I watch our new editor, Karen, pick at her bagel fixings and adjust her cup of double shot skinny latte before proceeding with our light brunch.

To be clear, I liked her.

The little habits of people have always intrigued me. I feel as if I am almost as alien to this world as Ashwin is.

Karen, unlike me, still uses the name her parents had given her at birth. I am fascinated by the inner workings of people who don’t end up changing their first name. Why did they make that choice? How has their name influenced their development, their psychology? Why do they end up fitting it so well? How is it that they can buck the stereotypes upon their name and be able to make it their own so effortlessly?

I’m sure Karen was observing me, too. Evaluating me. She was doing a pretty good job of appearing to pay attention to anything but me and my sysmates.

My drink was called a gingersnap, because it tastes exactly like one. And my cookie was called a mocha espresso dream, because it was full of mocha, espresso, and dreams, presumably. I liked the juxtaposition of that.

“So, tell me about yourselves,” Karen said, smiling. I couldn’t help but watch her burgundy lipstick move flawlessly with her lips without cracking or thinning.

As I chewed my cookie, I considered the possible ways I could ruin this business relationship. I sent out a mental query for my systmates to answer, to give me suggestions, and when not even Sarah answered, I decided to leave it up to Karen.

“What would you like me to fill you in on?” I asked. “Our history? Our childhood? How we came to Portland? Or the really weird stuff?”

Karen shrugged, and retorted, “Well, what’s weird, exactly?” She gestured at the cafe around us, “We’re here on your turf for a reason. Start, maybe, by reminding which one of you I’m talking to?”

“I’m Goreth. They/them,” I said, and took another sip of drink. It’s a tiny cup, so I don’t drink it that fast. It is so full of flavor and worth the money, even though I rarely have enough to buy it.

“So, at this point, as we’ve said over the email, we like to call ourselves ‘the Inmara’,” I told her. “It means ‘the Great Alliance’. Sarah and I are the originals in our system, but we are outnumbered by walk-ins now. Most of us aren’t from Earth, so telling you about our childhood becomes a question that depends on who you’re talking about.”

“Okay,” she said. “I am asking this question to get an idea of how to work with you, and how to market you and your work. How should we write your little author’s bio? These things are important.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But, also, I’d just like to get to know all of you, so that I’m not stepping on any toes or anything. We can start with knowing about all your walk-ins, Okay? That seems important to me,” she said.

“Oh, well, okay,” I replied, and pretended to think about it more. I’d already decided it was time to test our credibility with her. I knew she had interest in our more sensationalist seeming qualities. It was good to keep the conversation to a pace that involved regular pauses on my terms. Because sometimes I needed to think. I marked my rhetorical territory like the dragon I am. “So, I’m here, right?” I said. “Most of the others seem to be resting or conversing internally without me. I’m fronting to handle business today.” I explained. “But, I’m, in theory at least, also somewhere else right now.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, you’ve got my full attention. I’m not exactly dissociating right now,” I could feel adrenaline rise in my chest as I got closer to saying the riskiest thing I could imagine myself saying. But dammit, I was going to say it anyway. It was, after all, integral to our reasons for wanting to publish the Sunspot Chronicles, and could really be used as a marketing ploy. Maybe. “I’m fully awake, and aware, and really digging this meeting. But…” I couldn’t help trailing off. I guess I was anxious about it anyway.

“But, what?” she prompted.

“There is another me. An almost perfect copy of me. And right now they are on a generational starship somewhere in what we think is the Andromeda galaxy, but we could be wrong. They might be further away than that,“ I said, resigning myself to this story. This true, true story. “And they’re witnessing the weirdest shit I can possibly imagine. And learning a couple of new languages in the process, in fact. And in a month’s time or so, we’re going to reconnect and – fuse? Kinda. And it will be like I’ve been there. I’m told. Because I will have been.”

Karen pursed her lips and shook her head, blinking, like she was trying to get dust out of her hair and off her face, and then asked, “Is this the inspiration for your novels?”

“Yes, very much so,” I said.

They’re not novels. They’re history books. But I’m not telling her that. Liath Luachra Press publishes fiction. And we’d all decided that fiction was the best guise for these books. Mostly for our safety, but also for any sort of saleability.

We’d destroyed all the physical evidence of our connection to the Sunspot, or ʔetekeyerrinwuf, in order to protect the Earth from the dangers of that technology. And, even if we hadn’t, if we’d used that evidence to prove our experiences to the world, our writing would get lost in the chaos that would follow that move.

Better to keep it subtle and deniable, and let the messages of the stories seep into the public consciousness as if they were fiction, and do their work that way.

I look out the window of Aunti Zero’s Coffee Hut at the rising morning sun. It was at the right angle to match where the sun would form in the morning if I were on the Sunspot.

I was on the Sunspot.

My other me was, at least.

I wondered what was happening to them.

“Have we told you anything about how our friend Erik likes to frame things?” I asked. “I mean, about individual experiences and perceptions v.s. consensual reality?”

“No,” Karen said.

“Well, what it boils down to is that what we experience, what everyone experiences, is all a product of our brains, our neurology. We don’t actually experience an objective reality as we like to believe in it. It’s all curated and remastered by the processing centers of our brains,” I explained. “And our preconceived notions about how the world works can affect even the things we think we see, touch, and feel. Does this make sense?”

She nodded, and said, “My own son likes to talk about this all the time. I think I get it. I mean, I work in fiction! I work in fiction that is written by marginalized folks of all types.” She smiled, “I’m surrounded by this kind of thing, honestly. It’s my life.”

“Oh, so you get where I’m going with that?” I asked.

“I think so?” she confirmed. “You’re saying that we each live in our own realities. Even if you think that there’s some sort of objective reality that science can describe, the very way that reality works means that we, as conscious beings inside our bodies, cannot ever really be part of that reality. We all live in virtual realities inside our heads.”

“Yep!” I said. “That’s a good way of putting it.”

“And I bet you’re going to say that whatever happens in your reality is real to you,” she grinned, leaning back and stroking her partially eaten bagel like it was a rat, tilting her head as she did so. “And that that’s what matters when it comes to your formative experiences.

“In a nutshell,” I said. Feeling a lot better about our choice of publisher. And their choice of picking up our series of books!

She felt around her teeth with her tongue for food, and when she found some she chewed on it while she arranged her bagel just so, to get it ready for another bite. I had no idea what was going on in her head as she did that, but it looked vaguely predatory. Like she was purely lost in the process of eating food and unaware of how hungry she looked. And that put me even more at ease. She seemed like our kind of people.

“So, anyway,” I said. “Want to see a magic trick?”

—

Standing on the ledge of the observation deck of a spoke, accompanied by a small entourage of new friends, looking Forward and waiting for the day’s sun to be born, or ‘to hatch’ as they say, I confess my mind was back on Earth.

As weird and amazing as everything I was seeing and feeling was, I knew that I was also meeting with our editor, and I was wondering if it was Sarah who would be talking to her, or me. Or Ashwin? Or maybe even Phage or Niʔa. And, I was getting ideas for the title of my own book.

We’d decided to try to traditionally publish the Sunspot Chronicles, a set of books originally written by the Ktletaccete of ʔetekeyerrinwuf, the people I was currently visiting. And to put our own autobiographies up to read for free on our website, with the first drafts accessible through our Patreon. So, Ashwin’s book, the End of the Tunnel, went straight to the Internet, and was already getting a small handful of comments from our loyal supporters.

I was thinking about how their book had a title that suggested the subject of death. And, if mine was going to be sort of sequel to it, I might pick something that had something of a thematic connection to it.

I’d always liked what my old high school teacher had to say about the title of Hemingway’s best known book, the Sun Also Rises. Or, at least, my memory of it. And though I hadn’t read that book myself, what I was seeing here on ʔetekeyerrinwuf, the Sunspot, was also reminding me of it. That, though the night might fall, and darkness cover the Earth, that terrible times might happen to you, as if night was a terrible thing (I personally don’t think it is), that the sun does also come back around and rise again. It does not always just set. A new day is always around the corner.

I’ve looked it up. Hemingway wrote his book while he was converting to Catholicism, and that’s definitely not happening to me, or Sarah, or any of us. But this, right here, was definitely a religious feeling experience, as much as I was distracting myself from it.

But also, as a trans feminine person myself, I have to confess to being taken in by the theory that Hemingway was actually a trans woman in the closet, like Cobain. And referencing him with my book’s title might be really cool.

And, if he was a closeted trans woman, it would be meaningful to say that the sun also hatches with my title, as I was planning. In a really queer way. Because it’s popular for us trans women to say we were eggs before we came out, and that in coming out we hatch into chicks. Get it?

Only, it’s really Sarah who’s the woman. My gender is enby, non-binary. My gender is dragon. My kind, under ideal circumstances, also hatch. Like the sun here on the Sunspot.

But, not having read Hemingway’s book I wouldn’t necessarily be ready to defend my choice if I gave my book a title like that.

I made a mental note to read his book later, get a copy of it from Earth, or to convince my Terran self to read it.

Then, as light began to form in the twenty kilometer wide hole in the Forward Endcap, the sun spout, I forced myself to refocus on where I was and what I was doing.

This, after all, was my new forever home.

I might get to re-merge occasionally with my Terran self, and trade memories that way. But a copy of myself would always live here now, as would my original self on Earth. At least until one of both of us died in some way.

We were separated by unfathomable lightyears, parsecs, megaparsecs, galaxies, an as yet unmeasured distance and direction, and all of the relativity that implied. But the physics of the Tunnel Apparatus, an ansible, meant that in all practicality that distance was meaningless. Nothing physical could go through the Tunnel, but information could, and we, people, are really just information.

And we’d finally got Phage to agree to let us back through to visit Ashwin’s home, and so I was here.

All traces of my Earthly vessel were left behind. No need to recreate it in any way, since it had never really fit who I was. It was closer to Sarah’s own self image, but when she came here she’d likely also choose a new body, one in line with her residual self image, as the Wachowski’s have called it.

The nanite exobodies of ʔetekeyerrinwuf are nearly indescribable.

How can I put this in any terms that an Earthling would be able to comprehend? Nothing I have experienced before can be said to be an analogue to it. Except for maybe feeling the relief I felt after we’d started HRT or received our bottom surgery, to treat our physical dysphoria.

Since I’d come to their world, the Ktletaccete had recommended that I inhabit an exobody as soon as possible and remain inside it until I stopped experiencing derealization and culture shock. It would be a way of grounding myself in reality, they said. So, I was doing that.

I even slept in my exobody, which apparently was possible. Silly, perhaps, but possible. And it worked a lot like sleeping in my original body. My subconscious mind was still in contact with my new vessel and sending those signals, if muted, to my dreaming mind and influencing my visions.

And, when I had slowly woken up that morning, I had felt my new body as if it was a fully biological form that I’d been born in. One that was intimately familiar to me as if it had shaped my very being with its neural signals and contact with the physical world. All six limbs, tail, snout, claws, scales, and teeth of it.

Because, you’d better believe, if on any day I get to choose what my body looks like, I am going full dragon. Every time. And the nanite exobodies allowed for that, and that’s what I had been doing right from the start.

I’d known I was a dragon since I’d learned what dragons were. And I’d felt phantom limbs and everything since then, and not really known if those were some kind of psychological trick or rooted in something mysterious and spiritual. But I’d felt them, and had never stopped feeling the loss of not having them for real.

And now, they were mine.

They were made of silicon, iron, tungsten, carbon, and other trace elements, all mixed up in a self replicating powdery clay that was engineered to do things our physicists back home will swear are outright impossible. But they were programmed to send my mind signals to convince me they were as organic as my original body.

So, when I had woken up, I could feel the weight and movement of my scales as I stretched. I could feel the texture of the cushions beneath me as I drew the fatty pads of my clawed hands and feet across them. And I could feel the air entering lungs I didn’t actually have as I yawned and drew in breath.

A lot of that was simulated, I’m sure, but it felt real.

And, later, as the lift doors opened and we stepped out onto the observation deck, I could feel the cold ceramic walkway beneath my feet, and hear the click of my claws against its burnt sienna surface. I let my tail drag across the threshold of the lift and could feel as each of my under scales ticked the edge of it.

The glint of brassy trim along the edges of the walkway tickled my eyesight, twinkling in the soft lighting of the deck.

My companions were also all wearing nanite exobodies, and I could smell the greasy metallic scent of them as if my own nose wasn’t made of the stuff. That had been the smell that had permeated the lift ride there. But now, two hundred meters above the surrounding forest floor, I could also smell the plant life, and the atmosphere of the Garden itself.

I wondered how much of this was orchestrated to help me feel at home, and how accurate the smells were. The atmosphere that the life breathed on ʔetekeyerrinwuf was not the same as Earth’s. I knew that much. I had been told that. It should smell different. And the life here had developed with XNA, a DNA-like set of molecules that were yet fundamentally different and incompatible with ours, and their cells didn’t even have mitochondria. The chemicals consumed and produced by that life would also be different from Earth’s.

Thanks to my parents’ meager but sufficient wealth, I’d been able to travel to Europe once, on an exchange program with Germany, and I’d learned just how different a whole continent could smell from my home. On the same planet.

But, how would these nanites know? How could they be programmed to produce accurate sensations that would make the right nebula smell like strawberries if I could visit it? How could they make this place smell so much different from the Pacific Northwest temperate rainforest, but so weirdly familiar at the same time, and make it an accurate smell to me?

It smelled kind of like a cross between truffles and cinnamon, with sea brine mixed in? And shit. But the shit part wasn’t so bad that it was repulsive. It’s possible that the shit smell was the product of rot in this ecosystem. Until I got together with my new Tutor and traded notes, I wouldn’t know.

I suppose I could have asked right then but, as I said, I was preoccupied.

Also, the smells were pretty faint, due to our altitude. But because I’d opted for a very sensitive olfactory system, I definitely could smell them.

I could smell the moisture in the wind, too. And the materials used to construct the observation deck.

Something about the architecture reminded me of the movie Forbidden Planet.

It was huge. And built for very large people. People with bodies as big as mine now was. I got a sense of the scale of the doorways not by walking through them, but by watching Jural Pember do so.

Jural is about the size of an Earth middle schooler, and when wem walked through one of those doors wem was absolutely dwarfed by it. I, simply, did not have to duck. And neither did Eh.

Okay. I grew up in the U.S. I used to think in feet and yards all the time because of it. We’d had a unit on the metric system in third grade, but nobody had actually learned it.

I’m thinking in the metric system now, thanks to Ashwin, because it’s based on a standard that is easily translatable to the sets of standards the Ktletaccete use to measure things. It’s really easy to get their measurements and convert them to meters. So that’s what I’m doing now, and I’m going to describe everything in meters and the like.

My nanite exobody is seven meters in length. I’m four meters tall. The doors are roughly six meters high, and not at all rectangular. They are irregular hexagons, with the widest point about two thirds down toward the floor. Well, those are the doorways. The doors themselves are made from nanite clay, and can open in all sorts of weird ways.

You get to give the ʔetekeyerrinwuff Network a command for how all the doors open for you, if you’re the first to get to the door. For giggles, I had them opening like stage curtains, and when I got to see it, they rippled and everything. The lift doors had opened for me, so they’d done that.

The short hallway between the lift and the deck had already open doorways, so there wasn’t any more animation like that.

But it allowed me to look down the covered walkways in either direction, toward the adjacent observation decks, and the tram that ran along the inside of that ring.

Oh, there’s so much to describe! And I’m not going to be able to get to all of it.

We were at one of the spokes of the second to last ring of regions before the Aft Endcap. When each of the great spokes reaches the Garden surface it enters a sheath that functions as a shock absorber for the torque and gyrations of the spoke. Movements that are so big and slow that we don’t actually get to see them, but so strong that megastructural engineering is required to make it work.

The habitat cylinder of the Sunspot is roughly two hundred kilometers across and nearly four hundred kilometers long. It contains landmasses and bodies of water equivalent to Washington and Oregon states put together and rolled up into a tube that has almost the same proportions as a beer can. And there are five sets of eight spokes each. And each spoke is about three hundred and eight-some meters wide. Nearly four football fields to those of you back home. Comparable to the length of the starship Enterprise from the original series of Star Trek.

So, like, some of the architecture was phenomenally bigger than me. Which is why it reminded me of the Krell world machine of Forbidden Planet.

And the observation decks of the base of the spoke were arrayed in a ring around the top of the gargantuan sheath, and reachable via lift.

As I stepped out onto the pentagon shaped deck that stretched out several body lengths before me, I didn’t really get to see much of the Garden, as they call it. The lighting was soft, to allow for it, but it was the darkest part of night, before the sun started to form and long after the moon had been absorbed by the ship’s drive.

The sun and moon, every day, were balls of plasma sent from the Bussard collectors at the front of the world to the fusion drive in the aft of it.

The peak of the pentagon of this observation deck pointed directly Forward. We’d chosen this one specifically to witness the sunhatching, and we all walked to that point.

It was there that my technological eyes adjusted to register the darkness of the forest that stretched out across the island around us, below us. And the ghostly white of the snowy Ring Mountains, and the clouds around them.

Without the flood of sunlight causing the atmosphere to occlude our vision, we could more clearly see the other side of the habitat cylinder than during daytime. It would be faded toward blue then. But, on Earth we can see the surface of the moon fairly clearly even during the day and it’s much further away than that. Still, about twice the thickness of the atmosphere lay between us and the other side above us. It would be discernible in the daytime, just definitely also blue.

And I understand that blue means an atmospheric makeup that’s not too far from Earth’s, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s just not the same.

The spoke behind us rose into the sky like an infinite technology covered wall. Not truly infinite in any way, but big enough my mind read it as such. I wanted to fall over backward in a panic over it and never move again.

The cities of ʔetekeyerrinwuf, way off in the distance, in the sky, above and around me, glowed an amber that reminded me of old street lights, and illuminated the purples of the forests that surrounded them. Those that weren’t covered by clouds.

They were kind of like stars. And my mind wanted to assign them that purpose.

I could count the number of cities on my fingers and toes. And, unlike Earth’s cities, they didn’t sprawl. Each one was contained within a discrete circle of a parameter, just a few kilometers across, with no streets, highways, or railways visible between them. All travel would be happening in the hallways and trams belowdecks. 

And yet, as small as they appeared, each city contained hundreds of thousands of people. And living not quite as densely as you might expect for that! The layers of decks below each city could accommodate millions more if the population ever grew that large.

“So, this is your first sunhatching,” Jural said.

And that’s the line that got me thinking about the title of my future book. This book.

I am almost certain I don’t have any sort of writing style similar to Hemmingway’s. He might even frown at my book if he could read it.

I heard myself answering Jural as I lost myself in thought, and don’t remember exactly what I said. It was a vocal acknowledgement of some sort.

Phage stepped up beside me and said something about how it had experienced a view like this for far, far too long.

Like Ashwin, Jural Pember looked kind of like a cartoon opossum, if that opossum had then been run through an AI filter to make it look ‘realistic’, and then given feathers instead of fur. Though, most of the feathers looked a lot like fur.

Phage had painted its own exobody black with visions of nebulae, galaxies, and pulsars floating within it, much like how I’d always seen it in our dreams. And, like always, its silhouette resembled something similar to a classic demon, but without wings. A devil. But, one drawn by the Frouds, of Dark Crystal and Labyrinth fame. More animalistic qualities than human, except for the upright stance. Its tail was thin and tufted, like a lion’s. Maybe it’s more charitable to describe it as a galaxy colored vision of the Frouds’ interpretation of Shakespeare’s Puck.

Apparently, the people of ʔetekeyerrinwuf’s predecessor ship, Feruukepikape, had looked a lot like that, but with skin and hair and horns and no tail and no galaxies. And it was not how their ancestors had looked, either, supposedly. A lot of that was speculation. Prehistory so ancient it was like extrapolating the appearance of dinosaurs on Earth, but without fossils. Only a dead language with clues in it.

That’s a whole story of stories we get into by publishing the Sunspot Chronicles, which you absolutely should read when they come out.

Suffice it to say, I was surrounded by a lot of weirdly familiar but alien things that were making me feel like I should be dreaming.

And then, about fifteen or so degrees up from the Forward horizon, a circular section of the sky began to faintly glow a dark red. And, slowly, as it gained luminosity, the disc of the Forward Endcap seemed to darken in contrast to it.

“I prefer watching this by looking Aftward,” Phage said. “To see the light reflected off the Aft Endcap and the Aft Sea, and to watch the terminator move across the Garden as the sun emerges. But you can do that tomorrow.”

“Makes sense,” I managed to say, transfixed by the engineering required to collect enough hydrogen from the surrounding interstellar space to generate this eighteen kilometer wide ball of plasma and bring it up to sun-like temperatures and brilliance.

On ʔetekeyerrinwuf, the daily sun is forged. Heated and compressed by intense magnetic forces to the point of generating fusion.

But they call it ‘hatching’, because the people of ʔetekeyerrinwuf, the Ktletaccete, hatch. From eggs.

I usually feel embarrassed to say it, but I’d always dreamt of being able to lay an egg. As absurd as that may sound to my fellow Earthlings, it would have made me feel like something was finally right with my body.

Maybe, now, sometime in my future aboard ʔetekeyerrinwuf, through the sorcery of their technology, I might actually get to do so.

“At some point,” Phage said. “You will need to consent to my gift. And we’ll need to talk about whether or not your self back on Earth should have it as well.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I think that training here with it will help you manage it on Earth,” Phage said. “Assuming I can even give it to you.”

“We’ve already had this conversation,” I pointed out.

“And we’re having it again,” Phage said. “Because, for the first time in my existence, I am worrying about something.”

“That’s a lie,” Jural said.

“True,” agreed Eh.

It had worried about something before. 

I’ve learned that it worries about the welfare of the people it knows, and does everything it can not to show it. Usually.

—

“This is a really nice coffee shop,” Karen said. “But I do wish it was more of a diner, so I could order eggs and have a true brunch.”

“I get that,” I said. It seemed like she was deflecting my question, but I couldn’t figure out why. I let it go.

But then she asked, “What do you mean by ‘magic trick’?”

Lightly surprised by this shift back on topic, I blinked, and then said, “Well, I can’t actually do it myself. And I’m not sure Ashwin is up to coming forward to demonstrate, even if nem agrees to. But I thought you might appreciate a demonstration of why we like to meet here.”

“Oh?”

“Remember what I was saying earlier about individual realities?”

“Yes.”

“Well. There are also localized consensual realities, it turns out. The people in an area, such as this coffee shop, have a certain amount of control, or say, over what happens there,” I said. “Collectively. And they can exert that reality over that of individual newcomers, to a degree. More so if a newcomer agrees to it.”

It was her turn to blink, but it was a more laconic one. She jerked her head back a little in the process of it. “OK,” she said. “What exactly would I be agreeing to experience?”

“Well, we could take our pick,” I said. “Or you could. We’ve primed this place in the past year, by doing demonstrations, so there are several options.”

“Go on.” She sounded increasingly incredulous, and that worried me.

“I mean, I asked if you wanted to see a magic trick because if you don’t that’s OK, too,” I said. “Nothing weird can truly happen without your express consent. But, like, we could warm the cold dregs of your latte, right here on the table, for instance. Without touching it.”

She picked up the nearly empty cup and sniffed it, wrinkling her nose, and then put it back down again. Then she scratched her head and asked, “Why?”

I shrugged as easily as I could, “To bring you just a little bit more into our world, mostly. To help you understand what we’ve been experiencing, and what inspires our writing. It might help you decide how to help us edit our books, I suppose. But, really, we don’t like being in the closet about anything anymore. And this is one of those things that gets closeted by default, you know.”

She narrowed her eyes and chewed on her lip lightly as she considered this. Then she asked, “What are the other options?”

“We can make the air around you colder, like they say ghosts can do. A chill, but a persistent one until you’re done with it. Or,” I worked on deciding just how many options to give her. Maybe just three more. “Ashwin could talk to you with just the air, not moving our lips or using our vocal cords. Just vibrating the air molecules directly. Or, we’ve got a mechanical pocket watch for this one, we could make a watch stop running for any given period of time. Or run faster. Just with a thought, as it were. And you could pick it up and examine it while we’re doing it. Even take it apart.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” my conviction and sincerity was easy. These were things that Ashwin had done numerous times for acquaintances and friends already. This was now a routine.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Perfect,” I said. “That’ll make the results more convincing. Just as long as a part of you kind of wants to experience one of these things, it should work here. Out on the street? I’m not so sure. In your own home, if we were there, not at all.”

“Why is that?” she asked.

“Consensual realities,” I said. “Or, just consent, really.”

“Huh.”

“This all started when Sarah and I met Phage as children,” I explained. “We always thought Phage was our boogieman, our bedroom floor monster. But it’s not. Like us, it’s not any sort of a man, but unlike us it’s from across the stars. Or it says it is.”

Karen leaned forward and nodded. This was the stuff she’d come here to listen to, after all, apparently.

“You’ve read Systems’ Out! now, right? Our first book?” I asked.

“Yes, and I do have some ideas about it, too,” she said. “But I want to hear all this first. I want to know where you’re coming from and what you’re trying to say with the book.”

“OK,” I smiled. “So, what Metabang describes in that book is mostly true. Or, an interpretation of the truth, as we know it.”

“In your collective reality,” she said.

“Sure,” I replied, smirking and nodding. “Assuming that the Sunspot is a real place, and that a version of me is actually visiting it right now, Phage is a being that the Founding Crew of the Sunspot summoned to help them keep the ship intact through early turbulent times. We’re not sure how or from where, but one theory is that it came from their original homeworld. That it is one of their ancestors, with access to technology that looks like magic compared to theirs. And their technology looks like magic to ours.”

“Interesting.”

“And after over a hundred of their millennia – their years are different than ours, of course – it eventually agreed to teach them its secrets,” I said. “And Ashwin is one of them, and knows those secrets.”

“So, Phage could do these magic tricks, too.”

“Yes,” I said. “But it’s currently not here, and it doesn’t like to demonstrate anyway. It leaves that to Ashwin, who likes doing it.”

“Ah,” she said. “Are either of them going to teach you its secrets too, then?”

“Maybe?” I said. “If they can, and I prove worthy, I think. It’s not like it’s going to turn me into some kind of superhero here, or messiah, or anything amazing. Nothing more than a quirky and insane author who claims to be able to do slightly inexplicable things for people who believe them.”

She tapped the table and said, “This sort of reminds me of the sensationalized multiple personality books of the 80s and 90s. Like how the Troops said that the extra energy of all of them in Trudy’s system would cause electrical equipment to fail and spark.”

“Oh, so you’ve read When Rabbit Howls?” I was delighted.

“Yep!” she said. “Believe it or not, it was required reading for the job. Our board thinks it’s important that we take our authors seriously, even if they might have outlandish backgrounds like Trudy Chase. Part of the territory for who we’re trying to represent. Even if we’re publishing fiction. So, reading books like that, and Freshwater by Akwaeki Emezi, was homework.”

I nodded, looking down at the table, and admitted, “I like to hear that kind of thing.” 

“Most of our writers do,” she said.

“But Emezi’s book isn’t sensationalist or outlandish. It’s clearly stated as fictionalized, but also sharing an inner truth, a spiritual truth,” I pointed out.

“I know,” Karen said. “I mentioned their book for the broader diversity of it. We’d be lucky to get to publish something like that.” 

“Well, there might be a reason that what I’m telling you reminds you of When Rabbit Howls,” I said.

“I believe it.”

I scrunched up my lips and pushed them to the side as I rubbed at the new stubble that was already haunting my face. We hadn’t quite figured out how to stop it from growing at all, yet, but it was five days worth of growth and felt like what used to be five hours of growth. We did have several people working on it, but every time we took the MAX and a transphobe clocked us, it clocked us, as it were. Gave us a little jolt of growth that we’d been keeping at bay.

It didn’t bother me as much as it bothered Sarah. She’s the girl. As a dragon, beards almost feel right to me. But the longer we had a relatively smooth face, the more I came to enjoy and rely upon it. And, as I said, she hated the beard. So I still shaved every week.

“Can we do the watch thing?” Karen asked.

“Sure!” I said. “That’s one of my favorites. If you take it apart, you can let the bits go flying. That’s OK. We can find them and put it back together. That’s part of the trick. And you can hold it until it starts up again, even. On the agreed upon time.”

“That sounds elaborate!” she exclaimed.

“It is,” I said. “That’s what makes it feel like a real magic trick. You know, professional slight of hand and illusion. Which, of course, you can tell yourself is happening, so it’s even more likely to work.”

She chuckled.

“But, if you want to spook the living hell out of yourself, you should interview Ashwin while I take this vessel to the bathroom,” I said. I hoped Ashwin would be up to any of what I was suggesting.