“OK, Ashwin, you get to pee and shave,” Goreth said, stepping aside internally. “Try it!”

“What?” I gasped as our butt landed on the toilet seat.

Our panties were already down around our ankles, and our nightgown was pulled up around our belly.

“You got this,” Goreth said from my right. “Just relax. I’ll walk you through shaving.”

Really, what we did, though, was work together, with me more forward than the others and experiencing it like I was doing it myself, but with knowledge of how.

Still, it felt weird and different from what I was used to.

I think peeing always will for me.

The mechanism is largely the same. Liquid of some chemical waste composition coming out of a hole. But the nerves and the way our brains interpret it is so different that I always notice it. And I’m used to squatting on my hands and knees, haunches low, tail laid flat, on a Sunspot toilet, not sitting back and upright. And I don’t think even human bodies are meant to sit on a toilet for evacuation, honestly.

Since that morning, experiencing how long it takes for our bladder to empty itself sometimes, I’ve done some research on the subject and there are several theories. I’m not the only one on the planet that thinks toilets are designed wrong.

Shaving was nerve wracking and smelly, at first, but really much easier than I expected.

When I’d first arrived, I’d interrupted Goreth shaving, but didn’t take over. I barely remembered it. And they hadn’t known it was me. They’d chalked it up to some sort of weird ‘otherkin’ dysphoria related to being a dragon, and had gotten over it quickly and taken over shaving again.

As far as I know, no one has ever shaved their hair on the Sunspot. What we have is more akin to feathers, if we don’t actually have feathers, so shaving would work differently. Of course, we have technology that can temporarily or permanently remove it when needed, but drawing a blade across the face, or any other part of the body, is inefficient in comparison and just wouldn’t occur to anyone. But, also, with how wildly different our bodies are from each other, in comparison to the uniformity of humans, it’s certainly not a part of fashion or gender expression.

Not that there’s anything I could identify as gender expression on the Sunspot in the first place, let alone gender.

Due to recent events where we’d started to make a reconnection with our most distant past, something like gender had started to emerge amongst some people, but I had largely ignored it myself. It seemed superfluous to me.

While shaving, and Goreth thinking about how they did this for Sarah’s dysphoria, I found myself trying to remember if we’d talked about gender with each other a few days or so ago.

We had. But I couldn’t remember the specifics anymore, or exactly when it had happened.

“Welcome to plurality and amnesia,” Goreth said.

“I’m not a stranger to it,” I replied.

“Ah, right.”

As we wiped our face clean of shaving cream, using a cold, damp wash cloth, and felt what was left of our stubble and how smooth our face now was, Sarah brightened up and made the whole body feel lighter.

“Oh, if you keep doing that every time we shave, I’m happy to take over and keep doing it,” I said.

She giggled.

“Gender euphoria,” Goreth said. “Now we gotta take our titty skittles!”

They reached up to the edge of the mirror and pulled it outward, revealing a cabinet behind it. There was a shelf with plastic bottles on it (I’ve been calling it ‘polymer’ but this time I had the colloquial term handy). Goreth selected one and twisted its cap open, pushing down on it to unlatch a safety mechanism hidden in it.

They shook out two oblong, light blue pills and put them under our tongue before closing the bottle, and said, “then, one at night after we take our other pills.”

We left the bathroom and headed for the kitchen, our nightgown covering our panties and providing enough modesty for Sarah and Goreth.

Goreth opened the fridge and looked forlornly at a vacuum sealed plastic bag containing something called bacon.

“Is it you that can’t deal with the meat?” Goreth asked, meaning me.

“I think so,” I said. “I think it will be any of us who visit. We just don’t eat that.”

“Herbivores?” they asked.

I got a sense of what that word meant.

“Not exactly,” I replied. “I wouldn’t call fungus a plant.”

“Fungivores?”

“No, no. Omnivores. We just do not eat meat,” I replied.

“Vegetarians,” they concluded. Also a word I had to rely on them to understand. Technically all English words, but these ones were significant.

“Out of respect and necessity,” I replied. “Yes. The ecosystem of the habitat cylinder is more stable if we rely on nutritional intake from mushroom, lichen, and algae farms, and nut and fruit orchards from belowdecks. Um. These words don’t strictly match the lifeforms and facilities, I am certain. Analogs.”

“Right,” Goreth said. “Thing is. I’m really, really missing the bacon.”

I pulled away from the front, letting them take over more fully, and said, “Go for it. It’s already been harvested.”

“When you say ‘harvested’ for meat, it makes me want to eat it less,” the dragon rumbled.

“That is not my intent,” I said.

We proceeded to make bacon, and the smell of it drove me completely away from the front. I willingly went, hoping that Goreth and Sarah could enjoy their favorite breakfast.

—

Sitting on the MAX, forehead leaning against the window, we watched industrial buildings go by as we rode toward downtown.

I saw a couple of words just large enough to be read clearly, amongst much larger, more stylized lettering none of us could decipher.

“Penis Girl,” said an overpass.

Love her, thought Sarah.

—

Watch, Phage thought as the MAX train started to enter the downtown area. Pay attention to the people and what they are doing.

This is life, Goreth thought. In this horrid country, at least. And where we could so easily end up if we’re not lucky.

In places, here and there, usually under bridges, but nearly anywhere, there were tents. Sometimes the tents had people sitting or crouching outside, doing things, or just watching the world.

And, to me at least, I saw two general states of clothing. And this was true of the people on the MAX with us as with the people outside on the streets.

Some people had relatively thin layers of clothing, bundled up for cold weather, but light enough for mobility. And while most of that clothing was black, there were shocks of bright color here and there. The fabrics were nice, and everything was in good repair.

And then other people, particularly those near the tents, had layers and layers of mismatched clothes in poor repair, and the colors were muted and dirty and much less likely to be black. These people were also more likely to have backpacks instead of purses.

Sarah and Goreth had both a backpack and a purse. Which they clearly felt made them look a little more like the people near the tents. But wasn’t entirely out of place amongst the others. Especially the younger people.

Social stratification, Phage thought.

We were passing thoughts back and forth instead of saying them out loud, because we were around other people, in close quarters, and didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves.

Worse than on Feruukepikape, it observed. ‘The Best World,’ the Sunspot’s predecessor ship, the one our Founding Crew had fought to escape.

The idea of overthrowing the government of a whole world like the Sunspot just long enough to find sufficient mass to create a new starship of the same size, and then populate it, in order to get away from the old culture and start a whole new life, was impossible for me to imagine. I had no idea what it would take to do that. Or just what would motivate a people to do it.

But it is what my Tutor had told me was our history, or origins.

Not that that ancient revolution had been perfect. There were a group of people we called Kepikapeferuuni who had hidden amongst the populace of the Sunspot, and organized in secret to try to bring about the same type of order and government that had existed on our predecessor ship. Their efforts remained pernicious.

But if things were worse here…

Not worse, Phage thought. Different. But not our place to try to fix it, either.

But now we have to live with it, I replied.

Yes.

What about us? Sarah asked.

We will help you as best we can, Phage replied. Help you do what you want with your life, in thanks for letting us visit. And, when your vessel dies, we’ll all decide where to go and what to do with the Tunnel then.

I often wish we could bring all of your people over and figure out how to storm the capital, Goreth said. Our country causes so much pain and death.

There is time and energy enough for everything, Phage said, and fell silent for the day.

—

Instead of Pioneer Square we’d gone to the zoo, on the other side of Portland from where we lived.

The MAX, which vaguely resembled the trams of the Sunspot, let out in what I would call a belowdecks station, one below the ground level of the area. And the walls of that station were adorned with illustrations and signs relating to the zoo. And the walls were delightfully not at ninety degrees from each other, but arranged in a more organic pattern, creating hallways that were like paths through the ground of the Earth.

Goreth took us to a lift located down one of the hallways. The lift was operated with buttons, and had heavy mechanical doors that slid open and shut. We could feel it accelerating and decelerating as it took us up a very short distance to ground level.

It opened on the edge of a large parking lot, a place for people to put their cars, if they had them. We had to cross a portion of the parking lot and a loop of street to get to the entrance to the zoological park. But, there were marked crossings, so that it was safe for us to do this.

It was a weekday, and the middle of Winter, which Goreth assured me meant there would be fewer people than there could be. But it was not empty of visitors, either. We definitely could people watch if we wanted to.

A small group of people, including us, converged on the gates around the same time. There were two sets of gates, actually. The first set were simply open, and one could visit a restaurant or the gift shop after entering them. The second set were on the other side of a ‘square’ of concrete, and there was a person behind a booth there checking tickets.

We apparently had a pass, which Goreth would show to that person, that had been gifted to us by our parents as an annual birthday gift. Birthday gifts are also something new to me, and I hadn’t encountered the concept until Goreth pulled out the card and thought about it.

We do celebrate birthdays, or hatching days. Just differently.

Sarah and Goreth generally didn’t use this card often enough to justify the expense, but they still got a new one from their parents, who lived in Washington, every year.

So, yeah, Goreth was thinking as we walked, using our cane, into the park and started looking around. We read this blog post a few months ago about zoos. As awful as they might seem on the surface, a lot of animal species rely on them for survival at this point. And zoos are getting better every year at accommodating their animals and helping to restore them to their original habitats when possible. So, whatever you might think of this, it’s a relatively cool thing that’s going on right now.

We thought you might like to see some of Earth’s different kinds of animal life, Sarah thought.

Yeah, Goreth added. When you see something for the first time, we see it through your eyes, and it’s kind of like we’re kids again. It’s really cool! So, take the front, Ashwin! Explore!

What about our feet? I asked. This place looks big.

“Yeah, let’s go rent a scooter,” Goreth said out loud. “Can’t really afford it, but can’t afford not to use it. Besides, we might get a little boost from donations when we write about this.”

No mochas for the rest of the month unless we do, Sarah thought clearly.

“Yeah.”

We walked over to the gift shop, our feet not really hurting us a lot yet, but exhaustion seeping into our bones a bit already.

It was part of the building that housed the entrance and its turnstiles, and it had an area that would have held a line of three wheeled scooters just outside the door. There was one scooter there.

“I guess that’s going to be ours,” Goreth said.

But as we approached the door to go talk to a clerk inside, an older person with a cane was assisted by someone younger to come out of the gift shop and go over to the scooter to sit on it.

“Shit,” Goreth stopped walking.

Sit and wait for another scooter to be returned? Sarah thought.

Goreth looked around and spotted a bench, then started taking us over to it, adjusting our backpack, which had our lunch and some drawing supplies in it.

We grumbled and fussed and sighed and thought back and forth about just how far we could maybe make it into the park on our feet.

But before we actually sat down, I presented them both with an idea.

No words yet, just the whole concept of what I wanted to do, visualized, intentions and all.

It brought Goreth up short.

“You can do that?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” I responded out loud in return, thinking that most people were far enough away that they wouldn’t hear our low voices. “But I want to try.”

“OK, let’s sit down anyway while you explain it,” Goreth said.

So we did that.

We looked around to check to see if anyone was looking at us. They weren’t. Everyone had their own business to go about, and most people were moving away from us to go into the park. Those returning from the inner parts of the park were headed for the exit.

“The easiest thing to manipulate with Phage’s gift is always your own vessel,” I said. “This isn’t my vessel. We share it. But right now there are only the four of us. And alterations to it won’t typically affect other people in the world. Not directly. We shouldn’t have to get consent from anyone else.”

“Huh,” Sarah vocalized.

“This world is weird, and it is harder to do things here,” I said. “Probably because of how much conflict there is between everyone living here. I don’t really know. And altering a vessel is a long term project regardless. But, I should be able to arrest the processes that lead to our feet hurting and exhaustion taking hold. Slow them down, if not keep them from happening altogether.”

The others remained quiet for some time after that, wondering if I was telling the truth and trying to understand how they could possibly be given such relief, or whether or not it could even be real.

“Why hasn’t Phage done that for us sooner?” Sarah finally asked.

I shot an angry and confused thought in what I hoped was Phage’s direction and said, “I do not know.”

“I remember it saying, after you came aboard, that we’d need to bring a lot more of you over to really help us,” she said. “Is that true, or what’s it planning?”

“It might still be true,” I said. “I think it wants to help you in more ways than this, for one thing. And also, what I’m going to do is going to be temporary and it will require a certain amount of constant concentration.”

“Will it keep you from fronting or enjoying the park?” Goreth asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s just not sustainable. I also don’t know or understand your biology, so there may be some risk. But I should be able to see what’s happening and adjust for any problems.”

“This is like a superpower,” Sarah whispered.

“Yes,” I replied, understanding that she meant magical abilities that heroes of certain stories were gifted with. “Yes, it very much is. It felt like one to me when I first received it. More so than the nanite neural terminals, even.”

“Can you tell us about that?” Goreth asked.

“Yes. But, do you want to see my reactions to all your different animals, or sit here and listen to me tell you my world’s history?” I asked.

“Dammit. I don’t think I can answer that,” Goreth said.

“I want to feel the superpower,” Sarah countered.

“Phage really should answer you about why it didn’t do this before,” I said. “But, while it is more powerful than I will ever be, it is also weirder and more restricted in some ways. We’ve all come to expect these sorts of things. Also, maybe it wanted to teach me something by having me here to do it.”

“Typical deity shit,” Goreth said.

“It is not a deity,” I said.

“I’m not sure how it isn’t,” they countered. “The way it describes itself.”

“OK, quiet, I want to concentrate,” I said. “I’ll take the front when I’m ready to get up.”

“Got it.”

“Shsh.”

So I turned my attention to what our body was doing, and how it worked.

Shortly before it died, when our vessel was succumbing to age, we Pembers had taken turns doing something like this. I was intimately familiar with our old vessel’s biology by the time it had expired. Even though there were thousands of us in our system, we’d lived a long enough time that most of us had had the opportunity to learn about our vessel in this way. I had volunteered more frequently, though, because I really didn’t know what else to do with myself.

I’d never found my Art. I’d never discovered, in all my exploration of the Sunspot and its nooks, crannies, communities, and Network spaces, that one thing that would bring me a sense of purpose to my life. The common euphoria of Doing Ones Art has never come to me. So I’d thought I could at least get some sense of purpose by making life easier for my fellow system members.

And our internal government, the Council of Eleven, which hardly needed to exist near the end, had acknowledged my efforts. A couple of the members, including Myirra, had spoken to me personally about it. But I also got the impression that they weren’t really speaking for the entire system, but saying that they’d individually felt grateful for my work.

Anyway, I had learned enough about our own biology by that time to be a specialist of biological medicine here on Earth. If only everyone here had the same physiology that we’d been born with.

But our very cells work differently than yours.

You have something called mitochondria that were deeply mysterious to me until I’d watched them work for long enough. Of course, I didn’t get the name of them until much, much later, when I looked them up on your internet.

On the most superficial level, Sarah and Goreth had two things going on in their body causing the most immediate pain and exhaustion. Their nerves were deteriorating, and their mitochondria weren’t working right.

However, to figure this out clearly enough to do anything, I had to compare them to someone walking by.

But, also, those were the things that were causing the full body pain and exhaustion.

Their feet were a somewhat different matter. They were affected by these things, but also there was just a lot of damage done there over the years.

The bones of their right foot were a slightly different shape and set of sizes than their left. I vaguely remembered one of them thinking about that once, and blaming their right foot. And I couldn’t change that difference at all. Their bones weren’t growing anymore,
and there was nothing I could do that I knew of.

Also, the connective tissue throughout their body was deteriorating, much like their nerves, and that had been accelerated in their feet due to the immense amount of weight and work they endured over their lifetime.

And there was a lot of inflammation there, sort of an immune reaction to the pain and injuries happening.

So, for the duration of our visit to the zoo, I found that I could arrest the processes that increased inflammation as we used our feet, and dull the pain signals the nerves were sending. I could also slow down the deterioration of everything, and bolster the operation of the mitochondria.

I went about setting those processes up and practiced maintaining them. Then looked up with our vessel’s head and glanced around the front area of the park and watched people walking around, while I felt for the new balance of my attentions.

“You’re going to have to do the walking, and most of the talking,” I told Sarah and Goreth. “But I think I can keep my reactions to what we see to the forefront, so you feel them.”

“It’s like taking ibuprofen,” Sarah said, as we stood up. “No. Percocet. Holy crud.”

“We say ‘Hailing Scales’,” I offered.

“Sure. Hailing Scales!”

It’s from an ancient myth that has no relevance to a generational starship. We don’t even know if it came from our original planet, if we had one, or someone’s imagination, it is that old and our records that sparse. For the most part, prehistory on the Sunspot starts with our predecessor ship. We have begun to find and contact other Exodus Ships through the tunnel, but piecing together their histories is work that has hardly begun.

Doing what I’m doing probably prolonged the life of our original vessel, but we couldn’t keep it from dying, I thought. And I understood our biology better than yours.

“Unfair, but OK,” Sarah said. “Let’s go look at animals!”

Frankly, the trees were amazing enough for me.

Earth trees are shorter and smaller and much, much younger than Sunspot trees. And shaped a bit differently. The leaves and needles are different. But not by too much. A tree is a tree, regardless of the branch of biology that develops into that shape. On the Sunspot, some of our trees are fungal fruiting bodies, but they’re still trees.

But, as I noted before, your trees are green!

What a weird color!

However, I have to admit, my reactions to the animals in the zoo were very similar to my reactions to the trees. Full of emotions.Also, the architecture of the whole place was so similar to how we build things on the Sunspot, I had strange feelings of being at home while visiting each animal.

Instead of describing each one, I will say this.

I have never seen a person interacting directly with fauna before, besides trying to scare one away. But we’d made it to the zoo around meal time for the animals, and I got to witness a lot of it. And also, it was clear that these animals were aware of the people walking around the park and stopping to visit with them.

When we got to the gorilla exhibit, there was a sign there telling us not to look them directly in the eye, for instance.

But I didn’t need signs to tell me that they could perceive us.

Every animal reacted in small ways, if they were out and not distracted by something else, whenever we approached an enclosure. Even if they seemed to be resting and otherwise ignoring their surroundings, an ear twitch and a shift in posture told me everything, because I could see the chain of cause and effect between us and them in a way that few other people on Earth likely could.

But, the more obvious interactions between the zoo staff and the animals during feeding time were so gratifying to see, and reminded me of when the cuttlecrabs had decided to start approaching us and talking to us (and we consider the cuttlecrabs to be people now).

And, at the very least, I think that humanity should start listening to elephants more closely. You are so close to understanding each other and telling each other stories.

Crows too, probably. Maybe a few others.

We might be able to help with that.