical creature like Leaf into a human's brain structure... I've been thinking about what's going on with Sheleth. I'm worried that it might be a problem with the autonomic nervous system. Deb's basically got her whole body on life support, and we can keep that up for a few days at least, but I don't see her getting any better unless we can get her back to normal."

"That's what I was afraid of." Ashley didn't know if she was ready to lose her. Sheleth was the ship's captain, and her species, the Kasheeta, never lived much past thirty, so she knew she'd have to deal with it someday. But Sheleth, more than anyone, was the one Ashley looked up to - the one who was making decisions and helping individual people, doing the things Ashley herself wanted to be doing someday.

"Wait," said Tyler. "You were a feline. But your brain was like a human brain?"

"Caitians aren't actually that different from humans genetically - most of the differences are on a surface level. Our species do, in a sense, share a common ancestor, just like the Vulcans and Ferengi; we've been having kids together for hundreds of years. And I know I'm past forty, but I'm hoping that someday I'll have some of my own. Hopefully, with 25th-century technology, it won't be too late when I get to that point in my life." Misam leaned back against the pew. "Of course, it really comes down to what Deb thinks of it."

Tyler looked over at him quizzically. "Is she supposed to check whether you can still have kids?"

Ashley chuckled. "Deb would be the one having the kid."

"...They're dating?" asked Tyler. "I've been on this ship for a month. How did I not notice that?"

"I've been thinking about Sheleth." Ashley sat across from Misam at her bridge station, her chair turned away from the console and looking out towards the aisle that ran down the center of the room. "Why she's in such rough shape, but the zhrs are fine. Maybe I'm just missing something. But when Bel was here - weren't his medical issues the result of incompatibilities between human and zhr brains?"

"You're not wrong," Misam said. "But Bel's parents were trying to create a single consciousness. They did something very risky - and downright irresponsible - by trying to combine them. Whatever happened to turn us all into humans must have worked very differently: it mapped between organs based on their evolutionary history." Misam entered a command at his computer, then bent down to pull a sheet of paper from the compartment below. "You see-"

"Did you just use your space computer to print something?"

Misam shrugged. "Not much difference between this and replicating datapads. Anyway, zhrs actually have two brains. The organ we usually call their 'brain' doesn't have an analogue in the human body; it's descended from an ancient race of symbiotes. The analogous organ to a human brain - the descendant of the brain of the humanoid ancestor species, closer biologically to the Ferengi than any sort of bug or insect - is found right below it, and for a typical zhr, all that one really does is manage the autonomic nervous system and act as an interface between the main brain and the rest of the body."

"Like that thing where you could put a Game Boy game into a Super Nintendo. My dad had one."

"A Nintendo, or a brain?"

"Both. One of each." Ashley sighed. She missed having family members, actual relatives who were just... normal humans, but it was her own fault she was single - it wasn't like Iroshar didn't have its fair share of human residents. Maybe she was spending too much time at work.

"So here's what I think is happening with the zhrs," said Misam. "The secondary brain became the human brain, but since it didn't really contain the 'mind', the 'soul' that's being maintained, it gets replaced completely, and it controls all the functions of the human body just fine. The main zhr brain is carried over exactly as it is, and it acts as a symbiote."

"That's good, right?"

"Yeah, it's really good news for them. Unfortunately - and I wouldn't mention this if people hadn't already offered - we can't just put it in Sheleth's body and expect it to work. Trying to have a symbiote control her, in the state she's in... well, it would be like trying to run the Nintendo without a power supply. Just because you have the right adapter doesn't mean it's gonna turn on."

"Hmm. And we can't use the symbiote from your body either?"

Misam had grown up in Starfleet; when he was a child, his parents' ship had narrowly averted a potential disaster. The details had been wiped from his memory, and he preferred to keep it that way; all he knew is that it had left an alien symbiote attached to his spine. "Well, for one thing, it used to be a Goa'uld parasite before the memory wipe," he said. "The Goa'uld had a reputation of fashioning themselves as gods, and I'm not sure I'd be comfortable stepping that close to that legacy. But even putting that aside, we'd run into the same problem. Goa'uld parasites are very flexible, and they can take all sorts of hosts, but there has to be a working brain in the first place. Even Anbuis's genetically engineered warriors had functioning brains - highly unstable, but close enough to human that the symbiotes could make use of them. "

"I suppose that applies to other kinds of symbiotes as well?"

"All the ones I know of." Misam reached down to grab another sheet of paper, which he placed on his lap. "Even a Reach infiltrator scarab needs something to control - sure, it can lock the host in its armor and move that around, but as far as I know, it can't actually use an uncooperative host as much more than a battery."

Ashley turned her chair to the right and looked up at Leaf, who was standing at the main bridge station next to the captain's console and absent-mindedly looking into the distance. The console was wide, flat, and mounted on what was probably a modified utility table; it was normally Sheleth's station, and her species had the skeletal structure of a dinosaur and couldn't make much use of standard Iroshan furniture. Next to the console, though, was an odd wooden box.

"Hey, Leaf." She gestured towards his feet. "What's with the crate?"

"It's for Pyrite to stand on so she can reach it."

"Is she that short?"

"Oh, you don't know, do you?" Leaf glanced towards the door. "She's not human. She's, well... exactly the same."

Misam pointed at him. "Now that is interesting! Although it's not quite my field. I don't know if it really counts as biology."

"What else would it be?" Leaf asked. "Geology? Or holoprogramming, maybe. But it makes sense with what you were saying about the zhrs, that it doesn't mess with their brain. I have a brain. Pyrite doesn't."

The door in the rear of the room opened, and Pyrite stepped through. She looked just like she always did - small and unassuming, with a pale golden hue and a metallic cube on her head. Ashley always had to remind herself that "Pyrite" was just that, a literal cube of pyrite - even her own species, the Gems, didn't understand exactly how a simple crystalline structure could give rise to a self-aware mind with its own mobile holoemitter. Her homeworld, though, had recently allied itself with Earth; maybe someday it wouldn't be so much of a mystery.

"Got anything?" Ashley asked.

"Well," said Pyrite nervously, "I've managed to reduce the problem to a more manageable problem."

"I'll take it."

"You're really exactly the same?" asked Misam. "Just like before."

"Yeah, and... it doesn't feel great. I'm the only one who didn't get turned into a human. What's that mean? That I'm not even a person?" Pyrite sighed. "I felt bad about not really being affected by this whole thing," she continued. "I felt like I should be helping in some way. So I tried sleeping. I thought maybe my dreams might reveal some subconscious connections from my memory. In one of them, I dreamed I was a kid at a summer camp."

"Was it fun?" Misam asked.

"It was all right, I guess. But the catch was - magic was real there. If you were at the camp, you were in a world where magic existed. But if you weren't there, then there was no magic. I asked Leaf about it, since he's from a magic planet."

"And I reminded her," Leaf said, "that that's the plot line of an old TV show." He held up a datapad with a purple screen. "This data bank came from the human ship she captured."

"I was alone on that ship for a few years. I had plenty of time to watch them. But how'd you know about that show?"

"I like cartoons," Leaf said. "The point is - it made me think we might be in the same sort of situation, but in reverse. A spatial anomaly where other bipedal species simply don't exist, and never have. In order words, the nature of reality is dependent on the present location of the observer."

"The Diop theory of domain-local magic." Misam leaned forward in his chair. "Of course."

"I ran it past the Iroshan crew," said Pyrite, "and one of them's a sensor tech. He was already thinking along those same lines, and he's been trying to run some scans, but the problem is that we can't see outside this bubble - if we're in here, it's going to look like it covers the entire universe, and if we get outside of it, it'll look to our sensors as though it never even existed. We're hoping we can get the green light to at least bring other humans in and figure out what's going on."

"I know that holding position is the only way to make sure this area gets mapped," said Leaf, "but I don't want to wait too long. I don't know how much time we have with the captain in the condition she's in."

"Wait." Ashley got up from her chair and walked over to Leaf and the captain's console. "If you're from a magic planet, and you left that planet, why are you just turning into a human now? Shouldn't you have lost your magic back then? And I thought you blew up a control panel with your powers a few months ago."

Leaf leaned against the side of the captain's console. "Er... what I actually did was shapeshift my arm into a giant rock and hit it a bunch of times. Diop theory works in degrees - I lost most of my powers when I left for outer space, but I could still do some things to tweak my own body. Right now, though, I don't even have that."

"Misam's a scientist, right?" asked Tyler as he followed Ashley down the hallway. "And he believes in magic?"

"That's what he calls it," Ashley told him. "That's what everyone on Leaf's planet calls it, too. But it's really just a change in the laws of physics in a certain location. Sheleth and Misam have seen reality-warping beings during their Starfleet career, so this sort of thing doesn't faze them."

"So if this is some kind of spatial anomaly, and it's making the captain sick, why aren't we just leaving?"

"We don't know where this magical humans-only zone starts and ends. If we can't map its boundaries, other ships are going to run into it, and if they're not humanoid like Misam and I - and don't have the natural resiliency of the zhrs - their problems could be way worse than ours. Normally, we'd want Starfleet to check it out-"

"But this isn't the Federation."

"Doesn't matter. They love investigating weird stuff, and it's not like they're gonna charge us for it. But we only have so much time to work with, and between Starfleet bureaucracy and our being in what's technically Ferengi space, they wouldn't be able to get here before we have to leave."

The two of them reached a small cargo bay at the end of the hall. "So you need to find someone with fancy sensors who can be hired on short notice?" Tyler asked.

Ashley smiled to herself. Misam had only mentioned the Reach infiltrator scarabs to provide another example of a body-controlling parasite, but the reference didn't come out of nowhere; the crew had recently encountered a human from Iroshar who had bonded with one of the creatures willingly. Ashley knew what the scarab could do, and she had a feeling that its host, regardless of their possible criminal tendencies, wasn't exactly the mean, antagonistic person they made themselves out to be.

Skylar Martinez sat in the corner, avoiding eye contact. Clad in their red-and-black metallic armor, the human seemed to be having a silent conversation in their head. They were, Ashley realized, probably talking to their symbiote.

The Reach, an alien organization tens of thousands of years old, were known throughout the sector for their thirst for conquest. At one time, they waged war in a more straightforward fashion, but with the Green Lantern Corps (not to mention every other galactic power) looking over their shoulder, they had opted for more underhanded methods of infiltration and control, willing to spend hundreds of years in pursuit of their goals. The scarabs - blue insectoid parasites with the ability to control the host, bending their will to serve the Reach and their ambitions - played a crucial role in their strategy.

That wasn't to say it always went according to plan.

Skylar's symbiote had once bonded with a pair of humans on Earth. The first of these was able to bypass the scarab's destructive nature through a stroke of luck, and became one of Earth's early superheroes; the second made peace with the scarab, and bent it in the direction of good. Now, it was in the possession of Skylar, an aggrieved, disillusioned, and lonely twenty-something who fashioned themselves a supervillain by the name of Axyridis. The scarab granted them their destructive power, but Ashley believed that over time, it would be a positive influence on them, and Axyridis would be the staunchest defender Iroshar could hope for.

Skylar stood up and leaned against the wall of the cargo bay. "He can do it," they said. "We'll need access to the ship's distance sensors, and you gotta spin it around a few times too, to get all the directions."

"That's it?" asked Ashley.

"He's already got the gist of the shape of this thing." Skylar gestured around and above their body in a sweeping motion to indicate the spatial anomaly around them. "Khaji Da can see through temporal flux, fissures in the universe, the fronts of dishwashers, you name it. But I'm guessing you want numbers."

Ashley shrugged noncommittally. "I do like numbers."

"And one more thing," said Skylar, walking past Ashley with their hands in their pockets. "This stuff's hard work for both of us, so leave us alone."

As much as Skylar wanted to focus on the task at hand, all the scarab wanted to talk about was Ashley.

"Sure, she's a human," Skylar said. "That doesn't mean anything."

...

"We live in the same apartment building - if she was going to ask me out, she already would have. Don't you think maybe you're reading too much into this?"

...

"What do you mean you spied on her? You're in my body. Anything you do, I ought to know about."

...

Skylar sighed. "That's not spying, bugbot. That's just reading her blog." The human was pretty sure that their symbiote was misreading the situation, seeing interest that wasn't really there. But they had to admit - the people Ashley had shown interest in, at least on her Iroshan social media profile, all had something in common. The zhrs, the Trill photographer, even that cat boy Misam back when they were both younger - they all had symbiotes, other sapient beings living inside them, and they never reciprocated.

And Skylar knew, without having to say it, that there was no chance of this relationship happening either, no matter whether Ashley wanted it or not. Sharing Skylar's thoughts and emotions was hard enough for Khaji Da, a being who had never been designed to share control with its host; negotiating a three-way relationship with another human, someone Skylar barely even knew, was not something they would be comfortable with. Or, as the scarab might put it, "the scenario would exceed my intimacy parameters at the current time."

Well... probably.

Ashley opened the door gently. "Sheleth?" she asked. "Are you feeling all right?"

The reptilian captain was stretched out to her full length of eight feet, covered in a heated blanket. "I'm cold," she said. "Is human body temperature really just thirty-six degrees? I feel like I'm at Bsictiu's house. Or maybe his house is inside me. We must be out of the spatial anomaly, though, right?"

"Yeah." Ashley nodded. "Just a minute or two ago. We sent Starfleet the vectors that define the boundaries of the anomaly. They're trying to figure out whether it reads as a pocket universe or not. I guess Diop theory is widely accepted, but it's never actually been proven - maybe this will help."

"Everybody else on this ship was fine," said Sheleth. "That's what bothers me. There's a world out there where everyone exists except for myself. I haven't felt this way since I first joined Starfleet. For all the emphasis they put on diversity, they didn't know how to deal with non-humanoids like Bsictiu and I, and they definitely didn't understand his upbringing and his relationship to our planet the way I did. Too many of my crewmates were judgmental towards him."

"But he stuck around?"

"He didn't seem to mind. Maybe they just didn't understand me. Didn't understand why I would associate with someone who downplayed domestic terrorism on our planet, who defended a regressive patriarchal society. But he respected me. He explained why he felt the way he did, and made an effort to understand me and where I was coming from. That's why I wanted him in my life, and I wish my crewmates could have respected that instead of telling me to cut him out completely and thinking they were doing me some kind of favor." Sheleth sighed deeply. "That's why this feeling is so familiar. They made me feel like every world, every species' culture was valuable except for mine."

"Hey." Ashley sat down next to her. "If it helps, I know what it's like to come from a place that gets overlooked. That's why I want to accomplish something, to make a name for myself. I want to see my name next to those accomplishments, and next to my name, I want to see that little Surinamese flag. I want to do something my parents would have been proud of."

"I'm twenty-one," Sheleth said. "I'm not going to live past thirty-five. What am I going to do?"

"Sheleth, what you're doing right now is incredible. You've been alive less than a quarter of a century, and you're already commanding a starship and making a functioning crew out of a biology nerd, a clueless teenage monster, a piece of metal, and a woman who doesn't even know calculus. Trust me, this entire company is going to remember you."

Tyler looked down at his shoes as he sat on the medical bed. "Maybe we should call it quits," he said. "I've taken up enough of your time."

"I don't want you to get discouraged, Tyler." Deb pulled the curtain closed, a mostly symbolic act in the otherwise empty medbay. "It doesn't cost me anything to keep an eye on you. Anything I don't get from General Interplanetary, I can get from the Federation - they're more than willing to support it."

"It's not that," Tyler said. "To be honest, I don't know if I want to be human anymore."

"Really?"

"Having gotten a taste of it, well, I don't know. I thought I'd feel better. And sure, that pent-up energy, that compulsion to run and fight and wear myself out physically, it all went away. But I just felt... empty." Tyler laid his head down on the pillow and closed his eyes. "Besides, I was never really sick in the first place. It's changed who I am, Dr. Morrison. I think I'm going to be a Pokémon forever."