I pause at the sliding glass back door, standing on the porch with our cloak draped over our left arm, hat jauntily tossed back up onto our head, cane in right hand.

And there’s our reflection, ghostly imposed over the darker interior where relatives are conversing jovially.

What I see is something that is no longer familiar to me. Not that our body ever really was.

I see a tall, fat woman with a side cut. Which is fine. That’s what we want the world to see. But it’s not me. Not any more.

It really, honestly has nothing to do with being fat or intersex or trans, or any of that. It’s the little details in the face, the hands, the hair, some of the proportions. This body does not even look related to me. In any way.

I exist in two places now, as do Goreth and everyone else in our system. Here, on Earth. And thousands of millions of lightyears away, on the Sunspot. And on the Sunspot, we are Network entities that can choose the shapes of our own forms.

Transition has been important and lifesaving and a huge relief. But the shape I see in a reflection on the Sunspot is more me than my body has ever been. And every night, I reconnect with myself to swap and merge memories, so that I can continue to live as myself in both places at once.

If I think about what that’s like in terms of what my consciousness is and how I remember experiencing it, it gets confusing. It would be much scarier if Phage hadn’t gifted me with its type of existence in the universe. There’s something about no longer having a ‘ligament of separateness’ that makes it all OK.

Except that less than twelve hours ago, I remember traveling with Goreth via Network channel to the temple of Mau Rro where the Tunnel Apparatus is kept on the Sunspot with the memory of Ktletaccete food on my pallet, and thinking today would be a bit of a shock.

And so it is.

These people I see on the other side of the glass are so fleeting.

The bulk of their lives are already spent.

But, honestly, my own body is not likely to last terribly long, either, the way things are going globally. And my life aboard the Sunspot is very much, in a lot of ways, like the afterlife that they envision awaiting for them at their god’s side. And that I get to experience it daily already and feel just how tangible it is isn’t really all that different, for all I know, than whatever it is that gives them their faith.

I want to say it’s different.

I can, if I want to, list all the arguments and points of fact that differentiate what I’m experiencing from what they believe in. I can even point to how their churches are built to uphold an exploitative system that preys on their beliefs for control over them and their finances and votes.

But, in the end, unless I can give them access to my headmates and bring them to the Sunspot with me, when I talk about it I’m going to sound just as credible as any of them.

Orin is one of the atheists in the family, and I honestly don’t know how he puts up with them. Except that he’s too busy having fun with his style of masking to have any sort of the interactions that he might find frustrating, by keeping conversations as shallow as his clichés. The others just let him do his thing and don’t bother him. They love him, but at arm’s length. And I wonder if he wants it that way.

I smile at my reflection to watch that cute futchy woman of photons flirt with me, then open the door and step inside.

Orin and Henry are still in the dining room, looming over the snacks. I have no idea where my parents are at this point. Which is a little worrisome.

“You’re back,” Henry says.

I tilt my head up in a Ktletaccete affirmative, which he takes to be his own kind of body language, and I say, “I want to talk to Grandma. Would now be a good time?”

“I believe Penny is talking to her,” he says. “But she should be done soon.”

“Is there a waiting list?” I ask, glancing his direction after having scanned the living room and kitchen through their doorways.

“No, but I was going to head back next,” he says. “And I think we’re trying to give her a few minutes between each visit to rest and nap. Like fifteen to twenty minutes, maybe.”

“Hm,” I grunt, deciding I don’t want to push conversation with him any further.

The kitchen has Judy and Edward in it now, so I don’t go that way. And it looks like they may be circling into the dining room, so I slip into the living room without much thought, looking to see if there’s a seat I can take where I can watch Henry take his turn with Grandma.

There really isn’t.

As big as this house is, our family is still too big for it.

It’s not a small living room and there’s no derth of seating. It’s just all full. Camille is taking a break from watching the kids downstairs by sitting in Edward’s old seat. And Joseph is sitting where Judy had been seated, his eyes and ears more trained on the mumbling of his wife from down the hallway.

I think about glowering like I usually do when the accessible seating on the bus is taken up by young people without canes who seem oblivious that we need one of those spots. But, that hostility would be counterproductive to our goals, and we don’t actually need to sit all the time anymore.

There’s a spot of wall near the entrance to the hallway that I can lean on, so I go do that and relax. Then I set about to watch everyone without participating.

This puts me right in Joseph’s line of sight. To look in the direction of Penny, his wife, whom he cannot see because she’s in another room, he has to look at me now. But, I’m ignoring him, so if he’s scowling at me I don’t even notice. I find this amusing.

“I kept trying to tell them they should play outside,” Camille is telling the other grownups. “But between the pingpong table and the NES classic, they’re really rooted down there. Anyway, they’re all having fun.”

Maybe that’s where my parents are, giving Camille a break.

I could use my extra-sensory perceptions to check, probably, but I’m too focused on getting all of this over with as smoothly as possible.

Are they really extra-sensory, though, if they’re not a part of my senses? I don’t know what else to call them besides ‘Phage’s gifts’ and it doesn’t need to be credited in every paragraph.

“It’s OK to put your foot down about these things,” Joseph says. “It’s good for them. God didn’t intend a beautiful day like this to be wasted indoors, after all.”

Camille smirks and looks his direction to say, “One does wonder what you’re doing inside, Joe.”

He scowls at her because he doesn’t like that nickname.

Aunt Wendy, who is sitting in a rocking chair, speaks up to try to smooth things over by asking Joseph, “Speaking of doing things outdoors, how’s the house coming along?”

When he’s not here, he’s building a house. All on his own. I don’t want to make fun of that, because it’s impressive. But, also, there’s no way Goreth and I could ever do anything like it. Not here on Earth. He is completely unaware of the privilege he has, as an able bodied cis het white man, to just up and buy a piece of property and start building a house on it with his own two hands.

Privilege. I have a completely different kind of privilege now, that approximately 8 billion people on Earth don’t have. I can’t build a house here, but I don’t have to. I should relax and just listen.

In the grand scheme of things, it isn’t just about me and him. But in the moment, for me, it is. And I can stand down. 

He’s ignoring me anyway. He doesn’t want me in his world.

He immediately relaxes and shifts his focus, because this is a topic of conversation he is proud to talk about, “I’ve just about got the framing all finished. The next step, within a week, is to raise the roof. I’m really looking forward to that part. It will start to look like a house, then. And I’ll have shelter to work on the plumbing and electrical.”

“Are you going to have a roof raising party?” Wendy asks. “Get some help with that job?”

He shakes his head, “Normally, yes. Especially if I was building this house for another man. But, since it’s for myself, I want to see if I can do all the work myself. And I have ways of getting that roof up there. It’s not like it all goes up at once, after all.”

He says that like it’s some kind of innovative sneakiness on his part, or a revelation, and not just boneheaded hard work.

Wendy looks suitably impressed, and Camille smirks at me and rolls her eyes when the others aren’t looking at her.

I smirk back. We do have friends of a sort in this family, and she is one of them.

I mean, she’s an ally as a fellow younger woman, but I’m not really sure what she thinks of everything else that’s going on with us. Other than that she’s never brought it up, not even as a hint or little dig like almost everyone else in the house does.

Wendy and Joseph keep talking about Joseph’s house, but I can’t bring myself to continue paying attention to them.

Camille has now leaned over to talk in quieter tones to her husband, Jeff, who’s seated next to her, about their children’s interactions with the other kids. And that’s not a conversation for us.

Paul and Brenda are on the love seat, and are avidly listening to what Joseph has to say, even though they’re generally at odds with his religion and politics. He’s family, and he’s doing something they’re suitably impressed with.

Maybe it makes sense for how the U.S. culture has worked for so long, but this family is so coupley.

Goreth and I are kind of a duo, as much as any set of twins tend to be. But with the one vessel, and nobody really recognizing us as separate people, it’s not the same, and we’re really out of place here.

At this point, Orin and Henry are talking to Edward and Judy about food in the dining room. And they’re loud enough that I can overhear most of their words over the other conversations. Not that I could actually understand them if I tried. There’s too much noise now. But, that means that if I get hungry, I’ll either have to fend for myself in the kitchen, where Brenda’s mushrooms appear to remain, or face the combination of Edward and Henry to reach for some snacks.

Waiting in this position for something to do is excruciating and grueling, and lonely, but not being the focus of attention and not having to deal with social expectations in the middle of hostile conversations does make it possible for me to actually relax a little.

Out of sheer boredom and the need for a distraction, I decide to take a look around with my Phage-senses.

It’s not quite like deciding to listen to my ears instead of looking with my eyes, or shifting to pay attention to what my nose is smelling. Like with those senses, I am constantly subconsciously aware of what’s going on in the world of localized physics and metaphysics, but when I’m fronting I find that the body’s senses do take priority. It’s more like shifting my focus from what’s in front of me to paying attention to my own thoughts.

So, up until this point, I hadn’t really noticed just how dim those perceptions had become!

It’s like trying to see through thick gauze that’s been bound tight over my eyes, but in the center of my soul instead. Or, it’s more like that the whole room is crisscrossed with that gauze, running from body to body. And it’s so thickly woven that I can’t move through it, or see much of anything. And it’s dulling all sound and dominating my sense of smell with its sterile cotton scent. Only, of course, it’s not my actual senses or muscles that are being restricted by it, but rather my very self.

I suddenly feel like I can’t breathe, and I desperately need to get out of the room.

I hadn’t noticed this on my first pass through the house because I wasn’t trying to focus on it. It had certainly affected me, making it harder for me to manage my reactions to everyone. But now that I am paying attention, it is overwhelming.

I feel a sharp tension string up my guts, right through my heart and into my throat.

Let me, Ni’a thinks.

I nod.

It takes a moment, but then I start to feel as if someone is pinching that tension with their fingers and drawing it down and away. Muscles in my shoulders relax.

Now is a good time to retreat, Phage’s child tells me.

I nod again and scootch over to the corner of the wall and allow myself to fall around the edge of it, to turn and step away from the living room. Thinking quickly, I keep turning and head toward the house entrance. Which is where the stairs to the basement are located.

If our parents are down there, then we have an excuse to visit that won’t be questioned by anyone else.

Not that we should need any other excuse than to visit our youngest cousins. But I know how some of my aunts think, and the opinions they hold of trans women and queer people, and we do have to be cautious here.

The top of the basement stairs is blocked by a white, heavy wooden door, almost as heavy as the front door of the house.

When I open it, more of the noise from downstairs is unleashed. It’s a cacophony that reminds me of why we usually avoided the basement at family gatherings in this house. Our spot was always this little reading nook type space at the top of the stairs on the second floor. But, when we were younger, we’d played with our older cousins in the basement, too. The toys were down there.

The stairs had once been painted white, the same paint as the door. Once. Most of that paint had long been worn away, revealing the coarse grain of the wood underneath. And as people frequently walked up and down them over the years, the softer parts of the wood had worn away fastest, creating a natural grippy surface.

There are basic thick dowel railings bolted to the walls. But with our hands full of cloak and cane, we don’t use them. The cane is really a mobile railing anyway.

With each thump-thump-thump of our feet and cane, I think that everyone below can guess who it is that’s descending into the basement. But no voices go quiet. Nobody seems to care.

I do hear the voice of my dad raised playfully over the screeching of children.

It might actually be nice to interact with our parents in this setting, come to think of it.

The children will keep the topic of conversation light and away from the strained subjects, and provide plenty of distraction on top of it.

How does this sort of thing typically work on the Sunspot? I think very loudly in the direction of our Ktletaccete headmates.

Family gatherings? Or child rearing? Ashwin asks.

Both? I reply. At once? Like this? How are children treated at family gatherings?

Metabang has far more experience than I do, nem states.

Or any of us, Phage adds.

It was my specific responsibility, Metabang admits. 

Then, it gives me visions of some of its memories as it speaks internally.

I don’t think we have quite the same concept of a child on the Sunspot as the humans do here in this region of the Earth, Metabang says. Assuming that your family is typical, of course. People are people, regardless of their age. Of course, there’s the entire population of people still in living bodies who, for most of my life, were segregated from the Crew, or Elders, much like your children are here. And, until recently, they were all unaware of even who the Elders were, and it was my task to help maintain that segregation. But within that population there were people ranging from a few seconds old to two and half of our centuries old, and still are, as you know. And amongst that population, family structures are very fluid and amorphous and dictated by whim, trust, and consent.

Except for in the case of us Tutors, Abacus interjects. Who were assigned by the Auditor, until very recently.

Yes, Metabang acknowledges. In any case, within that population, people of all ages mingle constantly. It is the default state. I have never really seen it occur to anyone to purposefully segregate family members by age groups like this. Though, it may have happened elsewhere on the ship. I have a long and winding but narrow view of the history of the Sunspot’s cultures, after all. However, it frequently has naturally occurred. People of the same age do tend to relate to each other better over certain things, and to have similar amounts of energy. So some activities tend to interest specific groups of people that way.

That makes sense, I nod.

But, also, because everyone but the Monsters has their Tutor with them at all times, there has rarely ever been a cultural emphasis on making sure a very young person is accompanied by their Caretaker or older person at any time. Metabang explains. Caretakers often do spend a lot of time around their children, of course. But they can take a break at any time, for as long as they need. And any given youngster, regardless of age, is known to be under the guidance and protection of a Tutor, unless they’ve specifically dismissed that Tutor. I also expect that the lack of socio-economic pressures for exploitation that I’m seeing present on Earth tends to reduce worries that younger people will be taken advantage of by someone.

What about safety? What about a child getting hurt from playing too hard or exploring something dangerous? I ask.

Again, we Tutors have always been there, Metabang says. With access to the ship’s systems, including the nanites, we’ve been able to physically intervene when necessary. Though, certain injuries are useful lessons. But this is all changing, and we cannot be certain what future Sunspot cultures will look like. We might have to look at some of the stranger Network communities for clues to that.

Now we are at the bottom of the stairs, past the landing at the southwest corner of the basement, and stepping into the hallway there.

The basement consists of several rooms connected by a hall. Some of the rooms also have doors between them. The northernmost room, which is under the livingroom and diningroom, is the largest, and is considered the rec room. It has the ping pong table and from the sounds of it, it’s where our parents are.

As I turn the corner from the stairs and step into that hall, a three and a half foot tall dark haired Devin comes tearing breakneck down the hallway. His head tilts back in time with his movement as he watches our face with growing awe and surprise and he tries to slow down.

No one is chasing him. He just seems to be running for the fun of it. Or, maybe he’s heading to a bathroom.

“Woah there, kiddo!” I say. “That’s a pretty good neutrino impression you’re doing, zipping around like that!”

He manages to pull himself up short before slamming into our leg, and then steps back and cackles at my words. He doesn’t know what a neutrino is, but he managed to surprise an adult and get complimented in the process, so he knows he did good.

He drunkenly whips around and rockets off down the hallway toward the rec room without saying anything to me. I’m guessing by the way his feet haphazardly step this way and that while he runs that he’s also been spinning in place a lot.

“Tharah’th here!” he shrieks upon entering that room, and I finally feel like I’ve properly arrived at the family gathering.

Over the howling and yammering of those who are playing with the ping pong table or playing tag around it, I can hear the obnoxious noise of Super Mario Brothers coming from one of the other rooms.

We Pembers did not exactly get along with our siblings, Ashwin says. I personally missed most of it, but I do recall that their conflicting needs and high energy was a burden to our nervous system, and we moved out first.

So, moving out is a still a thing there? I ask, looking into each room as I pass it.

Of course. One cannot live in a place without eventually moving out of it.

Right, of course, I concede. But, that first move is a little different, when you’re going from living with your Caretaker or parent to living on your own.

I suppose it is, Ashwin says. Though the age at which people leave their Caretakers or Tutors really varies a lot. I know people who did not move away from their Caretaker until they themselves ascended to become an Elder, even though their Caretaker was already an Elder themselves. Whereas we first moved away when we were twelve or thirteen. I’m not clear.

That young?

Remember your conversions, Ashwin reminds me. Thirteen Sunspot years is about twenty Earth years. Also, we mature at different rates than humans. We were still culturally pretty young at the time, if ahead of our peers in development.

Right. I guess I just really can’t compare.

I apologize if this is offensive, Ashwin says. But I do find that learning about human families and children does make me feel like I am learning about a species of fauna in the Garden. I think, maybe, because I don’t have many other things to compare it to.

I chuckle and think, That’s fine. I get it. Goreth and I have compared visiting the Sunspot to being at a furry convention, so it’s totally fair.

I would like to go to a furry convention some day, Ashwin says.

You know we’re planning on it! I reply. We’re pretty sure our books will sell there.

Wonderful.

During this conversation and our slow ambling down the hallway to the rec room, Devin has passed us four times, running back and forth, occasionally followed by a Kelsey.

Kesley waves at us with a huge grin each time.

The other children, who are all engaged in activities more stationary than running around, are either too engaged with their peers to pay us any attention, or briefly look up at us with wide eyes and slack jaws as we enter the room.

Our dad is now under a small pile of giggling children, trying to climb on him like a playground toy set. He’s declaring loudly, “I am definitely, definitely too old for this!”

“OK, Riley, Penelope, and Winston,” Mom raises her voice kindly but sternly. “I think it’s time to give your uncle a break. Please get off of him.”

I stand and watch as it takes a few more reminders and directions from Dad for them to back off and give him room to get up and recover.

I lean our cane against the wall and, as soon as there’s enough room for us, I step forward and offer him our hand, which he gladly takes.

He shakes his head at the floor, breathing hard, and then says, “I’m glad you made it back inside. Have you had a chance to talk to your Grandma yet?”

I shake my head and shrug, gesturing up at the livingroom. I’m not sure I can talk over the din of the children.

“Ah, well,” he says. “No one’s being organized about it, so if you want to talk to her, you’d better wait up there and just head in when you have the chance.”

I feel like this whole thing is really morbid and creepy.

At past gatherings, she’d just come out and sit in her rocking chair and talk with everyone there at once. Though, usually she spent most of her time listening. Occasionally, she’d start questioning everyone like they were radio guests and she was the hostess, which was fun.

But this is weird. It feels wrong. It feels like somebody is going to miss out on something. Something that isn’t usually this restricted.

End of life events usually do feel this way, Ashwin notes.

I half frown, both for nems benefit and my Dad’s.

I take a breath as if to say something, then sigh and shrug more pointedly, shaking my head.

I then try to say, ‘I want to talk to her, but I can’t be upstairs right now,’ but no words come out of my mouth, and I fix him with an apologetic and frustrated look.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “I get it. How about another hug?”

I accept it and then look at mom.

She’s standing up from her seat with a frown on her face, gathering her purse and the crossword puzzle she was working on. But she says, “I can keep an eye out for you and text you when it’s all clear.”

I gape at her.

“If that’s OK with you?” she asks.

I nod, maybe emphatically.

She nods back and says, “I really meant well by all of this.”

History says that she really does have my back in this case. But my very own thoughts are fixated on the idea that she’s sabotaging things. Not necessarily out of any habit she’s had in the past, but maybe just the shock over how she really has never had our back or supported us in regards to our plurality.

Her outright hostility to the idea was devastating and terrifying, and bewildering. I really had felt like we suddenly had someone else’s mom instead then. She’s always struggled with our own showing of emotions and our inability to eat most foods and our other autistic needs. She has yelled at us before, but in the sort of anger that a lot of parents show their children. But that immediate shaky fear and alarm she showed when I tried to tell her we had DID was nothing we’d ever seen before.

But, it’s possible that so long as we don’t shove our plurality in her face, she’s willing to ignore it all for the sake of the fact that we are still family to her. That would be how she thinks.

And maybe her plan was to give us an opportunity to prove to the rest of the family that we’re actually sane. Which, honestly, is never going to work. We’ve already failed by being trans and transitioning.

Our dad is harder to read, but he just gave us a hug.

“So, what do you think?” our Dad says, gesturing around the room after mom has left it to go back upstairs.

I laugh a little bit and wobble my right hand, then look back at the cane to make sure it hasn’t fallen over. I step over to retrieve it just before Kelsey reaches for it.

For her, I manage to talk, “Sorry, Kelsey. I’d let you hold it, but then everyone else would want to, and it’s heavy and pointy, and it’s my third leg basically. Maybe some other time, when there’s fewer of you, OK?”

She solemnly nods.

I smile back at her and say, “Thank you!”

“Dank you!” she replies.

Now that I know that I can talk while in this room of chaos and auditory bewilderment, it’s easier for me to turn to my dad and say what I wanted to say just a moment ago, “I really do wish I could have kids. Even after being in the middle of this. I don’t know how long I can put up with this. But it doesn’t really make sense anyway, so I just try to ignore it and get my doses when I can.”

He chuckles and laughs and says, “Yeah, well. Normally you have a little help, too. It wouldn’t be just you. Unless that happened.”

“And I wouldn’t have this many at once,” I point out.

“Yes,” he says, grinning. “But sometimes you alone felt like this many at once.”

I pull my head back and look at him out of the corner of my eye. “I’ve never been this many,” I say experimentally.

“Of course not!” He says. “But, even one kid can be a lot sometimes, is what I’m saying.”

That’s not exactly not referring to our plurality still. I wonder.

“Anyway,” he says. “I know that ship’s sailed. I’m not trying to rub it in, really. Just.” He gestures. “They happen to be the conversation at hand, you know?”

I really, really want to tell him about our opportunities and our future hopes and plans, but they’d just sound like daydreaming about an afterlife he doesn’t believe in to him. It just pains me so much to know that tomorrow I could go to an incubator in a Sunspot nursery and touch it, to confirm to myself that it’s all real. And then come back the next day to bring my memories to Earth and write about it on our Patreon. It’s so heartbreaking that there’s this gulf of experience and beliefs between us now that will always be there.

But, also, I don’t even want to try. If the conversation gets too weird, one of my younger cousins will ask me what I’m talking about. And then everything will get even more awkward.

I squint and formulate a plan. A way to say something about our life on the Sunspot without making it obvious to anyone, not even him.

“So, you know how Uncle Joseph is making his own house by hand,” I say. “And, like, he’s talking about that right now, upstairs.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dad says. “I don’t think I could do that. Your mom and I tried remodeling part of a house once, and we never finished it.”

“I remember that,” I say. “Anyway. It just happens to be something some of my housemates are talking about doing, too. Only as a group effort. Kind of a commune without the culty aspects of it. Just, like something to do together to keep long term costs down. You know, avoid rent.”

He looks at me in surprise and says, “Really? Peter and Abigail?”

I shake my head quickly and dismissively, and say, “No. My other housemates. But maybe they could be involved too. There’s talk about how those of us with disabilities could still contribute if we wanted. And the ‘if we wanted’ part is pretty key, I think.”

He opens his jaw, keeping his lips in a tight O shape, and works his teeth with his tongue while he considers that. Then he shakes his head once to the left and says, “I’d normally be really cautious about that kind of thing. But, I can see with how things are going politically, and with the economy as bad as it is, it makes a lot of sense for someone like you. Let me know if you need help figuring things out. In fact. Just let me help you figure things out, if you think you’re going to participate. Or if you end up having to move.”

I think it worked. I think it went right over his head. Or it was plausible enough that he could tell himself that whatever suspicions he had were ignorable.

And I do feel like I’ve shared a small part of something big and important with him, and it helps a little.

“So, what are the plans like?” he asks.

I turn my head up and to the right, looking at him out of the corner of my eye, and say, “I think they’re still in the pipe dream phase. It might never actually happen. Kind of like circumnavigating the globe might be for Erik and Beau.”

“Erik and Beau?” he asks.

“My best friend and his boyfriend?” I remind him.

“Oh, yeah! Wait, they’re sailors? Like – ?”

“Beau is a very gay tall ship captain, yes, Dad,” I say. “But Erik is not of the sea as far as I know. But he sure is smitten with Beau.”

“Ah, well then.” He seems bewildered by this news, and then he looks around at the careening children as if suddenly concerned about them.

He’s not the type to worry about saying ‘gay’ in front of any children, but some of the parents of these children are.

He doesn’t say anything about it, though.

This train of thought has me wondering something, so I tentatively shift my attention to my other senses again. And it is absolutely not as bad as upstairs.

In fact, things are more free and available to me here than even in the backyard without mom in it. And that gets me wondering if it’s because of the childrens’ presence disrupting lines of consent, or muddling consensual realities? Or if it’s because our Dad is just not as uptight and skeptical as Mom is.

“Dad?” I ask. “Didn’t you one time say you encountered a ghost?”

He scowls but looks at me with kinder eyes and says, “Maybe let’s not talk about that around your youngest cousins. They don’t need nightmares tonight.”

“Ah, right. Yeah.” Then I tilt my head for a moment and ask, “Are you even religious, again? Like, you don’t ever really say much, just support Mom and all.”

He shrugs, “Why do you ask?”

“Just trying to keep it straight about where I came from,” I said. “And, you’ve always just kept me, and I bet everyone else, just a little bit curious.”

He smiles and says, “That’s good. Because I’m always just a little bit curious myself. Never really took to any sort of a dogma. It just seems unnecessary to me. But I can’t rule anything out, either. The rest is just getting along with people.”

“I think,” I say, “I may have inherited some of that from you.”

“Maybe you have.” He keeps casually watching the room with his hands in his pockets, and says, “Your mom is really the same way, you know. Just more intensely into it is all. In a way, that’s what Unitarianism is at its core, I suppose. Or, what it’s supposed to be. But I prefer a little less hubub than she does.”

I nod and hum in consideration of that, but now I find myself wanting to try something risky. But I can’t decide if my urge to experiment is actually malicious in nature, to try to get something over on my worse relatives above, or just to stretch my metaphysical muscles that have been cramping for the past hour or so. And I’m not sure if I have any arguments against doing it besides the risk, and that kind of bothers me.

“I’m going to sit down for a bit,” I say.

“Be my guest,” Dad says. “If you’ve got this room, I’m going to check on the older gamers down the hall. I’ll be just a moment.”

“Sounds good,” I say, taking Mom’s abandoned chair, putting our cloak on the back of it and pulling out our cellphone to hold in our hand, so I can feel it buzz if she texts. She hasn’t yet.

As he leaves, Devin runs up to me, holding a sucker tipped foam dart in his hands, turning it over without looking at it.

His eyes get really big and then he asks, “Do you like gunth?”

“Can’t really say that I do,” I tell him. “Toy guns, sure. Those are fun. But not real ones.”

“Yeah!” he says, and then runs off calling Kesley’s name like he’s got something to prove.

Well, there you go, Sarah. You’ve either torn down a gender stereotype or upheld it, depending on what Devin has to say.

I shake my head and think loudly, Anybody want to switch with me while I try something?

Sure, Goreth replies.

If you want to know the extent to which you can act outside your vessel, I can tell you what I can sense right now, Ni’a pipes up.

That’s OK, I tell them. I really just need to stretch that part of myself after the ordeal upstairs. It’s more the doing than the learning that I want.

That makes sense.

In the past, switching with Goreth has felt a lot like becoming Goreth. And the same was true when Ashwin or Phage fronted. Sometimes I wouldn’t even notice it happening. A lot of the time, really. Suddenly, we’d be a different person, and when I came back later it might feel like I was waking up for the first time, or I’d sort of just realize that I’m me and not whoever it was that had been fronting before me. Sometimes there’d be a continuation of our working memory, whoever took over from me would feel like they had been me previously. And sometimes I’d have complete amnesia about it and experience a blackout.

But, sometimes, we could feel the switch, and notice each other’s presence as we moved about in our shared psyche. Even then, however, it still felt transformative instead of like just swapping who was in the driver seat of a car. If Goreth took over for me, I’d feel their mind settling in next to mine. And then our thoughts and emotions would merge and we’d feel like a single being. And then, being co-conscious I could, briefly, feel myself as if in third person drifting back into our subconscious. And my memories of events after that might be sketchy.

But things have changed.

We can still switch like that, but it’s voluntary and with mutual consent.

And I’m not entirely sure if it’s purely from Phage’s gifts, or if the experiences we’ve had with visiting the Sunspot might have something to do with it, but now I can leave the front and remain fully conscious. I take both my working and long term memories with me, and turn my attention entirely away from the front and still feel like I’m me.

It does feel like falling asleep and immediately entering a dream, of course. But it’s honestly wonderful, because now I can purposefully visit our inworld and explore it, and then return to the front with intact memories of what I’ve done there.

But, I can do even better than that now, too. And that’s what I set out to do.

To make sure that Goreth has every faculty they need to be present with our cousins and watch the youngest ones, I wait until they come forward and are cofronting with me, with all the usual sensations of that.

Then, once they give me a mental thumbs up, I begin to extricate myself.

It’s possible that Goreth has to resist the reflex to mimic my own movements, but it’s probably not that hard. The front is kind of magnetic. Once you’re there, the default is to remain. It takes some effort of will to let go and leave.

It also takes some effort to leave in a different direction than inworld.

Instead of falling back, I move left. My direction.

I lose connection to the signals from our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, and all sense of having a body, and instead become a raw awareness of all of the physics immediately around us. Just slightly to the left.

It’s the interoception of reality itself, and my mind does translate it into regular sensory terms when I sift through memories of it. But, as far as I can tell, there are no nerve signals involved at all in this.

So quickly that I hardly perceive it as a transition, my awareness expands to encompass the entirety of the basement and everyone in it. 

But now I have to make an extra effort to understand what they are saying to each other, or to even interpret their actions. I’m not alive anymore and I’m not having the thoughts of a living being. And although I can feel their nervous systems functioning, creating their own separate minds, I cannot translate them into my own thoughts like I can do for my headmates when we share a body. There’s no true telepathy here. To do that, I’d have to make contact with them somehow and get their consent.

Ashwin thinks that when we do this we are still tethered to our body and still using some of the neurons there to form our strongest memories and make sense of everything. But sometimes I wonder if that’s true.

Making a point of double checking on the state of my system, I get to witness Ni’a siphoning off stress from our body and shunting it deep into the Earth’s crust. It is not unlike a whirlpool of sorts. A long, thin vortex of wobbling potentials.

It’s also like perceiving the essence of mathematics.

When I do return to my body I will have the fleeting thought that we should go to college again and take science classes. Not that we could ever afford that. But it’d be fun to understand all this a little better, and to also know when the professor doesn’t have any idea how what they’re talking about actually works.

Of course, every time Ashwin cooks food it’s a chemistry experiment that we all can examine in detail, safely at home. And on the Sunspot we can do weirder stuff. We have the freedom to explore and we learn these things on our own.

Here, in this house, my boundaries are different. But very informative.

Within the concrete box that is the basement, I can feel the shape of my being eb and flow with the movements of the people, air currents, sounds, and light within it. The heat there is part of me, too, as is everything else. And all of these energies and how they interact with the space and matter beyond the basement gives me a sense of overall shape. 

At the walls and floor, everything either becomes suddenly dampened or suddenly more intense, depending on the type of energy transferred. This creates a sense of skin there that informs me of most of everything, and makes it feel like everything outside of that is the rest of the world.

I can expand beyond that if I want to, but I didn’t set out with that motivation, so I don’t.

Also, with the presence of my father and the movements of the children, I can feel my permissions subtly changing within the scope of each person’s awareness. This is not a thing that a human understanding of physics can explain. 

I know that near my father, for instance, I can change the flow of heat suddenly to cause him to feel a chill in the air if I want to. He is always expecting that. And I might be able to speak to him by causing the air molecules around him to vibrate in the pattern of words. It might even sound like my voice, because he might expect it to. Though it might be more likely he’d mistake the voice for someone he’s lost, and thus shape the actual sound to resemble them more.

And in one corner of the basement where there are two children and no adults, the paths and shapes of photons themselves are malleable to me. I might be able to create for them a shape of shadows or glowing light. Though I don’t want to scare them at all, so I don’t do that.

The ceiling and the floors above are a different matter.

There is still a sense of the energies changing as they hit the matter of the house, and the sensation of that creating a boundary to what is me and what is not. But the added complexity and intensity of personal autonomy and lack of consent from the people above is an even stronger barrier, and feels like an enormous weight that is slowly crushing me.

I can’t detect who is specifically where upstairs, but I can sense the differences in that weight.

The living room, kitchen, and dining room are downright oppressive.

My grandma’s room much less so. But it’s still heavy.

And as I examine that area of the house, I can feel the weight shifting, like a wave receding. And in its place the room becomes an area with almost greater permission than all the dirt surrounding the house, as deep as I might go into the Earth’s crust! Much like that corner of the basement where the two children are playing alone.

I do have reactions to everything I discover, but they are more calm, detached, as if they are happening further away. But with no sense of centralization, no locus but my own self, which also has no locus.

I experience a sense of hope, and the potential of forming a plan.

When I set out to do this, this was all that I had intended to do. I had no motive to reach up through the floor and interact with my grandmother in this way, so I don’t.

But it seems possible that when I visit her in person, in our vessel, we’ll be able to talk to her about things our dad might not even accept, so long as no one else is in the room with us.

Perhaps that is why we’ve always gotten along so well with her.

She used to babysit us when we were all so much younger. Then, through our teens, we’d talk to her one on one as often as we could, whenever our family visited. Occasionally they were nice, long conversations during which we’d felt like we were really bonding. 

But so much has happened since our transition, and our ability to visit was impaired so much by our estrangement from the rest of our family, that we’ve never truly told her just who we are. Even during our last visit, which we made on our own using a windfall from our crowdfunded money, our conversations were mostly about what our surgery was like and how we felt.

Maybe, if you are most people, you might be thinking that we should be asking questions of her, and listening to her, instead of yearning to disclose our secrets and tell her about ourselves. Especially if her time on Earth is shorter than typical, and the morbid anticipation of several of our family members is not unfounded.

But, the way it works with our grandmother is that she gets to the questions first. And then, when we answer them, she follows that up with her own accounts. And then the conversation flows from there.

We compare lives and experiences, and both learn from each other.

It’s just always been the way we’ve done things, and it has been fairly equitable.

We’ve learned how she was the middle child of three girls, and felt neglected by her parents. How she met our grandfather in university philosophy class, but found commonality in an interest in interior design. How they became partners in business as well as in family, and the strains of that. How having six children became her entire world for three decades, while his business languished and he had to seek employment from Boeing to meet the bills. And how, as the last of her children moved out, she chose to leave her Lutheran church for a more progressive Unitarian congregation, and dabbled with hosting a radio show through the local university. Which is where she got her habit of being the one to ask questions.

And so much more.

However, I do have questions for her this time, yes. Some of which are forming right now.

But there’s a problem.

A sharp and sudden increase in sonic energy is erupting from the northeast corner of the rec room, and Goreth is moving our vessel quickly to attend to it. The nexus of that sound and activity is tense with quick biological changes and firing nerves.

And by the time that I process this and decide to start returning to our vessel, I can feel everything above me begin to shift, and all that terrible weight slides toward the door to the basement, near the front of the house.

As I reconnect to my body, I do have a coherent thought.

During my time outside of my body, I didn’t once sense another being like myself besides my headmates. And I don’t know what that means.

Either the world is spookily absent of beings like us. Or, more likely, there is a reason I couldn’t detect them.

Are they just so big, so decentralized, so ubiquitous that we exist within them like we exist within the atmosphere?

Or is it that the sheer force of skepticism and banality of most people keeps us so divided and restricted that we are few and far between?

Is it just a function of the congregation of people in our grandma’s house, and that our perceptions of the local population aren’t true to the rest of the world?

Or what?

This thought seems completely incongruent with the screaming that hits my ears as I rejoin our psyche, and the quick, calm, but super focused thinking of Goreth.

Adrenaline has flushed our system of all remaining chaos, flattening our stuttering processes, and giving clarity to Goreth’s memories of what to do in a moment like this.

Kelsey is in more pain than she likely has experienced before, her fingers having been pinched in a poorly made toy.

Devin is hovering, acting like he’s worried he will be blamed for it, but also dutifully filling everyone in on what he thinks happened.

Goreth is just kneeling before Kesley, thinking about what to do if there is an open wound, already formulating words to tell the other children, to seek the assistance of our father, and asking Kelsey if they can see her fingers, when the avalanche of God’s wrath from above rolls into the room through the doorway.

“What is going on in here?” Penny shouts.