Sana was mildly annoyed that her first humans released into the wild after Nick, proceeded to leave the system on a jaunt, when she would have preferred to be monitoring them just in case she had missed something. Illnesses were one thing, but allergic reactions, or even extreme reactions to smells, were a lot harder to catch. Well, Nick is with them. He knew humans; he could advise the Fazzab doctor if anything went wrong.

Sana allowed Oscar Trent and Jack Smith out of quarantine, admonishing them not to leave the ship for at least a day so that she could check their health after live exposure to alien biological particles. Trent's legs would need another day to print. She told Jillian and Alyssa that they would be released from quarantine within an hour or two.

I need to schedule the brain surgery for Jillian and John, finish up the cures for fungal infections and bone cancer, keep working on whatever is making Penny sick, answer at least some of the questions from Zekel and Boik... She shook her head. Zekel and Boik were a comedy duo she had enjoyed as a child. Be careful not to call the human doctors those names out loud, even if they do fit all too well, she warned herself.

Then there's the Human Genome Project to go through. Humans seem to be missing chromosome 11, but there are other, minor differences. Petra should be close to finishing that analysis for me, but then I'll have to interpret the results.

Then Sana blinked. Wait, where is Petra? Did Nick leave her behind? Or did he take her with him?

< Petra, are you here? >

< Yes, Sana. How may I help you? >

< I was just checking. I'm surprised that Nick left the system without you. >

< I am surprised too. And unhappy. >

Sana blinked, and read that last a few times. UMPs aren't sapient. Everybody knows this. Even the Collective agrees. What in fire did Nick teach that thing? Why is Petra saying things like that? Then her brain caught up with the immediate consequences of what Petra had said.

< Well, Petra, I hope he apologizes to you when he gets back. >

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

< I hope so too. >

She considered asking for details, but worried about triggering something by accident. Better not to mess with it until Nick gets back. But I'm going to have to have a talk with that sexy monkey. And speaking of monkeys...

< Petra, did you finish the analysis of the Human Genome Project? >

< Yes, Sana. >

< Please send me a summary of the results. >

< I sent it to you 10 rels ago. >

< Oh! I'm sorry, Petra. Thank you very much. >

< You're welcome, Sana. >

* *

Sana helped Zekel and Boik—she couldn't help it—with some of their questions, then actually asked them a number of questions of her own, hoping for some past-the-border insights from the alien perspective. She could not figure out what was wrong with Penny. It was clearly not psychological. Her body chemistry kept going out of kilter, and Sana traced the pathways, trying to find the gem in the mine.

She requested blood samples from Penny's closest living relatives, only to find that the child was adopted and no one knew who her birth parents were—or if they knew, they weren't saying. Sana brooded, feeling stuck. She'd lost count of how many possible explanations she had tested and discarded at this point. I need a clue from somewhere.

To clear her head, Sana finished up the bone cancer treatment plan and sent it down to Steve Horton and Vanessa Harburg for patenting and distribution. That's another few thousand humans saved, she noted. I am doing some good here. She would take more time to savor the accomplishment once she was no longer so incredibly busy.

I'm going to be run ragged the whole time we're in the system. Sana sighed. It was inevitable; there was a whole world of eight billion primitives who desperately needed her help, and she couldn't sort out their entire biosphere without...

Biosphere. Monkeys.

Sana called up information on human evolutionary theory, and the evidence for it. There was the usual set of ideas; Sana had skimmed past them, not noticing their importance the first time through. She had assumed, because so many humans rejected the idea of evolution, that there was a large gap in the fossil record, and no close ancestors, the same as for Goldaskians. They even had the same term for it, the "missing link."

Only there wasn't one.

Not on Earth.

It can't be... Sana stared. Could it be the other way? No. Taking an evolved organism and removing an entire chromosome should be nonviable. And for every other Goldaskian chromosome that's exactly what happens—except for chromosome eleven. We always thought it was a fluke, a handful of freakish genetic variants in our distant past. It just was.

We knew that that chromosome had been tampered with by our uplifters, but I don't know whether researchers ever considered the possibility that the entire chromosome was artificial.

Humans don't have a missing link. They evolved here. Without assistance. Holy fucking shit.

I think I just found the Goldaskian missing link.

Humans are the origin species for the Goldaskians.

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