On January 1, 2002, a magazine called Gyo published a comic by Junji Ito called, in the English translation, the Enigma of Amigara Fault.

If you are an Earthling, and you are the type of person to read my book, I’m pretty sure you’ve read that comic.

So, like. Spoilers, though, if you haven’t. 

However, this is a horror comic and you might want it to be spoiled for you. Still very much worth reading.

Just do not read it if you are considering transitioning or are in your early years of transitioning.

It’s not an allegory for transition. But I read it early in our transition, and it made me feel sick in a very bad way.

Here’s why. Here are the spoilers.

After a big earthquake, a shift in the Earth at Amigara fault reveals a bunch of human shaped holes.

People, upon seeing the holes, sometimes recognize their own silhouette in one of the holes, and get the idea that that hole was made for them. And then nothing can stop them from making their way to the hole, stripping off their clothes, and jumping in.

At a certain point, there is a whole conversation in the story where a man is talking to a woman who wants to go into her hole. She’s absolutely obsessed with it. And he’s trying to dissuade her.

He says that nobody knows where the holes go, and that if there’s nothing but pain and death on the other side, she will be making the plunge for nothing but that pain and death. Everyone who has entered their hole has not come out, and no one knows what’s happened to them.

This is not like transition. It is like death.

But, there often comes a point in a trans person’s life, when they are considering transition, where the people closest to them will initiate this same conversation.

They say shit like, “This is a permanent change. You don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And you can’t go back. It will be like you’ve died, or you’ll want to.”

And you, as a trans person, will retort with, “But, this will make me happier. I have to do it. I just know I do. This is who and what I am, and I need to be authentic to myself.”

And to that loved one, you will sound like you’re saying, “This is my hole. It is shaped like me. It is meant for me. I need to go in my hole!”

And the argument will go nowhere, and you will both feel like shit. And the transphobe will deserve to feel like shit, and won’t feel like shit enough. And you’ll feel more like shit, and very, very scared.

Listen to me.

Transition is not the Enigma at Amigara Fault. We know how it ends up. We know the results. There are millions of other trans people who are demonstrably, measurably happier, and more beautiful because of it, because they took the leap of transition, and we can see them all.

Don’t read that comic when you’re anywhere near that state of doubt. Read it when you are more safe. Please.

But it is still a good, and possibly important comic.

You’ve seen the memes, I’m sure.

Now, the Tunnel.

The Tunnel that I just went through.

That is the Enigma at Amigara Fault.

Do not go through the Tunnel.

Do not.

Ever.

Don’t do this.

Of course, it’s going to be hard for you to do so, because it’s inside the head of our system, now. Phage was thoughtful in doing that. But, if you do get the chance, don’t.

Earthlings were not meant to go to space this way.

OK.

Meltdown done.

Carry on.

—

“You missed the sundeath,” Ashwin said.

“I think I needed to.”

“It’s OK.”

“It feels easier to be outside during the nighttime,” I said.

“Interesting,” Ashwin said. “For me, on Earth, I feel better if there are clouds covering the sky. You might like an overcast sky better here, too.”

I took a breath and nodded in my Earthly way, looking carefully down at the walkway as I crawled along it. We were headed toward a beach.

The city I’d chosen to live under was named Frra, and it was near a body of water. I’d chosen it because, if I pretended that Tenmouth Sound was actually the Puget Sound, Frra would be approximately where Portland was in relation to it.

Not exactly, but close enough.

The geography around it was nothing like Oregon, of course. Nothing at all like it.

And trees had either fiery red or piss yellow trunks and leaves and needles of all the shades and hues of purple. The biggest leaves, those of what I’m calling a hex willow, are an electric translucent indigo.

There was really nothing about Frra that was like Portland.

For one, Portland could not hope to match the diversity of people that Frra had. Which was a point in Frra’s favor, really.

But, it also just happened to be the city where the Pembers had hatched, and where Ashwin had grown up. And Ashwin was very pleased with my choice.

“This might not be a good idea,” Ashwin said. “It might be too much on your first day here.”

“I think it’ll be good for me,” I said. “I just really miss Erik and the Murmuration, and especially Sarah. And I’m going to always miss them now.”

“Every time you merge with your other self, it makes it better,” Ashwin said. “You really should do it more frequently than once every thirty-one of your days.”

“Maybe.”

“You should. Do it. For yourself. Please.”

“OK.”

“Take this all with baby steps,” Ashwin said. “You just leapt across the entire cosmos. It is a very silly thing to do when your legs are only so long.”

“You say ‘baby steps’ here?” I asked, looking over at nem. I could never look up at nem in our current exobodies, unless nem was standing on something very tall, and I wasn’t.

As it was, when I was looking at the ground, the entirety of nems body was visible in my excellent peripheral vision.

“It is your idiom,” nem said. “But it makes sense even here. Especially now.”

“Why isn’t it an idiom here?” I asked.

“We do not naturally, or even unnaturally push ourselves the way that humans do,” Ashwin replied. “It is not usually needed to say something like that.”

“Sometimes I wish I grew up here,” I said.

“Yes?”

“But most of the time, right now, I wish I hadn’t come here,” I concluded.

“I understand that,” Ashwin said. “It is a good place. But it is not your place.”

“It’s going to be, now,” I pointed out.

“Yes.”

“I’m scared.”

“That’s understandable,” Ashwin said. “But. If I may observe.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’ve come here at the best of times,” nem said. “When I was hatched, this place was shit. It was scary. We didn’t realize just how scary at the time. But it was in a terrifying state. And we had to work to make it better. You don’t have to do that. I can see now how it is better.”

“You’ve been telling me this, and I’ve read the books you’re translating,” I reminded nem.

“It is still an important-to-you observation that will make your life here good,” Ashwin said. “Especially if you regularly reconnect with your other self. Reconnect often enough, and it will be like you are living in both places at once. And it will be a relief to your other self. Until they die. Whenever that is.”

The air had not stopped smelling like truffles, cinnamon, and dog shit.

I breathed it anyway, telling myself I didn’t actually have lungs to be soiled or poisoned by anything. Then I hesitantly said, “I’m. Uh. I’m… not going to die here, am I?”

“Not unless you specifically will it or ʔetekeyerrinwuf is destroyed. Maybe not even then. Not for a very long time,” Ashwin said. “You are a conscious echo of memory in the Network, and the Network exists in the powdery husks of the self replicating construction nanites. And Eh specifically had the Network written to prevent the deletion of any people like me or you.”

Ashwin hesitated before speaking the last sentence, though, and looked sideways at me while nem did so.

“Why do I feel like that’s not the whole truth?” I asked.

“We will get to the whole truth,” Ashwin said. “When it is time to do so. This is good enough.”

“I’d think that someone of your background wouldn’t say shit like that,” I said.

“I don’t want to scare you with the actual dangers until you’ve learned all the safety protocols,” Ashwin said. “Especially when you will not ever likely be the target of the actual dangers.”

“That sounds backward,” I said.

“The danger is in you hurting the rest of us,” Ashwin said. “If you don’t have the knowledge, in this case, you can’t do it.”

“Oh,” I responded. Then I squinted over at nem, “But then how would I be the target, if I could only be the perpetrator?”

“Selves harm,” Ashwin said.

“Oh,” I repeated with emphasis. My mind rushed over all the possibilities I could imagine, such as self duplication, filling the Network with copies of myself, all armed with Fenekere codes for causing mayhem, and knew I would never do such a thing, if that’s what Ashwin was talking about. I didn’t say what I was thinking, though. “What if I accept Phage’s gift?” I asked.

“Weirdly,” Ashwin said. “You will become more restricted, and less of a danger to us.”

“How is that?” I asked.

“It enforces the laws of consent,” Ashwin said. “You become a being that is ruled by the consent of others. In a lot of ways.”

“So, a loss of freedom?”

“Not really,” Ashwin said. “But, also, yes. It’s a loss of the freedom no one has ever really had, to hurt others. You get weaker if you try, and stronger if you don’t.”

I thought about what had happened in the last year, and something about that didn’t fit with what we’d all experienced, so I said so, “You and Phage haven’t always asked for consent before doing your things. And in Phage’s case, that has resulted in people getting hurt. At least, emotionally.”

“It works on the level of subconscious consent, not conscious consent, and Phage has always had trouble with the confines of its bonds. It loves them, but it also must always be testing them,” nem said, looking ahead at the beach we’d nearly reached.

“So there are loopholes.”

“Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyes.”

“Great.”

“I feel like I shouldn’t say more,” Ashwin said. “I want to trust you, but we have all been through a lot of turmoil over this, for much longer than you have been alive.”

“OK, we can drop this,” I said, not feeling great about it. But as we stepped from walkway to pebbles and sand, I thought of a viable change of subject that felt natural. “Speaking of lifetimes,” I said. “How does the relativity work now? Am I currently living before or after I was born?”

“Hailing Scales, Goreth!” Ashwin exclaimed.

In Inmararräo, everyone pronounces my name like ‘Goresh’, and I am not writing it that way. The ‘th’ is really important to me.

“Well?” I asked.

“It is weird,” Ashwin said. “I am nearly five hundred of your years old, and I do not like contemplating the effects of relativity. I never have. It unsettles me.”

“I bet what that means is that when we are here, then my Earth is some untold number of eons in the future, and when we are there, then your ʔetekeyerrinwuf is that which is some untold number of eons in the future,” I said, cheerfully.

“See,” Aswhin said. “If you had accepted Phage’s gift by now, you would not be able to say things like that to me.”

“Really?” I was genuinely worried about that.

“No,” Aswhin said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Oh, good.”

“If it did, we would all be in perfect stasis, with no wills of our own,” Ashwin said. “Ah! Here is the Collective to greet you!”

And that is what I was talking and thinking about when I came to meet the Collective of what Ashwin once called the cuttlecrabs. They really look like a cross between cuttlefish and crabs, if you haven’t seen either one yet in some untold number of eons in the future.

I’m not going to tell you what they’re like, though. Because they do that themselves in one of the books we’re hopefully going to publish. But also, it was a very spiritual experience for me, and really personal.

And, I mean spiritual in the Earthling English sense of the word, that I never really understood before.

Suffice it to say, when I was talking to Ashwin, I had agreed to nems recommendation to re-merge, or re-synchronize, with my Earthly self more frequently. Maybe once a night.

But it wasn’t until I’d talked to the Collective that I’d decided to actually do it.

Communication is vital.

That’s the message of Systems’ Out!, the first pivotal moment in ʔetekeyerrinwuf’s history.

It’s what everyone in my system has been complaining about regarding Phage, who should know better.

And dammit, I think I’m going to make it my life’s work from now on.

And, by the way? Ashwin is right. Humans should start listening to the elephants more.