On Thursday, December 7, 2023, in Aunti Zero’s Coffee Hut, Portland, Oregon, at the request of a being I’ve called Mau, I found myself in the middle of a conversation with a set of Earthlings.

“So, you’re a walk-in,” Erik said.

He was wearing a black, sleeveless garment with a hood on it that lay against his upper back, leaving his head bare. On the front of that garment there was the stylized illustration of a person with a cracked face and billowing plumage with their arms spread to present a word rendered in large blocky letters, ‘Other’.

I found myself staring at the word, bewildered that I could read it at all, nevermind that I could understand what he was saying.

It took me a moment to work it all out.

“I don’t know what that means,” came from my mouth, echoing my thoughts. Of course, I’d never heard the term ‘walk-in’ before.

“Just that you come from outside your system, like you just said,” he explained. “It’s a plurality thing.”

Oh, yes. Of course. He was right. I did come from somewhere else. My mind was projected into the body of his friends, who were a couple of people alien to me. Everyone here was alien to me, because as I’d apparently just explained, I was an Outsider.

If you are an Earthling, I want to tell you about how I see your world and your people through my own eyes, but I can’t. I left them on another world long ago, or well into the future, depending on how you calculate the effects of relativity.

The biology I have available to me, including every neuron, is borrowed.

But, a number of things were finally converging to allow me to converse intelligibly with everyone at the table.

“Plurality is familiar to me,” I told him, choosing to focus on a sympathetic subject. “I come from another plurality myself. The trait develops in roughly ten percent of our population.”

Brock of the Audreys, who were sitting to my left, wearing a button that said ‘Ask us about our fics’, leaned forward, eyes wide, and asked, “Say what?”

I took a breath, noting how the air moved through the mouth and throat I was using, and decided to let loose with my knowledge, “We think that psychological variances like plurality must occur with some regularity amongst complex lifeforms. In fact, a singular overarching consciousness might be the rarity, an emergent behavior that doesn’t always conform to our expectations of it. But until now, we haven’t known many other people we could compare notes with. The cuttlecrabs were either created by someone, genetically engineered, long ago and forgotten, or they evolved parallel to us. And then there’s the Dancer, which we encountered only recently and was our only contact with Outsiders before you. Xenopsychology, so far, has been too strange to classify as either plural or singlet. But now that we’ve met you, we have a myriad of similarities we can finally compare. It’s a delight!”

“Woah, woah, woah,” Brock said, almost laying their hand on the table, hovering it just above the surface. “That’s a lot to take in. Can we review?”

“I can do that,” I replied, letting my willingness to discuss this at any pace motivate my response. But I may have jerked with a worried thought that I had.

I had knowledge I couldn’t remember receiving. I knew these people’s names, pronouns, and identities. They were familiar to me, despite being so alien. But that didn’t bother me so much, because I could guess a few of the ways that I had access to that information.

It was clear the conversation had been going on before I became fully aware of myself. We’d probably introduced ourselves to each other.

I was sharing a brain with two other people that I knew about, and I clearly had access to their linguistic complexes, and that meant memories attached to words and names.

Also, I seemed to recall that I’d been briefed before my journey, so that I would know these things and have something in my memetics to align with their system.

Finally, I had flashes of memories of interacting with Erik and the Audreys previously, and bits of daily life from my hosts, Sarah and Goreth, and interacting with their housemates, Peter and Abigail.

I’d spent some time integrating with their psyche and biology before being able to come to the front, as we call it.

And that was fine. Expected. And I was experiencing the crafts of that Art.

No.

What bothered me was that I was suddenly more aware of where we were.

Looking around, I could see that we shared this space with many other people. Some were entering from the outside, while others were leaving. And almost everyone was talking to someone else, often with cups in their hands. Many were seated with small plates of food in front of them.

Some had a form of tablet, a thing that you call a cellphone, in hand, operating it, and communicating over Earth’s version of the Network. The Internet.

No one was paying us any attention, but we were very clearly in public with people I didn’t know.

“We’re safe to talk about all of this here,” Erik said. “Aunti Zero’s is a special place.” He gestured at the large sheets of colorfully striped fabric that hung in the windows. “That’s not just rainbow capitalism. The owners are fam.”

The meaning of all of that was supplied to me, if not by my hosts and their collective psyche, than by Mau itself. ‘Fam’, in this case, wasn’t just short for ‘family’, it meant that the owners were like Erik specifically. Queer and with very dark brown skin. Black, I believe the social and ethnic class is called, yes?

This trio of pluralities had been meeting here weekly for a couple of years now. And sometimes more often, as they could afford it. They considered it home. Possibly more of a home than where they each actually lived.

But I was still a little worried. There was information to divulge that maybe should not yet go beyond this circle of friends so easily.

I knew that Mau had vetted them, but it seemed doubtful that it could have scrutinized this many random strangers.

I tilted my head at Erik and noted, “You understood my body language.”

“I think so?” he replied. “You looked worried.”

“I might not tell you everything yet,” I said. “I want to, but we should find some privacy before certain subjects are spoken about. But, until we do that, do ask. I can tell you when I shouldn’t divulge something. Is that OK with you?” I glanced at the Audreys to make sure they knew I was speaking to them as well.

Brock looked like they wanted to ask something, but Erik interrupted cheerfully.

“Sure! Hey. We could walk to Laurelhurst park when we’re done here,” he suggested, gesturing with his own cup of liquid. “You might really like it, and we can talk more privately there. Lots of open space, so we can see who’s in earshot.”

Brock nodded in agreement.

“But really,” Erik said, lowering his voice and leaning forward, turning his head to the side. “I think if you talk about really weird shit around anybody here, like where you’re from and what Phage says it can do, or whatever, people will just assume you’re talking about some science fiction thing you’re involved in. Or, they’ll think you’re crazy, like me. You really can get away with a lot. Especially with your face.”

Of course, I couldn’t see my hosts’ face. But, our collective emotional reaction to that phrase made it clear what Erik was talking about, and culturally relevant memories became mine. He was talking about the color of our skin. Apparently, a bewildering and infuriating cultural norm that is common on Earth is that people with lighter skin are afforded more leeway and forgiveness simply for existing.

This was important information to me, though. It was reason for caution, and a critical matter for diplomacy.

In my own experience, people who can take their own power for granted are more likely to hurt other people with it. Often thoughtlessly, but not always.

“And here, specifically, it’s safe to be weird,” Erik repeated. “The staff have our backs. They put up with no shit. But also, everyone knows us already.”

“Can I ask my questions?” Brock asked.

“Sorry,” Erik said, bobbing his head and gesturing at me.

I inclined our head in affirmative.

It seemed to take Brock a moment to realize that meant ‘yes’, but when it clicked for them, they asked, “So, you come from another world, right? That’s what Phage said.”

Phage was their name for Mau. The two words mean the same thing.

“Yes,” I replied. “M – Phage also came from my world. Though, our world is a spacecraft, created by my ancestors. It is a very large one, and part of a very long line of spacecraft. They are small mobile worlds that we call the Exodus Ships.”

“OK, wow,” Brock said. “Phage said something like that, too. So, I guess let’s roll with that. It also said that your ship is called the Sunspot?”

That sounded unfamiliar for a moment, and I found myself uttering the name I knew, “ʔetekeyerrinwuf.” But as I said it, the meaning of each word coincided in my mind, and I followed with, “Yes, the Sunspot. That’s a beautiful way to say the name.”

Brock put a finger down on the table next to their drink, and pursed their lips, then asked, “And you said your name was Infinite Division Pember? That’s not in your language, right? That’s a translation your brain gave you, am I right?”

So, I’d already explained that much to them. Or someone had. But was that right? Was that really how my name translated? It felt wrong.

I inclined our head anyway and said, “Yes. It’s an advantage that our mode of travel gives us, a way to learn new languages without having to decode them with algorithms. But, it has its drawbacks, too.”

“What was it you called your ship?” Brock asked. “I can’t pronounce it.”

While Brock had furrowed their vessel’s brows and squinted their eyes, with mouth tight, Erik had leaned back and folded his arms across his breast, baring his teeth, eyes wide.

My own reflexes and cultural interpretation of body language read both as alarming and worrisome expressions, but the emotional reactions from my hosts and from Mau, or Phage, were relaxed and reassuring.

It was a moment where I was more keenly aware of who I was sharing this vessel with.

According to those feelings, Erik was supposedly happy and enjoying himself, and Brock was focused, and maybe concerned, but not repulsed.

I didn’t know how much of this conversation either Sarah or Goreth would remember, since I wasn’t yet familiar with how their psyche worked beyond my short experience with them. But I was thankful for their subconscious interpretations.

“ʔetekeyerrinwuf,” I repeated for Brock.

“So, that’s in your own language?”

“Yes.”

“Neat. I wonder how much of it you can remember. Do you think you could write up a grammar and a dictionary for it, or something? Even just, like, a simple one? Enough words to show how it works?” they asked.

“Yes! Given time, I would love to,” I replied, feeling a spark of eagerness. “It would be a wonderful exercise in exploring the differences in our languages and how it is that my new connection to this – brain? – allows me to bypass them. I will do so.”

“Rad. I look forward to reading it!” Brock mimicked Erik’s expression briefly, flashing teeth. “So, what about your name?”

“Ah,” I took a moment to try to think in my own language and let it come out, and I felt a push from Phage, assisting me. The sensation of its help was like a combination of sliding down a slope and watching a puzzle piece fall into place. And I spoke, “ʔashwin Minbäoni.”

Brock screwed up their face and asked, “How does that translate?”

I looked at the cup full of liquid in front of me, purchased by Sarah before she had called me forward, and tried to visualize the translation. Again, Phage assisted, but it felt a little wrong, still. I couldn’t straighten it out, however, and ended up saying, “ʔashwin means, emm, Infinite Division, and Minbäoni means Pember.”

It wasn’t the ‘Pember’ part that was confusing me.

“But, Pember sounds like a nonsense word. Isn’t it?” Brock asked. “How does that work?”

“Oh, I got it!” Erik exclaimed. “At least, I think I do. It’s a hunch.” He turned to me, “Is it a portmanteau of Person and Member?”

“What?” Brock asked. “Why would it be that?”

But Erik was right. And I knew what a portmanteau was because Sarah and Goreth did.

I lifted our chin, “‘Mäofni’ is our word for person, and ‘hinbäoni’ means ‘member of a plurality’. My, emm, headmates thought it was cute and chose the name before I was conceived. I like both versions. Ours and yours. Minbäoni and Pember. But let’s use Pember, please. It will be easier to explain to others.”

Erik closed his mouth and made an expression that almost looked like a smile that I was familiar with, and aimed it at Brock, cocking an eyebrow.

Brock swayed backward in their rigid, unyielding chair, and rolled their head, then leveled a gaze at me again and asked, “So, is, like ‘Infinite Division’ a title or something? Why are you named that?”

I chose to ignore my own doubts and told the story of how I got it, “It is just my name. I didn’t really think about the meaning at first. But I liked it when I learned it. ʔashwin was a hero of my favorite story, and when we heard the name for the first time, while our Caretaker was reading the story, I knew it was what I should be called.”

Brock looked at Erik, “Don’t we know another trans guy named Ashwin?”

“Yeah, but nah. It sounds different,” Erik said. “If you listen closely, it sounds really different. This is almost more like Awe-shween, not Ashwin. And,” he squinted at me in a distinctly friendly way, tightening his lips briefly, too, “I think I’m hearing a pronounced glottal stop at the front there, too. ʔashwin.”

I tilted our head to the side. I would have to look up ‘glottal stop’ later, if I could learn how to use the Internet. Or maybe one of my hosts, or Phage, could act as my Tutor while I was here. But no meaning was presenting itself at the moment. He was getting the difference in sound close enough, though, so I also said, “I believe you are correct. You are pronouncing my name with an accent, but it is very close.”

Brock made a noise, a chuckle.

And Erik said, “Oh, ʔashwin, you have an accent, too. A pretty thick one.”

“Ah, so, this vessel doesn’t give me full linguisti – Oh,” I said.

His mention of it made it obvious to me, and I became intensely aware of how my pronunciation of words and where I put the stress on them was very different from his. It felt deeply embarrassing, but I couldn’t tell if that embarrassment was mine or someone else’s. And yet, the fact that my natural way of speaking was coming through in my English also felt reassuring in a way. Especially since our vocal apparati are so different. It was something from home that I’d brought with me.

“That’s interesting,” I said very slowly and carefully, trying to say it without my own inflections.

“You do sound a bit like a furry who is trying to sound French,” Brock said. “Badly. It’s goofy, but it’s OK.”

“Oh, yes, the uwu,” Erik said, pointing at Brock. “I don’t know about the French part. Maybe the rhythm is like that, or a Cajun accent, but listen. Let’s take Ashwin seriously here. We don’t make fun of the way people speak, OK? It sounds genuinely foreign to my ears.” Then he cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at me, “And like you don’t quite know what to do with your tongue?”

Tongue? Yes, I had a tongue, just like at home. But it was thicker and wider.

Why was a tongue an evolutionary commonality?

And was I really using it to talk?

I opened our mouth and tried to answer, but I couldn’t make words. I was baffled by the muscle movements necessary to do so.

It was confusing.

Now that he’d pointed that out, that I didn’t know what to do with our tongue, I realized how true it was. And then it was like I didn’t know how to speak at all.

Erik reacted to my expression.

“Ah, shit,” he said. “I’m sorry friend, did I just mess you up?” He paused, and when I didn’t answer, he said, “Just nod or shake your head if you can’t talk now.”

I slumped and tilted our head up.

This conversation was important.

I had things to say, a request to make, but we needed to develop rapport and familiarity.

But in the other pot, it was fun. As aggravating as this particularly moment was, it was also an amusing challenge. I loved getting to know people, and having them get to know me. And this was a definitive part of that process.

So, I tried to go with the flow. I tried nodding in a way that I’d seen Erik or Brock do earlier.

“Are you used to speaking in some other way? Like without a mouth or something?” Erik asked.

I considered that, then turned our head to the right and tilted it sideways toward him, to try to indicate he’d almost guessed correctly. I then held up three fingers to indicate there was a middle answer, but I don’t think he understood that.

The process of making sure I held up three fingers was more work than I’d expected, however. At first, I almost held up only two. I was used to having four digits on my forelimb, instead of five.

Then, looking at what I was holding up, my skin felt extraordinarily naked. It was free of the feathery fur I was used to, and that made me feel especially vulnerable and prone to being hurt by any little thing.

Everything started feeling very wrong after that, and I was panicking over tiny inexpressive ears that almost felt like they didn’t even exist when I drew our lips back and bared our teeth in a grimace of discomfort and fear.

“Hey, it’s OK,” Brock said. “Let’s take a break and reset. Let you drink some of that mocha. If, after a while, you still don’t think you can talk anymore, maybe signal with a thumbs down? Or maybe we can try typing. We get it. We’re all autistic here. It’s a thing.”

Autistic?

I was sure the meaning of that word would come to me eventually, like everything else I was hearing. But, with the loss of my ability to talk, the understanding of some words were beyond my grasp now, too.

And the idea of gesturing, typing, or grasping anything with these bizarre spade tipped claws was alarming.

To focus on anything but the body I was in, I looked down at the drink, as directed.

Then I picked it up and sniffed it.

That involved hand movements, but by focusing on the drink I barely realized what I was doing.

It smelled very sweet, with an underlying bitterness and a little sourness.

There were artisans on the Sunspot who specialized in mixing beverages like this, though with other ingredients. They used things resembling fungus, algae, fruit, and herbs to create formulas of wildly different textures and flavors. Some where hot and frothy, others were smooth and cold, and a myriad of other states in between. I understood this. It was something I could relate to.

This drink, I knew, had something from an animal in it, however.

I knew that this drink was something that Sarah and Goreth were OK with. That maybe it was Sarah’s favorite. So, it would be perfectly safe to drink it. And a strong flavor of some sort might do well toward helping me to relax, even if it was something I personally wasn’t ready for.

None-the-less, I felt hesitant and anxious about drinking it. We don’t consume animal matter on ʔetekeyerrinwuf.

It seemed I’d become more of myself, and in so doing I’d become less connected to the rest of our psyche and my headmates. I was feeling cut off and alone, and everything seemed far less familiar.

I found that what I really wanted was my own favorite thing, a food that our Caretaker, Tshana, used to make. Wunturäʔo. It loosely resembled what I’ve since learned is an apple Danish. But neither Tshana’s treat nor anything resembling it were present, and I would never again taste wunturäʔo itself so long as I remained on Earth.

Well. There was a way I could refresh the memory of eating that food, but that may come later in this story. Perhaps a later book. At the time, I didn’t recall that. And I was feeling intensely homesick and near panic.

Which galvanized me, as I think you say it.

Part of the whole reason I had traveled to Earth was to experience something new.

I’d existed for long enough, at odds with my life that whole time, that only a completely new, extraordinarily alien experience had seemed desirable. I had been that desperate. But that also meant that I was that experienced. I had felt that I was so familiar with life and everything it had had to offer that I could move on.

When I get to the part where I divulge my age, you might understand, though there are people in my home world who are much, much older and have stayed right where they are.

In any case, I was able to drink the mocha.

I think I was expecting it to be warm for some reason, but it was not. It wasn’t quite as cool as the ambient temperature, but it was close. The faint residual heat of it indicated that it had been warmed earlier. Our discussion had given it time to cool.

It tasted almost exactly like how it smelled.

The tongue that I no longer knew how to use to talk was bathed in frothy, smooth complexities of dark bitterness, faint sourness, and thick sweetness. The flavors were alien and incomparable to anything I could remember tasting, but they weren’t offensive. And flavor as a thing in and of itself was something I understood. I craved it.

More importantly, the familiarity of that flavor for my hosts and their vessel made it so that they came back forward to be more co-conscious with me, and their emotions began to cushion me from the world again.

I drank more of the mocha, eyes closing, until I felt the urge to speak again.

So I put it down, and took a deep breath, and looked at my two new friends, and said, “We speak with an organ that’s in our chest, the rräoʔong, near our air sacks. Lungs? Not lungs, but probably close. Same purpose. Maybe lungs enough. We can make a wide variety of sounds with the rräoʔong, by just opening our mouths and flexing the muscles around its branches. Or, most of us can. There are exceptions.”

The Audreys perked up in their chair and spoke with a voice that was different from Brock’s, lighter and more sing-song, “Oh! That’s like a bird’s syrinx!”

“Oh, yeah,” Erik agreed.

Brock took over for the Audreys again, and lowered their head, furrowing their brow once more, and said, “OK. So, you’re an alien. And you said before that you had met other aliens?”

“Yes,” I replied. “The Dancer. Another spacecraft we encountered by chance, created by another type of being. They are a colonial entity with no distinct sense of self.”

“And what was that about cuttlecrabs?”

“A hive mind collective of smaller, unrelated creatures that we mistook for fauna for a long time,” I told them. “They either evolved parallel to us and we took them with us on our Exodus Ships without knowing that they were learning our language, or they were a breeding experiment created by someone on an ancestor ship. We don’t know, and they don’t remember. Their cultures did not survive transfer to each new ship like ours sometimes did. They are like the opposite of plural, with many bodies and one collective psyche. But they also have individual identities of a sort, and share something in common with pluralities like us.”

“Cool. I love it,” Brock said. “So, I have to ask. Why did you come here? What are you doing on Earth? I know what Phage said, and why Sarah and Goreth agreed to invite you, but I want to know your motive. … Sorry if it seems like I’m grilling you. It’s just the way I talk. But also, we all love meeting new headmates, whoever they are. Especially when they have good backstories.”

“Eh,” I said. It was not an expression of disregard or ambiguity, but an utterance of the sacred name that alludes to how our personal natures guide and shape us. And I’m sure Brock and Erik and everyone else misinterpreted it. It didn’t matter. “I wanted to learn,” I said. “And I felt that I had stopped learning anything more while still on the Sunspot. I wanted to change who I was. I felt a … dysphoria. A very strong, agonizing dysphoria. And I was willing to trade it for a myriad of other dysphorias just to experience something different.”

“That makes a lot of sense. I get dysphoria,” Brock nodded. “And your people? Why are they making contact with us, you know, through you?”

“Ah,” Erik vocalized, but said nothing more.

“We got a taste of speaking to Outsiders through the Dancer, and wanted more. Then, when Phage discovered that the Network of Tunnels included your world, and that there were people here, many of us felt it was inevitable that we must talk to you,” I said. “To keep learning. Because life in its diversity is worth celebrating. And protecting.”

“Network of Tunnels?” Erik asked.

Brock nodded, gesturing at Erik to affirm he wanted to know what that meant, too.

“Did Phage not tell you how it came here?” I asked.

I felt a stirring from below, in our chest.

“I think this is a subject for the park,” I said, then, interrupting any answer. “Or close to it.”

Erik slapped the table, and said, “Well, then, let’s go! Do not forget your cane. You’ll need that. It’s special.”

I looked down at the object he’d indicated.

It was leaning against the table, wrapped up in the strap of a small, heavy, purple bag that was resting near the edge, so that it wouldn’t fall over.

The cane was dark wood, probably stained, with a molded steel adornment on the front of the handle, a toothy and spiky creature’s head with horns that curved back toward where our hand would rest. It was finely detailed for anything I’d seen on Earth so far, and someone else’s memories identified it as a dragon. Like Goreth.

Goreth looked a bit different in their dreams, but I could see the categorical similarities.

The Audreys had a cane, too. One made of lightweight metal, painted black with a scale-like pattern engraved into it. It had a cushioned grip, and looked far more utilitarian than Sarah and Goreth’s cane. When they stood up and picked up their dishes with one hand and started toward a cart near the door, with their cane in the other hand, their steps were uneven and sometimes went astray.

It was subtle, but I’ve become particularly attuned to such observations and, being aware of how alien the people around me were, I was paying extra attention to details.

I learned what our cane was for when I tried to stand up.

Sarah and Goreth’s vessel had been aching since I could remember being in it, but I’d dissociated from that ache while I had been sitting at the table. Standing, however, put weight on our feet. This changed the flow of fluid in our legs. And everything began to hurt so much more, starting with the balls of our feet and cascading up through every joint and muscle.

“ʔii,” I gasped, leaning on the cane more heavily for balance and strength. “What is this?”

“What’s what?” Erik asked, circling around the corner of the table, hefting a large bag onto his shoulder and back and picking up his cup and saucer. “Here, I’ll bus your mug for you.”

“Why does this body hurt so much?” I asked.

“You don’t know?” Erik paused in his movements to ask. “Nobody told you?”

Vague memories of a conversation at the controls of the Tunnel Apparatus came back to me, and I got the gist. “Ah. Yes. Ah. One of the things we’re supposed to try to help with, if we can,” I said. “An unknown illness?”

“Undiagnosed, yeah,” Erik said. “Sarah and Goreth should be able to fill you in, really. It’s a whole thing. Really sucks.”

The Audreys had come back to assist, and looked down, Brock saying, “Who dressed you this morning? Those are not your walking shoes.” They squinted at our face without looking directly into our eyes, and asked, “Goreth? Were you feeling dysphoric? Did you really need your mules?”

I felt a fluttering in our head to my right, but I was too firmly in the front for any more of a response than that.

“I think I am receiving an acknowledgement from them,” I said.

“We take the bus, then,” Brock concluded. “Goes right from here to there. And you might need a taxi home. We can crowd fund that if we have to. Or, maybe we should take you home now, and get you out of those shoes. That ridiculous dragon.”

I felt the need to stand in place for a bit, getting used to balancing in this body without a tail, to relax and let the vessel’s muscle memory do the work. So, I took the opportunity to ask one of my own questions.

“Goreth has dysphoria?” I asked. The answer was obviously ‘yes’, but it was more of a prompt for these two to tell me what they knew about it.

“Well, yeah,” Erik said. “So, we’re all trans here, right? Transgender? That doesn’t mean we have to have dysphoria. I don’t, for instance. I just know I’m not a girl, I’m a man, but I still like skirts and sparkles and shit.” He twirled to show off his outfit, which was elaborate, with sparkly markings and fixtures on dark fabrics, and swirled about him. His red and black braided plumage danced about his head as he did this. “But, you all, Sarah and Goreth? Some of the worst physical dysphoria I’ve ever heard of. Hormones and surgery did a lot for them. But Goreth’s not human. Never was. What we call a therian or otherkin? They’re non-binary, not the boy they were told they were, which is a gender thing, but they also need a tail, and scales, and wings, and all that funky shit, and dressing fancy kind of helps with that sometimes.”

There was a lot I wanted to ask Erik about gender, and to tell him about physical dysphoria and the Sunspot and its history, and how what he was saying was making more sense to me than anyone likely would have expected. And also how some of his words were very confusing. But I decided to keep it simple, so that we would not stand in this one place for too long.

“We know of this,” I said, referring to my own people. “Another similarity. Another thing complex beings seem to experience sometimes. Some of my own headmates felt it. One of our friends felt it so intensely shem chose to ascend early.”

“Ascend?” Brock asked.

I felt that growing tension in our gut and chest again.

“I will explain that at the park. It is again related to subjects not for everyone,” I said.

“So, you still want to go to the park?” Brock asked. “Not home?”

“When my original vessel got very old, it had pain much like this,” I said. “I can manage. I can take care, too, I think, not to injure it. I’ll go slowly. I would like to see this bus while I’m awake, and the park. I don’t think I’ve been outside yet. I want to see what your flora looks like.”

Brock smiled, closed mouthed, and shook their head, “I think I’m starting to actually believe what you’re saying.”

“You’d better,” Erik said in a sharp and low tone, head lowered in their direction. “You get me?”

Brock looked startled, and said defensively, “I know. I know. I’m just saying it’s coming naturally now, instead of me having to force it. And I’m not speaking for the others. But you know how it is, right? We were raised in skepticism. It rules the world.”

“This part of the world,” Erik said. “And not around me, OK? We can do reality checks as we need to, to see if we’re all experiencing the same thing, having a shared hallucination or something. Particularly when I’m having an episode. But when someone talks about their own identity and personal reality, we take them at their word. As mad trans people, it’s ridiculous for us not to. But it’s what everyone should do.”

“Yeah.”

I sighed, and started moving toward the door.

They were both humoring me. It would have to do.

We’d all figure it out as we went.

It seemed that I was starting to read their expressions more naturally. I wasn’t sure if that meant that I was learning quickly, or if I was fading from the front and someone more familiar with them was taking over. But the increased ease of communication was very welcome.

And what these two were saying was very informative. Reassuring in some ways, and worrisome in others. Phage, and its child, Ni’a, both of whom had led this project, had warned me that Earth would be rough and difficult and perhaps more closely resemble the stories we’d heard about our predecessor ship, Feruukepikape. But, if Phage had had a hand in shaping Sarah and Goreth’s lives for the better already, I could see why it had favored Erik and the Audreys as friends.

They were peers of my hosts, in many ways, from the sound of it. But also, they strove for a philosophy closer to what I was used to than to what might be in store for us outside that door. Even if they didn’t yet fully embody it, they were young and working toward it. And that’s what mattered.

I like your friends, I tried to think clearly and loudly for my hosts.

The cane felt more at home in our right hand, so I used it there, with the small bag strapped across our body to hang to our left. Which I’d put on after I’d donned our thin, long black coat, which had been draped over the back of the seat. This all had necessitated briefly removing the wide brim hat with a feather in it that we were wearing, which had rested on the table until I could put it back on again.

The movements all felt routine, but also a hassle.

And then, when we tried to walk, while Erik and Brock were still talking, I was presented with the problem that this body didn’t have a tail, and the hips didn’t work quite the way I expected.

So the cane was very handy then, and I took it as slowly and deliberately as I could without thinking about it too much.

Erik rushed over to take our left arm by the hand and elbow, his backpack resting on both shoulders now.

“We really should just take you home,” Brock said.

“We can do this, Brock,” Erik stated back. Then asked me, “Right?”

“I think so,” I said. “I want to try.”

“We can also change our minds at any point,” Erik added.

“This is true,” I agreed.

Brock relented, “OK.”

“If Sarah and Goreth ever have this much trouble, though,” I said, “I think the cane is inadequate. Do you have other tools of accommodation?”

“Yeah, but they’re more expensive,” Erik said.

“Expensive?” I asked.

“You know, cost more money?” Brock asked back, checking to see what I understood.

“Money,” I repeated. I felt an alarmed tension from the rest of the system. Like it was a sore subject.

We were moving faster and more easily toward the door, as the vessel seemed to take over to teach me how to walk in it. I tried to let the pain in our feet just happen and roll through them with the movements. But the shoes were raised in the back and low in the front, and they put extra weight on the balls of the feet. And the pain got more intense with every step. Like walking on sessile hexavalves with their tiny, sharp shells.

So, I took a deep breath and imagined that I had my favorite feet. Not the feet of my old vessel, young or old, but my own feet. The feet I had made using the nanite exobody I had created for myself whenever I left my vessel to be on my own. Feet that could feel the ground and the air they moved through, and that convinced my mind that they were every bit as organic and biological as my original feet, but never feeling pain or exhaustion or any detrimental sensation I didn’t want anymore.

Even though those feet worked a little differently than a human’s feet, the two legged gait was close enough, and Sarah and Goreth’s vessel was firmly set enough in its rhythm, that I was able to just remember that old relief and use it to float through the pain.

So we made it to the door.

“Money is this bullshit thing we all have to have in order to live and have shelter and eat and get anything we need or want,” Brock was explaining.

“Amen,” Erik said.

“And hardly anybody has enough of it, and a tiny handful of people have way, way too much. And things like walkers and scooters and other mobility aids cost too much. That cane, actually, cost too much, but we all gotta have our joys somehow. It’s Goreth’s baby, and they deserve it.”

“Preach it,” Erik said.

Brock glanced at him and asked, “Are you Father Erik, now?”

Erik shrugged and said, “No such thing. We’re all atheists and pagans. If anybody actually worships anything in here, it’s horror movies. You know that.”

“Sorry.”

“No worries.”

“Anyway, money sucks.”

“It does.”

“We don’t have money on the Sunspot. Nor anything like commerce,” I said.

Brock squinted at me with incredulity, “If you don’t have money, then how do you know about commerce?”

“We’ve been told stories about our predecessor ship, as an explanation for why we didn’t have these things,” I replied. “My memories are not always quick here. Things are muddled. But the more you talk about something, the more that bubbles up from either my own past, or from Sarah and Goreth’s.”

“That makes sense,” Brock said, opening the door. “Brains work by association.”

At this point, I was able to walk on my own. In retrospect, I think I may have been using more than just mind tricks to do so, but we’ll get to that.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about the pain, or its accompanying exhaustion, anymore. I was eagerly looking up and forward to take in my first fully conscious view of the outdoors of a new planet.

The dark, cozy, colorful interior of Aunti Zero’s Coffee Hut gave way to a bright, cold, hard, and drab landscape of rectangular buildings, paved ground, and roaring, whooshing wheeled vehicles.

There were trees, and they stood out starkly against everything else for how organic they were.

Trees are not a single type of lifeform, but a shape commonly taken by sessile species that feed on their atmosphere and must grip the substrate below them to resist the currents that surround them and flow through their branches. And if they grow over a certain size for their environment, they develop something akin to wood or rock for strength.

Some of these trees had mostly yellow and orange leaves, which also littered the ground. And many of them were bare, having lost most of them. Yet others were covered in dark green needles. And those trees were roughly conical in shape, instead of the mushroom-like shapes of the crowns of the other trees.

No purple, magenta, or indigo foliage. The first big difference I noted in the natural world of Earth from my home on the Sunspot.

The architecture of the city, Portland, was all wrong and weird, too, of course. But I was ignoring that.

What gripped me was the sky.

The horizon bent in the wrong way, which I had expected but dreaded.

And between the scant clouds, the sky was blue with nothing beyond it. No faded geography, no mountains, no sea, no cities and forest pointed back down at us. No gigantic Endcaps to keep the atmosphere in. No spokes. No electromagnetic rings to guide the sun and moon on their journey across the habitat cylinder.

No habitat cylinder.

A sun that, logically, was bigger than anything I’d ever seen this closely before, but so distant that it looked similar to what I was used to on the Sunspot, but unmoored by a lack of any guiding magnetic bottle. If it had been a twenty kilometer wide ball of plasma a hundred kilometers of so from the ground, it would have fallen on us all.

And I knew that at night we would see the depths of space all around us, as if we were looking out of one of the shipyard doors. And that idea made me dizzy.

It was too much.

I wanted to dash Belowdecks to get away from it. But there were no Belowdecks. Not here.

I closed my eyes and felt myself fall away into unconsciousness, thinking that I was going to fail my mission.

The body remained upright.