“So can you tell us why you’ve come here today?” asked the kind Affini. Her silver bark broke into shoots and leaves of a brilliant, youthful green where her nominal face met the vines that served as her hair.

Philosophy, or Sophy for short, leaned back in the oversized chair, glancing restlessly around the domestication centre’s consulting room as though the notices about ‘maintaining floret health’ and ‘proper xenodrug usage’ would provide a sudden inspiration.

Finally she spoke, her mouth feeling like an alien instrument she had forgotten how to use. “I don’t want to take another decision for my entire life. You can break me, put me on class-Os, turn me into a mindless housepet. Whatever you want to do to me, please do it. I can’t … I can’t take being me any more …” A heavy sob convulsed her body and her face froze into a grimace of anguish.

The kind Affini spoke like a flute carried over a summer breeze. “It certainly seems like you came to the right place, dear.” She slid over to Sophy on unnatural imitations of legs, enfolded her in a warm hug that pulsated with her core’s sympathetic rhythms, and used a small needle to inject the human girl with … something … on the back of her neck. Sophy felt a great heaviness seeping through her from the injection site, and then the world faded to nothingness.

 

***

 

Sophy was aware of a voice screaming with panic, and realised it was hers. While she had been unconscious, some great terror had overcome her inactive brain and body, and even now she fought through tears and hyperventilation to reach lucidity. She felt another prick on the back of her neck, and found it immediately easier to banish the terror gripping her and come back up to the present. She was in what looked like another consulting room, but one that was different in important ways. The posters were now spelled in Affini, not English and Spanish; everything was placed at an Affini’s eye-line, not a human’s; and most significantly, there was a different Affini facing her.

 

This Affini was a wild tangle of dark brown vines and dark green, spiky leaves that reminded Sophy more of a catoniasta hedge than a humanoid, although they did appear to keep to four approximate limbs, a kind of rudimentary torso and a vague head area, with a face of soft, pliable light green vines. “Oh, you’re through with the panic. Good.” She spoke like an oboe and a bassoon playing a duet in a sewer, an echo of authority reverberating around something faintly nasal and reedy. “You’re safe aboard the Affini scout ship Inscrutable, and I’m your new veterinarian, Anicia Hazel, Seventh Bloom. She/Her. I understand you volunteered for domestication?”

It took Sophy a long moment to realise she was being asked a question, and another longer one to force her body into compliance. “… Yes,” she murmured with a cracked voice.

“Just so.” Anicia shuffled some paperwork in front of her. “But the terms in which you asked for it … they raised some red flags with me, so you’re going to be my ward before you’re put up for adoption.” She stood up, in a manner of speaking, pacing restlessly around her office, still fiddling with the papers idly. “I’m not very experienced with Terrans, I must admit, and the only florets I’ve had have been from closer into the Core Worlds where the sophonts are a little … simpler, shall we say.” She finally put the papers down on a little table and pulled her chair closer to Sophy, lowering herself down to it by unfurling her vines in a thoroughly inhuman manner. “Still, I have a few centuries of expertise in sophont behavioural science, so the local Domestication Committee felt I was well suited for the job.” She puffed out a little air, perhaps as a kind of emotional expression. It smelled like rancid berries.

Sophy simply blinked at her. This was a lot to take in. “So … I’m to be … your floret, for the time being? Is that how it works? Kind of like … Foster parenting?”

Anicia laughed at her, a pleasant chattering sound. “In a manner of speaking, although I’m afraid there’s no way I will take you on as a permanent floret. I prefer looking after other people’s pets, and it keeps me too busy to look after one myself, at least this bloom. I just want to establish that expectation as we begin to uncover what makes you tick.”

Sophy nodded. “I guess after what I said in the domestication office, I’m not likely to get much choice in the matter regardless.”

“Again, only in a manner of speaking,” Anicia mused. “Our great mission is to make sophonts as happy and fulfilled as possible, the best sophonts they can possibly be. Naturally what makes you happy and fulfilled has some relation to what you want. But what you said made me wonder about the best way to domesticate you. You gave us full permission to obliterate your entire identity, and in fact encouraged us to do so. Do you understand why that might give us pause?”

Sophy’s impassive face betrayed no more human emotion than Anicia’s dispassionate parody of one. Yet her breathing showed her growing distress, and Anicia’s discordant rustles and pulsations of her core were clearly a reaction.

“Yes, I … suppose I do …” she began, eyes beginning to water unbidden. “I suppose it sounds … almost like …” She froze up entirely, and it was a long, long time before she spoke again.

Anicia simply waited for her to finish, with the unspoken patience of the ocean waiting for a rockface to erode.

Sophy breathed. Her long nails scratched at her arms, leaving long pink streaks of irritation. “It must have sounded like … a suicide note.”

Anicia glanced down at the papers to her left with one of her three pairs of eyes. “Ah yes … I can imagine why that would be a sensitive topic for you.”

Sophy laughed, a horrid, bitter, empty chuckle. “Of course you know what happened. How do the Affini know everything?”

Anicia flashed a brief grin. “Paperwork, dear. But I would benefit from hearing it in your own words, so I can start to understand your feelings around it.” She gestured to the metal collar around Sophy’s neck, which the human girl had quite simply not noticed until now. “I understand it can be hard to open up about traumatic events, but we have anti anxiety medications primed in your collar for panic attacks, you have a trained veterinarian here to support you afterwards, and we even have class-D xenodrugs to help get around mental blocks. You will literally never be safer.”

Somehow, this emotionless reassurance and promise of chemical assistance helped Sophy relax far more than any hug from a loved one. “Please can I have those … class-Ds? I really struggle to … speak about what happened.”

Anicia answered by taking a datapad from within herself, pressing a button and returning it to the inside of her body. Sophy felt a prick on the back of her neck, and a strange tingle spreading along her back. It made her shudder.

“So you were asking what happened,” Sophy said rapidly, her speech mirroring her thoughts with a fluidity that surprised her, limited only by how fast she could manipulate her tongue and larynx. “I was … caring for my partner … I wanted them to really thrive … I made sure they had a safe place to live … gave them … cuddles, affection, you know … Cooked nice food for them every day, took them on trips out to fun places when they were up to it …”

Anicia was making frantic notes on the papers in front of them, with a narrow vine that left a line of ink as it passed over the page. Distracted for a moment by the sight, Sophy burbled: “Trust the Affini to create a biomechanical graft for something as simple as a pen …”

Anicia laughed heartily at that, chattering like a corvid. She had instinctively put a sympathetic hand-vine on Sophy’s bare knee.

Sophy went on. “But anyway, so … I loved Kal very much … and then … and then …” Her nose was full of phlegm as her eyes blurred with tears. “It was the dying days of the fucking Terran Accord, and they … they got a letter … it said they needed to … they were going to be … called up …”

Anicia gently kneaded Sophy’s knee, and said nothing.

“I … I have the most vivid memory … of coming home from work … I was really tired … we were going to have something easy for dinner … synthveg cubes in gravy … again … and … and … Kal was … they were … dead.”

Even with the disinhibition the drug provided, she could not describe the rope hanging from the washing pole, the limp, incredibly heavy body staring up at her from outside the window, all the love and fire gone from Kal’s lifeless eyes and frozen face.

“I had to … had to turn off my emotions then … I had to … report it to the fucking police … I had to … do a lot of paperwork … tidy the house … sell their possessions … arrange a funeral … avoid their fucking shitty transphobic family … and then I just … kept going to work … coming home … synthcubes … sleeping pills …” She trailed off.

Anicia had heard enough. She gave Sophy a counteragent to the class-D, Sophy seeing a simple button press on her tablet and feeling a prick of cold down her spine. “Sophy, please may I hug you?” she asked.

Sophy seemed baffled, and nodded. Trust an Affini to drug without consent and then ask consent for a hug.

Anicia enfolded her in a hug that was surprisingly … wonderful. The softness and warmth of her flexible, prehensile tangled vines was a great foil to the gentle, stimulating spikiness of her little green leaves. Sophy breathed again, and the varied textures enfolding her body with warmth and weight brought her back up from the terrible memories. “It sounds like you never found the time to mourn your loss, or process your emotions, or … this might be a long shot, but …”

Sophy made a noise signalling curiosity, an upward inflection.

Anicia looked at her intensely with two of her three pairs of eyes. “… do you feel guilty for Kal’s passing?”

Sophy sobbed suddenly, body tensing against the cradle of vines. “Of course I do! It was my responsibility to care for them! If I’d seen the signs earlier … if I’d not gone to work that day … if I’d just opened the post …” She rocked back and forth, Anicia holding her loosely enough to let her.

“Dear,” Anicia said softly, the first term of endearment she had used for Sophy, “you sound like an Affini who has lost their floret.”

“How do you … how do you live with that? That … responsibility? That … failure?” Sophy asked between gasps for breath.

Anicia bent her simulacrum of a mouth into a wistful smile. “Clearly not well, or the Affini would never have tried so hard to rid this universe of all the death and suffering in it. I myself … my past florets … well … we never forget, and that weight is on me still. But there are different ways of dealing with it. Some shrivel and decide not to rebloom, giving up their place in this universe. Most of us, though … for most of us it only makes our passion burn harder.”

Anicia’s gaze grew so intense that Sophy felt an ounce of the great desire that led the Affini to conquer entire galaxies in its name, the terrible love that crushed battleships like tin cans and turned swords to ploughshares through sheer concentration of will. “We must relieve the suffering of every sophont, Sophy. Including you. And I refuse to destroy you to achieve that.”

 

“So … what should I do?” The gears in Sophy’s brain were freewheeling.

Anicia grinned, the wicked thorns that stood in for teeth on display, but surprisingly unintimidating, at least to Sophy. “First rule of your new life, little one: there will be no more ‘shoulds’ in your future whatsoever. You will never be allowed to have responsibilities ever again.”

Sophy’s guts twisted up. “Is that … is that wrong of me? I ought to help people out …”

“No,” Anicia chided, “you want to help people out, and that shows what a good and loving little sophont you are. Your owner may well agree that’s a healthy thing for you to do, especially since you seem to love being helpful! You took such good care of the one you loved. But … Kal was never your responsibility.” The echoes of Anicia’s resonant, nasal voice remained long after the word had ended, like a guitar’s distortion effect after a note has been plucked. Were those echoes in her ears or her brain?

 

Sophy teared up again. “But … I couldn’t …” 

Anicia’s hug became firmer, and she snaked an extra vine round Sophy’s back to pat her on the head. Sophy was now fully ensconced in an ancient sentient bush, something which her mind rejected as improbable even while it happened to her.

“There is an important difference you need to learn, cutie, between wants and needs. You wanted to help, and that is something no Affini alive would ever criticise you for. That impulse is the base of our entire society. But you didn’t need to help, and you now need to let go of the guilt before it destroys you. Do you believe in a world where everyone is safe, happy and fulfilled?”

“… Yes …” began Sophy, her stomach churning as the guilt that ever lingered in the back of her mind was summoned by name.

“Then you, too, sweetie,” said Anicia, drawing a vine under Sophy’s chin and eliciting an involuntary moan, “need to learn how to feel those things too.”

“It feels impossible, unless you … destroy the core of my being,” Sophy stuttered out.

“To be Affini is to reject impossibility,” said Anicia coolly. “I promise that guilt and duty are not what has shaped you into such a kind, loving being. You will see the lovely core that remains after we trim off that diseased wood.”

 

Sophy just blinked, unable to comprehend the reality of the words. It had always felt like duty was the core of her being, aside from the aspects warped around the weight of her guilt. Transitioning had helped for a while: the first aspect of her identity that had nothing to do with these factors, something she did purely because she wanted to. But soon after that, new obligations had arisen, two clusters of duties that defined her every waking hour and had frequently conflicting prescriptions, all of which she needed to fulfil. The first was to behave as a proper adult woman in a capitalist society, to be a good worker, a responsible consumer, and present in a sufficiently, but not excessively, pretty way. Those demands governed the shape of her days, from what she had for breakfast to when she got home from work. The second was to look after her friends and chosen family in the trans community, which governed her evenings and long, long nights. Most trans people in the Terran Accord were suffering one way or another, with expensive healthcare, abusive families, unemployment, harassment, and so on. Providing mutual aid was an absolute obligation for Sophy, and it led to many sleepless nights comforting someone through a mental health crisis or weekends finding someone housing. After a while, she had almost come to resent the community she loved, feeling like a resource more than a person, refusing any help or comfort they offered in return.

 

Anicia’s eyes seemed to see into her soul, and she tittered. “You’re just like a first-bloom Affini, you know that? I can see it in your little eyes. All the same insecurities, a sense of mission based on fear of not being right rather than love.”

Sophy nodded. “That … sounds … like it might be true …” Her voice tailed off as she considered that. “I’m terrified of doing the wrong thing, either through action or inaction.”

Anicia let out a great fluting coo, startling Sophy somewhat. The Terran girl visibly whimpered and jumped an inch out of her seat. “Oh sorry!” she apologised quickly, “I expect my incompetence at Terran socialising must be off-putting at times. I just wanted to show my excitement at finding something we can immediately deal with. Us Affini are experts at banishing sophont fear. After all, we guarantee your safety and wellbeing. We make sure there is nothing to fear. And that includes fear of intangibles. We can take away that fear, and in fact I will, as soon as you get those burning doubts off your chest.” A straggly vine vaguely gestured at Sophy’s white-knuckled grip on the sides of the chair and unsubtle leaning forward as though to push herself into the conversation.

“Well …” Sophy began, “How can I sacrifice that God-given knowledge of right and wrong that has guided me my whole life?”

Anicia pondered this bizarre statement for a while. “As I understand it, in your ancient Terran mythology, it was the knowledge of right and wrong that cursed humanity to exile from paradise, to lives of struggle and sin. We are offering you a new Eden, where, like the old one, all you have to do is surrender that foolish pride, submit to following the will of another. Of course, we are not gods … Everbloom help us, we are certainly fallible …” She let loose another puff of air, her equivalent of clearing her throat, perhaps. It smelt faintly of sage. “Many times our florets have persuaded us to do something against our better judgement, and it turned out to be the right thing to do. We listen to that twisted little moral sense you each have, because every sophont has their piece of wisdom to contribute. But you need never fear getting on the wrong side of justice, for we are your arbiter and we say that you are very, extremely cute and deserve all the good things that we give you.”

Sophy held her head in her hands. “I … I can’t be … I can’t just let myself go after my failure …”

Anicia’s vines slowly, gently, but irresistibly removed the hands from her face, and pulled her up by the chin to look into her soft, green face. Sophy hadn’t previously noticed the brightness of her eyes, or the ways they flickered red, no orange, no red with orange around the edges, or was that magenta? She became lost in contemplating their mysteries.

“Sophy.” The words hit her brain with the unstoppable momentum of a freight train, tearing through to the rough scar tissue of her subconscious. “You are no failure. You are loved and worthy of that love. You deserve rest, and healing, and happiness.”

Sophy’s hands and face writhed in denial as she processed these facts, resisted the way they sunk into the core of her very sense of self. Anicia spent a few minutes just letting her calm down and fixate on the Affini’s pretty hypnotic eyes once more, offering soft coos, mindless words of affirmation to every strained “No …” that passed from Sophy’s cracking throat.

Anicia was not yet done.

“Sorry that this is a bit rough for you … Class-H makes the words go down a bit more smoothly, but dirt, of course I would sensibly decide I wouldn’t need it for this appointment … oh roots … ahem,” she muttered. “You can act without fear or worry. Your Mistress will take full responsibility. Your desires are not selfish or wrong. Trust your Mistress to know when you need to stop. You can feel all the doubt in your own self transmogrify into trust in Her. Every black bubble of fear turns clear with love and trust.”

Again, Sophy’s body spasmed with resistance, and it took several minutes for the strained cries of “No … Wrong … I can’t …” to become cries of “Mistress … please … I have fear … Mistress … I can trust … Mistress …”

All the while, Anicia held her steady, almost dispassionately, giving her pets and coos of affirmation with clinical precision as her words set into the sophont’s adorably plastic brain. Terrans might have been a new pleasure for her, but it was a familiar joy all the same to go about excising all of the accumulated gunk that prevented these beautiful machines from experiencing the joy and love the Affini Compact offered freely to all.