“So, we did a demonstration for our new editor from Listra Luachra Press,” Sarah said.

“Oh, shit. How did that go?” Erik asked, leaning forward.

Beau’s eyes widened and he put a hand on Erik’s thigh.

The Murmuration snorted into their coffee in mock surprise. Of course we’d done a demonstration.

“Better than you would have suspected, I think,” Sarah told Erik.

“You think me a cynic,” Erik said.

“Honey, you are a cynic,” Beau told him.

Erik looked at him and said, “When it comes to anything like business, you bet I am!”

“Well,” Sarah said. “We were going to do the stopped watch trick, but then Goreth decided we had to go to the bathroom first and suggested that Karen interview Ashwin while we did that, letting Ashwin stay at the table without our vessel.”

“Oh,” the Murmuration said.

“That didn’t make her run for her life?” Erik asked.

“Nope.”

“OK, she might be a keeper.”

“I don’t think she’s going to believe her memories when she wakes up in the morning, though,” Sarah said, lifting her tea to her lips. “Or she’ll make up something about a hidden speaker.”

It was the afternoon of the same day. I had already spent the bulk of our Aunti Zero’s money, but had left just enough for a pot of tea for winding down later.

“I bet she won’t,” Erik said.

“But she did say it was her job to believe in us,” Sarah elaborated. “So, whether she thinks she just shared an hallucination with us, or actually realizes she just talked to an extraterrestrial, she declared she did have a better idea of what we were trying to do with our books, and thanked us for the experience.”

“I think I like her, too,” Beau said.

Even when seated, Beau was a little taller than Sarah, and that made her happy when she looked up and smiled at him.

Seeing Erik and Beau together, still together since they first met a year ago, gave her so much hope and compersion. It was weird how, even though they were just friends with her, her subconscious insisted on interpreting the situation as them all being in the same polycule, and any affection that Beau and Erik shared was affection she was experiencing personally. She did have to occasionally remind herself not to make assumptions about familiarity, but it also really helped with the loneliness she and I often felt.

It didn’t help me nearly as much. Especially when I was fronting. But I needed to rest after the meeting, so she was in charge now.

Thinking of me, she did spend a moment wondering what kind of a romantic partner we could eventually scare up, if we were as lucky as Erik.

We’re both ace. Asexual. But sex favorable, or some term like that. We can enjoy sex as part of a romantic relationship. It’s just not why we’re ever attracted to anybody.

And in the very few pseudo-relationships we’d experienced, that did seem to be a sticking point. A lot of humans liked to know that their partners were sexually attracted in them. It helped them feel randy in return, or something, and needed, and excited about the relationship.

We could kind of fake it at first. Go through the motions. But it wasn’t heartfelt.

We needed to really love someone, seriously care about them, to make our physical affections expressive enough to get through that. And we really hadn’t had a lot of experience with that, either.

And then there was the problem that Sarah was primarily attracted to men. While I’m primarily attracted to anyone but men. It’s like we divided our pan-romantic attractions up between us, with very little overlap. And while that makes her kind of but not quite straight, it makes me very, very queer.

I can’t help but to be queer, being maverique, and a dragon. And no one can know who and what I am and be attracted to me without being very queer themselves, really.

I mean, if we did hook up with a man, and he looked at me and was attracted to me, he wouldn’t be having homosexual or homoromantic feelings, exactly, but he wouldn’t be attracted to a woman, either. And most of U.S. culture has pretty ridiculously strict ideas about what that means.

Ah, yeah. And then there’s the other thing where if we got into a relationship with just one individual from outside our system, it would still be an instant polycule. Sarah and I want to share, even with our incompatibilities. And with Phage, Ashwin, Niʔa, Abacus, and everyone else who has come over from the Sunspot. And that gets weird and complicated.

Our best bet would be to find another system, like our friends, who would understand right from the beginning.

And looking at Erik and Beau, Sarah could see that was maybe possible.

Kind of like Erik, Beau was very slow to open up, though. After all this time, we still didn’t know anything about his system, except that he had or was one.

But while Erik didn’t reveal a whole lot about himself when he talked, he still talked about himself a lot.

Beau didn’t even do that.

To get Beau talking, there were two subjects that worked pretty well now.

Erik.

And tall ship sailing.

Sarah smiled, and could feel her own eyes glinting. Or thought she could. Maybe it was half a tear.

It was Beau’s turn to lean forward, and he said, “Tell us more. Please.”

“Well, we don’t really know what Ashwin said to Karen, because we weren’t there,” Sarah said. “Except for what Ashwin told us afterward.” But then, at mentioning nems name, she could feel them coming forward, and almost laughed, but relaxed instead.

“Oh, I mostly told her not to panic,” Ashwin said, their Inmararräo accent almost completely gone now. It had been one of nems goals to speak like a Pacific Northwesterner, and they had come a long way in a short time. Probably due to the same system neurology that allowed nem to speak English in the first place. “And then, for melodramatic affect, I told her how old I was. It seemed to be the thing to do.”

Everyone else nodded.

“And she said what to that?” Beau asked.

“She did not,” Ashwin said. “After listening to me talk, she then asked me questions, but after a moment of silence.”

“Ah, you did scare her,” Erik said.

“I think I may have, yes,” replied Ashwin.

“What did she ask?” Beau prompted.

“She asked me if I wrote books too,” Ashwin said. “I told her the truth. That I have written one book, and that I enjoyed doing it so much that I had finished it within a month, and we’d posted it online almost immediately.”

“Ah, of course.”

“She seemed disappointed, because then she couldn’t publish it. The publishing company likes their first publishing rights,” Ashwin explained. “But then I told her I had done the translation work for Systems’ Out! and that we had many sequels in the works after that, so there would be opportunities to market more books. This, of course, is weird to me. The market is something that makes me uneasy.”

“Same,” Erik said.

“Fuckin’ A,” Brock of the Murmuration said in a decent approximation of their source’s voice.

“She was delighted, but then told me I had written two books, then,” Ashwin said. “She said that a translator may translate a book, but that they do so in order to write their own book, the translation. I told her that makes sense to me, and thanked her for the perspective. Then she asked me what kind of editing or critique I’d be open to.”

“And?” Beau asked. He was uncharacteristically interested in something other than Erik or ships today. But he seemed at ease in it.

As she observed from beside Ashwin, Sarah considered that Beau did seem to try to make up for Erik’s social bluntness and disregard for others feelings, and was maybe pretending to be the Allistic at the table to compensate. Even though that wasn’t really needed here.

Or, he was just working to be a better part of the friends group, a more active participant.

It was nice of him.

Ashwin dutifully continued to engage with Beau’s questions, “I explained that since I already had my copy of the manuscript, and that I would save that separately, I was open to anything. ‘Really?’ she said. To which I told her that we are trying to publish these works under the pretext that they are fiction, so making them more closely adhere to local conventions of fiction would be welcome. She laughed and smiled at that, and I did my best not to be startled by her show of teeth.”

“Fun,” Beau said. “I do like her.”

Erik shook his head, “It does sound like she could become a regular here, if you’re not careful.”

“I think that might be the goal,” Ashwin said.

“It is,” Sarah confirmed, pushing forward again. “If we’re going to be working with her closely to polish off our books, we’re going to want to have a lot of conversations. And this is the safest feeling place to do that. Safer, even, than home.”

Audrey of the Murmuration beat Erik to the question, “How’s that going?”

“Eh. I really don’t want to talk about it,” Sarah said. And then they all moved on to talking about the Murmuration’s work and Peter’s, our housemate’s, infatuation with Beau’s job, running a tall ship replica as captain.

It wasn’t that our relationship with our two housemates was going sour in any way. Abigail continued to be a little chaotic and weird for even us, and unwaveringly supportive. And Peter followed her lead, and brought in almost all the money that the household needed. Cheerfully, without complaint.

Which just made Sarah nervous, though. There was a huge power differential there, and she kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Especially with all the supernatural feeling weirdness we were bringing into the house ourselves.

But, every morning, everything kept running the way it had been before, with tea and peanut butter toast, and quiet encouragement from Abigail and Peter.

No, the problem, as it had always been, was with the state. And she knew that that’s what Audrey had been asking about, and what Erik would have been asking about too if he’d gotten to the question.

They wanted to help, but they couldn’t. And it made the occasional questioning feel like nagging.

But Sarah also really didn’t want to think about what was going on there. So she just didn’t. And we’ll get to that subject later, then.

Instead, as she watched her friends banter, and quietly switch between their own headmates, voices subtly altering in the process, she wondered what the local Ktletaccete were up to. Besides Ashwin, that is, who was participating in the discussion.

Phage was off on the Sunspot, she knew. Unlike most of the others who crossed through the Tunnel, it could do so without leaving a copy behind. Something about what it was and how it worked. It could choose to leave a copy. There was always a copy of it on the Sunspot, for instance. But, for some reason, it had decided to make its focus known by traveling fully with my duplicate to the alien vessel.

Copies. Duplicates.

Nothing really new for a lot of pluralities, really. The Murmuration made copies with quite a bit of frequency.

Some systems called it splitting. One person would become two. Sometimes they were splinters of their original self, like James T. Kirk in a teleporter accident, with certain traits and memories going to one and the other traits and memories going to the other. But a lot of times, a new system member could be created that was a near perfect copy of the original. And they’d be a full person, with a full and separate consciousness, and their own new line of long term memories. And it was just a thing that a lot of systems got used to.

Erik even thought it’s what happened with him for the most part, though he’d shrug when asked further.

But, for us, it was new and weird.

We’d been a three person system ever since we’d brought Phage aboard. And a two person system before that.

Even with our co-consciousness, and sharing memories and perspectives frequently, Sarah was used to thinking of herself as an indivisible whole.

The idea that she could become two people shook her.

Especially with the distance and division enforced by the Tunnel, she couldn’t imagine what it would be like.

Which of the two hers would she be?

Would her locus of awareness cross the Tunnel and be forever after locked on the Sunspot? Or would it remain here and unaware of the amazing experiences her other self was experiencing?

Or would she, against all explanations Phage had given her, somehow experience both things at the same time and have a simultaneous awareness of being in both places at once?

As bewildering and overwhelming as it would be, she felt she would prefer that latter, third option.

She’d be able to keep her sense of self that way, and she’d also be experiencing something nobody else was.

But then, she’d have to become the Tunnel, or something like that, she guessed.

This was why she’d insisted I go first, on my own. To see how I experienced things when I later re-merged my two selves.

The way it would actually work, as it was explained to us, was that both of my selves would cross the Tunnel again, making another set of duplicates. And then those duplicates would attempt to permanently fuse with their counterparts on each side of the Tunnel.

Phage had recommended, from its own experience, that we go no longer than a month before doing that, or the fusions might not work.

And while we could have tested the procedure the very next day, I really wanted to push it out for as long as I could.

I am, sometimes, maybe a bit adventurous for your typical autistic person. Sarah believed I got all the adventurousness, and left her without any. She also contended I paradoxically got all the worrying. But I could see that wasn’t the case.

I ruminate.

That looks like worrying. But I see it as analysis. It can be worrying, but it doesn’t have to be.

She’s quiet. Her thinking doesn’t use words like mine does. But that just hides the fact that she’s often riddled with worries. Well, hides it from her.

The rest of us, meanwhile, watch her take on the SSDI and Medicaid project all on her own and then dissociate and shutdown from the pressure.

Phage was trying to help us delegate tasks like that to our other new system members. Niʔa even stepped forward to volunteer, saying that they’re really good with numbers.

But, because of her worrying, Sarah can’t let go of the important, life threatening, bureaucratic bullshit that besets us from our government.

She just also doesn’t think about it. Not in the same way that I would.

At that point in the afternoon, though, even after pushing it away into the back of her mind and daydreaming about partners and alien helpers and books to write, her emotions clenched down on the problem.

The state had pushed us to apply for disability benefits with SSDI in order to keep our Medicaid, and it had done so before we were ready. We didn’t have the evidence, nor the medical team, to support our claim in court, let alone on paper.

Of course, the SSA would immediately reject our claim. Because it does that with every claim. Forcing us to appeal. If we could function well enough to appeal in time, of course.

And then it would fail again, because we honestly didn’t know how to fill out those forms, even with Peter’s help. And also because we just didn’t have the medical records to support them.

And we were disabled. To the point where we couldn’t even get a job in the first place, much less maintain one. At least, not any sort of employment that was available locally. Not even like what the Murmuration did remotely.

At least, that’s how it had been until Ashwin had come over and started throwing around Phage’s gifts like parlor tricks on a ghost hunting show.

I make that sound snarky and frivolous, but Sarah’s mood was souring and that’s sort of how she was thinking at the time.

Ashwin had started to figure out how to reverse some of our chronic illnesses (and we did have a few, thanks to autistic comorbidities). And then, to help and to be close to the distant part of their parent, Niʔa had arrived and had applied their natural expertise.

We used to use our cane, a truly terrible mobility device for our chronic fatigue and foot pain, to actually help us get around. Now it was just a fashionable affectation and a visible deterrent for would-be assailants and other transphobes. And we had the energy to write so many books. And Sarah’s art show was nearly complete and ready to hang, in time for the scheduled show. And I was feeling good enough that I wanted to suggest that we start a writing or art group here at Aunti Zero’s, to bring in and meet more people. 

And both she and I were definitely worrying about how that all would look should we go to court about our disability claim.

Or, if we dropped the claim, just refusing to appeal it, how would it work then?

How long would we go without medical coverage before we made enough money to buy our own?

Considering that we still needed the coverage to pay for our hormone therapy, any time longer than a month was too long. And the longer it went, the worse it would be.

We no longer had any gonads to produce any needed hormones, not even the wrong ones, thanks to surgery.

And with how writing books and selling art famously didn’t bring in much money at all, there was no telling how long we’d go without enough money.

And, then, what about getting a day job, as they call it?

We might be able to get hired at a Starbucks. Or Aunti Zero’s, if we were lucky.

But a job like that would require standing all day, and we weren’t that recovered.

We had the portfolio. We might be able to get a remote graphic design job like the Murmuration’s, but then that type of creative work would eat into our energy and time for creating our own art and writing.

The Sunspot Chronicles was not something either of us were ready to abandon or slow down on in any way.

It felt important.

Special interest important, but also, literally, galactically important.

As much as it made us feel like stereotyped mad people, we were actual hosts to visitors from across the universe, and we were also now beginning to visit their home, and this was an actual first contact situation.

If records weren’t made of our interactions and the history our guests were sharing with us, then the event would go forgotten by humanity, and the species might one day die out not knowing that they had already achieved one of their wildest dreams.

Nevermind that if we published it as fiction, as we were doing, that was likely to happen anyway.

This made dealing with our government’s bullshit hard.

Peter, by gleefully supporting us, was making it all practically easier. He even said he’d pay for our HRT if he had to.

But, especially after our encounter with Mike last year, Sarah could not bring herself to trust him, no matter what he said or did.

Also, she’d pointed out to me, it’s not like Peter’s job, or anybody’s job really, was stable enough to support three bodies in Portland’s rental economy.

When that thought occurred to her again, there in Aunti Zero’s Coffee Hut with our friends, she wanted to slump her head down onto her arms on the table, like we were back in fifth grade, and cry.

Which she allowed herself to do, Ashwin quietly leaving the front to let her feel all her feelings.

“Hey,” Erik said softly, cutting through the discussion with his concern. “Can we get you anything, Sarah? A mocha?”

Sarah shook her head.

“I’ll get you a mocha anyway,” Brock said. Then they affected their source’s voice again, “You, uh, look like you could really use it, you know.”

Sarah sighed.

“I’m getting it for you,” Brock said, getting up. “But you don’t have to drink it. Just put up with it, alright?”

Erik said to Brock, “You are really leaning into that voice today, aren’t you.”

Brock paused on the way to the counter, leaning on their cane, and said, “I might not like him, actually, but sometimes he hits me like a truck hitting a water balloon. And it’s funny.”

“I guess so,” Erik said. Sarah could feel him turning back to her somehow, and he asked, “Was it the conversation?”

She shook her head.

“Flashback?” he asked, without referring specifically to what.

She shook her head more vigorously.

“It might be, you know. Trauma has its anniversaries,” Erik said.

She paused to consider that. It had been a year. And we’d had to reapply for Medicaid two more times as a result, once at the halfway mark, and the other at the one year mark, as always. And that had been really stressful, especially with the government wanting updates on our SSDI application.

But was that C-PTSD? Or just the stress from doing the thing so recently and genuinely worrying about it now?

Sarah knew that Erik was referring to our kidnapping by Mike, which Ashwin had successfully foiled. It wasn’t exactly a year to the day of that, though, and she really didn’t feel like that had anything to do with how she was feeling.

The following months had been really rough, but it turned out that Niʔa, Phage’s child, was particularly good at managing PTSD and C-PTSD symptoms and recovery in other people, and it didn’t feel like the subject of that event or anything resembling it were triggers anymore.

Sarah opened her mouth and said, “I’ve been feeling too good, lately, and now I’m scared of that.”

“Ah, shit,” Erik said.

“Real problem,” Beau confirmed. “They don’t let us rest. They don’t let us recover. Gotta hustle or gotta drown.”

Sarah cringed.

“Are you talking about the government or the sea?” Erik asked Beau.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Beau said.

“OK, yeah.”

“Some people get it worse,” Beau said. “But it even applies to people like Sarah and Goreth.”

“True.”

Sarah raised her head to look at Beau, with his long angular features and stern but soft look, wild curly hair reaching as if like a barnacle for food particles floating in the space around his head. And she observed, “That’s the most political speech I think I’ve heard you make.”

Beau shook his head and said, “It really isn’t. It just sounds like it is. I said it because I think it’s what Erik would have said. But he wasn’t saying it.”

“Ah,” she started wiping her eyes.

“I’ve been listening,” Beau said. “I know we’re all comrades, more or less. Even if our loyalties are sometimes divided by… other things.”

Sarah nodded, not knowing exactly how to respond.

Brock came back with her mocha then, and it smelled good, despite already having had my ginger snap earlier that morning.

Everything we drink is decaffeinated because, despite the efforts of the Ktletaccete, our body still reacts to caffeine with an involuntary energy crash and sleep, followed by violent shits.

But even decaffeinated coffee and tea has some caffeine, and if we drink too much of it, it can still happen.

As she tentatively accepted the drink, Beau said, “I’d recommend sailing for getting away from it all, but. You know. It’s work. And, also, your chances of drowning go up.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said.

“Also, this is not the season.”

“Seriously, though?” Sarah said. “Maybe someday, possibly in a couple of years, we might actually take you up on that.”

“Really,” Erik said.

“I would like that,” Beau said. “Maybe not on the Lady Washington, though. Too many volunteers. Maybe a rental cutter? My own boat is a little small.”

Erik looked over at him, and gestured back at Sarah with his thumb and said, “But…”

Sarah leaned forward on her elbows, chin resting in her palms, fingers tickling the edges of her eyes, and said, “I’m feeling better, Erik, because the Ktletaccete have been healing us.”

He looked over at her and said, “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

He got an impish look as he processed that information and considered the possibilities, and then said, “So, you’re going to be stronger and faster than ever before, maybe?”

“That’s a long term goal, yes,” Sarah admitted.

“So, combined with your new psychic powers, or the psychic powers of the Ktletaccete, you think maybe you’ll, you know,” he said, “go out and dish out some vigilante justice in the dark of the night? Portland could use an actual superhero, you know.”

“It’s be gay, do crimes, Erik, not stop crimes.”

His grin became bigger, and he said, “So, it’s supervillainy, then! I can get behind that!”

Sarah couldn’t help but laugh, but shook her head and said, “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to do anything anyone couldn’t explain away as coincidence or slight of hand or mind games. You know that Phage says that there’s something going on on this planet that dampens its strength and reach, and that Ashwin confirms it.”

“Yes,” Erik said. “But what Ashwin was able to do, and keep doing, was fucking amazing. You all literally stopped an actual crime yourselves. A bad one. A violent one. And you weren’t even healed yet. Hadn’t even started healing, right?”

Sarah took a deep breath and noted how she wasn’t at all shaky. “I don’t think we want to relive that kind of thing ever again, honestly.”

“Fair. I wouldn’t either.” Erik turned to the Murmuration and asked, “What about you and Rräoha?”

Rräoha surged forward in the Murmuration and said, simply, “No.”

“Also fair.”

It honestly wasn’t like we hadn’t had these kinds of conversations on and off throughout the year. We met weekly. It was a thing. But, there were a few things said here that hadn’t been said before. Some of Erik’s surprise was feigned, part of the act. But some of it was genuine. He was needling us, like he does, but we hadn’t really told him how much we’d been healing until then.

We’d been very self conscious about it. It was scary. Healing, getting better, was so ridiculously scary.

Because we weren’t healing everything. Just enough to make it look like we maybe weren’t disabled anymore. Like maybe we could take on more responsibility. Long before we actually were ready to.

And it was hard to even admit that to our best friends.

Ashwin sent us a thought, then, maybe accidentally, that this wouldn’t even be a problem on the Sunspot. It was a thought they’d had many times before. Nem was intimately familiar with our dilemma by now, but still emotionally confused by it.

Probably because we were also confused by it.

The gap between the point where the government decided it didn’t need to support you anymore and the amount of money and work it would take to actually support yourself was a terrifying gulf. And the severity of it was alien to us.

As difficult as our childhood had been, our parents had supported us pretty reliably with their jobs. It hadn’t been until we’d fled from them and the state of Washington to be who we truly were that we’d run into this catch 22.

And honestly, even those of us who are born on Earth tend to find it an alien and hostile planet. We’re all newcomers in the beginning. Some of us just don’t acclimate as quickly as everyone else.

No, Ashwin thought. Your culture is needlessly and deliberately cruel. If I could, I would do everything in my power to change it.

It was at that point where Erik worked his mouth a little bit, then leaned forward, and said, “OK. So. Beau and I have been talking about it, and I’m thinking maybe I’m ready to host a Ktletaccete visitor. Like the Murmuration and you guys. Really. If that can actually work. I. We. We want to be less blurry. Maybe they can help.”

“I want to travel,” Rräoha said.

—

There’s a theory that Rräoha is also still part of our system, despite the fact that gem had jumped to the Murmuration’s system somehow.

Our experiences with the Tunnel seem to support that.

Niʔa and Phage appear to be clear exceptions to this apparent rule, however. But they have something else going on that may allow them to move themselves more thoroughly when they want to. Ashwin may also be able to do this, too.

But – and this is not a theory held by all systems who experience system hopping by any means, just us, as far as we know – it seems that when someone somehow moves from one system to another, they either create a new version of themselves in the new system, or leave a copy of themselves in the old one. An echo that then gets filled by a new consciousness?

We don’t really know.

I certainly know what I’m experiencing by jumping across the tunnel, but perceptions are not always the truth. Despite all we’ve ever said about how personal realities are real realities.

It could be that when Rräoha had left our system, on the day that gem arrived, and settled in the Murmuration, that either Phage had helped gem move completely. Or, possibly more likely, that gem so very much didn’t want to be a part of our system for some reason that the remnants of gemself that gem did leave behind remained dissociated and dormant.

What I know is that the one time I tried system hopping, to visit the Murmuration with their consent, it seemed like it didn’t work. They did not receive me, nor create a factive introject of me, and I definitely didn’t perceive myself crossing any gateways into a new psyche.

It was not at all like the Tunnel, where what I felt was unmistakable.

Even though I remember using the Tunnel now like an especially vivid dream, because it happened in our inworld while our body slept, it still haunts me.

For a brief moment, while I was crossing that threshold and being torn in half, duplicated, I could perceive both worlds simultaneously. A double exposure. Like superimposed videos, with smell, sound, and tactile senses involved, too. Proprioception for both bodies, such as they were, existing in our inworld and on the Network of the Sunspot at the same time.

For that split second I was two separate people. Twins.

Take from these descriptions what you will. Believe in what you need to believe in.

Just understand that this is what immediately sprang to my mind when Erik and Rräoha made their declarations.