The Aunti Zero’s Coffee Hut of Erik’s mind is a set piece. There are lights and cameras and a faceless studio audience of laughs and applause.

There are no other customers, and no staff, but the table they usually sit at is big enough to seat all fourteen Eriks, Rräoha, Phage, Niʔa, Abacus, Metabang, Ashwin, Sarah, and the monstrously big Goreth. And somehow, paradoxically, it’s not so big that any of them are out of reach of the others. It’s still cozy.

Dreams can work that way.

Erik is sitting in fourteen different chairs, and he can look around at each of his selves. But whenever one of himself talks, his point of view shifts to that position, because they are all him. This is not new to him. His dreams are often like this. But it’s still interesting and intriguing, and it baffles him.

The floor is covered with the cuttlecrabs of all three systems, all Chattering silently, with dancing and the flashing of belly lights.

Sarah is talking.

“I know Goreth has been cautioning against jumping into following us,” she says. “That travel to the Sunspot comes with its massive drawbacks, and so does Phage’s gift. And they’re not wrong. But I’m realizing how precious our connections are. And right now, even though we can do this amazing thing, we have to pick either your system, Erik, or the Murmuration’s, and if we do either we can’t have all of us here.”

“Everyone has to take things at their own pace, Sarah. And no one should be pressured to accept these things,” Goreth says. “It’s important.”

“I know,” she says with a harsh sigh. “I just. I don’t know what to do.”

“I hate to mention it, too, but we also can’t take too long here with this experiment, because we’ve got a recombination to make before we wake up,” the dragon says.

“Yeah.” Sarah leans forward on the table to think, chin in hand, then she looks up at Erik and Rräoha, eyes scanning across the table, and asks, “How’s the sailing trip going? Do you have any good stories?”

Rräoha unerringly looks right at Erik where his point of view currently is, pointedly.

Erik sputters and glares at Rräoha. Then he says to Sarah, “Well, you know about the Goreth thing, obviously. So, that was, like, in the middle of one of my weirdest episodes.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“No! Listen,” he says. “With what you’re trying to talk about, but Goreth shooting you down, I want you to hear this. I want to say it, for myself, even. Because I sort of can’t believe it, and I want someone to help me reality check it, OK?”

“I mean. We’re… here,” Goreth rears up to gesture with both of their foreclaws at the dreamscape.

“Yeah, OK,” Erik retorts. “But if I tell you something here and now, in this place, and then we get together in meatspace and confirm we had the conversation, then that’s one fucking hell of reality check.”

“True.”

“So, you know how I hate, hate, haaaaaaaaate institutional shit,” Erik says.

There are nods all around, including from himself, and Goreth says, “Yes. You are famous for it.”

He closes his eyes and breathes in, steeling himself to say the thing, and marvels at how he feels like he can sense every molecule of air as it enters his lungs. It’s such a vivid dream.

Then he says it, “I find myself wanting to get married. Gay married. Really fucking gay married. So gay married.”

“To Beau?” Sarah asks, gormlessly.

“No,” Erik says. “To John Linell’s smile. Yes, to Beau!”

“Neat,” Goreth says.

“Neat?” he asks, just a little flabbergasted. He turns to Rräoha and says, “Look, if we wake up in the morning and I don’t remember this conversation, I want you to hit me over the head with a bratwurst. Take your time. Be methodical about it. Let me see you coming, but you do it, OK?”

“That sounds funny,” Rräoha says. “I will try.”

“Thank you,” he says. Then he adds, after a thought, “If Beau moves to stop you, just give him the sausage and say it’s from me.”

“Complicated.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m just being like this because I’m giddy and I want someone to pinch me, you know?”

“I do not see how pinching you right now would accomplish anything,” Rräoha observes. “But I can do that after we wake up. Beau won’t see it coming.”

“Don’t. Look. Just remind me we had this conversation.”

“Definitely.”

“Thank you.” He turns to everyone else, “I’m really torn. Life just keeps getting more and more intense. Especially with you all in it, and I’m including all my selves in that.”

His perspective shifts again just for him to counter himself, “Like it’s ever been un-tense.” He’s just teasing himself, really, though.

“I think I get what you’re saying, though, Erik,” Sarah says. “Is Beau offering you a kind of stability you haven’t had yet? If so, I think that’s really so cool.”

Another shift, “Yeah, I think maybe that’s it. But, Sarah, don’t you see how fucking sexy he is, too?”

“I mean, I’m ace, but yeah?” she grins at him. “I’d just marry that smile.”

“You get it,” he nods, putting his hand out on the table. “I just don’t always trust myself with things like this. It’s scary. And I do not know what to do about it. But, then, also, here you are asking me to consider going to the Sunspot with you somehow.”

He supports his own statement, “We’ve got shit to do on Earth, and our attention is already divided.”

“That’s a legitimate concern,” Goreth agrees. “It’s really hard sometimes.”

From another end of the table, he throws in a counter argument, “But with the way things are, you know, like they’ve always been but worse, anybody would be a damn fool to ignore help. We gotta connect, and stay connected. This here is part of our community and we can’t let go of it.”

Goreth turns to face his new perspective, and says, “You don’t have to cross the Tunnel to stay in touch with us. You don’t have to accept Phage’s gift, either. We’ll keep reaching out like this, wherever you go. We’ll make it work.”

From another part of the table, he says, “Yeah. But, you keep calling it Phage’s gift. Does it really come from Phage, though? I read your book, you silly dragon. How does it work?”

Goreth tilts their head and looks at Ashwin.

Ashwin tilts their head in return.

“You’re the one that called it that, first,” Goreth says.

“I was not,” Ashwin replies. “I’m not sure where it started, but it might have been ʔafejeʔa and Tomash in their science fiction novels, the Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil.”

“Molly Rocketcoil?” Erik switches facets yet again to ask.

“I localized the title for you,” Ashwin admits. “I think I made it sound like a classic pulp publication.”

“It has sort of a Disney feel to it, too,” he tells nem.

“It’s called Bisherrgarerr Mogi in Inmararräo,” they explain.

“Bisherrgarerr Mogi,” he repeats, nodding. Then he turns back to Goreth, then looks at Phage, “It doesn’t come from you, does it, Phage. You’re just the first one on the Sunspot to figure it out, because it was done to you, first, maybe. Or something like that.”

“More or less,” Phage agrees. “Niʔa’s conception helped me to see it. Something happened there I still don’t understand. But looking at the difference between them and the rest of the Ktletaccete, I could see what needed to be changed. But the gift, if we must call it that, comes from your own connection to the rest of the universe.”

“You called it ‘severing the ligament of separateness’,” Goreth reminds it. “Is that ligament there for a reason?”

“You called it that,” Phage says. “That is how your mind interpreted what I tried to tell you. And there is no reason for anything.”

He becomes another Erik to lean forward on his elbows and spear Phage with a searching glare, and asks, “Why do you offer to change people in this way?”

Phage, a shadowed silhouette resembling its child, Niʔa, but filled with the lights of billions of cosmic bodies, turns twin super novas for eyes his way and says with the voice of a black hole, “When you find yourself holding a great power over everyone you know, the only thing to do that changes anything is to share that power with them. It is, after all, what I do.”

“I wish more people thought like that,” Erik says.

“So do I.”

“I wish more gods thought like that,” another Erik says, this time without him switching to that perspective. And he looks at himself in surprise. This has happened before, too. But it’s always unexpected. His psyche is unpredictable.

“I have grown to feel,” Phage says, “that whenever a people invent a word such as ‘god’, they do so to apply it to a being that does not do what I do.”

Erik is so focused on himself, he doesn’t fully register what Phage has just said, and instead he asks himselves, pointing at Phage, “Are we unanimous in this?”

He’s worried that his sudden display of separateness means that he’s not.

But there are solemn nods from around the table.

And another of his selves says, without his perspective shifting to him, “We’ve been debating it all day while you’ve been watching the lurkers.” He shrugs, “We need all the tools that we can get. We always have. And this one comes from within. It’s already ours.”

“I will tell you what I told Sarah and Goreth,” Phage interjects. “Once I unlock all of your connections, you will lose a leverage that you already have. A type of protection and a force of will that you can currently exert will become your weakness in certain situations. Sarah can attest.”

“It is right about that,” Sarah confirms. “It’s not a total loss. You can work through it. But, if you join us in this, consensus realities like you’ve described them become palpable, tangible things that you can’t shift or push aside. Maybe no one ever could, but you’ll feel them like a physical weight constricting you, depending on who you’re around. Sometimes it feels like I can’t breathe.”

“It’s always felt like that to me,” Erik tells her.

“Right,” she says, nodding. “I won’t tell you it’ll be worse, because I really don’t know what you already experience. But, at least, this way, you will be able to do things to confirm other people’s realities for them. And in the spaces in between, there’s the rest of us.”

“And I’ll finally see you for real,” he says. It’s really a question, but he doesn’t say it that way.

“Yes,” she confirms. “But, again. Really important. We haven’t yet encountered anything like Phage on Earth. Just masses of humans that can push it around just by believing in things. But that doesn’t mean things like it aren’t out there, and dangerous.”

He knew that. He’s always assumed that sort of thing. If it turns out to be a problem, well, he has friends. He has this. And he’ll be able to see it coming, too.

“I’m in,” he says. “We’re all in. We’ll decide on the Sunspot thing later, after we’ve lived a life focused here on Earth and discovered all we can here. We might find something better than the Sunspot for ourselves. I gotta tell you, we’re honestly looking for it. But I don’t think we even see this as a choice anymore. We consent to Phage’s gift, as the Ktletaccete say. And maybe actually we can do some good in the world, too.”

He repeats in chorus, “We consent.”

“What will Beau think of this?” Sarah asks.

“He doesn’t get to make this decision for me,” Erik replies. “But I’ll see to it that he gets to make it for himself. Phage, teach me how to do what you do.”

“Of course,” Phage says.