As per article 1 of our contract, found in chapter 9 paragraph 9 of Ashwin’s book The End of the Tunnel, which states:

1. 1. This vessel belongs entirely to Sarah and Goreth Ampersand, the original inhabitants who were born and developed with it. As such they collectively and each retain final veto over any decisions regarding the vessel’s state of being, including who may front and control the body.

Phage asked before acting, “May I pull you inworld for a conference?”

I hadn’t even started to say, “Yes,” before I experienced it, but I was going to.

I fell into darkness.

It felt like a hypnic jerk just before falling asleep in bed.

It felt like falling into oblivion, with all the sudden fear and shock of it rushing through my last breath awake.

It felt like I was going to die forever.

Right in the middle of Pioneer Square’s food pavilion.

Unlike similar episodes we’ve had while lying in bed, that unexpected feeling of all support dropping out of us, leaving us gasping, heart racing, this time I could feel more than just Earth’s gravity pulling on me. 

I felt myself stretching, the lower half of my being accelerating faster than the upper half.

I felt time itself stretching.

The ancient amalgam of my grandparents’ and parents’ houses that was our first inworld structure, surrounded by dark gray forests, hills, and the lava field where the End of the Tunnel hovered, that all comprised our known inner landscape, flashed by so fast, it was a single frame of memory.

I fell into darkness, I saw that, and then I was part of a deeper darkness.

The panic and terror of all of this cleared my head of all previous thought, like switching sometimes does, or walking through a doorway into a new room, but more thorough.

I floundered limblessly in the abyss, but it still felt like I was breathing air and pulling oxygen into my lungs and bloodstream. My cells sang with it, making me feel more awake than I’d ever been.

“This is my home,” it said. “This is me.”

I didn’t reply.

“Ashwin remains above, doing nems work.”

There was nothing to say.

“Similarly to how I handled this on ʔetekeyerrinwuf, I will not awaken you or Sarah separately,” the darkness reverberated with thought. “My agreement with you requires that I help you maintain a balance, to avoid destruction. This is how I will do so.” 

I did not feel anything except the existence of my own life and this speech in the void.

It continued, “You have kept your end of the contract, despite all of the adversity you have faced. I expect that to continue, as I will also continue to uphold my end, until all parties bound by it agree to dissolve it mutually. And so I will make you equal with me and my children, but Sarah must also agree.”

“Are you kidding? Yes!” Sarah’s voice rang out from every point in space around my locus of awareness. Just as the voice of the universe was doing. But where its voice was the thunder of the Big Bang itself, hers was a single cathedral bell ringing once.

“Thank you,” I heard my own self resonate, a flat, dissonant oboe note.

After that, neither Sarah nor I wanted to interrupt with our mortal thoughts.

“Welcome to my family,” Phage said.

I felt something within me rise, as if governed by adrenaline. Or like a solar sail unfurling within the compression wave of a supernova. But I didn’t go anywhere. I still felt like I was sinking, ever so slowly now, like how it happens if you relax after diving into a pool.

If the pool were the heat death of the universe itself.

“The way this works is one of the simplest things I have ever discovered,” Phage said. “And yet it is locked away from the prying minds of the vast majority of life. You cannot unlock this within yourself. Another must do it. And it does not have to be someone for whom it has already been unlocked, but some sort of adequate perception must be reached by them for them to know what to do. And as I reach inside each of you to tear asunder the ligament of separateness, you will feel very little, if anything at all. But it will constrain you in other ways. You will be bound, as before, by the wills of others, but instead of this bind being physical, this will be existential. Do you understand?”

Both Sarah and I, in harmony, indicated that we did not.

“You will not be able to alter the domains of others without their active cooperation,” it said. “This will go doubly so for those who have not been awakened, for the ligament of separateness gives them a leverage or strength that you are about to lose in return for another kind of freedom you do not yet have, but seek.”

It did not take our silence after that for anything but the need to process its meanings.

None of the three of us were speaking with words. The words I’ve written on this page are merely the most adequate to convey to you what was being communicated.

We didn’t say that we understood so much as that we all waited until everything clicked and made sense.

The question of why the universe worked this way was not even a consideration.

What was understood was not even the how.

All that was required of us was the comprehension of what it would mean for our future as beings of consciousness.

And that seemed clear.

We’d seen it demonstrated, after all, whenever Ashwin, Phage, or Niʔa exercised their abilities.

It is like how, in a nightmare, a monster will chase you and nip at your heels, and terrify you for leagues on end of running, jumping, climbing, flying to whatever height you can reach, but won’t ever be able to catch you unless you give up at least on a subconscious level, and decide that it is your fate to be rendered, sundered, and eaten by it. Or to stop playing with your fears, and wake up.

In this dream, we were about to become the monsters.

We didn’t even have to express our understanding, the moment it clicked for both of us, Phage said, “Now that you are informed, I must ask for your consent again to do this. Is this what you want? May I unlock the myself in your being?”

The way it expressed that last query was just as awkward feeling as the way I worded it here. But I thought that I understood it just fine, and felt a little amusement at that turn of thought.

It did not change my resolve and resignation in any way.

“Yes,” I said, simultaneously with my soul twin, Sarah.

And then I knew what it really meant.

—

What must it be like to hatch from an egg? To be aware of the process?

You’ve been growing in this little world of yours, everything you need to survive packaged within it for you.

A cord that extends from your belly attaches you to a sack of all the nutrients you need.

Light filters in and sound reverberates through the shell of your world and bathes you in its waves, but there’s very little for you to do with it besides become used to the rhythms and startled by its sudden changes.

And then, slowly, you find yourself pressing up against the walls, your back curved and your muscles cramping.

Maybe you’ve been kicking and shuffling about a little bit for a while, as you learn how your body works, your nerves twitching your muscles at first to let you know that they’re there. And now you have less room to do that.

Your food sack is nearly depleted.

It’s time.

So you twist and you turn and you try to bite this concave wall that encloses itself around you, and you cannot get purchase. Not even with your claws.

You have to puncture it. To crack or tear it.

But something’s wrong.

You don’t have a shell tooth. For some reason you weren’t conceived to grow one.

And your claws are still too soft, and your limbs too weak, and you’re not going to be able to do it.

You move in the congealing atmosphere of your world, desperate to avoid the fate that is so obviously closing in on you, even if you can’t quite comprehend what it is. Your body knows.

And then something impacts the shell from outside.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

And it’s enough, and you can start to push yourself free, the light of the Sunspot nursery blinding your eyes.

Your first intake of breath is dry and burning, but it instantly later makes your whole body sing. 

Two more breaths and you cry out.

I’m warned that if I do pursue a new organic body on the Sunspot, I will likely get to experience that.

I’m not sure I want to, having now experienced something I think is so very similar.

—

Before we resynced with our cosmos-borne counterparts upon the Sunspot, we had to make and eat dinner.

I felt like I awoke from a long night’s sleep to find myself stir frying green beans in garlicky butter on the stove, and Ashwin’s eagerness to eat the food was palpable, familiar, and amusing in its intensity.

Sarah was floating to my left, looking around the room without the assistance of our eyes. I could feel her there as I so often had before. Someone using a portion of the neurons in my brain that I wasn’t using, and a portion that I was, and creating her own electromagnetic field with their activity, that was in harmony with my own but separate, overlapping like drops of watercolor that fell too close to each other.

I heard, or felt, Abigail shuffle into the kitchen from the hallway, her bunny slippers scuffing on the linoleum and her electrons absorbing some of the photons from the light above, repelling others, and generating heat with their excitement over it.

I turned our head to look at her.

“Hey, Sarah,” she said. “That smells so good.” She had a softness to her smile and a warmth to her tone that was gratifying.

She had a humanity that was terrifying.

The smell of Abigail’s hair gel made the right side of our tongue tingle, still.

“Actually, I’m in front right now,” Ashwin said. “This is my favorite Earth food.”

“Oh,” she said, smile breaking into a cute little grin. “Of course. Is there enough that I can have a couple pieces?”

“These are almost done,” Ashwin said. “I can make another batch, and you can have this one.”

She altered her expression to convey consideration, lips closed again, lightly pursed, and said, “You’re not supposed to share the food you buy with EBT, but I won’t tell.”

Ashwin looked down at the beans and examined them.

I didn’t have a frame of reference yet where I could say, ‘this amount of entropy in my beans means that they will be this degree of delightful and this degree of too mushy.’ But I still perceived the curve of that trajectory of energy as it was being altered by the stove element, as an inherent knowledge of what they were as matter.

So that was how Niʔa was getting their numbers.

My own personal psyche didn’t translate that information into numbers like Niʔa’s did, but it made sense now. I could imagine how that worked. I could perceive the process of it.

I remember thinking, this is going to be distracting forever. And it’s not going to solve our problems.

Sarah had been slowly turning to the left, examining the kitchen while Ashwin cooked and talked to Abigail. She was looking at the doorway to the dining area, the dish drainer that sat atop the dishwasher, the sink next to that, below a window that was dark with Winter nighttime, the overflowing trash receptacle next to that, the little hallway to the back door and the pantry, the washer and dryer that were incongruous in the kitchen, one stacked upon the other, the counter where Ashwin was now plating Abigail’s helping of stir fried beans, with the wall cabinets above that, the toaster a little further down the counter, and then Abigail, standing in the middle of the kitchen.

Sarah had turned that way, while Ashwin had turned to the right to talk to Abigail, then back to the stove, then a hundred and eighty degrees to the right to dump the beans on a plate that already had a fork on it, and then back leftward to Abigail to hand her the plate.

As Abigail said, “Thank you,” Sarah’s direction of perceptions aligned again with our eyes.

“We can watch each other’s backs,” Sarah said with our body’s vocal cords.

Abigail beamed, and said, “Yes! We can!”

I was busying myself with realizing that Abigail had no clue yet what Sarah actually meant by that.

Sarah didn’t explain, she just let Ashwin take command again.

Ashwin shrugged like a Ktletaccete by lifting our head up and then tilting it clockwise from our perspective, chin jutting gently to the left, and said, “This is the way.”

Abigail leaned into the cultural reference and said, “This is the way.” She lifted up her plate of beans, grinning, and then turned to shuffle out to the living room.

As she sat down on the sofa and put her plate on the TV dinner stand, and Ashin reached for the fridge to get more beans from the crisper, the sound of Peter tumbling up the front steps like a pratfall in reverse hailed his arrival home.

How are we going to handle this? What are we going to do?

They expect it by now.

There is nothing truly new happening.

There was silence from out front while Peter arranged himself to engage with the door.

And by the time he opened the door, Ashwin was already beginning to fry the last of the beans, stirring another pat of butter into them, adding a little bit of sesame oil to help keep the butter from burning.

Meanwhile, in our bedroom, on our tiny, rickety little hand-us-up student’s desk, sat our disassembled laptop. Its dissociated parts were carefully stacked atop each other, as if to let gravity pull them back together eventually, to protect the insides from collecting dust while we searched for new refurbished parts on our phone. Screws were stored in an otherwise disused pill organizer to the left of it. To the right were arranged a scalpel, a forceps, a jeweler’s screwdriver set, and a dime.

Uncharacteristically, the desk had nothing else on it.

With Peter’s arrival, my thoughts had turned to the laptop, and I found I could visualize my memories of its contents and state of being perfectly.

“Hey, kids,” Peter declared, “I am haveth returned!”

I could also perceive what I thought was the accurate amount of energy needed to bring each failing part of the laptop back into stable working order.

“That is not grammar,” Abigail stated around a mouthful of green beans.

“Oh, but that smells good,” Peter said.

“They are green beans that we purchased,” Ashwin informed him from where we were in the kitchen. “These are the last of them.”

“Do not offer me any, then,” Peter called out back to us. “I’ve got my own food. Just, thanks for the smells!”

I could feel a little irritation from Sarah that Peter felt like he had to instruct us about how to manage our food, but Ashwin was fairly likely to actually give him our beans and make something else for ourselves. Which would have been OK, really, but against the rules, and against our pangs of hunger.

Ashwin could gracefully say ‘no’ to anything. They knew how. But nem also really enjoyed sharing anything they made. And nem was flexible about their options when it came to planning out the future, near or far. It’s part of what had led them to be here with us.

That thought pushed my attention back to the laptop, which my mind already seemed to want to focus on.

I was now not just hyperaware of its physical relationships to everything around it, mass and energy, but also the more complex plays of potential energy involved in its state.

It wasn’t like looking at a hologram, or someone’s aura, or seeing the pathways a person might take before they actually move through the room as weird, wobbly worms of cosmic strings. Though, after Niʔa had described their experiences, and from knowing people like Erik, I was sure someone’s mind or brain out there would interpret things in that way and create those visualizations and sensations if they had our new senses.

What I could perceive was raw comprehension.

It was especially vivid and bleedingly obvious, and this was the critical component to my next realization, when it came to the understanding of my own body and what it was likely to go through, or the stresses it was currently capable of handling, or any of that.

And I think part of that is just being so familiar with it. Having, as a disabled person, pushed it beyond its limits far too many times, I already had an intuitive sense of it, even after a year of Niʔa assisted healing.

And what I saw, when I contemplated the laptop, myself, my system, our projects, and all of our budgets, was that our best course of action was not to fix the laptop, like Phage was set on doing.

I saw, with calm conviction, that we should just remove the harddrive, to save the data on it, scrap the rest of the laptop, and save up the money to get a new one. Perhaps run a crowdfunding campaign for it. There was a lot of potential energy in that move that I was sure could be leveraged.

But we could type on our phone, if we couldn’t borrow someone else’s computer. And if we weren’t stressed about the laptop, if we gave up on it, we’d have more emotional energy to deal with it.

I’m pretty sure that any number of our readers, even yourself, could have figured all that out just by reasoning it. Even I had had the experience necessary to eventually come to that conclusion myself, despite all of the stress I’d been under messing with my faculties. But there’s a difference between calmly, as a third party, looking at a situation and seeing the obvious solution, and being in the middle of the situation and looking around at everything to see the solution spelled out in raw physics.

And Phage had, for all its unfathomable experience and cosmological perspective, been so focused on the practical physics of it, its domain, that it had staunchly offered its particular solution to the problem.

Or, had it?

I turned my focus inward to where it lay in our collective being. And, in so doing, I was also able to pick out every other one of my fellow system members, Sarah, Ashwin, the Collective, and all three of Niʔa, purple, green, and pink. All orbiting the bottomless singularity that was Phage.

Were you manipulating us? I asked.

It radiated amusement, and thought back, Does a black hole manipulate the star that it is consuming?

That pulled me up very short.

Had it just confessed to being death itself, or some agent of it? Sarah and I had just spent the last year learning the extent to which its stories about itself had all been true. And we had, in a moment of fear and worry, drawn up a contract with it last year.

And then, earlier that day, we had, in a moment of desperation and panic, agreed to accept its gifts.

Like a demon from the Bible, a book and religion we’d rejected back when we were twelve. 

Well, I had never really accepted anything from the Sunday school our mom had forced us to go to. It had honestly felt to me like God Himself was just as bad as the demons mentioned in a couple of passages. Possibly worse. I couldn’t reconcile my experiences with the world with anything the teachers and ministers tried to reason from scripture.

Though, of course, Phage had already been part of our system for a few years before Sarah and I had put our foot down and said “no” about Sunday mornings.

Had we just sold our souls to something profound and deadly?

It had been an old friend for so long, a dark and exciting one, reliable, helpful, scary to others but not to us anymore. We’d put a great deal of our personal identities into our relationship with it, and the fact that it was part of our system, one of us.

But in suddenly feeling more real and alive and present than I ever had before because something had been unlocked in me by this self proclaimed sentient cosmic force, with the caveat that I would, in some ways, be more at the mercy of the wills of others, really seriously had the effect of causing me to look at things from a new perspective.

And it momentarily robbed me of the ability to appreciate Phage-humor.

You are still a person, Goreth. You are still you. Like me, you will make mistakes, it thought at me, as if reading my doubts. But unlike me, you will retain something of yourself if you stray beyond the bounds of a system such as your vessel or the Sunspot. I will simply rejoin my greater self, and return to the thoughtless processing of the equation of the universe. It was you that gave me life here, and this is my gesture of thanks. How we got here is how we got here. It is simply what happened, and if you look at it, you now have the tool to see that what I say is true.

What are you? I asked it.

I don’t know, it replied.

And even though it had said other things at other times, all of those things had been true. Just like they were for me.

Unlocking my awareness and breaking me free of the confines of a mortal perspective and action didn’t change what I was. I was a dragon. I was the sibling of Sarah. I was the child of a couple of Earth humans. I was the product of both genetic and memetic evolution. I was the agent of it. I was enthalpy and entropy dancing in the heat of the sun. I was a pattern of information casting interference waves across the universe. I was Phage, Mau, ʔefegeʔe, whatever you wanted to call me. And I always had been and always will be.

I was. I am. I will be.

Goreth.

“Hm. I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said with our mouth.

“What was that?” Peter asked, stepping into the kitchen.

“Everything,” I said. And I could see that I was right, even if it didn’t make any sense to him in the moment.

But, what I’ve learned since is that even if you’re someone like I am now, you have to keep looking at the truth in order to keep it in mind.

It’s when you don’t look at it that you’re being yourself, after all.