Dear Ashwin Ampersand of the Inmara,

Ashwin Pember pinched the bridge of our nose just like I tended to do, while hunched over our laptop, trying to restrain nemself from arguing with the screen out loud. Karen meant well. That’s what mattered.

Sarah quietly thought, Oh, just like a married woman!

Ashwin ignored her and went back to reading.

Please see attached my first round of recommendations for editing your manuscript. As you’ve divulged to me your typical rate of writing, I thought I might suggest our earliest typical deadline as far more than enough for what you’d need in order to rewrite your novel with these suggestions in mind. Three weeks. If that is not long enough, please let me know which of three months or six months might be better. Remember, though, that the six month deadline will impact our hoped for publishing schedule, and will also affect how we continue to edit your book. If you can manage the three week deadline, that will only give us more time to go back and forth and really massage it into the best work possible.

“Take the three month option,” I said out loud.

“Yes,” Ashwin said afterward. “Take the three month option, and if I finish this in four days, as I expect, so much the better.”

“It’s almost like you’ve done business before,” I muttered back.

“I have not,” they said. “But I’ve been picking up your memories from school and employment, and this makes sense.”

“Gotta avoid burnout, and keep our boundaries.”

“Precisely. But I fundamentally object to the concept of deadlines and responsibilities,” nem said.

“We do, too,” Sarah said.

I like threes. I hope you do too.

I’ve categorized my editing suggestions into three priorities or degrees of importance, and then color coded them.

Starting with the scariest and most severe, which isn’t really scary or severe, are the red comments. Red comments are items that we need to change in some way to properly facilitate the sale of your book. And for each one, I have given you three suggestions that I think will work. If you have a better idea that is different from what you have currently written in your first draft, I would like to see it. Go with your gut and your passion. With this round of revisions, we need to show each other what we can do.

“Why does that make me feel tense?” Ashwin asked.

“It’s making me feel tense,” Sarah replied.

“Remember,” I said. “We want to appease her where we can. Our plan was to let her help us hide that this is actual history. Any changes are good changes. They don’t reflect on you or us, either. They reflect on the publishing company represented by Karen and what they think the market will bear.”

Ashin nodded.

Gold comments are the things that I would like to know more about, or understand better. Or they are suggestions I personally have, based on my understanding of you and what I think you are trying to do. You can, if you wish, completely ignore them. Remember, you are not writing for me, you are writing for your audience, whomever that may be, and you do know your audience better than I do. However, if you do have explanations for why you are ignoring any one of these comments, I would love to hear them so I can adjust my work to match yours better.

That felt a lot better. We all liked that quite a bit more. But after the wording of the red category, Ashwin found themself looking for any subtext in that paragraph that might hint at any unwritten expectations.

Nem knew better than to invent worries, but having never done anything like this before, and with two Earthlings feeling nervousness into nems own consciousness, it was hard not to.

Green comments are things that I want more of. I think you are doing something very, very right, where you are being yourself in the best way possible, and if you possibly can, fill your story with these things. Again, if you don’t want to, feel free to tell me why, but also feel free to just do what you do and I’ll figure it out. With each one, I explain what I’m seeing and why I think it’s good, so you can work with it more easily. But, you can also choose not to read my words and take the green color as a signal to go, go, go. At this stage, if the green things make your manuscript longer, that is wonderful. Go for it.

The rest of the email was just personal details, being friendly and maybe a little too familiar. And a closing salutations.

And then there was the attached document:

Systems-Out-First-Edits-01-06-25.docx

“Who the hell doesn’t do a four digit year in this, the 21st century?” Sarah snorted.

Ashwin saved the file to nems folder without opening it. “I want to come back to that after lunch. I need to think about this email,” they said. “But, you should also know, your laptop is about to perish.”

“You had to use the word ‘perish’,” Sarah said.

I leaned our vessel over to check the cord connections and the light on the transformer.

“No, not the battery,” Ashwin said. “I can see with my gifted senses. Our attempts to increase its longevity are coming to an end. The consent of this world will only let it go this far. There’s a power greater than us at work here.”

What? I thought.

“Shit,” Sarah said. “We can’t afford a new one.”

We sat on our folding conference chair, precariously balanced on it with our bulk, and stared at the bulky little black laptop.

“I hate moments like this,” I said.

“At least we’re getting a warning,” Sarah replied.

Internally, I looked Ashwin’s way, but kept speaking out loud, “How long has it got?”

Ashwin turned our head to the right and looked down at the machine out of the corner of our eyes, screwing up our mouth in consideration.

You’re hoping that it will last four days, aren’t you? I thought, picking the length of time it had taken nem to translate the book in the first place. I’m still not quite sure how we did it, but it was only sixty thousand or so words long.

Our translator tilted our head up a little bit, chin to the window near our bed. A faint, worried yes.

Fuck.

“Maybe we could use Peter’s computer,” Sarah suggested.

I’m certain we could, I thought.

Ashwin stood us up and walked us out of our bedroom and out into the kitchen. There nem went for a glass to fill it full of water.

They took three full gulps, and breathed out, then topped the glass off, imitating our own habits of nearly three decades of life now.

Then nem turned to the freezer and opened it to grab the cheese pizza we had in there, and placed it on the stovetop, and proceeded to go through the steps of preparing to bake it.

I usually would have to reread the instructions every time, just to make sure I was remembering them correctly. Ashwin didn’t.

Why nem could rely on our brain better than I could was something I hadn’t yet figured out. I could feel that Sarah was equally flummoxed and worried about not reading the instructions.

“It’s the gift,” Ashwin said. “You are benefiting from it too, with our growing presence here. You just have to trust yourselves.”

After a second, Sarah said, “What I really wish is that our publishing company was just a bit bigger and felt more boldly about our book. That way we could get one of those advances the industry used to offer, as they say, so we could get a new computer. Even three hundred bucks might get us what we need.”

A few more movements and Aswhin was closing the oven door and reaching to program the timer.

I said, “Even then, I remember that the advances used to come for the second or third book, but Listra Luathra Press supposedly can’t afford to do that.”

Ashwin leaned back against the counter, briefly worried about their tail and then feeling a weird relief and thrill that it wasn’t there and that leaning that way was actually comfortable. That relief was followed by dysphoria and self recrimination that nem quickly dismissed.

I shook our head, and said, “At least we’re not paying to publish it.”

Ashwin screwed up our face into a nasty scowl and said, “On the Sunspot, I could publish this myself, with bound hard copies for every Child on the ship, with my own resources and still build a new house and eat without worrying about my safety.” By ‘Child’, nem was referring to every living, organic body. Network entities like Tutors and Cew would only need Network copies, and those were virtually free.

When it came to marketing something on the Sunspot, well. That wasn’t even done. There was no commerce to speak of. All you did was show your work to people you thought might like it, even just give it to them, and call it good. Someone would put it in a library, and there it would be for anyone to take interest in it in the future.

But you also wouldn’t need to rely on any sales of it to be able to afford a new laptop, either.

If you wanted to get feedback on what you’d written, you’d just ask someone. And, they might agree to read it. If they didn’t, someone else might. Usually your own Tutor, if you had one anymore, would jump at the chance to read it, like a human’s grandma.

The culture was just so different there.

It had only been a couple days since Sarah had joined me there, and our quarters were already full of plushies, the floor carpeted with them. Each one handmade by someone.

In a world like that, there would be at least one reader out there for your book, and they’d find it eventually. And they’d let you know just how much it meant to them. And you’d probably make a new friend that way.

“Maybe the Collective will have some ideas,” Sarah said, referring to Erik, Beau, and the Murmuration.

Tomorrow was our usual weekly time to meet.

Phage gently surged forward and said, “Or we could attempt to physically fix the laptop.”

Sarah took full control and slapped both our thighs through our leggings, “And how are we going to do that, Phage? We don’t have the tools or the materials!”

“I believe that Peter does,” it took control firmly back, and stated. “His utensils are not meant for laptop repair, but they should work.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I am physics itself.”

They both stared daggers at the wall simultaneously. Sarah refused to believe it, or trust it. And it refused to budge.

—

There was an orange colored sign on the door that looked like it was printed by a government agency, with a logo and address, and it said,

Closed for investigation by the Health Department of Portland, Oregon.

We all stared at it in shock.

“I don’t understand,” Beau said, the first of us to talk.

“I think orange is supposed to be a stern warning, and red is the end of it all,” Erik said.

“Yes, but” Beau said. “You know the owners, right? And when I look behind the counter, I never see anything worth investigating. This doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t this mean they’ve already been investigated and they found something that needs to be fixed? I wish there was more of an explanation. I hate governments so much.”

“Portland kinda sucks,” the Murmuration said.

“I’m saying it was sabotage,” Beau said. “Not by who. I don’t know who. But this is the best queer place in town.” He pointed and said, “That’s sabotage.”

“Sweetie,” Erik said. “I’m supposed to be the paranoid one.”

Beau stalked away, quickly turning his back to us, and snarled, “I’m not being paranoid, I’m just stating a constant fact.” He went over to a street lamp pole and leaned against it, folding his arms and scowling down at the ground.

Another couple of regulars walked up, Sophie and Fern, and Sophie asked, “What’s going on?”

Erik gestured, and said, “Closed.”

“What?” Sophie bent to look at the sign and said, “Shit!”

Fern frowned and looked at it too. They were holding hands. She sighed with a loud, quick exhale of breath, mouth open with their tongue pressed back in her mouth, making it sound like a hiss.

Sophie turned to hug Fern and said, “Let’s go to the park. Pick up something at Freddies. This sucks.”

“That’s what I said,” Brock said.

“Let’s go with them,” Niʔa said, magically making our body feel small and light with their pink presence. They leaned forward to Sophie and Fern and asked, “Can we come with you? Make it like we’re Aunti Zero’s, wherever we go?”

Sophie got an angry and determined look on xyr face and said, “Yeah! Come on, let’s go!”

The Murmuration looked down at their cane and pouted.

“Rräoha’s not helping you with that?” Erik asked.

“No. Have it,” Rräoha scowled. “Thinking about things.”

“Come on,” Erik said. “I’ll help you think about things as we go.”

“Ha.”

“Hey, Beau.”

“Yeah. Coming.”

And soon we were on our way to the store, and then the park, with Erik tailing behind to talk to Rräoha with the Murmuration.

I thought I heard Erik using a pitch and timbre of voice I hadn’t heard from him before, but we weren’t really paying attention to him. Maybe it was the cuttlecrabs talking to Rräoha, despite the dysphoria that fronting caused them.

Sophie, swinging Fern’s hand back and forth broadly, turned to us and said, “Y’all sure are a fixture there! What are you gonna do if they close for good? Maybe we’ll follow you.”

“That can’t happen,” Sarah said.

Sophie looked hurt, until xe decided that Sarah meant that Aunti Zero’s couldn’t close, which was the right interpretation. “Yeah,” xe said. “No, it can’t. But. Contingencies, seriously.”

We dutifully cast about in our psyche for any suggestions from any of us. There was mostly silence. All of our minds had been focused on other things. This had kind of derailed all of that, and no one could really think of anything, except Niʔa, who could at least think of a way to make the best of the now. They were good for that.

Phage had almost always fallen silent for complicated social things like this, so we didn’t even expect anything from it. And, as always, it didn’t deliver. It could fix laptops, apparently, but not bureaucracies.

“Ah, well, anyway,” Sophie said. “What are y’all working on these days, anyway?”

“My show,” Sarah said. “At Aunti Zero’s.”

Sophie looked mortified, and Fern grabbed and shook xyr arm gently.

“No, it’s OK,” Sarah said. “I’m getting the artwork done anyway. I’ll show it somewhere. That’s what matters. We’re also, maybe, actually going to publish a book. With a publisher and everything.”

“Oh, damn!” Sophie said.

“Yeah. We’re already going into the first round of edits.”

“Congratulations!”

“Contract’s signed, of course. But for some reason it all still feels really tenuous,” Sarah explained.

“I bet it’s just because it’s overwhelming and new,” Sophie replied. “If the contract’s signed, that means you and the publisher are both bound to see it through. You just have to treat each other right, and not break the contract.”

“Yeah,” Sarah nodded, looking at the grass we were passing by. It was so green. In the middle of Winter. “There’s… stuff, though. Like Aunti Zero’s. And, I guess this is more funny than foreboding, but our editor’s name is Karen.”

“Oh my god.”

“It’s so 2015, isn’t it? I mean, to make fun of that?”

“Yeah, but still. A little funny.”

Sarah nodded.

“So,” Sophie said, looking at us thoughtfully, with a kind of playful but cautious look in xyr eye. “When you asked us if you could tag along. That didn’t sound like any of you I remember. Can I ask? Or was I imagining things?”

“Yeah, we’ve got new headmates,” Sarah admitted much more cautiously than Sophie had actually asked. “If they want to introduce themselves to you, it’s their right. But. I’m sorry. I’m not in the mood for speaking for them right now.”

“Oh, that’s OK. I understand. Just wondering if I recognize you all right still.”

“You do.”

“Neat!”

Niʔa asked thoughtfully if it was alright for them to front and talk to Sophie, and Sarah questioned why they even felt they had to ask and slipped aside.

“Hey,” Niʔa said, slipping into our body and making it feel all light and small again. This time, green. “My name is Niʔa. You can slur it into one syllable if you have to, but it’s really two.”

“Oh!”

“My pronoun here is they/them,” they said.

“Thank you. I’m Sophie, xe/xyr/xem. And this is Fern, she/they,” Sophie responded cheerfully. “It’s good to meet you!”

“I was wondering,” Niʔa said. “Could you tell me about the Health Department of Portland and what they do? What do you think they’re going to do?”

Sophie opened xyr mouth to respond, but with furrowed brows closed it again. Xe held up xyr free index finger and twisted xyr lips to the side.

Fern immediately pulled out her phone and started searching the internet for the information.

“They’re supposed to make sure that every restaurant in the city is making food in a safe way, that won’t make anybody sick,” Sophie said. “Supposed to. And I don’t know that anybody has ever really bad mouthed them like they do the police, except maybe bitter business owners that actually fucked up.” Xe wrinkled up xyr chin severely in a frown, and shook xyr head, “but I don’t understand why Aunti Zero’s would get dinged by them. I’ve worked there, and that place is cleaner than anywhere!”

Fern turned and held their phone out toward us to show us the screen and waited for us to take it, apparently.

“May I?” Niʔa asked, before taking it when Fern nodded expectantly.

It was a policy page on the Health Department’s web site, describing the procedures typically followed for an investigation. It looked like it covered the kind of thing that was happening to Aunti Zero’s. And it suggested that if whatever they’d found was fixed, Aunti Zero’s license to operate would be restored, and they’d be allowed to reopen, but that they’d have to schedule a new inspection.

Pretty simple stuff, really, couched in a mess of legalese and reference numbers.

Niʔa had no trouble reading it.

They handed the phone back to Fern and said, “Thank you.”

Fern solemnly nodded and said, “You’re welcome.” They were almost as short as Erik, really slightly built, and had a voice as naturally chest resonant as ours. I always loved it when Fern was around. She didn’t speak all that often, but when they did, it gave me shivers and I felt better.

Sarah couldn’t figure out if she had a romantic crush on Fern, but Fern wasn’t a man, and she was pretty monogamously in a partnership with Sophie, anyway.

Our nascent feelings about Fern were part of the reason why we weren’t actually closer friends with the two of them. We got nervous about it all, usually.

It was nice to be having a casual stroll with the two of them.

We all passed a businessman who was walking the opposite way, and Niʔa glanced up at him as he glanced back.

28, Niʔa thought, very clearly.

Sarah’s surprise made us stumble, and Niʔa planted our cane firmly on the ground to right ourselves.

I think I missed what had just happened.

For some reason, with Fern and Sophie with us, we felt less like communicating with each other out loud, even though those two knew we did that. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Sarah sensed my confusion and sent me memories of Niʔa picking up on numbers wherever they looked. And gave me the sense that I’d been fairly absent in the past two weeks and probably had missed that. Niʔa had been fronting more often.

Picking up on numbers? I tried to think clearly for everyone to hear.

“Sorry,” Niʔa said out loud, then looked at Sophie and held up a finger like Sophie had earlier. “I’m going to talk to the others, just a moment.”

“OK!” Sophie said, and just waited, as we all continued walking.

Niʔa looked down a little as they kept us walking forward, and focused inward, and said in a somewhat lower voice, “I inherited this sense from my parent. When I look at anything, I instantly see just how far away it is from me and how old it is in its current form, and a whole bunch of other numbers. My mind is simply capable of subconsciously translating what I see into numbers I can list off and describe. I’ve always been able to do this. So. It has been twenty-eight Earth years since that man was born. I think that number became relevant to me because of something Sarah was thinking about.”

He’s the same age we are, Sarah thought. But he looks and acts ten years older. And not like a thirty-eight year old. Like we’re eighteen.

“Ah,” I managed to say out loud. Then noticed Sophie was looking very curiously at us.

I gave control back to Niʔa, pointing out Sophie’s interest, because I wasn’t prepared for that and Niʔa had gotten us into that mess.

“Do you know about Phage and Ashwin?” Niʔa asked Sophie.

Xe nodded, and Fern looked over at us again too.

“I’m Phage’s child.”

Sophie mouthed an, “Oh.”

“Oh, let them both in on everything,” Sarah said. “They’re both cool when Sophie’s not this curious.” Then she smirked knowingly at Sophie, like it was an in-joke.

I wasn’t sure I liked it much when Sarah was that stressed out, honestly. But I knew she felt more girly when she snarked at people, and that that’s an important thing sometimes.

Sophie grimace smiled in acknowledgement.

“It’s me again,” Niʔa said, putting a little skip in our step. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you know, because I’m pretty new. Can you tell me what you know about Phage and Ashwin?”

Sophie bit xyr lip.

Niʔa decided to take another tack, and divulge what Sarah had been thinking, but as if it was just an observation they were having right then, “Have you noticed that some people look like society’s idea of an adult, and the rest of us don’t? And that that really affects their apparent age a lot?”

Fern nudged Sophie and Sophie took that cue, “Oh, yeah! Yeah, definitely. And it’s usually queer and ND people who seem younger than everyone else!” Xe relaxed quite a lot in the process of saying that. 

ND meant ‘neurodivergent’, but Niʔa seemed to have already picked up on that. They weren’t telepathic, just superhumanly observant, and I apparently had been spacey a lot lately.

“Anyway,” Niʔa said boldly. “I’m a superhuman extraterrestrial, if you want to call me that, and I could see just by looking at him, that that man is almost as old as you are, Sophie.”

“What?” xe craned xyr neck and body to look around us at the man’s very distant retreating back. Xe nearly fell over doing so. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Wow, that always takes me by surprise. I know I just said it’s a thing, but it’s always more a thing than I remember.”

Niʔa nodded gracefully and naturally.

I really felt like I needed to sigh some tension out of our chest, and Niʔa obliged me, but as discreetly as possible.

Seeming to guess something, but maybe just wanting to change the subject, Shophie looked at us again and asked, “What’s that book you all wrote about, anyway?”

Niʔa smiled and started telling xem all about it.

When Niʔa was fronting and making us feel small and light, I didn’t feel dysphoric about it. I felt their feelings. And they just always felt good about being alive.

I liked that.

—

“How’d laptop surgery go?” Peter asked.

“It’s still going,” Sarah said. “Phage hasn’t broken anything, but we need parts, apparently. Which, honestly, I figured. And, in the meantime, we have to write on our phone, instead. Goreth’s good at that, thankfully. But Ashwin hates it, and it’s their work.”

“Oh, dang,” he put a black and silver robot into his pink and green house and took a moment to smile at it. Then he frowned back at us, to make sure we knew he was taking us seriously.

“Aunti Zero’s is closed by the Health Department,” Sarah said. “Temporarily, but we’re worried about the impact to the business anyway.”

“Oh, shit!” Peter leaned back. “That’s. That’s not a good sign.”

“It’s not a good thing at all,” Sarah said. “That’s our home.”

Peter looked hurt, but then he nodded and bit his lip and nodded a little more and said, “Yeah, I get you. I get what you mean. You relax and light up there more than anywhere else I’ve seen you.”

Sarah leaned us forward on the edge of our chair, putting our weight on our palms, which were resting just under the outer edges of our HRT enbiggened butt.

“I bet you’ll find another coffee shop if you have to,” Peter said. “They’re not the only queer one in town.”

Sarah opened our mouth and shook our head, but couldn’t say anything without breaking out in tears or just simply having a meltdown.

It’s frustrating how that goes, sometimes. One second, either one of us can be calmly explaining something in a soothing monotone. The next, our whole body is full of sorrow and anger and chaotic energy and Things Could Hit The Walls.

She felt it as if her kaleidoscope of thoughts had suddenly been broken open and dumped all over our naked brain. It was almost like a migraine. It also felt like she was trying to push our face and words through an icewall while simultaneously suffocating on vacuum.

“We can’t,” she finally managed to say without disaster.

“Ah,” Peter said.

I gently took over, momentarily feeling more calm. This was a trick we’d always had, but didn’t always remember. And it didn’t always work. And when it did, it made us feel like such fakers, usually. We could tag team these things.

Sarah fought all the way down to our subconscious, just to let me know she was raging, just so I wouldn’t forget when talking to Peter. And then she had her meltdown down there, and I could feel it happening in the left half of our chest.

I took a deep breath, and said what I remembered her trying to think, shakily, “There are too many things going wrong. We can’t handle it very well. We are not used to it anymore. And if Aunti Zero’s closes, we can’t imagine what we’ll do. We can’t visualize it right now.” And I followed that with another breath.

Real breaths. Real oxygen. Polluted with Earth’s industries, but actual molecules.

“OK. I should not have suggested another coffee shop. I’m sorry,” Peter said. “Let’s try breaking this down. Is that OK?”

“If you can help us do that, I think it would be good,” I said. “I can’t imagine what that would look like.”

“I’m going to get a sheet of paper, and a pen, OK?” he said.

I nodded.

He ran upstairs and then came stumbling down, making the most noise of anyone in the house. It was like if a two hundred and eighty pound golden retriever was wearing galoshes all the time. If you didn’t listen for the rhythm of it, it sounded like he fell down the stairs when he was in a hurry. Or it sounded just like he had four feet.

He walked back into the living room far too calmly and gracefully for all the noise he just made, and I never understood it. But the familiarity of this helped, even if the noise had been too jarring for our nerves.

He slid a half sheet of card stock onto the table and sat down, saying, “Now,” and clicking his pen. “Where was I?”

“Breaking it all down into… something,” I offered.

I think I can help too, Niʔa offered.

I believe you can, I thought back. But let’s let Peter help in his way first. Please look after Sarah.

OK.

I was worried that I was spending too much time thinking at Niʔa that I’d miss what Peter was about to say, but he took enough time to organize his own thinking, pretending to draw in the air above the paper first, that it didn’t matter.

It was a couple more seconds before he said anything.

“OK, I’m going to start writing small, because this paper is too small. Sorry,” he finally said. “Now. If I remember correctly, here are some things you’re… working on.”

And in the upper lefthand eighth of the paper he made a tightly lettered little list, with comments in parentheses:

Medicaid/SSDI bullshit (still, argh)

Your book – writing (yes, do this)

Laptop surgery (holy shit!)

Sarah’s art show (thumbs up)

Saving Aunti Zero’s (YOU CAN’T DO THIS)

and what?

Then he looked pointedly up at us, and said, “I don’t think I was very gentle with this. But I think you can handle it, actually. I think a firm point needs to be made, here, so that you can manage what you can manage. Is that OK?” Then he pushed it toward us. “I’m going to help you with what you can do. See if I can make it possible. And the ‘and what?’ is one of the things you can do. We have the whole rest of the paper and the other side to work that out.”

I looked at it and I thought, You tore this paper in half on purpose, didn’t you? To keep it small and manageable.

I nearly choked doing so, but I pointed and said, “I guess you can cross that line out, can’t you?”

And he just reached forward and crossed out the line about saving Aunti Zero’s. Then he nodded and said, “That’s their responsibility, not yours.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t think any of us were planning on trying to save it ourselves.”

“Yes you were,” he said. “I know your community. It’s how you survive. When you all get together and work on it, you can make shit like that happen, too. But you.” He pointed at our collarbone. “As many people as you are, with as many amazing gifts as you have, cannot do that. Not alone. I’m talking to everyone else, Goreth, don’t protest. The rest of that list is more than enough. Got it? If someone else starts a save Aunti Zero’s campaign, join it like hell. But until then, cross your fingers and work on your part, which is this stuff.” He pointed at the rest of the list, tapping his finger again on the ‘and what?’.

“We have to pace ourselves,” I said.

“Yes.”

I was feeling flattered and reassured that he’d kept track of nearly everything we were working on here on Earth.

What he didn’t really know, even though we gave him very highlighted briefings every now and then, was what we were dealing with on the Sunspot.

But that was way more personal. We weren’t trying to take on any more actual projects there except healing from the trauma of going there in the first place, and maybe figuring out how we were going to be people again.

But I really wanted to tell him about it now. And I worked my mouth awkwardly, lips pursed shut, trying both to say something and avoid saying anything at all.

He watched me do this.

I realized that Niʔa would be good with this, as new as they were to Earth. New, not so much in that they came over here so recently. It had been several months already. They’d just been really good at lurking. But new in that they’d started fronting more in the past couple weeks while I’d been dissociating, and a lot of people didn’t know them. And they hadn’t had much actual practice dealing with humans.

But the way they’d handled Sophie was just amazing.

“I don’t want to rush you, Goreth,” Peter said. “But, I might get a call any minute. So, I’m going to hand you the pen, so you can do the exercise without me if I have to go, OK? I might be home all night. I just want to make sure you’ve got the tools, OK?”

I lifted our hand up and opened my fingers to take the pen. And he went to place the pen in my hand.

But then it felt like there were six hands held out in front of me, and I could feel them all, and I couldn’t quite figure out which ones were the vessel’s, and I froze.

“Uh, oh,” I said.

Peter also froze, and asked, “What is it?”

“Dissociating. Bad.”

“Well, OK.”

Let me help.

“Please do,” I said to Niʔa out loud.

Then I guess I stood up and went to bed.

—

Someone once said that you can do everything right, and still fail. And that that has to be OK, because that’s life.

It has become obvious that the ‘you’ in that equation can be plural and can include up to everyone.

I’ve wanted to add, hopefully, that, if everyone understands this and is cool and forgiving about it, then maybe it can be OK.

Maybe that was implied in the first statement. I had never felt like I could trust that it was. Not if it wasn’t stated explicitly.

Because, even if something has to be OK, if it can’t be OK then it won’t be OK.

Also, what does ‘be OK’ mean?

If you’re going to say something like that, you should define what the phrase means, or you’re just being squidgy with your statements and basically a politician about the whole thing.

—

The next day, we sat in Pioneer square with our old replacement government phone. The one we’d somehow managed to get after our last one had been destroyed by Mike while he was trying to assault us in his CRV on the side of the freeway on Government Island last year.

We had a big thermos mug of tea, and a bagel from the store, with store bought cream cheese in it. All from home. All purchased with EBT.

We were listening to the few MP3s we had been able to squeeze onto the phone, all instrumental movie soundtrack themes of various sorts. Lots of Giacchino and Elfman. And by lots, I mean about three or four songs each, amongst the others.

And we were trying to read Karen’s editorial comments on our phone without panicking or without actually making any changes to the book yet.

I was trying not to interrupt Ashwin’s work by thinking too much about how Sarah and I were doing things on the Sunspot. And I was also trying not to get lost in staring up at the sky.

Here, on Earth, at least, what we’d decided was that since Aunti Zero’s was closed for the time being, if not indefinitely, we couldn’t spend money there. So, instead, we’d save what little money we got this month from our Patreon, and put it toward replacement parts for our laptop. 

This was going to take a while, since you couldn’t just go to a Rat Shack to get a transistor anymore, and the transistors on computers were all embedded in chips anyway. Not that we were ever old enough to have entered a Rat Shack, as our dad used to call the place. They’d all closed down before we’d had any interest.

But Peter assured us that there were sources on the internet for the bits that Phage was demanding we acquire, and so, when we weren’t reading editorial comments or writing in Ashwin’s book, we were searching for those.

It was all hard.

Elfman’s piece “Face like a frog” wrapped up as Ashwin squinted our eyes shut against a line of text that frustrated nem.

Then, as we sat there with eyes closed, the earbuds remained silent for a while.

Oh, I thought. I think this might be one of my favorites.

There were some very faint orchestral hits that were so quiet that I actually couldn’t hear them. But Ashwin could, and when they reacted to them, I knew I was right.

A few more seconds in, I could hear them. They were getting louder. And there was an urgent underlying rhythm to them.

“I’m sorry,” I said out loud, and then leaned us back in our chair to look up between the awning above us and the tops of the buildings across the square, at the pale blue, cloudless sky. And I let the emotions of Giacchino’s “Roar!” wash over us ever so slowly.

In my mind, a towering monster was destroying Portland, and I was OK with it.

I leaned our head further back and stared up at the awning, through the slats of it at the sky above, and said, finally, “Phage? Hit me.”