we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

I watched from a distance as Sarah copied and pasted this one message over and over again into a text channel to her friends, Erik and the Murmuration.

Our feet hurt so much, and our arms and legs ached with both cold and exhaustion, but she gritted her teeth and kept trudging on, coatless, in a T-shirt, skirt, and fishnet stockings that we’d been wearing when I’d taken the front in the bedroom earlier. We were still wearing our house slippers with orthotic insoles in them.

In all my experiences of inhabiting plural systems, I’d never experienced this before. This level of dissociation, pushed away to the far back of the mind, but still very singularly conscious, cut off from the frontrunner’s thoughts and emotions and only feeling the body and its senses, and watching as the frontrunner, Sarah, did things I just wouldn’t do.

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

I had no idea where we were at this point. Our head was down. Sarah was navigating by peripheral vision, which I didn’t have, if she was navigating at all.

She’d managed to make it out and across the street before Peter had made it any distance. She’d ran, and he was in a bathrobe. He’d gone back inside.

I’m sure Sarah was worried he was calling the police or someone like that. I know that I was.

we need a place

we need a place

we need a place

“Hey” came a text back from Erik.

“Stop” the Murmuration sent almost at the same time, “Hold up”.

Sarah stopped walked abruptly, and stared down at the screen.

“I’m on a date” Erik sent us, “Can u deal Murmur?”

“What’s going on?” the Murmuration sent.

“we need a place” Sarah pasted in and hit send.

“Tonight?”

“we need a place”

“OK. This is incoherent. Breathe, please.”

“we need a place”

“OK.”

Sarah took that as assent from the Murmuration or something, and she started walking again with purpose, looking where she was going, then glancing down at the phone again after a few steps.

The Murmuration had sent, “Come over. I have something to show you, too.”

Sarah picked up her pace, our feet feeling like she was walking on knives with every step. Or like they were being pulled apart by the movement.

I worried that we couldn’t make it any notable distance, maybe not to the end of the block. But She kept stumbling, ignoring the pain.

I think it was muffled for me by my dissociation. Not as sharp as might have been for her. And it was awful. Intolerable.

On the other hand, it might have been the other way around, and while the other senses from the body were dulled for me, I might have been feeling the pain in our feet more than she was.

In any case, it was distracting me from thinking clearly.

I was scared.

I was terrified.

My own mind was running through the horrible possibilities, the consequences we might face for doing this. And I didn’t really know what this world had to offer in regards to that. Just abstract concepts of homelessness or being locked up somehow.

The only analogs I had to work with from the Sunspot were the lifestyle of the Monsters, like Rräoha, and Sanctions.

But Monsters weren’t homeless by any stretch. They just commonly hid from anyone else. The Sunspot had layers and layers of what we call the Fallow Decks. Hectares upon hectares of empty quarters. It was built for a much larger population than we had ever achieved. And as a result, there were more than enough resources for every person who lived within the vessel, regardless of their standing in society.

I could not use their mysterious habits of hiking and camping in the wilderness, or wandering the deepest of the Fallow Decks to visualize what homelessness in Portland, on Earth, might be like.

And Sanction, our harshest and only penalty for breaking a law, was more of a set of safety protocols to put in place to keep someone from harming others while we negotiated with them for a better future. We’d attempted to abolish it in my lifetime, and had altered it considerably, removing some of the most egregious uses of it from practice. It works something like blocking or banning someone on your social media, only as applied to our Network and ship’s systems.

Someone who was Sanctioned typically couldn’t be confined to any particular room. Usually, it meant revoking consent for them to access certain ship systems and individual private quarters. And certain doors and Network channels just wouldn’t open up for them.

Phage itself had had the harshest Sanction in the history of the Sunspot. And many believed it had been powerful enough that that Sanction was functionally voluntary. Something it had agreed to do to prove it was trustworthy.

There is a story about how it earned its release, and you might get to read it someday.

But, that night, I was thinking about how awful being locked into a single room might be. That was easy to imagine, but hard to believe. How could anyone do such a thing to another being?

And I stopped myself from ruminating on that, because I couldn’t quite recall where I’d got the idea that was a possibility.

It must have been a secondhand memory from when I’d been co-conscious with Sarah or Goreth, talking about something with someone. Because I couldn’t remember any specific conversation I’d had.

I was just thinking about trying to push and fight my way forward somehow to discuss this with Sarah when we reached a rare bench and sat down on it.

It was near a busy street. Which wasn’t as busy and filled with cars as it might have been if it had not been in the middle of the night. But it would still be treacherous to cross it. Especially without cane and with feet in this much pain.

Especially since our clothes were black and it was very, very dark out.

We definitely needed to pee now. I could feel that clearly.

Our phone had been in a skirt pocket, for carrying it around the house, and Sarah pushed it back in there briefly, then felt around her body and cussed, “Our fucking purse, god dammit.”

Of course we didn’t have our purse. It was in the bedroom with our backpack and coat and outdoor clothes. I remembered seeing them piled up near the bedroom door, when I’d looked around at it all. And Sarah had run right for the front door of the house, to get out.

Oh, right. The bus! We were at a bus stop. And if we didn’t have our purse, that meant we wouldn’t be able to pay for a bus ride anywhere, because our HOP card was in our purse.

Sarah fell over on the bench and pulled her feet up onto it, crying, hands over her face.

We had a fairly large body. It didn’t fit very well on the bench and threatened to roll off of it whenever she relaxed our muscles. But she managed to stay there, as uncomfortable as it was.

Sarah, I tried thinking out as loudly and strongly as I could.

She didn’t respond.

I repeated her name in our head three more times, but to no avail.

I wasn’t experiencing any of her thoughts or emotions myself. It was like she wasn’t there, except for what I saw and felt our body doing, which I couldn’t control. I only knew it was Sarah because of my Phagely senses.

I tried pulling our right hand away from our face, and it twitched ever so slightly, but she kept a grip on her control over it.

I could feel our phone vibrating with messages in our skirt pocket, but I couldn’t reach for it to find out what the messages said. And Sarah didn’t bother.

I was still at a complete loss as to where Phage might be.

It would normally be the one to help manage this kind of thing. It wasn’t as good as its child, Ni’a, at soothing biological systems like people’s bodies and brains, but it could do something, and it had hundreds of generations of experience managing the chaos in complex systems like the Sunspot itself.

But it was not here. It also did not respond to its name when I repeated it.

I just assumed Rräoha would either not be available or much use if gem was. I suspected that gems absence was related to Phage’s, in any case.

I also tried calling for Goreth, and I did feel a stirring from them. But it was weak, and they pulled away after giving a feeble try to come forward.

Sarah’s distress had a tyrannical grip on our system, and there wasn’t anything I could do using my lifetime of psychological tricks and techniques for helping another system member.

This left me with three other options.

Sit and wait. Which wasn’t appealing, as she was in so much distress and I felt I needed to do something. Also we were in pain and it was very cold out, and we were severely underdressed for it. I could feel our body beginning to shiver violently. So this wasn’t an option.

Or dive into our inworld and and see if I could look for Phage to help, or work with Goreth to get to Sarah and help her out directly through concerted effort. But, I’d never experienced anything this intense and untenable before, and I was afraid I’d be stuck in our subconscious with no way of reaching the front in an emergency.

I might not even be aware of what was going on outside
if I did that.

So that left the most desperate thing.

The wildest thing.

At least I knew I could do something via this method. Just, to what extent, I wasn’t sure.

I turned to the senses I had that were not muffled by dissociation in any way. I’d been distracted from them by events and by pain and by trying to reach Sarah directly. But now that I’d explicitly given up on those things, it was only natural to turn to the gifts that Phage had given me, or that it had unlocked in my being.

I followed the heat that was leaving our body, quickly into the bench that we lay upon and more slowly into the cold January night air.

That was easy.

Beyond a certain, irregular radius, it was harder to stretch, but only by degrees. It was still possible.

By doing this, I became the eddies of Brownian motion in the air above our vessel, and the photons bouncing off our form from the street lights. The subtle dance of electrons in the bench and the ground around us, their bounces and transfers as light hit their atoms or the beginning rain brought ions within reach of them were mine and became part of my thoughts.

There were a myriad of such processes that fed into my consciousness and began to be influenced by it by virtue of becoming part of me.

And it wasn’t so much that I’d been separate from these things. They’d been a part of me this whole time. I was simply becoming more aware of them.

Or that is what it was like.

And as I did this, it gave me a better and more detailed view of our vessel, as I was no longer perceiving the world from within it, but perceiving it as part of the world that I had become.

Even though Sarah kept our eyes covered and clenched shut, I was aware of everything within a fifteen to twenty meter radius, including the states of all of our organs, and every blade of grass, and every insect, every raindrop.

Here’s where I had a difficult choice to make.

I could simply arrest the loss of heat from our body, and help keep it from experiencing shock from the cold. Which I was going to do regardless.

Or I could also attempt to do what I had read Phage’s child, Ni’a could do. Reach into the center of our vessel’s being and sooth its neurons and make it easier for Sarah to think and process what was going on, relax her.

That would be ideal. That would be what I really needed to do in order to get us out of this mess and prepare her and the rest of the system to deal with whatever might happen next in the outworld.

But it required her consent.

As per our newly written contract, she had ultimate veto over an action like that. And if I violated that against her consent, she would have reason to be very hurt and angry with me, and she would not be out of line by declaring I could never front again. Though I suspected she would not do that, and would appreciate my efforts.

But, also, it was against all of my upbringing and beliefs.

The right to bodily autonomy and consent over it were the two Ktletaccete rights. Everything good in my life had come from everyone around me, my entire culture, working to preserve and respect those rights in everyone.

I knew full well that we had never been perfect about it on the Sunspot, that that was impossible. It was an ideal. And that there were circumstances, like this one, that called for violating those rights.

Especially when it came to managing a plural system, where several people shared custody of their body.

I was technically within my right to act because I shared this vessel. My life was now bound to it, and if it died I might very well die myself.

But I was an Outsider to it. A visitor. It wasn’t really mine.

So, as I slowed the cooling of our body and started work on possibly reversing that flow and warming it, if the world would let me do so, I hesitated to help further.

Which is when a car entered my existence in the intersection beside the bus stop, and sat there, engine idling.

The car felt familiar, as did its occupants as I slowly became aware of them.

It was, I am told, a navy blue Subaru Forester. If that means anything to anyone. It does describe its general shape and capacity in a kind of shorthand. It had room in it for several people, but there were only two. One fairly large, and the other quite small.

The driver’s side window slid down at the speed of its small motor, and Peter called out, “Sarah?”

Sarah twitched, and then pulled herself tighter.

Peter sighed as Abigail reached over and put her hand on his arm.

“That’s her,” he said more quietly. “Hold on. I’m going to park the car and get out and see if she’ll let me approach. You can stay here if you want.”

Abigail nodded.

I don’t know if he somehow knew that Sarah was fronting now, or if he just defaulted to calling all of us Sarah when he didn’t know who was present. It was our legal name, after all. And I’ve come to learn that, as considerate as he is, he is sometimes lazy about such things.

He backed the car up far enough away to be out of the intersection and pulled it to the side, near the curb there. And then turned the engine off.

It was right on the edge of my awareness there, and I mostly just heard the door open and close as he got out. I heard it with all of my senses.

His footsteps and heartbeat became a stronger and stronger part of me, as did his breathing.

“Sarah? I haven’t called anyone. Please,” he said quietly. “Let’s go home. Let’s get you warm.”

As he got closer to her, he must have felt the air get colder and become more worried.

I was stealing the warmth from all around our vessel, and channeling it to our core, and that included taking it from his body once he entered that smaller radius. It was hard for me to be that nuanced about it, to prevent taking from him. But it wouldn’t hurt him by the time I planned to stop.

And he didn’t subconsciously revoke consent for his body heat to be stolen. He just walked right into it and accepted it as a thing that was happening, so it kept happening.

Sarah tried to roll over, to turn her face into the back of the bench, our cell phone continuing to buzz periodically in our skirt pocket.

With a lot of work she eventually succeeded, but was in more danger of just falling off the bench.

Peter crouched down behind her, between the bench and the road, and put his hand on her back.

His hand felt very warm.

And I knew that her back felt icy cold to him, because her skin was absorbing heat and letting very little out, via my action, to keep her warm.

He cussed in surprise and started reaching for his phone.

I did not want him to do that. It wasn’t necessary.

She’d stopped shivering, so our vessel was clearly OK. And Sarah would notice him calling someone and trust him even less.

I had to act.

There was one more vulgar trick to try. Another thing I had never done, but that had been demonstrated to me by Phage itself several times before.

I focused my grip on the air molecules within my being, that 15 meter radius, and held the bulk of them as rigidly as I could. This didn’t prevent either Peter or Sarah from breathing. I was not that strong. But the extra still air was notable. And it gave Peter pause.

The sounds from outside my parameter were muffled by this. I know from experience that this is very spooky.

But Peter was already half spooked and expecting more spookiness, so, again, it was possible for me to do it.

And then, I tried to say something.

It was a matter of causing the molecules I did control to vibrate in a series of frequency and amplitude modulations that matched speech, and letting the molecules I didn’t have a grip on react to them and carry that sound.

Phage had shown itself to be very good at doing this, though I suspect it had never demonstrated or practiced the ability on Earth.

I knew it could be done. But what I didn’t know was what it would feel like to attempt to do it.

My first attempt just failed, and I lost my grip on the atmosphere.

And Peter relaxed again and pulled his phone out, shaking his head.

He held his phone up and pressed the call menu, to open the keypad.

“No,” I said, without further thought.

He stopped, looking surprised.

It had worked!

He looked around, trying to figure out where the voice had come from. But then he must have decided he’d imagined it and turned back to his phone.

“Stop,” I said, this time managing to still the air notably again before saying it, giving it that spooky feeling again.

He stopped. Frozen. Eyes wide.

I’m not sure how loud or audible I was. I was no longer paying any attention to any of the signals from Sarah’s vessel. I wasn’t even sure I was part of it anymore. And I did not yet have a sense of how much the vibration that I was causing correlated to any particular volume of sound.

But I was clearly audible enough.

“We are not freezing,” I said clearly. Focusing on the critical detail.

I wasn’t even sure I was speaking English, though. If I had no connection to the vessel’s psyche, what memories was I accessing to talk?

I knew who I was and I remembered some things about where I was and who these people were that I was talking to. But I couldn’t hear myself talking without ears, I just felt the vibrations as part of my being.

I had to trust. Even if I didn’t fully understand what I was doing or what was happening.

“Ashwin?” Peter asked, when he felt safe enough to move again, lifting his head and tilting it a little from one side to the other. “Is that you?” Then he leaned over Sarah to try to get a view of her face, and then tilted his head to aim his right ear toward where her mouth should be, under her hands. “Can you speak again, please? What should I do?”

“Trust me,” I said. “Trust Sarah.”

His left ear caught more of the sound than his right, very clearly then, and his eyes widened considerably.

He straightened up and looked around again. Then turned his back to Sarah, and looked up into the air where he imagined I might be.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, or the supernatural,” he said. “But…”

“Yes?” I prompted.

He twitched, then said, “For now, for tonight, I absolutely believe in you. Ashwin, tell me what to do.”

“I can’t,” I replied. “I am also scared. I don’t know what to do.”

He shook his head, squinting.

Maybe that was too complex.

“Home,” I tried.

He nodded.

Then I said, “Sarah. Sarah. Let’s go home.”

—

“When I first touched her, she was icy cold,” Peter was saying, still sitting in the driver seat of the Subaru.

Abigail was beside him, and our vessel was lying in the back seat, breathing strongly and slowly.

Peter shook his head. “Everything I know is telling me she had hypothermia. It hadn’t been long enough for a normal person to get it, but she wasn’t shivering and she was icy, icy cold. Breathing, but so cold. It must be her dysautonomia, I thought to myself. And I knew I had to act fast.”

Abigail looked back at us.

We were sleeping. Or, Sarah was sleeping. The vessel was sleeping.

“But, they’re all alright?” Abigail asked.

“I think so?” Peter said. “I really should take her – them to the E.R. to make sure, but Ashwin made me promise not to. And when I touched her again, to try to pick her up and move her to the car, she was suddenly burning up! Like she had a fever! That shouldn’t be possible. At all. But Ashwin talking to me like that shouldn’t have been possible either.”

“How do you mean?”

“It was like some kind of ghost,” he shivered.

“Nem is a spirit from outer space,” she told him.

He shook his head.

“You like being a skeptic.”

“I do.”

“It helps you feel in control of the world,” she stated.

“No,” he started to deny it. But, then he let his head listlessly fall to the left a few degrees and said, “Yeah. OK. Yeah, it does. I really didn’t have any control until I moved out. So, yeah, I guess that’s definitely part of it. Also, I hated my mom’s beliefs. She kind of used them against me.”

“Yeah,” Abigail said. “Too many parents do that.”

“I like to think I had a normal childhood,” he said.

“I think you kinda did, Sweetie,” Abigail told him. “I really think your childhood was the norm, unfortunately.”

“Shit.”

“At least, among the people we know, you know?” she said, rubbing his arm.

“Anyway. Thank you for keeping me in check. And grounded,” he looked over at her. “I think we’re good.”

Abigail looked back at us again, and asked, “What’s their temperature like, now?”

Peter twisted back and stretched and put the back of his hand against our forehead. And then shrugged. “I can’t tell for absolute sure until I get a thermometer on them, but they feel perfectly normal. And their breathing is just so rock solid. When I checked their pulse, it was strong, too.”

“We are OK,” I said, to reinforce the point.

Abigail’s eyes widened.

I’d been quiet since Peter started carrying Sarah and Goreth to the car. But I’d remained separated and aware, contracting myself to just the car and riding with it and the rest of them back to their house.

Being smaller, more concentrated and with more complexity and chaos, with three bodies and a machine within my being, I could feel more like myself. More stable. I had more memories.

I still wasn’t absolutely certain about my communication skills, but it looked like I could get reactions from the both of them.

“Yeah, that’s what it’s like,” Peter said to Abigail.

“I believe in this stuff,” Abigail said. “But it makes me feel like we’re having a shared hallucination.”

“I’m not really sure if that’s a thing, or a medical urban legend,” Peter said. “I need to research it more.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Phage told me it could do stuff like this,” Peter recalled. “I wonder why it’s not the one that’s here, talking to us.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m worried about it.”

He frowned.

“There are messages,” I also said. I wasn’t being terribly coherent. At the time, those two things seemed to go together for me, but I could not explain why. I also didn’t want to use too many words. It seemed that shorter sentences led to more intelligible interactions.

Peter drew in a long breath and then sighed.

Abigail echoed his sigh, looking up at him, and then rubbed his shoulder again. “You take such good care of everyone,” she said.

“There are so many ways that life can go wrong and, even, end,” he said, staring out the windshield of the car and up the walkway toward their apartment, which was the second and third story of a house.

Someone else lived in the bottom floor, and all their lights were on.

“It could really have been hypothermia, for instance,” he said. “In which case, she should be in a thermal blanket right now. Or, she could have been hit by a car, or a bus. Or run afoul of a… of a.. a transphobe or something. Or I could have been an average dick and called the police, and yeah she’s not Black, but they might have shot her anyway for being trans and insane. Or she could have ended up in the wrong psych ward and abused to the point of suicide.”

“They’re not insane,” Abigail said.

“Society doesn’t know that,” Peter looked at her. Then he looked back up the semi-lit walkway. “Anyway, I know the statistics for suicide attempts for the two weeks after being released from a psych ward are alarming. And the longer the stay, the worse it is. That’s just the average, across the board. And, like, I know how the industry tries to spin that. And I know, from what Goreth showed me about it, that it’s much worse for trans people. Much, much worse, because they get misgendered and all that. Hormones withheld. Told their dysphoria is really depression or a delusion.”

Abigail said, “You know that Goreth’s the one who told you all that.”

“Yes, but I looked it up afterward,” Peter said.

“Good.”

I was curious about something, and I couldn’t remember the answer from Sarah and Goreth’s memories, so I decided to risk asking a question.

“What’s a trans person?” I inquired, saying it slowly, hoping that the words wouldn’t get muddled by a resistant physics, or come out in Inmararräo.

Both Peter and Abigail looked into the back of the car, above and behind where our vessel lay, frowning in almost identical expressions.

“You don’t know?” Abigail asked.

“No,” I said.

They looked at each other, and then back at where they thought I was, and she said, “When a baby is born, a doctor looks at their genitals and based on what they see, they declare the baby either a boy or a girl, and that gets recorded. And, from then on, legally, that’s what the baby is. And everyone calls them either ‘he’ or ‘she’ and everything about their life is decided based on that.”

“Is that a trans person?” I asked, not aware that that didn’t make a lot of sense.

Abigail just shook her head and said, “That’s nearly everyone. A trans person is someone who a doctor said was a boy, but who actually isn’t. Or someone a doctor declared to be a girl, and who isn’t a girl.”

“Oh,” I said. And then realized I must have understood that, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have replied that way.

“Some trans people are trans women, which means that they are female, even though their original medical records say they are male, and they probably don’t have a uterus or ovaries,” Abigail explained. “Or trans men, who are the other way around, assigned female at birth, but actually male. Men.” She nodded. “And then, some trans people are non-binary, which is not male or female, or maybe they’re a bit of both. Or something else entirely.”

She waited for me to acknowledge that, but I remained silent, waiting for her to say more.

She continued after a couple heartbeats, “Sarah is a trans woman, and Goreth is a trans enby. Enby is short for non-binary, but it can also act like a noun.”

“You really have this down,” Peter said to her.

“I care,” she said.

“Yeah.”

All of this sounded vaguely familiar, so maybe I was still connected somehow to our system here on Earth, to Sarah and Goreth. But it was confusing, too.

“We don’t do that,” I said.

Abigail nodded, scrunching her mouth gently.

Peter frowned, scrunching up his face quite a bit, and then said, “I’m going to want to hear all about that, Ashwin. But I don’t think this is a good way to have that discussion. It’s time to go inside, I think. Can you rouse Sarah or something? Help me move her?”

“I’ll try,” I said.

—

Sarah was shaky and didn’t want to talk much, or couldn’t. She gripped her mug of Sleepy Time tea and avoided even looking at anyone’s face. Fortunately, Goreth was co-consciuos again, and could take over for brief responses. Which is how they had ended up with the right tea.

The four of them, three bodies, were seated around the dining room table.

I was still keeping myself separate and engulfing the whole room. Being a bigger space than the car, I felt less coherent and less like myself, or anybody at all, while doing that, but it felt important to me to continue giving Sarah and Goreth their space.

“Ashwin said you have a lot of messages on your phone,” Peter said gently. “Are they overwhelming? Do you need someone else to look at them for you?”

Sarah twisted her mouth and closed one eye.

Goreth relaxed their expression briefly and responded, “I think that would be nice.” And then they pulled their phone out and pushed it across the table.

Sarah hunched their shoulders and glowered, but didn’t object.

Abigail looked at Peter and then at Sarah and Goreth, and reached for the phone slowly. When no one stopped her, she brought it to her face and turned it on.

And then she put it back down on the table and pushed it back to Sarah and Goreth, the security screen displaying an empty field and a number pad.

Goreth reached out with their right hand and, with one finger, typed in their PIN.

“Thank you,” Abigail said, and took the phone back, opening the text messaging screen. “Oh. It’s your friends! They’re worried. You really scared them.”

“Ah,” Goreth said.

“I’m typing in that it’s me, and that you are OK and at home, and that you’ll get back to them after you’ve slept,” she said. “Is that OK?”

“I might get back to them sooner,” Goreth said. “Thank you.”

“I’m sure that will be fine, but I’m not telling them that,” Abigail replied authoritatively.

“OK,” Goreth said.

“Goreth? Sarah?” Peter said. “I don’t want to focus on this tonight. Just when you’re ready. But we should go over our safety protocols again, OK? Like, just, update me. I think something’s changed, and I want to adapt, to help you better. The way you need me to.”

Sarah flinched, but Goreth nodded.

Peter echoed that nod.

“I’m happening,” I tried to say as softly as I could.

“Yeah, I don’t actually think you’re at fault, though,” Peter said to the room, as if it was all normal to him now. “There’s something bigger, but more down to Earth going on. Maybe just a shift in their mental health. It could even be healing, you know?” He’d turned to Abigail, and glanced at Goreth and Sarah, as he continued, talking to them more and less to me by the time he finished.

I was going to try to explain about the overdue paperwork finally, giving up on keeping that confidentiality, and I think I sensed that Goreth was about to confess something, but we were both interrupted.

“Oh. Hey,” Abigail said, still looking down at the phone. “One of your friends knows where Phage is, apparently!”