The longer I stood there, the less I understood my surroundings.

And I started to feel more misshapen and confused.

I couldn’t tell which direction was Spinward, and that was seriously disorienting to me.

I carefully sat down in the chair in front of the laptop. It was technically too small and too flimsy for my body, and designed to be folded up and put away somewhere, or carried around. But it held well enough.

If I’d had my tail, it would have fit through the hole in the back of the chair, and I would have been reasonably comfortable sitting like that. My original legs might not have liked it. But based on my research of meters and converting to our measurements, I think I would have been able to sit in it without worrying about it collapsing if I’d had this very same chair back on the Sunspot before I’d left. Even with my heaviest nanite exobody.

Maneuvering so that my tail could go through the hole in the back easily and comfortably would have been another matter. The thing used to seem to have a mind of its own.

I had always been more comfortable with the kind of chairs you lean forward into.

But here I was, in a human body, sitting in an inadequate human chair, about to open a human designed piece of computing equipment called a laptop, and try to remind myself what I was going to do with it.

It was about twice the size of one of our own larger tablets. And it was black and boxy, with bits of paper with colored images stuck to the top of it. A couple of them were simple rectangles with patterns of colored stripes on them. One of them was a picture of an animal that vaguely but not quite convincingly resembled my original vessel. I could see a similarity, but it was still alien. Instead of eyes, it had crosses or exes drawn in, and its tongue was sticking out.

There were hinges along the back of the laptop, with a cord plugged into a socket there, which I detached and reattached, with some effort.

And there was a latch on the front of it, with ridges on the surface for a grip that indicated I should slide it sideways. Which I did.

The top half of it came free at the front, springing up on the hinges, and I delicately lifted it up and folded it back, adjusting it to show my reflection in the dark screen there.

There was a keyboard inside it, on the bottom half. An alien keyboard, with a rubbery orange nubbin in the middle of it. Characters were helpfully printed on each of the keys.

Nothing happened.

I remembered being there when this piece of equipment was used before. I remembered these fingers pressing against the keys and operating the nubbin to make things happen on the screen.

But I couldn’t remember how to turn it on.

I sat there for a while, waiting for that memory to resurface. Usually, I could remember someone helping me out with this.

But I was clearly alone.

“Can someone help me?” I asked out loud.

That sounded like English when I did it. I still had use of the vessel’s linguistic memories at least.

This cast severe doubt on my sense of identity, so I immediately said the same thing again in Inmararräo. Which helped me feel better, but didn’t do any good at bringing anyone forward.

“Phage?” I called. “Mau? ʔefejeʔe?”

It did not answer.

I was going to call Sarah’s and Goreth’s names next, but Phage not responding made me feel so shocked and alone and suddenly in danger that I couldn’t.

My dark, almost silhouetted reflection in the laptop screen was a supremely unsettling apparition.

It reminded me somewhat of Phage, but the resemblance refused to call Phage forward any more than its names had done.

I would have reached up to touch that face, but I was afraid to confirm it was mine by doing so.

That protruding and rounded chin below a painfully tiny mouth, for one, was so contrary to anything I’d ever seen associated with people while growing up. The strange, overhanging nose that was the same color as the rest of the face was also, just, not me. There was no snout.

And I had to turn my head to see my ears out of the corner of my eyes, and they were wrinkled and wrong.

The only hair I had was in tufts. Two little ones, in lines above my eyes. And then the whole top half and back of my head. Except on the right side of my head, where it was clipped really short. Down to stubble.

I remembered vaguely that there should be even shorter stubble all over my lower jaw and cheeks, but I dared not touch it to confirm.

Examining my reflection like this, though, was making my feelings of dissociation worse.

I leaned forward and examined the case of the laptop more closely instead. I knew it wouldn’t respond to voice or thought, so I knew I should be looking for a switch.

Pressing any of the keys on the keyboard did nothing.

So I decided to spiral my search out from the keyboard, and in the upper righthand corner there was a depression that looked like a button that had a little white dot printed in the middle of it.

I pressed it.

It was a button. It depressed.

A speaker in the molded polymer case emitted a harmonic set of tones, and then I could hear a fan spinning up.

So that was taken care of.

I waited.

I remembered that this thing would take some time to be ready to use.

I didn’t dare look around the room, unless I found it as alien as my reflection, so I looked up at the wall in front of me and at the painted surface of it. There was a crack in it, and a few bubbles in the paint, and many imperfections, none of which looked remotely intentional. It made me think of decay and age, which I found rather beautiful.

My home has old things in it. My home itself is unfathomably ancient. But most of it is maintained by the construction nanites, and by the people, to remain clean and sturdy and in the same condition it was when it was first created, until someone decides to alter it for Artistic purposes.

For the most part, the only things that looked truly old, in the same way that this wall looked old, were the rocks and the trees of the Garden.

There had been, some time ago, a movement to let things age. So that people could appreciate the beauty of wear and tear on them.

That had been long before my time, but here and there some people still did that, and I’d seen entire living quarters set up to show just how old and lived in they were.

This reminded me of that, only I knew this entire world generally looked like this.

The screen of the laptop lit up and filled with nominal blackness. It was not as dark as when the screen was turned off, but it was as dark as it could be when it was powered.

A symbol appeared in the middle of it and started cycling colors, and maybe there was some writing, but I didn’t watch. I knew it wasn’t ready yet, so I kept looking at the wall.

Eventually, the screen changed again, and showed an image of a waterfall surrounded by the greenest trees I think I will have ever seen, even living here for the rest of my life.

I felt cold at the thought of never going home again.

Perhaps I could, but maybe I’d also still be stuck here. Two people. One here and one there. Or maybe I already was. I didn’t dare speculate. But a consciousness of mine could very well be stranded here, all of my own choice, and I was that consciousness. All because I wanted to see something new and to learn more about myself.

But here, the Internet was a pale daydream of the Network, and I no longer had access to the construction nanites for any convenience. The toilets were terrifying. On a planet. A world so immense I might never see the other side of it, and if I looked up at night I would see infinity instead of the place where family lived.

The ground was curved the wrong way.

But the green of those trees in that image was so painful it was stunning. Unbelievable.

There were a few labeled icons displayed over the image, and a band of color along the bottom with smaller icons taking up about half of it.

In the lower right hand corner was a tiny, tiny clock displaying the time in what I remembered as hours, minutes, months, days, and years. And the years had been counted since some important event in the past, and
read 2024.

Apparently, I had lived for almost a quarter of that amount of time. It certainly seemed like a remarkably small number of years for a linear calendar. Technically, a mere seven generations of Ktletaccete.

Something about the date nagged at me, but I looked around the screen for something else familiar.

On the left, at the bottom of a line of icons that started with one labeled ‘recycling’, there was an icon that was a depiction of a blue square with little dots along the top and three darker blue lines in it. And below it were words.

“DHS – Disability – Medicaid Renewal To-Do List.txt,” it read.

That was the one.

Oh, Hailing Scales.

I didn’t need to open it to remind myself of the problem. I’d managed to commit enough of this to my own long term memory that it came back to me at the sight of that, and I double checked the clock.

Specifically the date.

The date read ‘1/6/2024’.

The paperwork was due on ‘1/5/2024’.

Shit of the Great One.

I had come forward while we were standing in front of the laptop getting ready to prepare the final steps of the paperwork, and it was past due, and I was left all alone in the room.

Now I knew why Sarah and Goreth weren’t co-fronting with me.

They were in crisis.

Sarah had probably realized what the date was upon just seeing the laptop, and had fled in fear. Goreth was probably triggered by being co-conscious with her.

I have had four centuries of experience living within and around a plurality. I come from that plurality. Ktletaccete brains are probably a bit different from human brains, maybe in some fundamental ways that might make things like our neural terminals useless here on Earth, but the overall functions of a plurality seem to be similar enough for the most part that our jargon for it all translated pretty easily into words this brain understood.

But I’d never experienced being in a plurality this small.

We’d known one.

Our closest friends, the Flits, were a trinary system. And they’d worked kind of like Sarah and Gareth, with the possibility of dissociative episodes like I was experiencing now.

We Pembers also had our moments, and even cases of amnesia. But, they typically would last a shorter period of time than the Flits experienced, and occasionally we did have to help them figure things out when it was bad for them. Theirs could go on for days.

But there is a profound difference between secondhand experience and firsthand experience.

I did, however, have access to something that neither Sarah nor Goreth had, though I hadn’t truly tested it yet.

Phage’s gift.

It’s hard to explain, and the story behind how I had received it is long and not for this book. Still don’t fully understand it myself. In large part because Phage doesn’t seem to, either.

Phage is a thing, a being, that someone summoned onto the Sunspot through the Tunnel Apparatus to help keep the ship running smoothly, long, long ago. It’s possible that the transition from wherever it came from to the Sunspot gave it some kind of amnesia, like coming to the front in a system will sometimes erase your memories of whatever you were doing inworld.

It thinks that it is physics itself, but it is also very obviously a person.

However, it can do things a typical person can not. Things that seem to back up its claims to its identity.

Apparently, it had been telling Sarah and Goreth about some of this during its time here on Earth, before I came over. And Erik and the Murmuration had heard about it, too. This was how Phage had saved Sarah and Goreth from a drunk driver by sabotaging the parking brake on their dad’s VW bus, and accelerating the effects of gravity on it so it rolled into the road faster than it typically might have done.

Phage had also, very recently, given everyone on the Sunspot access to its abilities. Again, a long story not for this book. Suffice it to say, there had been great deliberation and social upheaval before it had done so. And some afterward. It had tried to balance things in a way we had all thought we were prepared for, but really weren’t.

Phage’s gift was a very, very special thing.

Let’s say that it is like telepathy. And like something I’ve heard called telekinesis. Only on a more fundamental level with the universe. Goreth would say it is like programming in Assembly rather than Visual C#. Or Sarah would say it is like cooking food by using your own body heat, though that may be a gross understatement of its utility.

I knew the gift was suppressed here, on Earth, but that we’d been experiencing some of it a couple weeks ago, when we’d witnessed one of Erik’s psychotic episodes first hand ourselves.

I’d never seen anything like that myself on the Sunspot, but I think Sarah and Goreth’s human brain was reacting to it all differently than my Ktletaccete brain ever had. It maybe might have been filling in details and creating its own hallucinations to make sense of the senses I was providing it.

If I could tap into those senses again, they could help me navigate this world without Sarah and Goreth’s help. I hoped. Help somewhat at least.

But maybe I could also use them to explore our system thoroughly, and carefully, and find everyone in it, and make sure that they were OK. I thought I might be able to bypass the dissociative shenanigans the human neurons were pulling.

It was a thing I had only ever read about when regarding Ktletaccete neurology, and never done before, myself.

When you get a gift like this, you do what you feel you need to do with it, when the opportunities arise.

I’d just never been called upon to undertake this sort of selves examination.

I’d only had the gift for a few of my own decades before traveling to Earth, after all.

In any case, the one thing I did suspect very strongly was that I could not use any of my abilities or knowledge to print out the documents, take them to the offices where they needed to go, nor convince or coerce the people there to accept them even though they were late.

Particularly that last bit.

It was against my ethics to force someone to do something they wouldn’t do.

But also, my strange way of speaking and behaving, and my lack of knowledge might get Sarah and Goreth into trouble when attempting to represent them. I was even afraid of talking to Peter and Abigail on my own.

And Phage’s gift doesn’t work like that. Particularly here on Earth.

I would not be able to do something impressive and say, “Do the thing,” and expect anyone to take me seriously, because I very likely couldn’t do anything impressive with it.

But thinking about this, and as scared and frustrated as I was, I wanted to do something to exert my will physically.

I wanted to test the range and force of my gift, and maybe leave some kind of notable evidence for Sarah and Goreth to find later, to believe in.

It wouldn’t solve anything, but it would make me feel better. A lot better.

And that would be the first step in finding something useful to do afterward.

I let myself look around the room then.

It was familiar enough, fortunately. I had been living in it for the past month, after all. Though it had nothing in it that was to my tastes and interests, aside from the alien itself. And that gave me an idea.

I should find a way to decorate this room with my own touch. Something we could look at and think, Ashwin lives here too. And maybe make it something that would remind me a little of home as well.

The map I had drawn, which was on the wall near the door, technically fulfilled that wish. But I wanted more.

There were clothes all over the floor at the moment, instead of just the closet and laundry hamper. Sarah and Goreth both had a habit of letting things lie where they dropped them for a while, before spending a few minutes on any given random day to tidy up.

The little cabinet by the bed was absolutely covered in jewelry. Just mounds of it under the lamp that was also on top of it.

And where the walls weren’t covered by bookshelves, something I definitely approved of, there were images and drawings tacked to them.

The wall beside the bed had a huge piece of paper tacked up to it upon which Sarah was slowly working on a mural. Her scribbly swirly style of drawing was being used to create little doodles of dragons. Over and over. All sorts of little tiny dragons, some no more than a couple centimeters across. A few a decimeter or so, but only a few. Each one was its own unique creature, simple, but with different proportions, different number of horns, different styles of tail or wings, different number of claws, different shapes of heads.

But she was placing them in such a way, some overlapping, others far apart, such that their varying densities started creating a larger picture.

She’d started this project a while ago. Sometime shortly after they’d moved into this room.

I remember when she’d been working on it a couple days ago, one evening, she’d told me that it was a landscape from her last home town in Washington. A view of the islands of the bay there that she missed.

I only noticed just then, looking at it while trying to think of what I could add to the room using Phage’s gift, that she’d started working the Aft Endcap of the Sunspot into the sky above those islands.

And I think I might have cried.

It was so beautiful, and it reminded me of the one time I’d visited the city of Fikwakyet and had watched the sundeath from there.

That made my choice simpler. She’d already started work on something for me, to help me feel more at home. So, maybe I’d do something in response. Something maybe both she and Goreth would appreciate but also could not ignore.

But, before I did that, I decided I needed some tea. Something sensual to help me center myself, even if it wasn’t exactly familiar.

Already visualizing what I planned on doing, I dared to venture out to the kitchen.

And, I tell you, that was scarier to do than I had suspected it would be.

When I opened the bedroom door to peek out of it, it was like I was seeing the hallway for the first time. And it took me a few seconds to get my bearings.

And then I heard someone moving about in the kitchen. Large and animalistic.

It was like going for a walk in a wilderness park and hearing one of the megafauna shift in the brush near the trail without seeing it, and wondering if it was one of the ambush predators. Or a hunting bird.

The fauna deterrents of the park would usually keep them off the trail, but sometimes an animal was bold enough to make a lunge. And we weren’t supposed to do anything about it but step back and make noise.

I am over three of my centuries old. I’ve had a lot of experience with that kind of thing. It really doesn’t happen often, but if you venture forth into the parks often enough, it can happen more than once.

And this was a human dwelling with a human in it, and I knew that.

I’d momentarily forgotten that the body I was in was not my Pember body.

I’d also forgotten the cane, but as achy as the feet and legs often were, this vessel could walk on its own a lot of the time. Especially around the house.

Crouched in my customary stance, I boldly stepped out into the hallway and moved toward the kitchen, not bothering to sneak or anything like that. The right thing to do would be to walk in like I belonged.

Incidentally it was the same behavior one uses to intimidate the Sunspot fauna into leaving one alone, but in this case, if it was a housemate, that housemate would not expect to see me skulking.

So, I tried not to skulk.

“Greetings,” I said, when I came around the corner and saw the large man in a bathrobe pouring something from a box into a bowl on the counter near the electric tea kettle.

Peter.

He turned his head to look at me, mid action, and smirked. “Hey,” he said. “How’re you all doing?”

OK. That went well. OK. Yes.

I noticed my lower back was hurting just a little bit, but ignored it and said, “I think I’d like tea, if that is OK.”

He put the box down on the counter next to the bowl, and tilted his head, mouth partially open, half smile frozen on his face. Then he gave a tiny, silent chuckle and said, “Sure. Of course!”

That affirmative was nice to hear, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do next. So we both stood there for a couple of heartbeats.

I remember thinking that I felt like he should be quite a bit taller than me. But the way that I was standing, my eyes were level with his collarbone. I could straighten up and look him in the nose, and that felt incorrect.

It did make him seem less intimidating to me than he otherwise would have felt, though.

“Are you Ashwin?” he asked.

I couldn’t remember if we’d talked to each other before, or how much Sarah or Goreth had told him about me. So, even though I recognized him I felt like I was meeting him for the first time, so I introduced myself, “Yes. I’m Ashwin. My pronouns are they/them. I think I’m the only one fronting right now.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Excuse me, just a second. Hold it right there while I finish pouring my cereal, OK?” Then he closed the cereal box and put it back up on the top of the cooling cabinet, the refrigerator, which he then opened. He pulled out a translucent white polymer jug with something that looked like formula in it. Milk!

I watched him pour some milk into his bowl of cereal. Then, he opened a drawer and pulled a tiny metal ladle from it. A spoon.

Bowls and ladles, or spoons, are such a fundamental technology, I wonder how often a people who have mouths and grasping limbs to eat with might develop a civilization without some form of them.

“Alright,” he said, putting the milk back into the refrigerator. “Now I can get out of your way.” He picked up his bowl of cereal and stepped back, using the spoon to scoop up some cereal and milk and to shovel it into his mouth. But, then he frowned lightly, and spoke around his food, “Do you know your way around the tea machine?”

“Tea machine?” I asked.

He gestured at the electric kettle with his spoon. “It’s a simple machine,” he said. “But the switch is a moving part, that unswitches on its own, so I think it qualifies as a machine. Don’t you?”

“I do not know,” I said. “I also do not know where the tea is. Or the tea bowls.”

“A mug?” he asked, gesturing with the spoon now at one of the upper cabinets to his right (my left).

“A yes, a mug,” I said.

“You seem really spacey,” he commented, putting another spoonful of cereal into his mouth and chewing it.

I’d been so phenomenally good with English and English idioms for the past month, thanks to the linguistic centers of Sarah and Goreth’s brain, that it really bothered me that I didn’t know what ‘spacey’ meant in this case. It took me by surprise, and I couldn’t do anything but furrow my brow.

“Are you doing OK?” he asked.

“No,” I told him quite honestly.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, scrunching his face up even more.

I wasn’t really sure how to interpret that expression, and I began to worry about it.

“Can – can I get you anything?” he asked. “I could make you the tea, if you’re confused about that. Or, I could call somebody, if you need that.”

I really didn’t know how to answer him. He sounded concerned and, I think, friendly. It really isn’t in my childhood experience to have reason to doubt anybody, though my later adulthood had led me to encounter some very dangerous and deceptive people. My instincts were still usually to trust. Except that I was having a lot of trouble reading his expressions and tone of voice, because it was so alien to me.

And, on top of that, I didn’t want to misrepresent Sarah and Goreth and get them into trouble. Especially with someone they relied on for shelter.

A concept, by the way, that had confounded and horrified me when I’d first learned of it, but that was truly hitting me now how terrible it was.

Food and shelter on this world were not provided by the world itself. For the people here, they were not givens, taken for granted, guaranteed by right of simply being alive (and, as of the writing of this book, they still aren’t).

I fundamentally do not understand why your culture is like this.

It is so hostile.

It is cruel.

It gives people power over other people, and that is wrong.

But, here I was, beginning to grasp, by my vague memories of Sarah and Goreth’s relationship to Peter, and my fear of misreading his face, just how tenuous their living situation was, and how close I might have been to destroying it.

If Peter didn’t like how I answered his question, he had the power and authority, as I feared I understood it, to kick us out.

And, based on the interactions between people I vaguely recalled seeing out in Pioneer Square, and Sarah’s worried thoughts about it all, closely associated by her worries about her disability claim (another thing I don’t understand), there were no empty shelters or quarters or house out there in this world for us to move into if we were kicked out.

I felt their chest thumping. Our chest. My chest.

And I felt jumpy and shaky.

And I felt the body just stand up straighter on its own.

I thought maybe someone had come forward to help take over, but no, apparently it was just a reflex.

I looked around the kitchen, trying to think, but all that came to mind was what I had come in here to do and what I was planning on doing afterward. So I clung to that and hoped it would be OK.

“I think I would just like some tea,” I said. “I think I would like some help with it, with your consent.”

Peter gave a human smile, showing some teeth, which alarmed me, and said, “I can certainly do that! Um. Caffeinated or herbal?” He then grabbed the kettle and whirled toward the sink that was behind him near a window there, to fill it with water.

I chose the word I understood, “herbal.”

“Good choice at this time of night!” He said. “Um, Sleepy Time? Or Market Spice?”

“I do not want to sleep,” I said, not yet relaxed, not yet certain I was navigating this correctly.

What if I acted just a little too weird? What if my answer was just alien enough that it concerned him? I had no way of knowing at that moment. No one was reassuring me except Peter himself, but I couldn’t feel his thoughts or his…

I turned my head sideways and looked out of the corner of my eye.

“Yes?” he asked, pausing before the cabinet that probably had the tea in it.

“Excuse me,” I said. “May I look at you in a different way? It might help me communicate. I am not sure it will work, but I would like to try.”

He squinted his eyes and furrowed his brow again, and asked, “What do you mean?”

“It will not harm you,” I said. “I don’t even know if I can do it. But I think I should ask for your consent first anyway.”

He straightened up, and pulled his head back, crinkling up his chin and tightening his mouth, pulling it to the side a little, then said, “I’m going to tentatively give you the OK, but if I do feel anything weird, I’m going to revoke my consent.”

“That is fair,” I replied, relieved that we seemed to be speaking more clearly to each other. Though, his expressions were worrying me more. They were becoming more strange.

I wanted to see if I could use Phage’s gift to monitor his patterns and see how much stress he had, and then to try to judge if our interactions were causing even more stress or less. So, to make sure that his consent was properly informed, I explained that.

“If I can,” I said, “I am going to look at you through my own senses, instead of just this vessel’s eyes, to see if I understand your expressions better. This means that I may be able to see fluctuations in your nervous system’s electromagnetic field and other patterns of cause and effect around and through you, but I will not be able to understand your thoughts. You will still have to speak. My goal is to accommodate myself for not being human.”

Maybe I should have been more precise in my language, like I was in describing my intentions before my speech. But I was second guessing myself badly, because of how nervous and scared I was.

He seemed to work and stretch his face as he considered what I just told him, stepping back a bit. Stepping back is not a good sign amongst Ktletaccete, so that worried me.

“Hhhoa-kay?” he said, cryptically. “I don’t think I understand, but if it helps you, I think that’s important. Again, I retain my right to revoke consent if I feel anything funny.”

“That is the way consent works,” I agreed.

“It is!” He smiled again. Even though he showed his teeth once more, I did find that reassuring. It was an expression from him that I now knew. He turned back to the tea cupboard, “So, Market Spice?”

“Yes,” I replied, simply accepting it as the tea I would get. And then I tried to access Phage’s gift, thinking that if it worked here there was more of a chance I’d be able to write on Sarah and Goreth’s wall by using age, later.

As Peter put the glass kettle onto its base and flipped the switch, then turned to reach for the tea cupboard, I tried to look at him differently.

If you don’t have this gift, how do I describe using it?

If you are human, then you don’t have a neural terminal, and I can’t use that as an analogy, as inaccurate as it is.

Do you have an imagination of some sort? A way of holding and examining even abstract concepts or thoughts in your head?

I am not necessarily talking about the ability to visualize things, because I know that that varies a lot from person to person.

I don’t know what you’re capable of, but if you are reading this, this far into my book, then you can track a narrative at least. Correct?

It’s basically memory.

But, it’s the quality of memory, or thought, that you experience while reading a story that I’m drawing your attention to.

Take a moment to examine that process you go through when you read about me interacting with Peter.

Try to figure out how you would explain to me what your brain does when you read my words and how you experience that.

In fact, pretend you are telling me all about it. Recite the words in your head or say them out loud.

Have you done that?

That is what it is like to consciously choose to access Phage’s gift.

Your ability to perceive your own thought processes is a sense that you probably normally don’t think about as a sense. You probably just take it for granted and use it when called upon to do so. Most of the time you probably ignore it.

More importantly, it’s a sense that doesn’t have an organ that you might consider it to be measured by, such as
your eyes.

It does have an organ associated with it. Your brain. But since it is your brain sensing what your brain is doing, and you can’t see your brain doing that with your eyes, it’s probably not natural for you to think of your brain as doing the sensing.

You probably think of you as doing the sensing.

When you’re plural, by the way, the question of that can become particularly poignant.

Using an internal sense of your own thoughts like that is very, very similar to choosing to look at the ebb and flow of entropy in another complex system, such as another person’s body.

I’d done it many times before.

I’d stopped trying to do it when I’d come to Earth, for some reason. Perhaps because I had been told it might not work. Perhaps because I was now more human than Ktletaccete, and it was no longer a reflex of mine. Or perhaps it had been emotional amnesia induced by traveling through the Tunnel.

It wasn’t until I’d involuntarily started experiencing it again just recently that I thought to try it on purpose.

I found myself shifting my attention to an awareness I already had of the details of the complex system that was Peter. And it was waiting for me right there to perceive it.

It was muted and dulled, just as Phage had warned. It felt like there was a greater distance between me and him, that obfuscated the details of his system and would make it so it might take more effort for me to reach out and alter it.

But I wasn’t interested in reaching out and altering the way he worked, so that part didn’t matter so much.

This was exactly the same perception that Sarah had been utilizing, through me or Phage I assume, to see how many people were fronting in the Murmuration’s system previously.

But, something new to me was the emergent visual effect!

I assume this was related to how we saw all the Eriks when he started hallucinating the presence of his headmates.

As I looked at Peter this way, a shifting and rippling aurora of sorts unfolded itself around and through him. It didn’t exactly have color, and it wasn’t white either, but it shined to me like light. And it fluctuated with what I knew to be his thoughts, emotions, and other changing physiological functions.

“How’s it going?” He asked, picking up his cereal again to eat it while waiting for the water to boil. As I’d been changing how I looked at him, he’d already taken a bag of tea out and put it in a dry mug.

“I can see you the way I’m used to,” I said. “It is reassuring.”

I watched a ripple pass through the head and upper body area of his system, and grow fainter as it reached out towards the ends of his limbs, and he said, “Wonderful! I don’t feel a thing. So far.” And then he filled his mouth with cereal and chewed it. He watched the water as he chewed.

I wondered if I could accelerate the boiling of the water. I could easily see that system in action, too, of course. And in examining it, I could see that I would have to accelerate the flow of electrons throughout the house itself and the machine up until the point they interacted with the heating element. And then I would have to instead increase the resistance there and facilitate the creation and transfer of heat. More or less.

I’m describing this using precise words that do not truly correlate to the actual physics or my actions, but it’s close enough to get the point across, I think.

I would be able to do this easily on the Sunspot, so long as I had the subconscious consent of everyone my actions might affect. Here, it looked more complicated than that.

I decided to try it anyway by first verbally priming Peter for the results.

“I imagine it would be pleasant if the water came to a boil faster,” I said.

There was a small ripple through him before he laughed and said, “Yeah. I think that a lot when I watch water boil.” He ate another bite of cereal.

I felt that that should do it, so I strained and reached across the space/time and causality between me and the tea kettle, and felt my way into the electrical circuitry of the house, all the way out to the transformer on the utility poles outside.

I quickly discovered I would have to work from at least there.

In the simplest language possible, I extended my own complex system outward to include this circuitry. I also encompassed the molecules of the tea kettle, the water, and the atmosphere around it, because those mattered as well. And then, I flexed.

It felt like a much longer stretch than anything I had done before. More of a strain. It may have shown on my face, in fact. I felt a lot less like myself as I did this, losing my sense of identity briefly.

But I did manage to cut the time of the water to boil in half. There were enough variables, including how the perception of time can fluctuate, that I had no idea if it would be noticeable.

But when the bubbles started rising quickly with a small roar, and the tea kettle automatically shut off with a click, I relaxed and looked at Peter.

A slightly different ripple went through his being, and he swallowed his cereal and said, “huh.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“I could swear that went faster than it should have,” he said. He casually pointed his spoon in my direction, keeping his eye on the kettle. “Did you actually somehow do that, or is my mind messing with me?”

I considered the various different truths I could tell him, and settled on, “Technically, the house and the tea kettle did it. I believe it boiled in half the time it should have taken.”

His being vibrated low and quickly, and he worked at something in his teeth with his tongue before he shrugged and said, “Huh. Well, might as well steep your tea.” And then he went about pouring the boiled water into the mug, picking up the tea bag by its string, and swirling it in the water a little bit afterward before wrapping the string around the mug’s handle.

“I think I have found the extent of Phage’s gift to me,”
I said.

“Phage, huh?” he asked, before I could see any reaction in his system. A reflex, almost.

“What do you know of it?” I asked. I wasn’t really getting a much better read on him by using all of my senses, but something about this conversation had settled me a bit, and I was starting to relax. However, I still didn’t want to overstep my bounds with someone who had power over Sarah and Goreth, and whose extent of knowledge about me and Phage was something I couldn’t clearly remember.

“I’m friends with it,” Peter said. “I think. Like, Sarah and Goreth told me a bunch about it before it would come forward and talk to me. And then, one day it was all chummy in the kitchen, like we’re doing here, actually.”

I nodded.

“Sarah told me it was their old imaginary friend from their childhood. A monster they befriended late at night in their bedroom. And that it believed some really outlandish things about itself,” he explained. “But then, when it talked to me, as much as I wanted to consider it to be the product of a vivid imagination – and, admittedly, I still do – I felt myself taking it seriously when it talked.”

“It does that,” I said.

He nodded in thought, “It does, yes. So. It said it was a visitor to Earth, and that it was something like Entropy Itself. So, like, it’s from absolutely everything, everywhere, all at once, but also that it somehow traveled from someplace a long, long way away and came here to visit. And, like, I’d heard stories like that from famous mediums channeling spirits and that sort of thing, you know?”

I turned my head to the side and said, “I do not.”

“You don’t know what a medium is?” he asked.

“I do not,” I replied.

“Huh. OK. A medium is someone who says that they can channel spirits – uh – host them in their body and let them talk through them. Kind of like how Goreth says you’re from outer space, and now you live in their body. Really, just about the same thing exactly. Only,” Peter explained, “It’s sort of a job or career. Mediums advertise that they can do it and they charge money for it. And I’m not sure that all of them are telling the truth about it, either.”

“Ah,” I said, taking the opportunity to express a concern I had. “Money is a strange thing to me. It seems like it compels people to do things they might not otherwise do.”

“That’s really true,” Peter said, brandishing his spoon. “I don’t think it’s as bad as people paint it out to be, though. I can use it to help people, after all.”

I was not thinking terribly clearly, so I did not feel equipped to delve further into that conversation. But I was pretty sure I didn’t agree with him. I remained quiet.

“Anyway,” Peter said. “Goreth and Sarah aren’t mediums because they don’t call themselves that. They don’t charge money for letting people talk to Phage or you, which I think is fine. Honestly. Though they could definitely use the money.” He blinked a couple times, the ripples in his being echoing the action. “Can I make an observation about you, Ashwin?”

“I would welcome it,” I said. “Please do.”

“You were obviously really stressed when you came into the kitchen a bit ago,” he gestured to the mug of tea. “I think your tea is ready, by the way.” Then he ate some more cereal and chewed on it while he observed me and thought, before saying, “you seem to have calmed down a bit, but you still seem really distressed to me. Your accent, or the way you talk, is really thick and hard for me to understand completely sometimes. And, also, I haven’t seen Sarah or Goreth just gone for this long before. Are you sure there isn’t something more I can help you with? Are you all doing OK in there?”

Composing my thoughts, I tentatively stepped far enough into the kitchen to acquire the mug of tea and remove the tea bag, holding it up in the air above the mug, with what I hoped was a questioning look on my face.

“Here, I’ll take that,” Peter said. Then he took it and turned and threw it underhand into the disposal bin by the sink.

“I do not think they are well,” I said, referring to my hosts. “I cannot call up Phage, either, which is usually a very
bad sign.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“Sarah missed a deadline,” I confessed, hoping I wasn’t overstepping, but not knowing what else to do.

“A deadline?” he asked, definitely looking concerned to me. Maybe I was learning.

“It is a personal business, and I do not know how much she would consent for me to divulge,” I said. “But, it is a big thing, and I think that scared both her and Goreth. But, with Phage gone, I feel that there is more going on, and that it is a bigger thing. And I don’t know what it is.”

“Oh, well shit,” he said. He put his spoon into his cereal and held up a hand, to say, “You don’t have to tell me anything. But, I am obligated, by who I am, to ask you some questions and check in on you. And, as an EMT and generally really cool guy, I want to help. Is that OK?”

“I think so,” I said. “I would like some help.”

“OK,” he said, putting his half eaten cereal on the counter and then folding his arms across his chest to turn and
pay full attention to me. “So. Are you in a lot of distress right now?”

“I am much more calm than I was earlier,” I said. “But I am very worried and uncertain about things.” I then tried the tea and discovered that it was a lot of flavor. I made a face of disgust.

He nodded, and said, “That wasn’t ever my favorite tea, either.” And then he asked, “Are you experiencing any urges or impulses that scare you, or that you do not understand?”

“If I understand this body well enough, I think I may need to pee soon,” I reported. “That is weird to me, because I am used to it feeling different. However, it is the lack of other thoughts that is worrying me. My only desire at the moment is to help Sarah and Goreth to come forward, and to find Phage.”

“I suppose that makes a lot of sense,” he said. “What do you know about Sarah and Goreth’s states? Do you think they are safe, or could they be in danger somehow?”

I opened my mouth and made a few different noises as I tried the beginnings of different sentences, not all of them English, to answer that. I stopped, held up a hand, and then said, “I think so. I have considerable experience living in a plurality. My experience tells me that they are hiding in their inworld, or dormant, waiting for the outworld to be safe.”

He silently mouthed the word “outworld” and then turned his head sideways, like he was saying “no” in Ktletaccete body language. He pushed his upper lip up with his lower lip, and narrowed his eyes, while looking at me.

I opened my mouth again to say something else, in hopes of reassuring him, but he beat me to speaking.

“That’s good enough for me,” he said. “But. If you feel like you need some professional help that I cannot give you, please tell me. OK? Sarah has worked with me on this, told me about both of their concerns. We know that sending someone like you to, say, a psych ward, can be really, uh, problematic and dangerous. And certainly, calling the police to facilitate that is right out. But, sometimes it’s still necessary, and I know a place that’s pretty good. I know the people there. It should be safe.”

Maybe Sarah was partially conscious with me, because I felt intense alarm coming from her quarter of our psyche, pulling down and backward, away from Peter, urging me to flee to our room.

I even stepped back, eyes wide.

“Woah, hey,” Peter said. “It’s OK. I’m not suggesting you do that. You gave me answers I can work with. I’m not calling anybody, unless you want me to. Got it?”

I felt my head nodding, but my body didn’t relax.

“But, like,” he said, hands out with palms down. “Can I know more about what’s going on? Seriously. If it’s what I think it is, I can probably really help. I sort of know how the system works. Or, at least some of it.”

For some reason, that made the panic so much worse.

Our head shook back and forth quickly, sharply, and we stepped back a couple more paces.

And then we ran for the front door.

I remember thinking that I wouldn’t get a chance to attempt my little art project after all.

In the wall above the laptop, one of the few places in their room that was free of adornments yet, I had been planning on writing “thank you” in Inmararräo by aging the wall there more quickly in the shape of the letters.

I thought it would have been pretty. And striking. And subtle. And easily fixable should it prove to be a transgression.

After the experiment with the tea, I was certain I could have done it.

But as we stumbled down the front stairs, nearly falling, hands on the railing and the wall of the house, and then ran off into the night, Peter trailing behind, calling after us, I just regretted I hadn’t tried doing it before going to get tea.