The display read:
She pulled up the holo-display with a flick of her wrist. The air smelled of recycled oxygen, her own musk (a sharp, clean scent like ozone and clove), and the faint, sweet rot of the alien fruit she’d smuggled from the lower markets. Her reflection ghosted across the blue light: tall, lean, her dappled grey-and-cream fur bristling at the shoulders. The bioluminescent stripes along her arms pulsed a slow, worried amber. Not the steady, confident gold of a hunt. Not the deep, restful violet of sleep. Amber. Caution. Zetria -v1.4.3- -Karnedraws-
The patch—v1.4.3—had arrived three cycles ago, slipped into her datastream during a routine sync with the Arkhub. She hadn’t asked for it. She never did. Someone—a coder named Karnedraws, according to the sloppy signature embedded in the manifest—had decided that Zetria’s emotional subroutines were too “resource-intensive.” Too much grief. Too much memory dedicated to faces she would never see again. So the patch had carved out a space in her mind and filled it with white noise. The display read: She pulled up the holo-display