Here’s a small sample of how my mind was rushing as I made and ate lunch. 

I don’t think my writing reflects my thought processes. 

Ashwin maybe captures it better. My mind works almost as if I’m made up of a hundred little Goreths all thinking their own things, bouncing off each other and triggering each other’s trains of thought. And I don’t find myself with the urge to write like that.

Writing is nice. It orders my thoughts. Which is probably why I’ve done so much of it, between Sarah and I.

Anyway.

I’d returned to my quarters after a long and exhausting morning tour of my new world and home, ʔetekeyerrinwuf, doors parting like stage curtains once again to present to me a distressingly empty room.

I’m working up to this. It’s gonna hurt you. Maybe.

I walked across the room, on all fours as I do now, tail weaving back and forth along the ground behind me, to the food maker. Which is in one of the furthest corners from the door.

I would get to make this place my own over time. Or as immediately as I wanted to. I could do almost whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, from now on. No more obligations, ever. Or, not very many.

And it hurt to think of that, because that wasn’t at all true of my self back on Earth. And when they got my memories of what life was like here, it would hurt them, and then I’d have the memory of that hurt.

I think this is one of the things that had made Phage reluctant to allow this. But in the end, it couldn’t truly say, “No.” ʔetekeyerrinwuf is the land of consent and autonomy, and it had spent the last hundred and thirty some millennia of its existence in this culture. Even if coming to Earth had prompted Phage to start behaving more like an Earthling, with less regard for those things, it still, deep down, believed in these values, and had relented.

Sarah had become afraid, then, dropping her original enthusiasm for coming over here, when Phage had OKed our trip, and suggested that I experience a cycle of it first, before she sent a copy of herself over. And that seemed reasonable, and I had agreed to it, but I was now missing her quite a bit.

I was effectively a singlet here, and I’ve never been a singlet.

So, I reached the food maker with no one accompanying me to tell me how to use it. 

I’d completely forgotten about my Tutor, Mutabenga, who had eagerly assigned itself to me. It was very considerate, and almost always waited for me to prompt it. And I’m not used to it being in my life, so it felt like it wasn’t there at all.

The Tutors weren’t really Tutors anymore. And that’s a story that’s part of the Sunspot Chronicles. They weren’t assigned to raise Children anymore. But they could still volunteer to do whatever they wanted to, even if it was still Tutoring, because they had the guaranteed autonomy to do so. And, in wanting to show up its sibling, Yarrayoa’uf (a.k.a. Abacus), who was running tours of ʔetekeyerrinwuf for other Outsiders, Mutabenga had jumped at my arrival to show me around.

And then it had sat back while everyone else did the work.

Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of it. I’d forgotten it was on call.

So, here I was, in my set of rooms, irregularly angled and warping walls metallically reflecting light from the illuminated trim. The floor a dulled, darkened galvanized steel or something like that. The ceiling the same color. And what little fixtures there were were trimmed in something like brass and green ceramic.

The maker was basically just a bin of nanite clay, a ceramic and metal container a meter and a half tall and two meters wide. The top surface was bare nanite clay, and could be commanded to take any shape, apparently. There was a touch screen holodisplay panel on one side of it about the size of a tablet back home that was glowing a faint blue-green.

For how purple the outside world was, the Garden, the Ktletaccete sure did like their brassy gold and mossy green. It did make for some really nice contrasts with the purple of the plant life, of course.

So, here I was, hungry and confused.

Here it is. Here is the paragraph of my mind doing its thing.

Why was I hungry? I was now inhabiting a nanite exobody, called an exobody because the first people to make them had still had their original organic vessels. It shouldn’t need to eat, nor give me signals that it was hungry. Of course, maybe that was because it was engineered to make me think it was organic, like a real body, so that I would feel at home in it. But I could never really go home ever again, and it was my fault. And that meant that I wouldn’t be able to eat any of my favorite foods, and I could not fathom how my earlier self hadn’t thought of that before coming over here. I was autistic and ADHD, with food related sensory needs. And coming to an alien world where nothing of Earth origin would ever grow, where I could never truly leave again, was the worst choice possible for accommodating those needs. Holy shit. My parents would cackle. Feeling like justice had finally been served. Not like they had a really good sense of what justice actually was. How did justice work here, anyway? How would I avoid breaking a law? And what would happen if I did break it? Would it be like that one episode of Star Trek, the Next Generation? Of course not! But I didn’t know. Just like I didn’t know how to operate this food maker, even if I had any idea of what I might try to eat. Oh, god in hell, I was going to miss the fuck out of bagels. I could teach these people about bagels. Even if I never learned how to make them before, I now had untold eons, or whatever now, to reverse engineer them! Maybe I could simulate a bagel somehow with the ingredients of food here. And I wondered if I could somehow still access the Internet through the Tunnel. You know, for recipes. Speaking of tunnels, the trams here were spookily similar to the MAX in Portland, where they go underground for that one spot. Or the subways in Berlin. But without rails.

And that’s, like, how I think most of the time. Just, like, a run-on stream of consciousness, endless paragraph. Even when I’m not panicked.

OK, so the Tunnel Apparatus. That was a thing.

Even though there was the end of the Tunnel somehow metaphysically embedded in my systems’ psyche back on Earth, that wasn’t the case here. It was a physical piece of technology here, and I’d gotten to see it when I’d arrived.

It was now located in a place called Mau Rro, or the Mouth of Phage. A temple high in the Ring Mountains overlooking Tenmouth sound and the Katofar peninsula, which did look a smidge like Puget sound and the Olympic peninsula back home, if you squinted and tilted your head the right way.

When I’d first had visions of it as given to me by Ashwin, my mind had warped them to look more like my childhood region than they really did. But now that I was here, I could barely see the similarities.

We’d agreed, however, that in all the materials we published about ʔetekeyerrinwuf, we’d use maps that looked more like Washington state. To subtly add to our plausible deniability. To make it look like a lazy fabrication of fiction. Or a literary allusion to our childhood world.

But the Tunnel Apparatus.

Ashwin had said that there were disturbing coincidences between this world and Earth, and that was one of them.

It looked like a 1970s radio component as redesigned by an AI. It had too many fingers.

Well, nobs and pointers.

It had a brushed aluminum casing with what looked like polished wooden caps on either end. Unlike just about everything else in this word, it was boxy. Rectangular.

OK, actually, there is a city here, Fikwakyet (a.k.a. Fairport), with boxy houses, that I could have chosen to live in. But it had weird roots in the fascism of Ferukepikape, the predecessor ship, that I didn’t want to associate with, even if it was meant to preserve the non-fascist aesthetics of one of that ship’s cultures. That clinging to the past just wigged me out. Especially with that history.

But then there was this Tunnel Apparatus, with its black enamel trim on heavy steel nobs, and its black backed, amber lit linear dial, which had thirty-one pointers arrayed in a parabolic pattern along the bottom of it, and the large pointer at the top, pointing down. One of the smaller pointers was dark. The first one to the left, near the zero point.

This thing literally looked like something someone on Earth had designed. Someone in a marketing department of an electronics company.

I suppose that in an infinite universe there might not actually be an infinite number of ways to design a piece of electronics. And that physics lays some constraints on evolution itself. And when two species, or people, evolve to have enough similarities, given enough time they might duplicate the look of technology that has a similar purpose.

But if I were designing the Tunnel Apparatus myself, for the task it supposedly was designed to do, I sure would not design it like that myself. Because, apparently, it was limited in what it could do. It had been designed to accommodate only thirty-one immediate connections. You had to push a button to get another set of thirty-one connections. And then, after that, to make more connections, you had to coordinate with someone on the other end of a connection you’d made to make a relay to one of theirs.

And that seemed ridiculous for a piece of technology that was already well beyond anything Earth could dream of making. Well, several Earthlings had dreamt about it, Ursula K. Leguinn being one of them. A science fiction author. And there were scientists trying to unlock the physics and technologies necessary to make it. But we weren’t anywhere near there yet.

Just like it wasn’t anywhere near my quarters.

So, why had I chosen the quarters I had?

I wanted to be near or in a city. Under one made sense to me, because as beautiful and exotic as the Garden was, the concave nature of it, being in a gigantic can, was unnerving to this dragon who’d grown up on a planet. I could visit it whenever I wanted to, but I didn’t want to feel like I had to have windows that looked out onto it.

I had figured a veritable cave would fit my draconic moods better. Assuming I actually really was a dragon.

And it seemed to work for now.

I could change it later, almost any time. Put myself into a queue for one of the surface houses, and cycle into one of them when someone moved out. Or one of the quarters in a surface building.

Some buildings could be expanded upward, too, if all the residents in it agreed to do so and I put some of my allocation of resources into it.

My allocation of resources. A given, guaranteed wealth of matter and energy that everyone got to have, that was going to, hopefully, go into the food I was going to make, to go into this nanite exobody that didn’t really need it.

That was it, really. I had agreed to move here, because when Ashwin explained even some of what it was like, it had seemed like the fully automated luxury space communism all of my peers back home had always dreamed about.

I’d figured, during any moment I was thinking about it, that the loss of all of my safe foods would be a worthwhile trade for everything else. With a nanite exobody, I shouldn’t even have to eat!

Fucking thing.

I felt ravenous!

I looked around my quarters and tried to distract myself by imagining what I’d fill it with. I already had my bed, which looked a lot like a gigantic, elegant, regal dog bed. And I have to admit, I loved that thing with all my heart.

But with my hunger, I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Meat,” I said, finally. Out loud. Like I was on a ship in a science fiction show. “Make me some kind of meat. Preferably animal. Raw.”

I stared at the food maker, which didn’t register my command at all.

“May I advise?” a voice asked.

I nearly jumped out of my scales.

It had paused just long enough that the timing wasn’t right for a computerized response to a command. There had been a silence that was being filled with my frustration and disappointment, so when it had spoken it had startled me.

It was, of course, Mutabenga.

At this point, if you hadn’t been wondering since last chapter, you might be asking what language we were speaking.

There had been one change to my psyche, my memories and identity, that I’d allowed to be made to me, besides moving here itself.

Like some sort of open source operating system or piece of software, I had opted to be upgraded with an Inmararräo linguistics pack. Well, and also the Fenekere one, as well.

We’d all been afraid of whether or not it would work. But, when I had pointed out that the Network had seemed to adapt to my human, or human-adjacent, neurology already, and that I’d taken the risk to just jump over and find out, everyone agreed that it was reasonable to risk with that tampering.

Before accepting those linguistic memories and added Network neurology, Ashwin had been there to translate for me.

If I hadn’t really been human before, back on Earth, I definitely wasn’t anymore. And good fucking riddance. Now I’d have to think about if that meant I wasn’t therian, an identity I’d taken up in my youth, when I’d encountered it online.

A therian is someone who is in an otherwise human body who, for one reason or other, is a different kind of animal. And, I’m a dragon. And always have been. I didn’t become a dragon by choosing to be a therian, but rather chose to call myself a therian because it seemed to describe to other people adequately that I was a dragon.

I can’t really explain how or why I’m a dragon. I just am.

But, now I was amongst a people who didn’t have a species anymore?

Also, what did this mean about my autism and ADHD?

Or my status of gender?

Anyway, when Mutabenga had startled me with its question, I’d found myself spiraling into a thought process similar to what I just wrote above.

Instead of answering its question, I started pondering those things, starting with the thought that I still seemed to have some C-PTSD about people looking over my shoulder while in the kitchen.

“Goreth? Are you OK,” Mutabenga asked.

I opened my mouth and took in a breath, held it, pulling my head up and back, looking straight ahead for a moment, and then said, “Yes. Yes, I am deciding to be OK.”

“OK,” it said. “May I advise you about the food maker and meat?”

“Please!” I said, kind of frozen in place, trying to will my hunger away.

“To begin with, you may wish to edit your hunger pangs out of you, using Fenekere commands,” it suggested. “Many people who have ascended to the Network eventually choose to do that.”

I slowly nodded, trying to accept that idea. But suddenly, I was feeling like if I did that I would feel less alive. Less real.

“But, it is OK if you don’t want to,” Mutabenga said. “They may help you feel rooted in your sense of a body.”

I kept nodding.

“We don’t have meat here,” it said. “I’m sorry, but it is not a thing we eat. The fauna of the Garden may eat each other, but we have never done that ourselves.”

I stopped nodding, and said, “But I’m a dragon.”

“Yes,” it said. “And you’ll have to be a dragon that eats meat analogs, either Network simulated food, outside of your nanite Exobody, or amalgams made by the food maker from the fungus, fruit, nuts, and algae grown by ʔetekeyerrinwuf’s farms.”

It did not actually say ‘fungus, fruit, nuts, and aglae’, but used words referring to living matter that Ashwin, Sarah, and I have since collectively decided resembles those things.

“I am also informed that you like to drink something that you call ‘milk’. It turns out we have something we call ‘formula’ that is tailored to each person’s individual needs, and that can probably come very close to resembling milk,” it explained.

I took another breath and nodded, and then asked, “How do these things work?”

“Well,” it said. “When you are fully on the Network, the Network can be commanded to make Network food from your memories. It will be exactly like how you remember food to be. And your Network based metabolism, which you are currently experiencing, will be satisfied by it.”

I let out my breath, and said, “That sounds ideal.”

“It really is,” Mutabenga admitted.

“And then, if I want to try actual ʔetekeyerrinwuf food, when I’m ready?” I asked.

“I honestly recommend going to a food artisan,” Mutabenga said. “But if that is too advanced and complex for you, you can take the food you have eaten on the Network and command the food maker to do its best to simulate it. It might come very close. You might be surprised. I, also, might be surprised.”

I let myself chuckle. “OK. I think I’d like to try this,” I said.

“Wait,” it said.

“What?”

“I am being a fool.”

“How so?”

“There is no good reason you should leave your exobody in order to eat Network food. While you are in that body, you are fully in the Network. I am sorry, I don’t know why that did not occur to me immediately,” it said.

“Are you a person?” I asked it.

“Yes,” it said, reflexively.

“Then you’re fallible, like any other person,” I told it. “Memory glitches and weird paths of thinking come with the territory. At least, it does for humans. No matter how experienced and smart we think we are.”

“This is also true of Ktletaccete,” it said. “Yes. Thank you.”

“So, the food,” I said.

“Use Fenekere to tell the Network to manifest your choice of food, referring to your own memories,” it said. “Use the key word ‘ʔe’ as part of the command. Here, I’ll send you the best commands, so you don’t have to try to think of the logic yourself. May I do that?”

“OK,” I said. 

And then I felt a ping, and became aware of a waiting message. 

It was in an area of my consciousness that felt like inworld memories of cellphones and social media messages. I’d almost heard the ping, as if it was audible. And, just like I was used to thinking internally at my sysmates back home, I sort of intuitively knew how to poke the waiting message.

It wasn’t that I could see it. I just felt its cool, papery presence in a tiny corner of my awareness, to the upper right.

I poked it with a thought, and immediately knew that it had come from Mutabenga, and then I was able to visualize the needed Fenekere commands as if I had looked at them written in Fenekere script on a holoterminal screen.

The spot in the command that was for any given food was left blank, with a sense of the needed vowels to give it the right grammar. I would simply have to look up, or remember, the word or set of words needed to describe the food I was to visualize for the Network. 

And that’s part of what Eh’s name, ʔe, was for.

The way it was conjugated made it a reference to me and my own being as a source of creation.

Just being presented with all that information by the linguistic corners of my own mind made me appreciate how Ashwin could go mad with joy over languages.

In any case, that is how I made a food that wasn’t really there.

I finished the command, and said it out loud, even though I didn’t actually need to vocalize it, and then reared up and held out my upturned palm, claws lightly curled.

And it was like this raw steak was gently placed into my clutches by an unseen wait staff.

It came fluidly from out of nowhere and settled its bloody weight into my upturned, waiting digits. And its smell hit my nostrils. All iron and fat and coolness. It felt like it had been refrigerated, and was still within the safe zone of food, for now.

If this were a real steak and I was still in my humanish body, I’d definitely want to cook it just a little bit, to kill any germs on its surface.

But that shouldn’t matter here, and I was presumably a dragon. Maybe I wouldn’t need cooked food?

Cooking it would give it a sense of familiarity, though.

But, I had clearly chosen uncooked meat for a reason.

It had been a conscious choice.

“No one’s going to be offended if I eat this?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” replied my Tutor.

I looked around the room with my eyes, and said, “I think I’m going to get a little feral about it.”

“If you would like me to look away, for your privacy, it is usually my custom to do so unless it seems you need me,” Mutabenga said.

I thought about that for a minute, originally reassured but then confused. “If you’re looking away, then how do you know when I seem to need you?” I asked.

“Ancient Tutor related Network protocols,” it said. “Messages get sent to me if your metabolism or neurology reach certain states, assuming that they are within the same kinds of bounds that match Ktletaccete needs, and then I ask you if you need me before I even look.”

“Oh,” I said. “So I am being monitored at all times.”

“You are a Network entity,” Mutabenga said. “You are being generated and maintained by the very thing that is also monitoring you. It is not possible for you to exist and function without being monitored. This is a regrettable but unavoidable reality here. It is one reason that some people still choose to be Monsters.”

“Monsters?”

“People who choose to disconnect completely from the Network. Which is a thing you cannot currently do,” it explained. “You will need an organic body to do so. Which can be provided for you after the Network has taken enough readings of how you work. But it is, even for us, a risky procedure.”

My heart jumped and fluttered at the possibilities of that. I’ve already explained one reason why. Eggs.

“How is it risky?” I asked.

“Since you are human…” it started to say.

“I am not,” I stated.

“What do you mean?” it asked.

“I am not human. I never was. I’ve always been a dragon, like you see me now. I was born in a human-like body, descended from humans. But now that I’m here, I’m definitely even less like a human,” I told it. “And my instinct is to eat this steak like this. Watch.”

I reared up a little higher and slapped it down onto the ground in front of me, and then I found myself immediately pouncing on it with both my foreclaws like a cat, with all of the weight I could push into it.

The steak had been made proportionately the correct size for my current body. Like, if it had been in my old body’s hands at the same proportionate scale, it would have been a big cut of steak, requiring two hands to hold reasonably well. But because my new body was seven meters long, and my foreclaws so much bigger than my Earthly hands, the steak was even bigger.

It walloped the floor before I landed on it.

And then I unerringly sank my front teeth into it, between my claws, which were set just wide enough apart for this. And I pulled back with my head, tearing a sizeable chunk out of the middle of it.

I kind of chewed once, really just getting a better grip of it with a small jerk of my head.

And then I lifted my head back and opened my mouth to let it fall into my gullet.

This was so satisfying to me that I didn’t even stop to wonder about how a Network generated hallucination of a steak had made such a tantalizing noise upon contacting the floor. Or how it felt like my palms were resting on meat and not cold default flooring.

I also decided that with my next bite I would shake it side to side as if trying to break its neck, even though it didn’t have any bones in it.

I felt like that was absolutely the thing to do.

“Ah, yes, I am familiar with those techniques,” Mutabenga said.

“Cow,” I said, and did my thing.

As I was swallowing my latest kill, Mutabenga suggested, “I can explain in fairly minute detail how the Network is able to do this for you, a being that is not Ktletaccete. We have enough readings now to understand it. Let me know if you have any questions. Or I can direct you to the readings to peruse yourself, and the documents for interpreting them.”

I dropped my head to a horizontal position, after swallowing that last bite, and then tilted an eye to look up at the ceiling, as if Mutabenga was there. I sort of imagined that it was.

“How does it work,” I asked, “that I was born to human parents, with a nominally human sister, my sysmate, Sarah, who shared my brain and body with me. But that I’m definitely not human. That I have these draconic needs and apparently even draconic instincts? Dragons, which never existed on Earth except in stories? Where does all that come from? I’ve always wondered.”

“That is something we know considerably less about,” my Tutor said. Then it used a word that my mind now wants to translate to ‘therian’ or, more closely, ‘otherkin’. “We also have bashuketeni amongst the Ktletaccete,” it said. “They have studied themselves extensively, with great curiosity. But cannot agree on how they are conceived to be the way they are. There is no science that can tease out the answers. And even with fetal nanite neural terminals now monitoring development, we have found no evidence one way or another for any of their theories.”

“You have bashuketeni?” I asked. Therians.

“Yes.”

“Weird,” I said. “Maybe it’s a consciousness thing. Like, wherever life is complex enough to create consciousness, it’s also complex enough to replicate the minds of other beings far removed from it.”

“That is our most accepted theory, yes. And your existence does seem to suggest some truth to it,” Mutabenga said. “But, we can never know for sure. Especially with the existence of Phage, and its gift to us, which suggests that some of the more wild theories might be true.”

“Like spiritual theories?” I asked.

“Ah, that word does not quite mean what you think it means,” Mutabenga said, referring to the word I’d used for ‘spiritual’. “Your linguistic centers are not perfectly calibrated. There are numerous little glitches that are easy to adjust for and I get your meaning very easily. But that just sounded very silly. I suspect you meant to say ‘metaphysical theories’.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “What does ‘spiritual’ mean to you?” And then I took the final bite of meat in a brutal display of disregard for its feelings.

As that happened, Mutabenga said, “Imaginary. It is a very literal word, not far removed from its roots. It has never been used in the way you use it, that I know of. It means ‘a product of the mind’, and is used to talk about purely hypothetical things. Things that inherently do not physically exist because they are imagined, as opposed to their physical counterparts that may otherwise be identical. It’s like saying ‘theories that are only in the head’. But I am not sure I am getting the nuance of the meaning across to you, because you’re not really calibrated for our culture yet.”

“And the way I use it sounds silly?” I asked.

“Unfortunately,” it replied.

“I think that tells me enough for now,” I said. “So, like, metaphysical theories, then?

“For bashuketeni existence? Yes,” it said. “Many people, Phage included, think that Phage is inherently metaphysical in nature. And it seems to be.”

“When it lived with us, it told us the same things,” I told Mutabenga. “And then, Ashwin demonstrated its gifts in order to save us from ourselves and from a kidnapper. I honestly believe it at this point. It’s a fundamental law of physics given consciousness.”

“I will not argue that point,” my Tutor said. “I do not have the tools nor the will to do so.”

“I’ve read your book,” I said. “And we’re trying to publish it.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“You seem to write sympathetically about Phage in it,” I pointed out.

“I think I did, yes.”

“I probably would, too,” I said. “It’s been a lifesaver for us. It helped us get through the darkest years of our life, got us to Portland and secured our Medicaid and food stamps, despite our growing disabilities. And it did this despite the fact we thought it was a nightmare. Like, it originally scared the living shit out of us.”

“You use that idiom like it is your own,” Mutabenga said.

“What idiom?” I asked.

“Scaring ‘the living shit out of’ you,” it replied.

“That’s an English idiom!” I exclaimed. “I hadn’t even realized I’d used it.”

“It is an Inmararräo idiom as well,” it said.

“Weird! What about ‘holy shit’?” I asked.

“Shit of the Great One,” it replied.

I shook my head in disbelief.

“I am told that that gesture from you means ‘no’,” it said.

“Ah. I’m shaking my head at how coincidental that is. It’s hard to believe.”

“Ah, yes.”

“How do Ktletaccete gesture for ‘no’, if it’s not shaking your head?”

“Turn your mouth away from the other person. Turning to the left is a stern negative. Turning to the right is a considered maybe. Eye movement also gives a signal. Eyes looking away make the gesture lean even further to negative. Keeping your eyes on your counterpart, or the subject of the discussion, leans the gesture more toward a positive.”

I tried it out on the Network simulated meat stains on the floor. “Huh,” I said. “That feels very natural. I like it.”

“To indicate ‘yes’, tilt your head sharply back, snout upward,” it said. “The higher the degree, the more affirmative and enthusiastic the ‘yes’.”

“Ah, yeah, OK.”

“Or,” it said. “Look right at your subject, open your mouth slightly, without showing teeth, and widen your eyes. If you had a plume, or expressive ears, I’d say raise those, too. That also means yes. More of an intense interest or eagerness, but definitely a form of yes.”

“This sounds like the body language of a lot of Earth animals,” I said, suspicious of these directions.

“An animal that has a head with sensory glands and a mouth on it, that has learned to hunt food for prey, seems likely to have developed similar body language, wherever it may have evolved,” Mutabenga said. “That is the theory, at least.”

A thought about what that implied occurred to me, so I asked about it, “You Ktletaccete don’t eat meat. But are you saying that your ancestors may have?”

“You have seen Eh now, yes?” Mutabenga asked. It knew I had. It had been there with me during my morning tour.

“Yes,” I confirmed.

Eh had looked like a different kind of dragon. One that had what could be amphibian features on Earth. And when Eh had spoken, Eh had displayed pointy, conical teeth designed for puncturing and gripping large hunks of food. Eh’s gullet, as generated by the Network as my own now was, looked able to be stretched to accommodate a morsel as large as Eh’s head.

“Based on Fenekere elemental words, we think that Eh resembles what Ktletaccete must have looked like during the construction of the first Exodus Ship,” Mutabenga said. “An ambush predator, from the looks of it.”

“Oh.” I recalled then that Ashwin had said the Ktletaccete of ʔetekeyerrinwuf don’t eat meat in order to help maintain the delicate balance of its tiny ecosystem. Not even farmed meat, because that might affect things too much. But meat eating had been a thing on Feruukepikape, and that ship supposedly still existed, and I didn’t quite understand that. So, I asked Mutabenga about it.

“Something about ʔetekeyerrinwuf makes its systems more susceptible to chaos,” the Tutor replied. “Just like a person experiencing developmental fibrillation.”

“Huh,” I said. “What’s developmental fibrillation?”

“When a fetus deviates enough from its typical path of development, it creates an unstable set of conditions that introduce unpredictable chaos in its being for the rest of its life,” Mutabenga said. “The path of its life can no longer be predicted in any way, and this affects everything about it. It can become socially isolated, even amongst others experiencing the same thing, and it can develop clusters of diseases and mutations, even later in life, that it might not otherwise have experienced. But, as a person, it’s still worthy of life and enjoying what life can offer it. There are also benefits to fibrillation, such as increased forms of creativity and intense sensitivity to its environment.” It was using the Tutorial form of the pronoun ‘it’, or the Inmararräo pronoun that we’ve translated to ‘it’. Very much a revered and respected personal pronoun. And it made me wonder if Mutabenga was also someone experiencing developmental fibrillation.

“And you can tell this happens despite how radically diverse your population is?” I don’t know if you get this from my short descriptions of the few people I’d met on ʔetekeyerrinwuf yet, but the populace of the ship are all as diverse as a furry convention. They literally each look like an entirely different species, completely unrelated to each other. This is a product of a now abandoned genetic engineering program that uses evolutionary engines to create as diverse a group of people as possible. I’m told there is a new way of doing things in place now, but I haven’t been given that part of the tour yet.

“Yes,” Mutabenga said. “After as long as we had been running our breeding program, with how everything was tracked and recorded, we know this to be a universal truth. Especially with the nature of our experiment. Enough data has been collected that we can say with a certainty that developmental fibrillation occurs at a similar rate in all species of ʔetekeyerrinwuf life. And then, both Phage and its child, Niʔa, have confirmed it with their own senses. And now, with their gifts, we can see for ourselves when it is happening.”

I felt an excited chill.

“What about me?” I asked.

There was a pause. A lack of response.

“Mutabenga?” I prompted.

“Yes,” Mutabenga said. “You are what Niʔa calls a Fibrillator.”

“Another coincidence,” I breathed.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve just described one of the more scientifically accepted and progressive theories for what autism is on Earth, though a lot of people don’t know about it,” I told it. “I don’t know. Autism may really just be a social construct describing a set of common experiences in people who tend to think very differently than most of the populace. And that those experiences can happen regardless of whether they’re fibrillators like, uh, me. But, wow.”

“That makes sense,” Mutabenga said.

“It does?”

“Life is complicated and weird,” it said.

“True.”

“Will you be making it weirder for yourself?” it asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“Will you be accepting Phage’s gift?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But Mutabenga, hold on a moment. Let’s back up to something you said.”

“OK.”

“Did you just tell me that ʔetekeyerrinwuf, this worldship itself, is autistic?”

“According to your own definition of autistic, yes.”

In Inmararräo, the word ‘autistic’ sounds a little slurred. There is no ‘s’ sound. But the rest of the phonemes sound nearly identical, just with a foreign sounding inflection to American English ears.

In our latin alphabet, Ashwin has chosen to spell the Inmararräo version a little differently.

Atishtik.

It really just sounds like Sean Connery is saying it. Which, I have to admit, just makes me laugh sometimes.