It's a Thursday, and Poob has it for Salvador Green in the form of an HR chatbot.

Sal wants to transition gracefully at work. She already knows who she is. She's just got to jump through the typical hoops to let everyone else know.

The only problem is that her employers, Poob International, have replaced HR with an LLM. "AI".

And she lets herself get into an argument with it that follows her home and gets into her head, literally.

This opens up a whole new world to her, and exposes Sal to the future of Poob International, and its designs to begin streaming blood. And now it's just a question of whose blood it will be.

Meanwhile, Catherine, her brother's dog, wants to go for a longer walk.

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Note: we ALMOST tagged this story as a tragedy, but it really depends on your perspective and how you end up reading the last chapter—be prepared to have mixed feelings about that depending on what kind of therian you are. Also, it would be cool if there was a "questions unanswered" tag, because that would be appropriate too. Think John Carpeter's THE THING, maybe, in terms of what that means.

Finally, we checked GORE, SEXUAL CONTENT, and STRONG LANGUAGE for very good and solid reason this time. But there's no actual sex.