Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station
A first-person interactive science fiction narrative follows a character who is bitten by an insect on an interplanetary relay station and seeks medical attention. The story uses a choose-your-own-adventure format to depict the bureaucratic absurdity and futility of the station's healthcare system. The protagonist encounters various alien species and procedural loops that prevent them from receiving timely treatment.
- ▪The story is an interactive fiction piece included in the anthology Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017.
- ▪The setting is a relay station in orbit between Saturn and Uranus where the medical clinic has a six-hour wait time.
- ▪The narrative features alien species such as Saturnian slug-monkeys and Uranian Doodoos who complicate the medical intake process.
- ▪The plot structure relies on circular loops to emphasize the hopelessness of navigating the station's medical bureaucracy.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Lightspeed Magazine |
| Canonical URL | https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/welcome-to-the-medical-clinic-at-the-interplanetary-relay-station/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:08:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-26T21:05:40.759Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-26T21:05:40.759Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | nepo9nyynjnB · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A. You take a shortcut through the hydroponics bay on your way to work, and notice that the tomato plants are covered in tiny crawling insects that look like miniature beetles. One of the insects skitters up your leg, so you reach down and brush it off. It bites your hand. The area around the bite turns purple and swollen. You run down a long metal hallway to the Medical Clinic, grateful for the artificially generated gravity that defies the laws of physics and yet is surprisingly common in fictional space stations. The sign on the clinic door says “hours since the last patient death:” The number currently posted on the sign is zero. If you enter the clinic anyway, go to C. If you seek medical care elsewhere, go to B.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Lightspeed Magazine.
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