I have become a person who uses ‘Earthling’ unironically.

—

Niʔa was there to observe my re-merging, on both sides, to make sure it went smoothly.

Sarah was also there, on the Terran side, because our vessel was sleeping and she loves me as her twin sibling, and she wanted me to be OK.

Ashwin was there, of course, to also perform a re-merging, after me.

And Phage was there for all of those reasons.

It was otherwise a fairly private matter, and everyone else who was available to be there on either side refrained from doing so on my request.

Niʔa, who very much looked like a child of Phage, but tinted green, would come up to our vessel’s chin if they had a vessel of their own on Earth. I seemed to remember seeing Niʔa in purple and pink before as well, but didn’t think much about it, because I was preoccupied with what I was about to do.

“This is going to be easy,” Niʔa said to me. “But it will probably feel really weird.”

“I imagine,” I said. “Coming here in the first place felt really weird.”

They tilted their head back in acknowledgement and said, “Yes, that weird. I’m sorry. I felt the need to say it to be reassuring.”

Niʔa was younger than Ashwin by about fifty or sixty years or something like that. I haven’t done the math to convert it yet. But that meant they were still so much older than me. But I still couldn’t help seeing them as something like a teenager for some reason.

Whereas Ashwin’s apparent age reminded me of Yoda at the beginning of the prequels.

I mean, once a person was no longer tethered to their organic vessels, age sort of became rather meaningless. And trying to judge the age of aliens who each all look and function very differently from each other is a very silly exercise all on its own.

But I found myself trying, just to figure out how to act around them.

Yet another way I had been warped by allistic human culture to go by false cues for social norms that might not even exist.

Just be polite, Goreth. They’re your headmate now, anyway. You get a sense of their age when you share thoughts!

Not that they come forward very often to do that. Not that we do any of that here on ʔetekeyerrinwuf.

“No, you’re right,” I said. “It’s probably a good idea to verbally go over what we’re going to do, right?”

Niʔa’s eyes lit up in a Ktletaccete smile, and they said, “Yes.”

“So, what we’re going to do is step through the Tunnel…” I started to say.

“It doesn’t really work like that,” they said.

“It did in our inworld,” I pointed out.

“Right,” Niʔa agreed. “But here, on this side, at Mau Rro, it works a little bit differently.” They gestured at the small covered pavilion that housed the Tunnel Apparatus. On the other side of that thing, we were having a very similar conversation that didn’t involve this part. They continued, “We have to access it using Network protocols, and that might feel like stepping through it to you, but it might also not. It depends on how your psyche chooses to interpret the results.”

“OK,” I said.

“You can just try to do it intuitively, but if you are not used to treating a box of electronics like a portal, then that might be confusing to you,” Niʔa said.

“Right. Yeah. That makes sense.”

“A work around for that is to send it a Fenekere command, which you can probably figure out yourself given enough time, but which I will send to you, with your consent,” they finished.

“OK,” I said. “Yes. Please, do send me that command.” This felt a lot like performing some kind of magic in an epic fantasy story.

I felt that ping of the message arriving.

“You were saying,” Niʔa said.

“Um, well,” I looked around. The place we were standing in, Mau Rro, was breathtakingly stunning. Even in the nighttime here.

It was actually late morning on Earth, and our vessel was sleeping in, and it would be different next time, because ʔetekeyerrinwuf days and Terran days are not the same length. We were going to have to plan for when our Earthly vessel was sleeping, though. It kind of made this safer and easier.

I’ll describe Mau Rro in a bit.

“Once we do that,” I said, distracted by what I was seeing. “There will be two of me on each side, and we will want to merge somehow. Over there, that works a lot like being co-conscious and just sharing memories and intentions until we’re one person again, right?”

“More or less,” Niʔa said. “Your experience as part of a plural system will help, yes.”

“But, over here? I’m not so sure,” I admitted. “I imagine it works in a very similar way, though.”

“Yes,” Niʔa said. “There are some rituals you can do to facilitate it. They’re really just a way to get your two minds in enough sync to do the merging. But, again, you can also force it with Fenekere commands, since you are governed by the Network now. I don’t recommend that in this case, though.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It can be traumatic. I recommend doing a ritual.”

“OK.”

“But also, I can offer my active assistance, which will be rather intimate but will feel like a massaging of your souls,” they said. “Soothing. If you are OK with that.”

I glanced around nervously and said, questioningly, “Soothing sounds good? But, how does the ritual work?”

“You’ve read Mutabenga’s work,” they said.

“Yes.”

“Think about when Mortu and Mau merged. Or when they later merged with Myirra. It can be as simple as that,” Niʔa replied.

“So, something along the lines of, ‘I give you consent to share my thoughts and memories and foreseeable future’?” I asked.

“Yes, perfect. And then hug yourselves and let it happen.”

“I feel like I’ve seen this in a cartoon,” I said.

Niʔa smiled like an Earthling for me and said, “We’ve watched the same cartoon with you. It’s a coincidence, but an explainable one. That cartoon was probably written by a plural system. And ʔetekeyerrinwuf is functionally also a plural system. We’ve been doing this for far longer than that cartoon has existed, but the physics are essentially the same, regardless of which world we are on.”

The Sunspot is also a system.

Of course it is.

Mutabenga had just told me that earlier that day.

Its body might have been bigger than my two home states combined. And it may have been made mostly of metal. And its psyche existed in a dangerous slurry of carbon and metal that I still didn’t quite understand, despite the fact that my own current body was made from the same stuff. But it was, ultimately, just a vessel with a bunch of people stuck in it who couldn’t really go anywhere else.

And the Network, in which we lived, was constructed to work a lot like a dreamworld, an inworld, if in somewhat alien ways to me.

And it was autistic.

“OK,” I said. “Give me a moment. I’m going to take this in for my self back home.”

Everyone tilted their heads up slightly in acknowledgement.

I’d still been standing on the lift platform that was in the middle of the temple of Mau Rro. I imagined I would eventually walk over to the Tunnel Apparatus before activating it, but I just wanted to enter the scene more officially and look around.

I had just spent the day learning that when you are on four feet, you don’t typically just take one step forward to significantly alter where your body is. One foot moved doesn’t mean much. It’s tentative, not a full shift in position.

Honestly, I’d spent a fair amount of my early childhood crawling around on hands and knees, and maybe more of my later childhood and teen years doing that than most humans typically do. But, almost everyone is familiar with this if you just think about it.

I took four steps off the platform. One foot, another foot, a third foot, and then the last, tail dragging to give me a sense of movement.

My instinct, apparently, is to lift my tail and use it for balance a lot of the time. But when I’m relaxed and moving slowly, I can let it drag, and I like that sensation. It lets me know it’s there, and I can feel the contours of the ground or floor behind me as I move over it. It’s kind of a stim to move slowly enough to let my tail drag.

The lift platform was raised a few centimeters above the floor of the temple, with a beveled ring of that brassy metal around it, four decimeters wide. I think it is actually brass, or a brass alloy of some sort. It was always very shiny, untarnished, so something was going on with it. Probably the nanites.

The lift was hexagonal, and really just big enough to accommodate me, tail curled around my feet. Five meters wide, from side to side. Six from point to point. I think I was pushing the limits of Sunspot architecture with my exobody. It could fit two of Eh, for instance, if Eh had been there and wanted to be really cozy with Ihnself.

And arrayed around that lift platform were six irregular, elongated septagons arranged like rays of a stylized sun, narrowest points outward. They were a dark coppery metal, probably copper, and also gently beveled, slightly raised from the floor, embedded in it. Each one longer than me, about one and half times my body length. Ten meters?

The floor was stone. A gray marble. And cut into a wide circle. The whole temple largely just consisted of this fifteen to twenty meter wide disc of marble with metal embedded in it and decorative structures built onto its rim. And it was set into a rocky outcrop high on the side of this mountain.

When I’d arrived, the ceiling of the lift irising open as its floor rose up to the top of its walls to present me to the world as if I was rising up in the middle of a stage, the sight that had dominated my vision really had been two enormous hex willow trees set in gigantic marble planters on either side of the temple. They towered over us like arches in a cathedral, with more of those copper, beveled septagons hanging from their limbs like wind chimes. Only those septagons were three meters long, and must have been so heavy, but the limbs of the trees were big and strong enough to hold them aloft without worry.

Hex willows are unique on ʔetekeyerrinwuf in having bark that is a normal bark color for what an Earthling might expect for a tree. A dark mahogany color. But it’s like carpet. Soft to the touch and fuzzy. And the average leaf is as big as my head, many of them bigger, and hexagonal, and that translucent electric indigo I told you about. At night, they glow softly, and here they reflected the lighting of the temple with different hues of that indigo, depending on the angle.

The leaves of the hex willows became the stained glass ceiling of the cathedral at night. And the night sky of ʔetekeyerrinwuf, the Garden slightly illuminated by the ghost moon, the darkened corners of the rest of the structure.

It took work for me to focus beyond the hex willow leaves, but when I did, I had a full view of the Aft Endcap, which rose above the Katofar peninsula like, well, nothing I’ve ever seen before.

No other Earthling has seen a megastructure like this, ever.

I had, because I’d seen the sunhatching earlier that day, looking at the Forward Endcap. But I’d been in a daze at the time, and hadn’t really internalized what I was looking at.

Imagine that the moon is flat, like a coin. And then bring it down to Earth, to rest the edge of that coin on the horizon.

That’s actually going to be way, way bigger than either Endcap of ʔetekeyerrinwuf, but just trying to visualize that is going to get closer to what I saw than anything else I can think of.

Now, wrap the Earth around you for about the length of two countries, provinces, or states, into a tube with that moon-disc as a lid you are looking up at, or down at, or whatever. Losing your sense of direction while looking at it will perfectly simulate the effect this had on me.

I got dizzy.

Punch a hole in the middle of the moon. That’s the sun intake. It’s twenty kilometers wide. The sun intake is. One tenth the width of the Endcap.

Get rid of all the craters and mountains of the moon, and replace it with a flat brownish gray textured metal. I have no idea what that texture looks like up close, I just know that it reflected some light, but not coherently enough to be a mirror of any sort. It reminded me of what you’ll often see on the outside of a car engine.

It had a couple of concentric raised rings, or rims, of the same material, at diameters that seemed to mimic the golden ratio, two thirds, three fifths the width of the Endcap’s radius. And along the outermost ring, there were eight raised panels, trapezoidal in shape, each the size of the snowy peaks of the Katofar mountains.

Look at a map of Washington state. Look at the Olympic peninsula. Behold the part of that map that denotes the Olympic mountains. Take a pen and draw an almost square trapazoid around the snowy peak of those mountains, and that will be close enough. That’s how big each of those panels was.

From where I was standing in Mau Rro, the Aft Endcap took up nearly a third of the sky. Less, volumetrically. I’m not good at doing that kind of math. But, if I drew an arch from the Aft horizon to the Forward horizon, up over my head, for the sky, the Aft Endcap seemed to take up a third of that arch. Probably less, really. Maybe only a fifth. But looking at it it felt like it absolutely filled my vision, even though it didn’t.

Sarah has drawn an illustration of this from memories that Ashwin has fed her. It’s going to be in her art show. You’ll be able to come to Aunti Zero’s to see it in a few months. It’ll be the featured image. You’ll get to see it on our Patreon, and on the website where we’re publishing this book.

That will give you kind of an idea.

But it won’t give you the sense of the weight of it that I experienced there.

I had, so far, always been further from the Forward Endcap than from the Aft Endcap, so when I’d looked Forward, it seemed distant and safe. An abstract concept occluded by the atmosphere and silhouetted by the emerging sun. And then, during the day, it was faded to a very light blue, like Earth’s moon. I had somehow not really noticed the Aft Endcap yet, always looking somewhere else, always only catching it out of the corner of my eye, always looking down or away to avoid being overwhelmed by the weirdness of the ʔetekeyerrinwuf sky.

We were closer to it. There was less atmosphere in the way.

I didn’t so much feel like it was going to fall onto me, a god-like plate precariously placed on its edge.

I felt like I was going to fall into it.

Like its gravity should be pulling me, dragging me to a quick demise on its mostly flat surface.

It was, literally, the foundation of this world.

And while I was standing in Mau Rro, beholding that, there was this entire structure behind me, the artistry of the temple, full of alien symbolism and its own wonder that I just missed, because I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that Endcap.

Phage broke the spell by pointing at the sun intake and saying, “That’s my home.”

“Phage,” Niʔa said quietly.

“I’m going to have to come back here during the day,” I said. “I want to see more details.”

“The view of the forest below us is healing to see during the day,” Niʔa said. “It’s my favorite thing about this place.”

“I believe it,” I said.

“It sounds like you might finally be acclimating,” Ashwin suggested.

“I don’t know about that,” I said, shaking my head at the sun intake of the Endcap. “But, it may be true. I can actually look at this thing now.” Everyone was silent as I continued to stare for a few moments longer. Then I said, “I’m not sure I can take my eyes off of it.”

“Would it be rude or traumatizing for me to point out that you are technically not using eyes?” Ashwin asked. “Or would it help?”

“Ashwin!” Niʔa chided.

“I am sorry. I have picked up habits from living amongst humans,” nem replied.

I looked over at nem and tilted my head, “Ashwin. I’ve noticed. You’ve been re-merging with yourselves every night for the past year, right?”

“Yes.”

“But, you really seem like a different person here on ʔetekeyerrinwuf than on Earth, in our system,” I said. “Like. How much does this re-merging actually help?”

As I was asking that, a dragon the same size and coloration as me crawled out of thin air to stand on the platform of Mau Rro with the rest of us, and took on an expression of wonder and bewilderment.

My counterpart from Earth. One of my other mes. I now had three mes, apparently.

I guess we weren’t really synchronizing this event.

I didn’t know what to say.

Ashwin turned to them and said, “Welcome to ʔetekeyerrinwuf, Goreth. You’ve just asked me a question, and I want to answer it. Are you OK to wait until I do?”

“Um. Shit,” my other self looked around. 

They were just a Network projection at the moment. No nanite exobody. Their Network avatar appeared very similar to the body I was now inhabiting, just as I had had when I’d first arrived, based on how I appeared to myself in my dreams, in our inworld. The Network just does that. 

My other self was unable to answer Ashwin’s question.

“I will talk to them,” Niʔa told Ashwin, and walked over to my other self.

Ashwin approached me to answer my question in lower tones and said, “You are also like a different person to me while you are here, than when you are on Earth. Do you not feel like you are a different person yourself?”

I thought about it, and yeah. I hadn’t really had the time or mental space yet to have that level of self reflection, but I really hadn’t been feeling like myself since I’d arrived. Nothing around me was familiar at all. Ashwin, Phage, and Niʔa were the only people who I knew, and I’d only known them as headmates until now. They had been people I would meet by sharing thoughts and emotions and similar perceptions of the world while inhabiting the same body. And occasionally meeting in third person in dreams. Nothing about them offered much familiarity. And here, I had had no opportunity to practice any of my old habits or routines. There was no going to Aunti Zero’s and ordering a gingersnap here. We weren’t even speaking English.

So, of course, my reactions to everything were new reactions to new things.

I had been feeling like a child. Like I’d lost my adulthood.

And it hadn’t entirely been a bad feeling. Even for an autistic like myself, that sense of wonder can itself become an old familiar comfort sometimes. But, my day had been a constant balancing act of nostalgia almost being pricked by that child-like wonder and meltdown after meltdown from sensory overload, culture shock, and frustration.

Ashwin didn’t really wait for me to answer, and said, “What you do and how you act in the moment is not what makes you you.” Nem waited to see me glance in the direction of nems face, and then said, “It’s how you change your reactions to each new set of stimula, each new situation, each new context that makes you who you are. You change differently than I do, and that’s why you’re you and I am me. But the longer you stay here without reconnecting with your other self, the more that the way you change will differ from how the way your other self changes, and that’s what will make reconnection, fusion, less permanent, and more likely to divide you into truly separate people. The memories you share will be less vivid the longer apart you remain. But, right now, even though you are reacting differently to all of this than your other self, you can still become one again, you are still, mostly, fundamentally the same person.”

I nodded, and then I tilted my head up. And then nodded again, to reassure myself that I was accepting this. They really were helpful words.

“There is no urgency about this, though, except for what you create yourself,” Ashwin said. “It is your right to become more than one person, if you wish it. And if you want to re-merge strongly enough, and be in harmony with yourselves, you can still overcome centuries or even millennia of different experiences. It’s just easier if you do it now.”

“I think I get that,” I said.

“And also, like I said earlier tonight, your life here now is longer than your life there will be. Time will have a different meaning here. Less urgency as you get used to it,” nem reminded me. “And while that’s happening to you, your other self will be experiencing the tenuousness of life in Portland, and you won’t be able to predict when that will abruptly come to a halt and you won’t have access to it anymore.”

I felt a lump in my throat form, and tears threaten to flood my eyes, making me wonder just how different draconic biology was from humanity. And then I got irritated with my own mind for becoming distracted by old therian self recrimination just as I was about to cry about my removed mortality and family I would never really see again.

I took a shuddering breath.

“Go and recombine before you use the Tunnel,” Ashwin said, gesturing. Ktletaccete don’t casually touch each other, usually. Not until conscious implied consent is established verbally between people who are close. A human would have put their hand on my shoulder and pushed me. Ashwin didn’t. Nem just stepped partially aside and turned nems head. Nem said, “Give your Earthly self as many useful memories of this side as you can, so when you are on Earth you will know what it is like. And everything will be less of a surprise for all of you the next time.”

“Yes. Thank you,” I said, and looked up at the ghost moon, which was three quarters of its way across the habitat cylinder.

It was called a ghost moon because it was that time of the month when it wasn’t full strength. And because it was a pale ball of plasma, and not a ball of rock with the Earth’s shadow on it, it was ghostly, translucent, with its weakness. There was a city on the other side of it, slightly brighter than the moon itself, a pale dot within a larger, paler dot. Fikwakyet. The city I very deliberately had not moved to.

I looked back down at my other self, who was just finishing up with their instructions from Niʔa and turning toward me.

We tilted our heads at each other in the same way. To the left, not mirrored.

“Hey,” we said at the same time, in English. And froze.

“This feels like a trope,” my counterpart said after a few seconds, just as I was starting to think the same thing.

“Yeah,” I said. “You know we know the name of it, too.”

And, with that, an actual conversational exchange, it felt OK. I was, for all intents and purposes, really just talking to a new headmate who looked and sounded like me and shared my memories. No big deal.

They clearly felt the same way, and ambled forward more easily.

“We should probably make this quick, to cut down on the awkwardness,” they said.

“Sure,” I said, stepping forward, myself.

Smirking with the cliched novelty that still lingered, though, we did circle each other, claws clicking on the marble, examining our bodies, mine manifested in nanite clay, theirs a Network apparition that nevertheless looked as solid and real as anything else.

With eye contact, and a predatory grin, we dared each other to speak the same word at the same time again, and did, “Twins.” We chuckled in sync.

As spooky as it was, for how present I felt in reality, it was also just too fun.

“I’m going to – “ we both said simultaneously, and then just stopped.

They gestured acquiescence first, indicating that I should talk.

I sighed.

“It hardly feels like we have to do any sort of ritual,” I said. “You know, for synchronization. We’re talking at the same time. Seems like a good sign.”

“Agreed.”

“We’re not really made for hugs, this way.”

“No.”

“Curling up together and twisting tales is something I’ve always wanted to do, but feels way too intimate for this place, especially with people watching.”

“Absolutely.”

“Head butts?”

“Head butts!”

We stuck our forked tongues out at each other, pressing them up against our upper front teeth and wrinkling our noses like little girls. As dragons, though, it looked so threatening, like we were snarling.

Domesticated dragons, who’ve lived amongst humans for too long.

After another synchronized chuckle – or maybe it was more of a giggle – we stumbled toward each other, lowering our heads, and gently knocked skulls.

To a Monster, without a connection to the Network, that must have looked silly and bizarre. A single graphite colored dragon butting heads with the air, jolting to a stop as if actually impacted by something, and a little shockwave rippling back over their face and neck scales. 

Except, they’d probably be used to this kind of thing, having lived here.

To me, to us, well, we could feel the warmth of each other’s breath, we were so close to each other, eyes clenched shut, turning our heads ever so slightly to feel the contours of our skulls beneath our scaled hide. We tilted our heads up ever so much to transfer that pressure to push against the length of our snouts, from brow to tip of nose, and pushed.

We grumbled low at the same time, feeling as if the whole world was vibrating with the expression of comfort.

It did feel like I needed to say something, though. Something to usher us both into the same being. Even with all the coaching we’d both had, and how easy it was for me to visualize the effect of co-fronting.

I did do that visualization, of course. It’s a memory. I’d done it with both Sarah and Phage countless times before.

When you’re fronting, awake, yourself in your body, you will sometimes feel a presence pushing themself up through your body’s sense of interoception. Some people will describe this as like encountering a ghost or a spirit. Others will say it’s like the act of becoming possessed. Sometimes that presence is corporeal enough that you get a sense of their physical shape, as if it is another body overlapping yours and pushing you slightly aside in your own mind.

For me, it’s like a colored blob of pressure with a different temperature, warmer for Sarah, colder for Phage, rising up and adding its weight to my conscious mindscape. Not completely unsimilar to pressing heads together with someone.

And then, when you both agree to merge, it happens when you get a flicker of thought from them, and consent is granted.

And, like a venn diagram, your two bubbles of sensation, thought, and emotion start to overlap, and everything in that overlap is brighter, more vivid, more colorful.

And sometimes you can make that overlap complete, and you’ll feel like you inhabit your body more fully than you ever did before.

It can last seconds, minutes, hours, or, sometimes, if you want it to, the rest of your life.

Some systems are afraid of it, because it sounds like final fusion, which it can be. But it’s always been temporary for us. Sarah and I are just really such different people, with conflicting genders and respective dysphoric triggers.

We like seeing what it’s like to be the other person, but we like being next to each other even better.

And, for some systems, it’s impossible.

On ʔetekeyerrinwuf, like Niʔa said, it can be forced with a command.

Instead, I simply said, “Let’s be a person.”

And I felt my other self nod against my head, and then we started overlapping, just like I’ve done so many times before.

I quickly lost track of which one of us was me, because both were me. As each concurrent point in our bodies met, it merged, but I have no idea what that looked like visually because my eyes were closed and I was focusing on my minds becoming one. It felt a little bit like putting on a full body stocking from forehead to tip of tail, but just pushing myself into it. Except that the tactile sensation of it reached into the very core of my being, to every atom, every wavelength that was part of me.

And when I was done, I involuntarily stretched, reaching my head up to gasp, like surfacing from a lake. And I opened my eyes, to be greeted by the ghost moon there in the sliver of sky between the canopies of the hex willows.

What an amazing experience! 

To crawl into bed as a human, a therian but in a human enough body, at six in the morning, after a long day of socializing and writing.

To slip into a dream full of messages and discussions with a whole committee of familiar people, my twin sibling there, smiling reassurance at me.

To get the gist of the discussion before even understanding the words, as is so common in dreams. To learn that my counterpart on the Sunspot wanted to initiate a re-merging early, tonight if possible, or later this morning. To get the sense that it was probably 10 am already, and that I was still fast asleep, as the dream became more vivid.

To feel excited as I agree to it.

To walk toward the great staticky disc of the Tunnel in the deepest reaches of our psyche, surrounded by friends as Niʔa explained to me how it would work.

To then, step through that disc and wake up, just like waking up in the morning, a dragon.

To stand on an alien world. In an alien world. On top of a mountain, in the air, under a moon, with indigo trees filling my vision.

And then, after that, to walk up to a vision of myself who had already been here and become them.

It was time to go back through the Tunnel, almost immediately.

I knew that.

Our body would not stay asleep for long, and it would be more awkward to do this while it was awake. Possible, but harder to manage.

But I wanted to fly.

I felt like I should be able to fly, and that it would be the only thing that could possibly express the elation I felt.

I looked at Niʔa, Phage, and Ashwin and asked, “Can I fly? Can this body actually fly here, like in my dreams?”