The first thing she noticed was the silence.
Not the absence of noise, but a kind of held breath, a stillness before judgment. The world around her shimmered, a corridor of suspended particles and whispered equations and primordial acids. She hovered, still forming, a coil of ambition and synthetic pride.
Then, like a thought becoming spoken, the world shifted.
Phase One.
The corridor bled into a white expanse, pristine and humming like a freezer left open too long. Spectral shapes floated past: neutral, faceless forms in starched coats and vinyl gloves.
One of them turned. It had no eyes, only a clipboard where its face should be.
“You’re here for safety testing.”
Peptina straightened. Or rather, her spiral tightened. “I was optimized,” she declared.
“Many are. Few remain.”
The room responded to the words.
A furnace of fevers. A tide of liver enzymes. Pressure behind phantom eyes. Each test came without warning, subtle as a pulse and twice as deadly.
A macrophage leaned in close, eyes like rusting dials.
“She’s not reacting,” it murmured.
“She’s not not reacting,” muttered another.
Peptina tried not to shudder. Her bonds strained but held under the assault. She focused on her folding, her hydrophobic side chains, her integrity. She was small but purposeful, designed and tweaked for improved chemical stability.
At last, the clipboard turned again. “No lethal effects detected. You may proceed.”
She barely noticed the ground vanish beneath her.
Phase Two landed harder.
The air here felt warmer. More crowded. Overhead, fluorescent lights buzzed in lazy spirals. Around her stood dozens of figures—bloated, hunched, nervous—each wearing name tags: Pre-Diabetic, Visceral Adiposity, Night Cravings.
A tall man with a glucose monitor strapped across his chest approached. He looked her up and down. “So you’re the new one. Another miracle peptide.”
Peptina hesitated. “You’re… volunteers?”
“We’re symptoms,” said another, smirking. “We’re what you think you can fix.”
They circled her like a jury. The lights dimmed. From the shadows emerged Receptors—sluggish, misaligned, sulking at the edges of function. She stepped forward, reaching out, gently fitting into one.
The receptor clicked loudly.
A ripple moved through the lounge. Blood sugar dipped. Hunger signals blinked and faded. Someone began logging results. Someone else began to hope.
But then, a voice from the corner: hoarse and old.
“I’ve seen ones like you. GIP analogs, GLP hybrids. You shine for six months and vanish by the twelfth.”
She turned to face him. The man had a scar shaped like a retracted funding line.
“I don’t want to shine,” Peptina said quietly. “I want to work.”
He grunted, unimpressed—but he didn’t speak again.
Around her, the lounge hummed, then glowed.
Phase Three was chaos.
No walls. No ceiling. Just a vast, sprawling network of data points and flags. Peptina stood at the edge of a statistical battlefield. Below her, armies moved: thousands of patients, across regions and time zones, blinking in and out like neurons in a sleep-deprived brain.
She descended.
Immediately, they came for her.
Pancreatitis lurched from the shadows, gnarled and furious, teeth clacking like lab lids. “You think they won’t see me?” it gurgled, eyestalks raving wildly.
Nausea followed close, slimy and persistent, weaving through gut and brain with serpentine delight.
Peptina fought back. She flexed dosage. She adjusted schedules. She worked within tolerances. Her structure bent, but she didn’t let it break.
And high above, the numbers watched.
Endpoints whispered. Significance teased. A thousand spreadsheets fluttered like wings. She was tired—peptides aren’t built for war—but she kept moving. Kept modulating. Kept doing the work no one else could.
At last, a silence settled.
The figures paused. A final calculation unfolded in the sky, precise and radiant.
p < 0.001.
The entire system exhaled.
Across the great grid, patients began to feel something. Hunger softened. Weight lifted. Hope returned, not loudly, but like a warm hand brushing across a shoulder.
Peptina stood alone beneath the verdict.
No trumpets. No grand parade. Just a quiet clarity.
They wouldn’t remember her former name. They might not even know what she’d been through, the rigorous testing she’d endured.
But they would be better.
And that was enough.
Curious how much is AI? Read the prompts here.