Erik is talking to Erik and the cuttlecrabs about how he got to be sitting on a boat on the shoreline of Marin county California, while wondering just how long it’s going to take for Beau to settle things with the others and arrange to call things off.

He’s not saying his worst thoughts. He’s keeping them to himself, but he’s not sure which self he is.

He usually isn’t anyway, but he knows his memory of the last several hours is sketchy at best. And that’s unusual and unsettling.

Maybe he has amnesia fairly often, really. But, if so, it happens more on a day to day or week to week basis, causing time to seem to slip by. He typically has enough of a routine he doesn’t notice, otherwise. And his bullet journaling usually helps. 

Can’t help with this, though.

“I been up here the whole time,” his other self says, petting his cuttlecrab. “I think it was one of the other Eriks down there, yelling and screaming at Beau. He should be doing time, not you.”

“I don’t mind sitting here,” he responds. “I’m more worried about what comes after.”

“Word.”

“What do we do?”

“Just wait for it, and roll with the blows, as always.”

“We were witness,” the cuttlecrab in his lap says.

He looks down at it. They really haven’t talked that much since jumping over to his psyche. He’s just seen them every now and then during psychotic episodes, just like his other headmates. And he’d been starting to wonder if they were real anymore. But it’s always nice when they do want to hang out. They have a nice presence, as weird looking and bad smelling as they are.

He just waits for it to say more.

“We remember everything,” the cuttlecrab says.

“Are you going to do that thing where if I say, ‘Start at the beginning’, you start at your beginning?” his other self asks.

“We can do that, yes,” the cuttlecrab replied.

“I think I’d almost prefer that.”

The cuttlecrab takes that as a cue to start talking.

“Our earliest memories are of the surf and the moon. We hatch at night,” it says. “And the first of us hatched tens of thousands of generations ago. The world had just been created, we think. We do not remember that, but we do remember exploring it and learning how to eat and how to chatter.”

“Really,” he asks, “the first of you just sprang into being like that?”

“How are you speaking English so well?” his other self asks, rudely.

“We chatter with you and you know what we say. We watch and learn, but your Network already knows the words and gives them to us. We don’t understand but we are happy,” comes the reply.

“Huh,” he grunts at the same time as his counterpart.

“We have since learned that the Dragons built the world and seeded its shores with our eggs,” the cuttlecrabs say. “But that is our world. Not this one.”

“The Dragons?” Somehow, that capital letter is perfectly audible to him.

“We call them that.”

“The Ktletaccete?” Erik asks.

“Yes.”

“So you have a word that translates to ‘Dragon’?” 

He knows that the cuttlecrabs should be speaking Inmararräo, which they apparently learned from observing the Ktletaccete for a hundred millennia or so. That’s the story Ashwin has told everyone, and the weird little guys here seem to confirm it. But, he also knows that Ashwin had access to Sarah and Goreth’s linguistic memories, so maybe it works the same way in his system. However, if the cuttlecrabs are calling the Ktletaccete ‘Dragons’, there’s got to be an interesting reason for that.

“In three languages, now, yes. Yours, ours, and the Dragons’,” it says.

“Ah. So, in your language, what does dragon mean?” he asks. He wants to know what matters to something like a cuttlecrab. How is it that something so different could have a concept of a predator so similar to a giant fire breathing lizard that it translates to dragon so fluidly in his subconscious mind.

At least it feels like this conversation is helping him to calm down and center himself.

“A Dragon is a big and powerful monster that is unique in all the world,” the cuttlecrab explains. “No two Dragons are alike. And they are reclusive, and only visit our territories alone. And all predators are afraid of them. They created the world and so they represent it. And when we visit their shores, to listen to them speak to each other, they pick us up and put us back where we come from.”

That’s kind of baffling. He’s not sure how the word got from that to being translated to what he knows about dragons. Some sort of game of telephone. But, maybe he’ll have to ask Goreth about it. Goreth, of course, being an actual dragon from Earth, could probably figure it out. Still, he decides to try with the cuttlecrabs while they’re here. And Goreth is off doing something else, not on the boat. He might get to see Goreth when he gets back to Portland in a month and a half.

“Here, the word ‘dragon’ means a big, flying, fire breathing lizard,” he says. “Though, there are some things that are called ‘dragons’ that maybe reminded someone of a storybook dragon, but usually they can’t fly, and none of them breathe fire.”

“Yes,” comes the simple reply. Nothing more.

“How does it translate?” he asks.

“We don’t know,” the cuttlecrab admits. “The Dragons of our world do not breathe fire, either.”

“Huh.”

“There is something else familiar here, too,” the cuttlecrab in his lap says.

“What is that?” he asks.

“The web,” it says, waving its tentacle up at the webbing of the universe.

He looks up at the artifact. It looks like someone has taken one of those gray putty erasers that Sarah really likes to use, and stretched it out over everything, about four yards up from where he’s sitting. The strands are thick and fragile looking, dark gray with white stretch marks.

“Seriously?”

“We have never seen them before, ourselves,” the cuttlecrab says. “But a Dragon on the Sunspot did, and hem wrote about it.”

“You can read?”

“Oh, yes. A Dragon named Sha taught us how.”

“So, Sha saw these webs?” he asks.

“No. Sha taught us to read. It was another Dragon who refuses to be named who saw the webs.”

“Neat. I like hearing that. I’ve never met anyone else who sees that particular hallucination,” Erik says. “The lurkers, maybe, but not the web.”

“It’s not an hallucination,” the cuttlecrab says.

“What?”

“It’s an entity. It exists.”

“But I only see it during an episode,” he tells the cuttlecrab.

“We only know what the Dragon wrote, and we know what we sense now.”

This is starting to feel confusing and unsettling again, now. Everything the cuttlecrab tells him sends his thoughts spiraling off into more questions and recriminations, and he doesn’t like it. It’s really just exhausting.

“I feel like it’s getting worse, and maybe I just need to ignore everything for a while,” he says.

“That’s what I do,” his present counterpart says.

There are fourteen of him, plus the cuttlecrabs, eighteen in total. But only the two of him and two of the cuttlecrabs aboard the boat. He has no idea what the others are doing.

When he’s not feeling psychotic, and he’s got all of himself awake and forward, he often feels like he can do anything. Like he’s a crack team of experts that can solve any problem. But then, during those times, he can’t see himself. He can just feel his facets all joined together into this big jewel of consciousness, switching and flipping to see things from different perspectives as needed.

It’s times like this when he’s fractured, and there are only a few of him about at most, that he can see himself, and see how different he is from different angles. And it’s kind of fun. But also, just so exhausting.

Not all of his hallucinations are of things that so obviously don’t exist. Sometimes it’s just a chair, and he has to consider whether or not it’s actually there and safe to sit on it. And that’s to say nothing of the lines of thought he sometimes has that don’t really go anywhere useful.

And it all comes with an emotional cost, even when he chooses to ignore everything. Such a waste of time and energy. Such a distraction. But also, it’s like a migraine.

Maybe it’s related. The psychosis often accompanies a migraine. Or sometimes turns into one, which makes him tense now, because that’s the last thing he needs while out on the water. But, even when it doesn’t devolve that way, there’s just this feeling that persists that it’s all wrong.

“This is making me feel like even the boat isn’t real,” he says, against his own advice to himself.

“Sorry,” says the little alien.

And for a while, they all just sit and watch the seagulls patrol the cliffs of the shoreline, each one somehow navigating the webs as if they can see them, too.

But there is that constant worry that circumstances are getting worse as time drags on. Why is it taking Beau so long to come to the conclusion that they’re done and that Erik needs a bus ride home?

“Can we ask a question?” the cuttlecrab pipes up after much too long.

“Please,” Erik says.

“Why did you choose us to visit you?”

Maybe this will be a good distraction. Talking about intentions, instead of things that may or may not have happened, seems like a good idea.

“Well,” he says. “You seem to be an alien amongst aliens. And I thought maybe we could relate to each other because of that. And I wanted to participate in this cool thing my friends were doing, and be part of something maybe big. But I didn’t want to host someone who was the descendant of world builders.” He squinted down at the little creature. “Does that make sense?”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t you want someone who was the descendant of world builders?”

“Well, because they don’t seem like my class of people,” he said. “I’m not sure I’d get along with them.”

“Why?”

“What are you? A two year old?” he asked.

“We are as old as our world,” it replied.

Why did he have to ask that question? Now he’d been told another thing he had to decide whether or not to accept. Of course, it was easier to just take it in the moment. It’d be pointless to argue with a cuttlecrab. And rude. But now that statement would be there in his memory for later.

“Not quite as old, right?” he countered, mentally kicking himself for digging further into it. “The Founders, as Ashwin calls them, built the world first, and then you were born into it.”

“Yes,” it says. “But it has been so long that that little bit of time might as well be nothing.”

“It’s an important distinction to me,” Erik says. “It makes all the difference between you and them, and why I chose you. Do you know if anybody like you existed before your world? Were there cuttlecrabs on other Exodus Ships?”

“We do not remember,” the cuttlecrab says. “But the Dragons say we’ve existed before, in some form. They do not have full records, however. They do not know where we truly come from now.”

“See? There. That’s why I like you,” he said. “You can stay.”

“We don’t understand,” it says.

“That’s OK. We’re not really the same. You’re a cuttlecrab and I’m a bunch of Eriks on a boat. But, that’s one thing we kind of have in common, in a way,” he explains. “I can only trace my family back, like, three generations. I know we’re older than shit. The oldest on the Earth. Maybe older than the Earth itself, for all I know. But our stories have been broken, destroyed. And we just have the scraps they left us, and ourselves. But we be puttin’ ourselves back together anyway.”

“Interesting.”

“You can call it that, I guess.”

“You have your dragons, too.” Suddenly, there’s no capital letter there. A distinction of some sort.

“No,” Erik says. “No. I mean. Yes, but no. Dragons are something different here. When I say ‘they’, I mean Sarah and Goreth’s ancestors. And they ain’t dragons. Ice giants, maybe, but not dragons.”

“What are ice giants?”

“Big, mean people who live in a different mythology.”

“We are confused. Isn’t Goreth a dragon?”

“I’m not sure I have the energy and patience to explain. My head’s really confused too. Everything’s all wonky.”

The other Erik just looks over and nods, while both cuttlecrabs flicker different colored lights and wait.

“Also,” he says, changing the subject a little. “I picked you because I have a thing for squid. Even alien squid that’s half crab. Just makes you cuter, in my book.”

“We are not related to your squid or crabs,” it says.

“Yeah, I know.”

“We chose to visit you because we wish to see more shores and to Chatter with more collectives,” the cuttlecrab volunteers.

“I don’t know if we’ve got anything like you here on Earth,” Erik tells it. “But we do have a lot of shoreline. Probably way more than you’ve ever seen.”

“You are a collective, and we are Chattering,” it says.

“I guess?” Erik tries to wrap his tired mind around that, and manages, “But, aren’t you, like, one mind in several bodies, whereas I’m several minds in one body?”

“We are the Collective. The Collective is one thing, but this one is an individual, too,” it says.

“That is how it works, yes,” the other cuttlecrab says.

“OK, two things in common. That’s neat,” the other Erik says.

“Aren’t you the one that’s supposed to just quote video games and movies?” he asks himself.

“Nah. That’s Erik,” he says.

Shit. 

That was kind of funny.

He lets himself break out in laughter, because it feels good.

Maybe the episode of psychosis is wearing off already. Usually it lasts a few days. But if he can laugh without it hurting anyone, it’s definitely better than it was before.