“I cannot believe how lucky you are that Peter was so cool like that,” Erik said.

“He’s right here at the table, Erik,” Sarah mumbled.

“Yeah.”

“Abigail found him, before she found us,” she added.

“Well,” Erik looked at Peter and gave a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I wouldn’t have thought to trust him, honestly. He works for the system.”

Peter shook his head and said, “I’m still part of that system, too. Like, right now.”

Erik studied him for a bit, and then said, “You’re good. For now.”

“That’s a way of putting it.”

Erik shook his head, then he turned to the Murmuration and asked, “So what’s this about?”

Brock made a grin that was half grimace, and said, “You’re going to be really jealous.”

“I kinda figured.”

“But I don’t think you’re going to be left out.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll, um. We’ll get to that.”

Erik leaned back and cautiously said, “OK.”

We were not in our usual hangout place, Aunti Zero’s. This conversation was not for the one place we all felt like was really our home, because it was also other people’s home, too. And it was not for other people, as much as we might have trusted them with so much already. Also, Aunti Zero’s was closed right then.

But also, I hadn’t returned to our vessel yet, and I had vetoed a crowded area as being too confusing for me.

Instead, we were in the Murmuration’s dining room, while their housemates were away.

Peter had taken us in the Subaru to pick up Erik and head out to near Gresham, where the Murmuration lived in a large shared house.

Somewhere in there, Goreth had gone to a bathroom to pee.

These were typically work hours for the Murmuration, too. But they worked as a graphic designer who did remote jobs through a contract company, and they could alter their hours without much trouble.

Being two thirteen in the morning, it was unusual for the others who lived there to all be away. But, one of them worked a graveyard shift at a security job, and the other two were off on vacation at the coast. A fortunate coincidence for our needs, but a small one, really.

The Murmuration preferred to work in the early mornings, when it was dark and quiet and they could focus. It was part of the reason they had their job. It could accommodate their neurological needs.

Nevermind that I didn’t understand the concept of a job at that point. Especially in the state I was in.

I was barely there, though, anyway.

Honestly, the group of us from our household should probably have gone to bed. But the Murmuration had declared they knew where Phage was, and finding Phage was important. And Peter and Abigail had seemed to agree that it was more important than sleep.

I was perceiving everything as if I was dreaming it without visualizing it, and just knew what was happening. People with aphantasia probably know what I mean by that. I’m hoping others can figure it out, too.

The Murmuration looked around at everyone who was at the table, Erik, Abigail, Peter, and Sarah and Goreth. Then they looked up at the center of the room by way of acknowledging me, and it did feel like they were looking at me.

“I don’t know how to explain this,” Brock said, “because it’s too cool to be real to me. And I just don’t get it. And I’m worried I’m making it sound even more fake.”

“Brock,” Sarah said. “You just looked right at Ashwin, even though none of the rest of us can see nem. And we’ve heard them speak, so.”

“Right.”

“Out with it.”

Brock put both hands on the table and breathed out their nose, keeping their eyes on the center of the plane of wood, and said, slowly, “Phage is with us. In our system. Right now.”

Goreth gestured at the Murmuration and said, “That’s what I thought.”

Brock looked at them.

“Everything implied it,” Goreth explained. “The timing. Also the fact that I couldn’t think of anything else you might want to show us that was related to our messages.”

“But, it’s weird right?” Brock asked.

Everyone nodded emphatically.

“OK, good,” they said.

“I imagine our other visitor is over there, too?” Goreth asked.

“Rräoha? Yeah,” Brock replied.

“How? Why?” asked Peter.

Brock shrugged, but seemed to be happy to be getting to the point of the discussion, and said, “Phage says it’s an experiment.”

“It’s because of our fucking contract, isn’t it?” Sarah said.

“I asked and it said no,” Brock answered.

I heard myself speak up, “it might be, though.”

Everyone glanced in what was presumably my way.

Squinting her eyes as if trying to see me, right hand on the back of her chair, Sarah asked, “Is that why you’re hanging around outside our head?”

“Is it?” I asked. “I didn’t think so.”

She pushed her lips to the side in thought, and then said, “You are so much less coherent without a brain to help you think. You should get back in here and talk like a person.”

“I feel stuck,” I said.

“Yeah?” she asked. “Why do you think that is?”

“I am not thinking,” I replied.

“See?” she gestured with her left hand.

“What about the contract do you think is doing this?” Erik asked.

Sarah turned to him and said, “I think they all just don’t like it. Maybe it restricts them too much.”

He furrowed his brow, “I thought you said they recommended writing it up.”

“Yeah, but I supposed that doesn’t mean anything,” Sarah said. “There’s a difference between recommending a thing, and living with that thing.”

Peter and Abigail both started to nod their heads, then glanced at each other and stopped, giving Sarah sympathetic looks.

Brock tilted their head and said, “Phage says that it’s treating our system like an extension of your system. Same contract applies here as there, more or less. Which might be why neither it nor Rräoha have fronted here yet.”

Erik shook his head and said almost under his breath, “System hopping.”

“How does it figure that?” Sarah asked. “What’s the logic?”

“It asked us?” Brock offered, questioningly, like it was a possibility they were considering.

“You sound uncertain,” she said.

“It happened inworld,” Brock explained. “I’ve got several headmates confirming the conversation. We had a meeting with it and a quorum, so it’s official.”

Sarah folded her arms and leaned forward onto the table, frowning. “So, it came over there and dragged Rräoha? When? What prompted it?”

Brock shrugged and shook their head, “All I know is Rräoha reached out when gem got pushed out of your front, and asked if gem could stay here. Then Phage followed, apparently to try to clear things up.”

“This feels really weird,” Peter said.

“I agree,” Erik said. “Like, I believe in stuff like this. But the way this was done is sketchy. Sorry Murmur, sorry Brock. But you reaching out, when they are missing their system members, and saying, ‘hey, they’re over here!’ It’s the kind of thing abusers do sometimes. To control vulnerable systems, make them doubt their reality.”

“Yeah,” Brock said. “I know. It’s part of why I feel really awful about admitting it all.”

“Hm.”

“What should I do to not take advantage of this?”

“I don’t know, Brock,” Erik said.

“I have a suggestion,” Peter said. “Though it’s gonna sound ridiculous to anyone who thinks we’re all delusional.”

“Hey,” Erik said, giving Peter a suspicious eye, crossing his own arms but remained leaned back in his chair. “I’m always delusional. It’s not an inherently bad thing.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter said. “I think you know what I mean, though, right? Like, people like me who like to be skeptical.”

“Yeah. Go on.” Erik looked like he was profoundly uncomfortable being here. He looked that way even to me in the state I was in, without many memories of how humans worked.

“So. Ashwin is a third party observer right now,” Peter said. “They represent Sarah and Goreth’s system, more or less, but they are apart from it. We can hear their voice coming from thin air, when Sarah and Goreth’s mouth is closed, as unbelievable as that is. We know that they have a perspective none of us have and that we’re hearing from them directly somehow. And we can confirm with each other that we’ve heard them say the same thing.”

“I get you,” Erik said, nodding.

“So, I’m wondering if it’s possible for them to look somehow,” Peter suggested. “It seems like they can do some of the same things Phage says it can do. I’ve seen them do some weird shit already. Will that work?” He looked my way with that question.

“I will try,” I said.

They all turned in their chairs to look expectantly in my direction, but I was already shifting the locus of my presence to overlap with the Murmuration. Even though I still occupied the whole room, it felt like they were looking at where I had been.

Without deliberating or even thinking about it, I examined everyone at the table down to their constituent wave forms. I focused mostly on Sarah and Goreth and the Murmuration, but Erik, Abigail, and Peter were cataloged too.

Sarah and Goreth were the only ones occupying their vessel right then, a pair of overlapping patterns with distinctly different gamuts of color that wasn’t really color.

Peter and Abigail were very distinctly singlets.

Erik was like looking at a kaleidoscope. Almost but not quite the same highly chaotic patterns superimposed over each other, but tilted a few degrees off from each other, and as I changed my perspective, it was like they rotated separately from each other. Or, this is how I remember perceiving him. No Phage, and no Rräoha.

The Murmuration was aptly named. Their patterns of thought and being were like particles swarming around within a field of probability, following an apparent leader, a bellwether, who was constantly changing, being swapped out with any one of those next to them.

From a more distant perspective, they all appeared the same. Auroras of light-like waves fluctuating around human-shaped areas of space. It was as I got closer and looked at them in more detail that these differences unfolded and presented themselves.

And, again, I’m describing things here in visual terms when absolutely everything to me was merely conceptual at this point.

Phage and Rräoha were easy to differentiate from all the other members of the Murmuration. Although I could tell them all apart, and when I was linked with Sarah and Goreth I would get names for some of them, Phage and Rräoha were a different kind of being from the rest of them.

They were like me.

I couldn’t perceive myself, but the familiarity of their patterns was immediately evident to me.

But also, I mean that they were like me in that they were fuzzier and more encompassing, more reactive and interactive with the others and everything around them. Crudely speaking, it was like seeing a pair of amoeba in a cloud of paramecium.

That’s not to say the members of the Murmuration were absolutely separate from each other and their surroundings (or that anybody else was). Every person or being has edges that are hard to define, and chains of cause and effect that reach out from them well into the future and the past and, on Earth, beyond the visual horizon of the planet. But where a typical being has these fuzzy edges of increased density and complexity that maintain a relatively stable gaussian border of sorts, the borders of Phage and Rräoha were shifting between fractal equations constantly and with an apparent deliberation at a level of detail and scale that the others didn’t exhibit.

There was also another quality to them that is nigh impossible to describe. They were just different.

And the one that was Phage reacted to my observation and seemed to come for me quickly without changing its position, size, or shape. Like an optical illusion that made it seem like I was falling into it.

I had experienced that before, on the Sunspot, when trying out my perceptions for the first time. I knew it was a harmless effect that simply verified its identity. If I continued observing it, it would expand to fill the entire universe around me.

I pulled back, and said, “It is true.”

“Humor me for a moment,” Peter said. “Can you tell me who you are? What is your name?”

“Ashwin”, I replied.

“Good. Thank you,” he said. Then he asked, “How old are you?”

I did not have a ready answer for that, so I said, “I do not know.”

He nodded and said, “Fine. That’s OK. Now. Who were you looking for?”

“Rräoha and Mau,” came my reply.

“Mau?” he asked.

“Phage,” said Sarah. “Same person.”

“Ah,” Peter acknowledged. Then he asked, “And, Ashwin. Where did you find them?”

“Entangled within the Murmuration,” I said.

“Thank you.” His hands had been clasped on the table in front of him, next to his phone. He disentangled his fingers and reached over and tapped the screen of his phone. His phone began operating differently, with less activity. He said, “I don’t think that recording will convince anybody but us of anything. But, we’re not trying to do that, and I thought we would like to be able to hear that played back. Like this.”

He pressed the screen of his phone again, and sound waves started to emanate from the small device that echoed the conversation we’d had almost perfectly.

When it was done, Erik pointed at the phone, “That was a good idea. Thank you. I could still argue I might be hallucinating everything, but I try not to do that.” Then he looked up at everyone else and said, “You all heard that, right? It was the same conversation as before?”

Everyone nodded, eyes wide.

“Good,” he said. “That actually makes me feel better. Thank you.”

He thought about it a bit, though, nodded to himself as if he needed to reconfirm his thoughts. Then after a few moments, pushed himself back in his chair, moving it away from the table a fraction of a meter and folded his arms and frowned.

Abigail watched Erik do that, and then looked at the Murmuration for a moment, a line between her eyebrows. Then looked up at me.

“OK, so,” Peter started to say, but Abigail put a hand on his arm.

“Sorry,” she said. “Now I’ve got a problem with this.”

Erik pointed at her, his mouth a tight, crooked line.

“Yeah?” Sarah prompted her.

Abigail searched the air for where she thought I was and told Peter to hit record on his phone again.

Which he then did.

After a couple seconds she asked, “Is this an invasion?”

Erik snapped and nodded.

“What do you mean?” Peter asked.

“Think about it?” Abigail said. “Phage first comes to Earth to become part of Sarah and Goreth’s system. Then, after it has scouted the place for a couple of decades, it invites a friend over, Ashwin. And then, and I’m just saying how this looks, when Sarah and Goreth write up a contract to govern their system, Phage brings over another one of them, and they migrate to the Murmuration, and Ashwin leaves their vessel and starts experimenting with some kind of psychic abilities that are, honestly kinda scary.”

Brock leaned forward and spoke up, “But I said –”

Abigail held up a finger, “No. I want to hear Ashwin say that it is not an Invasion. And I want to hear them explain how it is not an invasion. Please.”

I was not in a state to think about these questions or even worry about them. At this point in the book, I suppose, since I’m writing it, that you’ll have to decide for yourself whether to believe me when I tell you that, or not. I will leave that up to you.

I was not in a brain, as far as I know. I was using unusual processes for supporting what little of my consciousness I had left and for choosing my reactions. The fact that I could talk at all was astounding to me at the moment, let alone that I could do so in English. But apparently, it was possible.

“No,” I said. “It is not an invasion.”

Erik was scratching the stubble on his chin as he listened, but didn’t say anything.

“Really,” Abigail said. “Explain how it is not an invasion.”

“We are visiting with your consent.”

“It sure doesn’t look like it, though.”

“Revoke your consent for us to be here, and we will leave,” I replied.

Abigail opened her mouth to say something, possibly to revoke her consent to us visiting, but Sarah held up her hand to stall her. She wanted to talk.

“We hold the Tunnel,” she said. “Can Phage or you move it again, say to someone else’s system, without our say so?”

“It is entangled in your system,” I replied. “It is now part of your vessel. It cannot be altered without your consent.”

“You won’t alter it, or you can’t?” Sarah asked, for clarification.

“We cannot,” I said. “It is physically impossible for us to alter your personal systems without at least subconscious consent on your part. That is how we work.”

They all screwed up their faces in slightly different ways, as they digested that, glancing at each other.

“Why is that?” Sarah asked. “There are so many forces in this world, even other human beings, that can just wallop anyone, obliterate them, hurt them, torment them, all without needing any consent. Why? How does this restriction work?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We don’t know.”

“Why not?”

“Phage doesn’t remember,” I said.

Peter leaned forward on the table and gestured with a hand, “What if… What if what they can do, this talking without a body and altering things, these psychic powers or something… What if it’s a type of technology that’s so advanced it’s like magic to us?”

“OK,” Goreth said. “What if it is?”

“What if this is a safety mechanism built into it?” Peter asked. “And like, I don’t know why Phage not remembering matters. There’s more story there that we definitely need to hear. But if we’re going to take Ashwin at their word, what if they’re using this technology, but can’t override the permissions?”

“We have speculated that,” I said.

Peter gestured up at me with both hands.

Brock, on behalf of the Murmuration, looked hopeful at that idea.

Abigail, Sarah, and Goreth all frowned in thought.

Erik clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and said, “That’s the thing, though, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Sarah agreed.

“We gotta take them at their word,” he said. “It seems like they might be more powerful than us, too. So, what do we do?”

Peter looked up at me and said, “I gotta admit, Ashwin. I’m stuck on that one too. The stuff you’ve shown me was subtle, but unignorable. You talking right now is unignorable. It’s kinda scary. Especially as it’s starting to hit that you really are something we’ve never seen before.”

“Eh,” Erik said. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

Peter looked at him questioningly.

“Remember, Dude,” Erik said. “We live on a planet that has been absolutely full of people like me, all through history. You know, who see things. Our tabloids are full of this shit. How many urban legends are there about alien contact?” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head, but clenched his own shoulders tighter. “And then there are all the gods, and demons, and spirits, and our ancestors who’ve been right here with us since we were walking out of the savanna, maybe before. Whole religions built around that stuff. Just saying. This is not new.”

“Right,” Peter nodded thoughtfully. “OK, yeah. Huh.”

“It might be why they say their powers are muffled here on Earth,” Brock offered.

“Maybe. Sorry, Brock. But maybe you’re saying that because Phage or Rräoha are influencing you,” Sarah said.

“At this point, how do we know Ashwin isn’t influencing our thoughts right now?” Peter asked.

“Shit, this is starting to trigger my paranoia,” Erik said, clenching his jaw. “Maybe we should back away from this discussion.”

“I’d like to resolve it so we don’t have to worry,” Peter said.

“So would I,” Erik shot back. “But, dammit, that might not work for me.”

“We can leave now,” I offered.

“No,” Erik said. “I’d rather you didn’t. Against a lot of my better judgment, this is still too cool for that. You’ve been friendly. You’ve been friendly. You’ve been friendly.”

“Hmm,” Peter reacted to that.

Sarah reached out to Abigail across the table, who took her hand, and looked at Erik questioningly.

Erik shrugged, and said, “It’s not really my decision. You’ve got the Tunnel in your head.”

Sarah nodded.

“But, maybe all the powers that are already here on Earth are more than a match for them if they start something,” he said. “Honestly, I’d like to think they are. Especially the ones that are at my back.”

Sarah thought about that, and said, “Goreth and I have known Phage for nearly twenty years now. It has actively helped us to get through a whole bunch of stuff we couldn’t have done without it. Just by being in the front and pretending to be human for us. It’s our friend. What it’s doing now makes me nervous, but I want to believe it is our friend.”

“Also,” Goreth butted in right on the tail of her words. “If Brock is telling the truth as to why it’s in their system, trying to help Rräoha out. That actually sounds trustworthy to me. Including the bit about still following our contract and treating the Murmuration as an extension of our system in the spirit of it.”

Brock nodded.

Erik looked at Peter, who grimaced and shrugged, and then nodded. Then he looked at Abigail, who nervously glanced at Brock, and then nodded.

“OK,” he said. “Like I said. It’s ultimately not my call. I don’t have the Tunnel or Phage in my head. But I’m good, so long as it’s understood we’re all watching.” He turned up to me, and said, “We’re watching you, Ashwin. Tell that to Phage.”

“It can hear you. We agreed to this,” I said.

“OK,” Erik nodded to Abigail and then to Peter, who turned off the recording again. Then, Erik said, “If you don’t mind, do not replay that in my earshot, OK?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Peter said.

“OK, so, that implies a new order as part of your contract,” Erik said, scooting his chair forward again to the table. “You all Ktletaccete do not bring anybody new over until we all agree on it. Is that OK with you and Goreth, Sarah?”

Sarah nodded and said, “yes.”

“Neat! Ashwin?”

“Agreed,” I said.

“So, uh, where were we?” Peter asked.

“Trying to get Ashwin to return to Sarah and Goreth’s system so nem can talk to us more coherently?” Abigail suggested.

“Sure.”

There were things in that discussion that had been left undiscussed, subjects and questions that someone probably should have brought up and considered. If this had been a session of the Crew Council aboard the Sunspot, they would have deliberated more thoroughly and for much longer, perhaps centuries.

They were human, and excited, and wanted to think of us as friends. We were discombobulated in different ways.

If Phage, Rräoha, or I had been more coherent at the time, I’d like to think we still would have let the humans lead the discussion and let them direct our actions. But as ancient and experienced as we are, and as much as we revere Autonomy and Consent as universal rights, we are still flawed people. Most of our experience has been spent learning just how flawed we are. I don’t know if we’d have done right.

I don’t know if we did right.

However, at that moment, Phage apparently took Abigail and Peter’s exchange as a cue to leave the Murmuration and help me to return to Sarah and Goreth’s vessel.

I presume there was consent asked and received all around, at least subconsciously, but I don’t remember it.

All I remember is that Phage’s presence grew in my perceptions and started to encompass me as if I was paying attention to it. And then it was all that I could perceive, the entire universe itself filling my awareness.

—

I opened our eyes. I was glad we were seated.

I heard Peter saying, “It’s getting really late, and I really need to get some sleep.”

The table we were seated at was made of pure wood. It was rectangular, and the surface of it was soft and light colored, unpainted, with a spare amount of carving and shaping around the edges. The grain of the wood, what used to be the rings of a Terran tree, mesmerized me and I reached out to stroke them, feeling the subtle variations of height and density of the material.

We would never have harvested a tree on the Sunspot to make it into a table. Its contributions to our tiny, fragile ecosystem would have been too valuable, and removing them suddenly like that for something we could grow and manufacture much faster using other plant matter just didn’t make sense.

The floor was a dirty, scuffed, and damaged laminate of polymers, glues, and woven fiber made to look poorly like tiles with grout between them, shiny and much softer than the ceramic it sought to imitate visually. Softer, even, than the table. We have similar flooring in some quarters on the Sunspot, but it is kept in much better condition by the nanites. It’s safer for children and for dropping fragile things upon it.

The room we were in was as rectangular as the table, all right angles, even where furniture, objects, and irregular architecture jutted into it. I had a vague recollection that the world I was now visiting had this kind of architecture all over, and that I’d seen it in recent days, but it was weirder to me now than before.

The walls were made of something flat and uniform, painted a cream color and trimmed with darkened wood. The ceiling was covered in quarter meter wide plaster panels that were white. Above the table there was a brass light fixture, using bulbs of glass that contained hot metal filaments to generate photons.

As the sole source of light, it cast obvious shadows.

Behind me and to the sides, the walls had large windows inset into them, showing darkness behind them, with reflections of the room and its occupants on the shiny surface of the glass. And on the other side of the table from me was a rectangular counter separating us from what looked like it might be a kitchen, but I didn’t spend a lot of time examining it.

We sat on alarmingly wooden chairs.

And everyone I saw there was familiar. I knew their names, I immediately saw how many of them occupied each vessel. But I was also struck by just how similar they all looked and how strange and illogical their features were to me.

And, of course, I could tell how similarly my own vessel looked and felt to theirs. The naked pinkish yellow skin of my arms and hands, with its red blushes and tan shadows, covered in dark brown specks of varying sizes, almost like stars in the sky, felt vulnerable and incorrect.

But I didn’t panic.

I maybe almost did. I think if we had been standing, I might have stumbled for lack of my tail.

But, instead, the shock of all of this reminded me of when I’d first fronted in this body, and that little flash of familiarity helped me to observe just how new this all felt again.

Being outside this body for so long had, apparently, recentered my identity and personal memories on who I had been before it.

Again, everything seemed so small and crowded, and claustrophobic. But, not enough to rattle me.

I couldn’t clearly recall how I’d gotten here, however. Those memories returned fairly clearly later, but at the time it was as if I’d gone directly from Peter and Abigail’s kitchen to this strange house with a different decor and state of repair.

“Eck,” I said. A nonsense sound of surprise and discomfort.

“Oh, that sounds like Ashwin,” Abigail said.

“Hey, friend,” Erik greeted me.

The Murmuration leaned forward, reaching a hand across the table in my direction, fingers relaxed, and Brock asked, “Are you doing alright?”

“I think so,” I replied. “I am feeling more like myself than I remember. It is disconcerting.”

“Fair,” Brock responded.

“Are Sarah and Goreth still there?” Abigail asked.

I felt around in my mind, and noticed them both returning to co-front with me, a couple of soft, rounded presences of different warmth and color rising from our body and nearly merging with my own awareness.

My return must have pushed them back quickly, but once I started to relax they were able to join me again.

“Yes,” I said. “They can probably talk whenever they have the urge, like usual.”

I still felt very much like myself, but as my hosts rejoined me, everything around me felt more and more familiar. Though, my voice felt weirder, and my accent more jarring to me.

I tried to ignore that about my voice. It would drive me from the front if I let it.

I also tried to speak more like a fluent English speaker. It was starting to come easier the more time I spent with either of my hosts.

“OK, so,” Peter turned to us. “Since you’re all here and relatively stable now. I feel I need to bring up a subject again that might be personal to one or more of you. But, you’re surrounded by friends here.”

I felt Sarah jerk away, but not completely. And I nodded.

Erik maybe noticed us twitch and said, “Hey, it’s OK. We just want to do whatever you need us to do, OK? You may have disrupted a hot date, but I’m not mad about it at all. Seriously. It’s going that well anyway.”

“May I ask about it?” Peter asked us.

Sarah felt reluctant, and Goreth hesitant, but I held up a hand to Peter to give us the time to confer internally.

We didn’t so much talk to each other as I gently urged them to both consent to it with my own emotions and memories of how trustworthy everyone at the table had seemed to be. And also, I tried to pull Sarah more forward to give her the room to be the one to speak.

Goreth would have had just as much right and felt more amenable to doing so. But, it was because of that that I thought Sarah giving official consent would be best.

She’d panicked the most. It had been her project that had failed. And if she consented, we were unanimous.

She was very resistant to actually talking, and when she did it felt weak and almost like I was putting words into her mouth, but we all took it to be her anyway, “Yes. OK. You can ask.”

It was clearly her voice and word choice, in any case.

Peter nodded once and said, “Earlier, in our kitchen, when you came in to get some tea, Ashwin was in charge, and you looked really rattled. They said you weren’t OK, and that they couldn’t tell me what it was about without your consent. Then, when I pressed it, you, Sarah, seemed to take control and run for the door. I can see it’s scary. But, maybe we can make it not scary. Can you tell me what was going on?”

I felt Sarah bite our lower lip, then half snarl before saying through burgeoning tears, “We’re past deadline for our Medicaid renewal.”

“Ah, shit,” Erik said.

“Crap,” uttered Brock.

“Oh,” Peter said. “Hm. Executive dysfunction and dissociation get in the way?”

Sarah nodded.

“Yeah, that’s a hell of a thing,” he said softly. “OK. Thanks to your struggles when you first moved in, and basically too many of my patients, I’ve looked this up. I don’t know all the details, but you should be able to just reapply. It’s a pain in the ass, but basically the same as renewing it. Just apply for Medicaid assistance again. And then, we’ll provide the proof they ask for. OK?”

Sarah pulled our lower lip back and down, showing our lower teeth, but didn’t say anything.

“It’s gonna cause a blip. A gap. You might have to move an appointment, or have me pay for your meds,” Peter said. “But we can do that. Your estradiol and progesterone aren’t all that expensive.”

Sarah took a deep breath, eyes and vision shaking with the rest of our body. Shudders stuttering her exhale. It felt like she was drawing the cold of the room into her body, through our skin and into our bones, as she wanted to shrink from all of our friends and hide. But she also bit her bottom lip again and nodded in slow and then jittery fashion.

“OK,” she said. Then she put our elbows on the table and eyes into the palms of our hands, fingertips trying to entangle themselves in our wispy, high hairline. “I’m so, so sorry,” she managed to whisper, a raspy and ragged sound, doing what she could to avoid actual vocalization, but adding a little at the end for emphasis.

“No, do not be sorry,” Erik said.

“Yeah,” Brock said. “The system is designed to do this bullshit to us all. We shouldn’t even have to deal with
this crap.”

I agreed.

I agreed so completely. As did Goreth. And so did Sarah, but she was focused on our behavior with Peter, and how she’d tried to run away, afraid of him. And she still wasn’t sure if she should trust him, I could feel.

“Sarah?” Peter asked, reaching out to touch her forearm. “Can I help you with this? Can we make it a plan? I can fill out the forms and make the phone calls if you all need me to. It’s OK.”

“You already do so much,” Sarah croaked.

“Yeah, but who cares?” Peter said. “Make me. Please. Like someone said, consider it the rent I pay for being on this planet.”

“You pay all our rent!” Sarah nearly cried.

“I like to credit Shirley Chisholm for that line,” Erik said.

“Thank you, Erik” Peter said. “Shirley Chisholm.” Then he turned back to Sarah. “Yes, I earn most of the money in the house. And it’s easy for me, doing a job I’m proud of. We’re not doing great, either. It’s hard. But, and I think everyone else here will agree with me when I say this, your worthiness to live under our roof has nothing to do with how productive or functional you are. You are my friends. I like living with you. I don’t want you not in my house, unless you decide you need to live somewhere else. Got it?”

“Good man,” Erik said under his breath.

Peter wagged a finger at him, but kept his focus on Sarah. Our eyes were still pressed into our palms, but I noticed this because I’d never lost my other senses, never stopped paying attention to them.

I thought I’d try something, see if I could do it from within our vessel, and said, using the air around us instead of our vocal chords, “I’m still in here, but I do think we need to go home and get some sleep.”

The longer sentence was so much easier to do while actually in a vessel with a brain.

Everyone looked suitably impressed.

“Let’s do that,” Peter said.

Sarah nodded.

—

Both Sarah and I had wanted to argue with Peter and Erik about the concept of paying rent to live.

It’s a good sentiment in some ways. Looking it up later, I’ve noted that the full line is “Service is the rent I pay for my life here on Earth.” It’s been spoken by a few other people as well, and I couldn’t get dates on who said it first, but I’m not sure that matters. Shirley Chisholm said it in the context of supporting her activism and in encouraging other human beings to walk in her footsteps, while fighting for civil rights in the United States, where it turns out I found myself living, Sarah and Goreth’s home country. And in that context it was a very important thing to have said.

But the idea that a being of any sort, human or otherwise, must pay rent for simply existing is repugnant to me, and Sarah had just felt too exhausted to do anything and couldn’t imagine paying any sort of rent.

She had wanted to die instead.

However, we all had been too exhausted to make any sort of a fuss then, and both Goreth and Phage had been encouraging us to go home and go to bed.

It seemed that Rräoha was staying with the Murmuration.

So, as we climbed into bed, and Sarah reached for Ajax, the second hand rainbow colored plush wolf that a friend had given her, I was trying to prepare myself for some sort of discussion or meeting in our dreams.

It would have been nice to have a dream together, and to hash some things out and come to a better understanding of our expectations of each other and ourselves in life. And maybe to help Sarah feel better about what she was doing.

Or to just have some sort of weird, dreamlike adventure together, exploring our inworld. I would have liked a semi-conscious tour of it, after all.

But, alas, we just fell asleep, and then woke up quite a bit later.