Somewhere in the past year, we’d earned enough money one month that we were able to buy a plushie that was long enough we could hug it with both arms and legs. It was basically a body pillow the shape of an axolotl. It helped with our neck and shoulder pains, reducing muscle knots in the morning, and it was cute. Orange, yellow, and white.

Sarah had named it Smudge. And when I’d asked why, she shrugged and said it was cute and then finished brushing our teeth.

That morning, I was the one to awaken, hugging Smudge, feeling myself rise from a vivid and wild dream that I was desperately grasping to keep ahold of. It felt like I was being pushed up into our misshapen, ugly ape of a body against my will. But when I got there it was disappointingly familiar.

It hurt.

A lot less than it would have hurt a year ago, but it had been lying on its side for several hours and the results of the uneven pressure on joints, hips, and shoulders couldn’t be helped.

The inside of my eyelids sparkled and glimmered like looking up into a waterfall of stage glitter lit by a sunlamp. And my breath felt heavy and hard to draw in.

I let myself yawn to get more oxygen, and didn’t really feel it reach my blood, so I opened my eyes to try to feel more awake.

It should be about noon.

I couldn’t see a damn thing.

There was light, and the hints of shapes around the edges of it, but it was like the center of my vision didn’t even exist.

It was so confusing and a bit scary, until memories of past migraines came back to me.

When we were twenty-four, recovering from bottom surgery and still struggling with some things, a doctor had prescribed us Wellbutrin for what he claimed was our depression.

Dutifully, we’d taken it. 

For eight days.

In those eight days, we’d started experiencing artifacts in our vision, daily episodes of this. It was a little different each time. Sometimes just crescents of extra brightness. Sometimes increased snow and afterimages. Sometimes everything in our peripheral vision was rendered as scintillating stained glass. 

We were still living in Washington. This was just before we’d moved.

On the day that the headache hit, Erik got wind of our symptoms and said it was a migraine. He knew we were trying out Wellbutrin, because we’d complained about it. Without us prompting him, he looked up the possible side effects and found migraines listed prominently there.

He told us to take ibuprofen and remain in the dark until we could function. Stay in bed, no lights, no music, just rest. Dream, if possible. Experience the pain. Think of it as interesting. Don’t focus on how much it sucks.

And when we’d been able to function better, we’d told our doctor about it, and he told us to stop taking the Wellbutrin. We hadn’t even started on the full dose, so we didn’t need to titrate it.

And ever since then, we’ve had migraines.

Most of the time, they were silent migraines, no pain. And other migraineurs we talked to always told us we were lucky. It kind of made us feel like we weren’t really having migraines, except for the one or two times a year we’d get a really bad one.

And, really, those auras are unmistakable, even if you don’t get the accompanying headache.

It’s possible that our habit of treating ourselves well on the very first onset of symptoms kept them to a minimal impact.

But we were also probably lucky.

We’d learned shortly after that that our mom had had migraines a lot in her 20s. And that we might be genetically susceptible to them. And after experiencing them strongly, since the Wellbutrin, I’ve always felt like I had memories of really mild ones in our teens, but they’d been so faint we hadn’t recognized them for what they were.

There’s just sort of this feeling you get with a migraine that says, “This is a migraine.” Even if no other symptoms crop up, and it’s just that feeling. That knowledge. It’s a kind of dysphoria that also feels like you’re dissociating from something in the middle of your mind that shouldn’t be there. A something that’s nothing. A faint weight.

At least, that’s what it’s like for me.

And I was definitely experiencing that, only increasingly amplified as I lay there in bed starting to panic.

Trying to see through my obscured and nearly absent vision to reach for the ibuprofen with my right hand, I started to be able to pick out the glitter in my vision again. It was what was obscuring it. An expanding ring of sparkling with Nothing in the middle of it.

My hand found our amber colored sunglasses first. Right there on our nightstand. We used those maybe three times a year at most. I could feel my hand starting to shake with the effort.

Shit.

The pills should be right next to the glasses, and next to that our glass of water that I was trying not to spill. The glasses would help, part of the routine. 

I brought my left hand out from under Smudge to help unzip the glasses case.

You’d think, sharing a body with my twin sister, a supernatural monster from across the stars, its child, and a handful of psychic aliens, someone would be able to help me with this. But no.

Migraines didn’t really mess with our plurality, it turned out. For some systems, they seemed to. For us, a good migraine, at most, just made us all hurt and not want to talk or hear anyone. We could still switch, and feel each other, and huddle under the covers together, and all that. It’s just that we usually didn’t think to do so.

It had to do with stimuli, I think.

If I’d managed to get up and hobble out into the living room or kitchen to complain to a housemate about it, it might end up being Sarah who grumbled at them. But as long as I stayed in bed and did relatively little else, I could be the only one fronting for the entire experience.

I normally would have been too preoccupied with the migraine to even think about it. But I’d just had a dream where I’d been interacting with everyone else.

As I pushed the sunglassed onto my face I mumbled, “If I wasn’t in the front right now, I wouldn’t come forward either.”

Nobody responded. Not even a stir of emotion in my chest.

I sighed and felt my boobs hug Smudge in the process, then reached for the pills.

I still couldn’t see, but the light hitting my eyes made them ache a little less with the sunglasses on.

The pressure in my head was mounting a little more slowly.

Hand on pill bottle, which rattled lightly with the jostle. Probably six pills left.

I didn’t move for several moments, hand just resting there, having achieved that much. I wanted to see.

Why was I having a migraine now?

Why did it have to be after that dream?

I wanted to spend the next few hours reliving the dream, not doing this.

And then, a small walnut sized area of my mind, in the right side of my head, started to clench like an angry muscle and really fucking hurt.

It got worse from there, and I have never really since been able to remember much of what any of us did that afternoon, besides become a nexus of pain.

Hours passed, but it felt like eons and no time at all.

I do remember as we slowly started to recover having a moment on the bed, all sweaty, kicking off our covers and pushing Smudge off onto the floor, and writhing onto our belly. I took our hands and placed them on the bed to either side of our breasts and pushed as if to do a pushup, but leaned forward, pressing my forehead into our pillow, feeling our muscles flex across our shoulder blades, wishing, wishing, wishing that I could flex my wings, tail lashing.

I wanted my claws.

I wanted to rend our mattress in rage and dysphoria.

I wanted to roar, and I think I actually might have.

Some short anti-time after that, Abigail knocked on our door to see if we were OK. It was late enough in the day that she was home.

I recognized her knock. It’s so much more tentative and faint than anything Peter ever does.

I didn’t want her to see me like this, whatever this was.

I was afraid she’d be terrified of my draconic form.

I was ashamed I wasn’t a dragon.

The shape of the headache might horrify her.

I don’t know. I just. I couldn’t.

“Migraine,” I managed to growl loud enough for her to hear.

“Ah, OK,” I think I heard.

And a bit after that, our body began to relax enough and the pain to lift enough that we could actually sleep again.

We ate nothing that day, and didn’t miss it.

The next morning, we learned that both Abigail and Peter had delivered water to our bedroom door occasionally that evening, to make sure we were hydrated, and that we had, indeed, answered the door, opening it just a crack to receive the water. But I don’t remember doing that, and nobody else does either.

Sometimes amnesia isn’t you failing to remember what your headmates did when you were away. Sometimes it’s just missing moments that none of you remember.

“I reintegrated with myself last night. Or, I mean, yesterday,” I said, staring at my peanut butter toast, where it sat on the table.

A migraine could last several days. I was definitely still experiencing it, even if I was functional enough to stare at toast without sunglasses.

I think Niʔa, Ashwin, or Phage were doing something to reduce it, maybe. I couldn’t imagine any of them standing by and letting this happen without intervention. We’d had almost no migraines in the last year, after all.

Peter was seated at the table with us, leaning back, hand on handle of his gigantic coffee mug. Abigail was standing next to him, head about even with his, clutching her arms in her fuzzy bathrobe.

“I thought you weren’t going to do that for a month,” Abigail said.

“Yeah, it was kind of a surprise to me,” I said, counting each peanut in the extra-crunchy peanut butter. The counting didn’t actually involve numbers. “But, after I talked to the Collective, and Ashwin of course, I realized that communication is key. Like, I was so homesick I was panicking, honestly.”

“The Collective?” Peter asked.

“Yeah,” I said, glancing up at him, like he should know what I was talking about. “You know, like,” I half gestured with my forecl – hands, “weird, cute little things about this big, that look like if you crossed a crab with a cuttlefish? Sort of? And they flash light from their bellies. And they’re a person. The Collective.”

Peter shook his head, “Yeah, Goreth, we don’t have those here.”

“I know,” I said, looking back down at my toast. I was kind of hungry, but I didn’t think I could eat it. “Anyway, I think reintegration doesn’t work very well for the human brain. It’s got to catch up and that hurts.”

“Sounds scary,” Abigail said. “Maybe you should get an MRI or something.”

Peter looked up at her and said, “That’d be cool as fuck. But getting a neurologist to sign off on that with only a migraine probably won’t happen.”

“Worked for me,” she said.

“Yeah, but,” Peter squinted, trying to fully remember the details of her past. “You had other things going on Sweetie. You had a neurologist already.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

“But, imagine, an active MRI with all those people in there battling a migraine with their psychic powers?” Peter said, gesturing at me. “I really wish we could do that.”

“This is weirder and more confusing than discovering I was a dragon,” I said. “Weirder than our plurality itself. I fully expect that if I step out the door right now, I’d see the Aft Endcap looming above the horizon, right there. But I know it shouldn’t be.”

“Like in Sarah’s drawing?” Peter asked.

“Yeah.”

“It’s overcast.”

“Oh, thank Phage,” I said.

You’re welcome, came from below.

“You didn’t really,” I mumbled into my collarbone.

“What was that?” Peter asked.

Of course I did, Phage thought. Just not this me. And not for you. Entropy happens.

“Sorry, Peter,” I said. “Phage is just thinking bullshit at me.”

“So, sort of back to normal?”

“Guess so.”

“Hi, Phage,” Abigail said at me.

“It says ‘good morning’,” I replied, right as it was thinking that.

She smiled.

“I think Sarah and everyone else are sleeping in,” I said.

“You said that already,” Peter pointed out.

“Ah.”

“Do you want to go back to bed? You probably should. You’re not touching your toast.”

I narrowed my eyes and listened to my ears and felt for my body. No, I wanted to move, to get blood flowing. Enough of the migraine had lifted, I was starting to feel relief. And I wanted to exercise it. Breathing was becoming easier.

“No, I think I’m going to eat that,” I pointed to the toast. “And I also think, if I don’t constantly remind myself that I don’t have wings, I’m going to try to fly.”

“Just don’t jump off anything,” Abigail said.

“Well. Maybe tell us more about it,” Peter suggested. “What was the Sunspot like?”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling and huffed a breath, tears brimming in my eyes, and went over the events of the previous day in my head. Just visualizing them.

There were two days to pick from, really. One where I had talked to Karen and where I’d watched from the side as Sarah took us through an afternoon with friends and having dinner and writing. And one in which I’d been somewhere else entirely. And they both felt as real, as a part of my life, as each other.

And since Peter had asked about the Sunspot, that came more naturally to the front. Those memories were ever so slightly more vivid and ready to relive.

“I met so many people,” I said. “And not all of them were on the Network or in nanite exobodies.”

“What are nanite exobodies?” Abigail asked.

I held up my left hand, looking at it, and said, “Well, like thi – Ah. Hm.” I let my hand drop into my lap and said, “As you can see, I have a whole new set of reflexes already. Especially when I’m thinking about the Sunspot.” Then I explained, “It’s the same thing as the nanites we destroyed last year, that were in the ground, in the communications probe that we never dug up. Only, the Sunspot is full of them. And people use them to make bodies they can walk around in. Like in, uh, I mean, so many movies.”

“Oh. OK.”

“I had one. I was shown how to make it almost right away, so that I could feel more real,” I told them.  I decided not to derail my first point by saying that I’d been my draconic self. I wanted to, but I also wanted to describe the people. So, I said, “Anyway, not everyone had one of those. There were still living people, in living organic bodies. And they were all different.”

“Neat!”

“No, I mean. Ashwin has explained it, and I think they’ve told you about it, or we have. But I don’t think we’ve really gotten the idea across. Metabang’s book kinda does, but there’s so much it takes for granted, having lived there itself the whole time,” I rambled. “No. This was bigger than a furry convention.”

“Heh,” Peter chuckled.

“At a big furry convention, you’ve got like fifty wolves and fifty dragons, and a smattering of birds, opossums, foxes, and unrecognizable fursuits, and then just a bunch of humans wearing ears. There, on the Sunspot, every person looks like they’re from a different species. Every one of them chimerical. And they’re all just walking around, visiting each other, enjoying their days, and making all sorts of artwork.”

“Wow,” Abigail said.

“And they’re all psychic, like Ashwin?” Peter asked.

“Yep,” I said. “But, like Ashwin, not telepathic, just that weird subtle telekinesis that can’t move pennies across a table but can make the air boom like thunder if everyone believes they can do it.”

“Right.”

“And they really don’t do a whole lot that’s immediately noticeable with it. Mostly just keep their bodies super healthy, like they’re trying to do with ours,” I said.

“So, you fit right in,” Peter quipped.

“I did get the impression, talking to Ashwin, though,” I said in lower tones, “that if some kind of war broke out on the Sunspot, it would be unlike anything we could imagine here. They’ve just had a huge, centuries long revolution, and they somehow managed to keep the physical violence to a minimum. Or something like that. The ship survived, anyway.”

Peter put his meaty palm down on the table, and said, “People have always dreamt and hoped that aliens would come some day and save us all from our stupidity. Enough that other people have warned that they might come to invade us. Or just step on us unknowingly while passing by. And all I can think, hearing this, is that I’m glad we don’t have their technology or magic, or whatever it is. Because, fuck.”

“Peter,” I said, looking up at him through my brows from my tilted head. “You know what I really have trouble believing right now?”

“Everything?”

“Besides that.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t believe that I’m in a human, or human-like body, sitting here, talking to two human beings about where I’ve just come from, and you both are acting like I’ve just gone to a park in a foreign country or something,” I said. “How are we this lucky to have met the two of you?”

Peter glanced at Abigail, who nudged him, then said, “Look, kid. Sorry. Friend. My dear dragon friend. We’ve been living with you and Sarah, and Ashwin and Phage and whoever else has come over from the Sunspot in there, and witnessing your feats daily. This household has become a place of magic. Stupid, pointless, funny magic most of the time, with talking air, and perpetually warm coffee mugs, mostly. But I’ve also seen you heal, to the point that it looks like you’re actually flying sometimes. And after all that, it’s just real, you know?”

I swallowed, and had to ask about one of Sarah’s big worries, “So, what about our income?”

He dismissed that with a wave of his hand, “You’re working on that. It will come when it comes. We’re doing OK. Maybe you’re physically better, but holy shit, you have your hands full. You have your brain full!”

I smiled wanly.

“Recovery always takes longer than anyone allows for,” Peter said. “And I want to see what you all can do when you’re given the room to actually recover. I’d be lying if I didn’t say my budget really screams with the pain of it sometimes. Stretched like it’s on a rack. But it’s worth it. And you all really do what you can to keep your impact minimal. Seriously. You’re cheaper than a dog.”

“Oh, great, thanks.”

“No. Listen. That medicaid, food stamps, and Patreon leavings you scrape in? It keeps you healthy and happy and covers most of your costs. And if you weren’t living here, I wouldn’t be renting that room out. At least not yet. We’d just be using the whole house for ourselves. You’re good.”

I didn’t know how to accept that, emotionally, so I just took a deep breath and sighed it out and said, “Thank you,” without looking at him.

“Now, eat your peanut butter. I’ve got to go take a shower,” he said, slapping the table.

When he left, Abigail sat in his place, leaning forward a bit, and watched us.

I reached out and picked up one slice of the toast and took a small, gentle bite out of it. It certainly wasn’t a raw steak on the floor.

“What’s it like being a dragon?” Abigail asked.

I felt my phantom wings unfold and my chest fill with fire at the validation of that question, and the memories of the day before it sparked.

My eyes completely full of tears, I swallowed the half chewed toast and rubbed the roof of my mouth free of peanut butter with my tongue and swallowed that, then looked up at her and said, “I got to fly, Abigail.”

She moved her mouth as if to start to say the word ‘wow’ again, but stopped silently at the first ‘w’ and almost shook her head.

“I mean, the body I’d made was too heavy for it. But I just needed to hollow it out to make it work. And it’s not really shaped for full aerodynamic flight, but the nanites can float when they’re on the Sunspot,” I told her. “I was able to use my wings for propulsion and my tail for steering, just like swimming through the air. And I miss it.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“That’s OK,” I said. “I’m sorry it’s hard to visualize or understand. But I’m going to write it down. I’m going to write a book and put this all down, and you’ll be able to reread it. So you can hear it and read it.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ve always felt like I wasn’t supposed to be human.”

“I know.”

“I’ve grown up with humans. I act like a human a lot of the time. I especially know that after living amongst aliens for a day.”

“That makes sense.”

“But, now I know for a fact that I’m not human. And I never will be again.”

“I really do see a dragon when I look at you. I’m not just humoring you when I say that.”

I smiled and shook my head and wiped tears from each eye, and snorted up a bunch of snot, and then said, “I don’t think it would matter any more if you were humoring me. I know what my future is now.” 

Then I took a shuddering, cool, clean, actual breath of oxygen rich air.

No matter how long I had left to live on Earth, be it two or ninety-two more years, or three hundred and fifty, my future was firmly on the Sunspot.

I’d get to experience two things, even. I’d get to experience death, someday, and whatever actually lay beyond that. And life on the Network as myself. Simultaneously.

And the thought didn’t bother me at all.

“Do you think you’ll have a migraine every time you do this?” Abigail asked.

“Oh, god, I hope not,” I said. That would suck.

—

Erik.

We’d sent him the text, “Can we do that cannon beach trip with you and Beau, please?”

“Oh, shit, yeah! Come on!” he’d replied back within minutes, as if we were going to go right then.

But we scheduled it for that Saturday. And we’d had a few more nights of recombination, resyncing between my selves, by then. With no more migraines, thankfully.

And it was a cloudy, but not overcast day in the Winter, and pretty nice all around, if a bit cold.

We’d left in time, in Beau’s car, to get there for lunch, which we’d packed. And then a walk along the beach without worrying about walking back in the dark.

The plan was to pay for dinner somewhere, our share on Peter’s dime, and watch the sunset. Like we’d done before, last Spring, for Ashwin. But this time it was for me. To remind me I was back on Earth.

But, also, we needed to talk at length with Erik and Beau.

Cannon beach at low enough tide is a wide open flat space that, in the winter, often has very few people on it.

It’s very flat.

Like the horizon is flat.

Too flat.

The whole world is too flat.

Not like a pancake. Like a really big ball. Ashwin can see the curve, and now I kinda can too. In contrast to the way it should curve.

It’s just that the curve is too big that it looks flat, and it curves the wrong way.

And, the fucky thing is, when I’m on the Sunspot, I have similar feelings about the curve of the world there.

Both worlds are wrong now.

Anyway, we were all in the middle of this big open, effectively private flat space, where there were no cuttlecrabs and just way too little wildlife in general, and talking as we walked.

It should be ours enough that we could do something funky if we needed to.

Ashwin looked down at Erik as he walked between us and Beau, and said, “Put the word out regarding your request.”

“Oh!” Erik kinda actually bounced. “Cool!”

“You should know.”

“Uh oh,” Erik said.

“We Ktletaccete have been clambering to come over here,” Ashwin explained.

“But?”

“We don’t perceive time the way you do. After as long as we live, our sense of urgency is very different from yours,” nem said.

“Ah, yeah, I guess I can see that,” Erik sounded a bit deflated but contemplative.

“If you keep interrupting me, I’m going to be giving you quite an up and down ride,” Ashwin said. “Like a see-saw.”

“You’re getting that idiom wrong on purpose, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

Erik went to kick us playfully in the foot, and Ashin stepped aside and said sternly, “Do not.”

“OK.”

“You can get me back by hitting me with more of your puns, please,” Ashwin said.

“You got it!”

Beau was smirking, and giving us knowing looks.

“Make them go over my head and laugh at me.”

“I’ll do my pest,” Erik said. He knew by now that Ktletaccete don’t pronounce their ‘p’s and tend to replace them with ‘b’s. Ashwin’s accent was almost totally gone, but that weak pun and its implications did not go over their head.

“OK, listen,” Ashwin continued after nem had chuckled. “Attitudes have changed a lot since learning what I have had to say about Earth, and the experience of being here. And they’ve changed even more in the past few days, while Goreth has been visiting the Sunspot and answering questions. This changes the demographics of who wants to come over. There are much fewer who want to do so. We are not clambering anymore.”

Erik looked really disappointed.

“Do not worry, please. I am just preparing you for the process,” Ashwin reassured him. “The Sunspot has a larger population than Earth and all have been informed. Imagine if you had a small vessel, like a car, that nobody else in the world had. And you could give one other person a ride.”

“OK?”

“And maybe one tenth of the population of the world was considering taking you up on that ride,” Ashwin said. “Even here on Earth, that would be a lot of people. And you could only take one.”

“Oh.”

“On tenth of nearly eight billion, Earth’s population, is eight hundred million, Erik. And if the percentage was only a tenth of a percent, that would be eight million. Eight million people want to ride in your car. Imagine that.”

“Oh, right, right. I’ve done this math before for autism and plurality, and being trans, and shit like that,” Erik said.

“Yes,” Ashwin said, as we continued to walk. “So, the demand is something like a hundredth of a hundredth of a percent of what it was before, upon hearing the news. We have so much patience, almost all of us can wait and see what happens before deciding to take the plunge, as you’d say.”

“Ah. Uh. So, what does this mean, exactly?”

“It means that the few people who do want to come over and jump systems to live with someone like you are very eager to do so,” Ashwin said. “And most of them are very, very old.”

“I guess that makes sense,” he replied. Then glanced up and asked, “Why?”

“When you have lived as long as my elders have, even in an existence as diverse and magical as the Network can be, there comes a point when a lot of people do not want to exist anymore,” Ashwin explained. “And, it is possible, on the Network, to decide to stop existing. And we’ve come to accept that, and try to celebrate when it happens. In the end, it has kept our Network population down to a manageable 53 billion ancient Crew.”

Erik doubled over and blew a raspberry, spewing imaginary coffee all over the beach in front of him, then turned bodily toward us and shouted, “What?”

“Remember, a hundredth of a hundredth of a percent of that want your approval and consent to visit with you for the rest of your life,” Ashwin said. “Though, there are others, too. You have your pick.”

“No, I mean,” Erik frowned, and kicked at the sand deliberately. “What’s the energy cost of that? Like. What is the computational cost of that many people living on something like the Matrix? How does that work?”

“How much energy does your brain use?” Ashwin asked.

Erik squinted up at us as Beau was nodding knowingly.

“What is the largest plural system that you know of on Earth?” Ashwin asked.

Erik relaxed and stared off at the trees further up the beach, “Oh, right. I’ve read of some who have billions. Like a whole planet. Or even a whole universe in there. Nobody believes them, but I do. Like, why not? It’s against my religion not to believe them.”

Beau snirked.

“I do have a religion, Beau. It’s called the religion of me!”

“That’s why I love all of you,” his boyfriend replied. “You’re my church.”

Erik turned back to us and said, “So, it’s the nanites, right? Your advanced alien species has figured out how to put the computational power of billions of human brains into all the sand in your world.”

“Not human brains,” Ashwin said. “Ktletaccete brains. But, that’s a terrible way to describe it, yes.”

“OK, so how does this work, then?” Erik asked.

“That’s what we wanted to ask you,” Ashwin said. “You have your pick. I told you what I did, because these eldest of us, despite all their crimes, are the neediest. You may feel that they should get top priority, based on that. And that would be reasonable, and no one would complain. And, you would also get access to an ally with more personal experience than anyone you could find on Earth. Someone on par with Phage. Not like Phage, but on par with it, experience-wise.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Or you could accept someone like me. There are Pembers, my fellow system mates, who would like to visit Earth with me, who’d be willing to ride with you. But, they would be happy with us.”

“Ok, yeah.”

“Or, you could go with a Tutor. There are a few in the list. Or another original Network entity. There are people who were created by rogue Crew members, because if the Network can create Tutors it can create other people, too. Just like your brain can create new people,” Ashwin added.

“Jesus. Anybody else?”

“The Collective.”

“The what?”

“They have my endorsement, by the way.”

“What are the Collective, Ashwin?”

“Goreth calls them cuttlecrabs.”

“OK, look,” Erik’s demeanor changed suddenly. “You get us to drag you all the way out here to talk to me, and I’m looking forward to catching up with Goreth, and you distract me with all this business! I want to talk to Goreth.”

“We were thinking of doing that over dinner,” I pushed forward enough to say.

Erik studied me for a second, screwing up his lips with hooded eyes, and then said, “Yeah. Good.”

“The cuttlecrabs are really cool, Erik,” I said. “But if you want to go with someone else, then Ashwin has a real problem to go over with you. You should do so while we’ve got this privacy.”

Erik nodded at the ground, saying, “Yeah, I get that. Sounds good.” Then he looked at us again and said, “Spill it, Ashwin.”

“We don’t want the same near disaster we had with Rräoha,” Ashwin explained. “We’d like to find a way for you to interview candidates before bringing one over. And, we need to do it without bringing anyone over first, because the Tunnel copies people. It makes you into two people, like splitting from trauma, or creating an introject.”

“Right. Which is why Goreth said they were going to do that re-merging thing monthly.”

“They’ve been doing it nightly, like me.”

“Right. Goreth’s texts said that much.”

I made us nod.

“And I’m also guessing that whoever hangs out with me isn’t going to get to remerge nightly, or maybe at all.”

“You understand,” Ashwin said.

“As best I can,” Erik admitted.

“I am thinking that Goreth and I could relay messages, but it would take a lot of time, and you might not get replies as quickly as you might hope,” Ashwin started to explain.

“That’s OK, I think I’m going with the Collective,” Erik said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Yes,” Erik scratched the back of his head. “They’re not Ktletaccete, like you said. Which, no offense to you, I kinda appreciate. And, then their name. I like it. They sound like my kind of people.” He shrugged. “I’m a collective, after all. It sounds good. And then, you say ‘cuttlecrabs’? Please. That’s like telling me, ‘Erik, you get to be a living meme’!”

Ashwin had been here for a year now, and living with us. They’d known what an Internet meme was since quite a while ago. Nem just nodded.

“Also,” Erik said. “It kind of seems like you just told me it was the most diplomatic choice, and I want to trust you on that.”

“That is what I was getting around to saying, yes,” Ashwin said. “Though there is a lot of information I have not divulged yet. More than I can tell you in one afternoon. And there may be more worthy and more viable, more compatible candidates.”

“You’ve manipulated me to pick the Collective. Let’s not make that work go to waste. Let’s do it.” Erik was smirking.

“You are being funny.”

“It doesn’t have to be puns, does it?”

“I like puns.”

“Anyway, I’m also being serious,” Erik said. “So, tell me. When can we do this thing?”

“Right now?” Ashwin suggested.

“Ooh,” Erik looked up at Beau.

Beau looked down at him with an even and unchanging expression for several seconds, and then said, “It is your system. I do like the sound of cuttlecrabs, even if we haven’t heard much.”

“They should get a chance to explore the universe, too,” Erik said.

“That’s what I think,” Beau said. “But I do think we should hear more about them.”

“I believe the tide will come in before dinner time,” Ashwin observed. “We should maybe walk toward an inland park bench before too long.”

“Yeah, let’s go over there,” Erik pointed.

And we all started trudging in a shallow diagonal toward the line of trees and what looked like a set of stairs set into them. More importantly, there was a big log of driftwood by the stairs that we could sit on for a while, if we wanted to.

But, our feet weren’t hurting.

We still had our cane with us, but we didn’t have to lean on it anymore.

It’s our friend. We take it with us everywhere. It feels lighter than it used to.

“OK, so the Collective,” Ashwin said. And they began to tell us all the history of the cuttlecrabs and how their little civilization within a civilization began to emerge on the Sunspot. If there were a lot of eerie coincidences between the world of the Sunspot and Earth, the cuttlecrabs were not one of them.

Here is what Erik was getting into.

You know how octopus intelligence is supposed to be one of the weirdest things on Earth? Like, how their neurology is kind of decentralized, and if you cut off one of their arms, that arm will be way smarter than one of our arms when it’s cut off, and it will try and, like, do things?

You know, to the point where people unscientifically speculate that they must be ancient alien beings?

The cuttlecrabs are like that to the Ktletaccete. Only, no one knows if they were dragged into space from their long lost home planet with the Exodus Ships, or created there as someone’s genetic experiment.

And they spent the last hundred and thirty some millennia watching the Ktletaccete and learning their language, mimicking what they heard in nonsensical sounding ways while everyone thought they were the equivalent of our parrots.

And, who knows? Maybe parrots are our cuttlecrabs and we just haven’t lived with them long enough. Or elephants maybe.

I mean, probably not. Our science doesn’t support that idea, but then, the Ktletaccete are way more advanced than we are and remained ignorant of the cuttlecrabs for all that time.

Notice how I’m not describing to you what the cuttlecrabs are like, though? Or just how they made themselves known?

There’s a lot of story there to tell. And they do tell it themselves.

This is the relevant stuff for this moment in my book.

The other important part of it, which we’ve already talked about briefly, is that they have sort of a hivemind.

Each one can retain enough memories and personality to talk for itself, but still tends to mostly think in terms of the Collective. Or sub-Collectives. And that’s part of how they stayed hidden for so long, along with some of the laws about fauna the Ktletaccete of the Sunspot had. They were just a little too alien for each other.

Now, here’s the thing.

The Ktletaccete are not human. They do not think like humans. Their neurology doesn’t work like ours.

But, something about how their Network works, and the way consciousness works in our own brains, and the way the Tunnel works, and maybe the help of Phage, makes it possible for us to visit each other and to share neurologically based functions like linguistic centers and memories.

It took the Ktletaccete about three centuries of studying the cuttlecrabs to determine if it was safe to connect them to the Network via neural terminals, their neurology was so different.

We didn’t know if this would work.

But the cuttlecrabs wanted to try, and so did Erik, and Phage and Niʔa were also enthusiastic about it.

Phage, who’d famously been a sourpuss about a lot of this stuff.

So, in the end, we all talked to Erik about it, until it was nearly dinner time, and we were sitting on the log with water lapping at our toes and the sun already set.

The sky was still light, but bright pink to the West. And I was able to call it ‘the West’, because that’s what it was.

I’d watched as the others were talking.

And my old childhood dream of flying out to the sun with my own wingpower to grip it in my claws like a hot ember that could never harm a dragon like me still haunted me.

Not even the magic of the Ktletaccete could allow me to do that. But I still wanted to.

But I knew, right then, that millions and millions of parsecs away, possibly further, I might also be flying low over purple treetops in the daytime, roaring at Sunspot ‘birds’ with the exhilaration of it.

And that I’d remember having done it upon waking up tomorrow.

Sarah had already decided she had to go over, too.

After sharing my memories while cofronting, she couldn’t not.

But the sun was well on its way around the other side of the planet, and our very rocky moon was already out, and we were hungry.

Erik was kicking his feet and staring down at the sand, holding Beau’s hand, while he listened to Niʔa use our vocal cords to explain how it would work.

I filled our lungs with air, thinking about how we’d have cuttlecrabs in our system for a few moments, but that they weren’t here to stay with us, necessarily.

And it would be happening in a moment or so. It might even be happening right now.

The reason we’d been doing my transfers at night was because of me. I’m so attached to my Earthly body, such a product of it, as much as it had always felt alien and wrong to me, that my consciousness is used to fronting. So, the easiest way for me to be as conscious as possible while in our inworld was to be dreaming. And that was something I wanted.

The same went for Sarah.

But for the others, it didn’t matter nearly as much.

And as for Erik receiving a system hop, right here on the beach, well, that’d be a lot like how Rräoha, Phage, and Ashwin had jumped to the Murmuration’s system a year ago. Temporarily for Ashwin and Phage, permanently for Rräoha. At least so far.

And we still don’t know if there isn’t a dormant Ashwin over in the Murmuration, refusing to emerge because they want to keep their instances of consciousness to a minimum and prefer being in our system.

Once the memetics of a person and their memories imprint themselves on a set of human neurons, it’s not exactly like that imprint goes away. It just might get dissociated enough to rarely ever be triggered into consciousness again, but it’s probably still there.

With Phage and Phage’s gifts in the mix, however, it’s hard to say.

Erik slapped his thighs with both hands suddenly and said, “OK, this sounds good. I think we can do it. We’re ready over here.” And then he sat up straight and stared off at the horizon.

“Goreth? Sarah? May we have your express consent, too?” Niʔa asked, looking up at the distance, too.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Yes,” Sarah followed shortly after.

We felt our head nod. “You shouldn’t feel a thing, unless you want to,” Niʔa said.

I wanted to tear up for some reason, so I said, “I’d like to say, ‘hi’.”

“Do you want the Collective in our system too?” Niʔa asked us after a couple seconds. “Because they’d love that, I’m pretty sure.”

Erik and Beau glanced over at us, a little surprised each.

“Would that be OK, Sarah?” I asked.

There was a bit of a pause, then through my tears she screwed our face up into a smirk and snarked at me, “You want to give us crabs?”

“Yes!” I said, bobbing our head.

Sarah broke out cry-laughing and then said, “Sure. Let’s do it.”

“Murmur and the Shouting Backward can have some, too, if they want,” I said after a bit.

It was Niʔa that made us nod after that, in the Ktletaccete way, lifting our head up a bit.

Then I felt what was kind of like a tickling, scuttling sensation in our ribs, right above our diaphragm. Like emotions from someone else bubbling in the lower part of our chest. I knew it was our brain making synesthetic interoceptive sense of the Collective moving around in our subconscious.

We’d been feeling each other in similar ways since we could remember.

“This might be so weird,” I said. I looked over at Erik and said, “Ready to have aliens in common with us?”

Erik exploded with a snicker and said, “I’ve been ready for half the week, Goreth.”

“You know, we’re being given a good name for our little group here. We could call all ourselves the Collective,” I suggested.

“Do you have any idea how many systems call themselves the Collective?” Erik pointed out.

“Yeah, but how many of them have cuttlecrabs?”

He breathed in sharply, pointing a finger sideways at me, and picked at a tooth with his tongue. Then he said, “I’m hungry. Is this done?”

Then his eyes widened a little.

“Oh, hi,” he said.

I smiled, and said, “Now it’s done.”

“It sure is.”

—

You know how I’ve been telling you about how my human-ish body has been making me dysphoric even through our transition? How the fact that it doesn’t have wings and a tail at least makes me feel sad and wistful and antsy? And my phantom limbs? And how natural it was for me to inhabit my true form on the Sunspot?

Now.

Let me tell you all about how the cuttlecrabs really don’t like fronting in a human body, and we tend to only see them in our dreams.

The Ktletaccete have trouble with this, too. Ashwin’s mentioned that. But we’re just a bit more compatible. And the more of them there are in our system, the easier it gets for each of them for some reason. Maybe our inworld is starting to feel a little bit more like their own home. And the Collective is definitely helping with that, too.

But if you meet us at a science fiction convention or something, and you want to talk to the cuttlecrabs, I’m sorry but it’s probably not going to happen.

—

Later that night, we were sitting at our dining room table with Abigail while Peter was off at work, eating sugar cereal and talking about our day.

“It was Ashwin that brought up our lack of a love life with Erik and Beau, over dinner,” Sarah told Abigail. “Asking for advice on how to counsel Earthlings about it.”

“Did Erik fall out of his chair laughing,” Abigail asked, with raised eyebrows.

“No, but Beau did.”

“Oh. He must have made quite the clunk!”

Sarah shook our head, “It was more of a slow, barely controlled melting, right there in the restaurant. But the waiter asked him if he was OK.”

“Oh, dear.”

“And then through his tearful laughing, he told the waiter, ‘I’m sorry, I just haven’t got my land butt back.’ And then laughed harder. And the waiter did not get it. But we were going to tip him well, and still did, and it was OK.”

Abigail put her cereal bowl down and then placed her spoon into the cereal and placed her hands into her lap and said, “OK, but what about your love life?”

Sarah blinked, “We don’t have one.”

“And?”

“We don’t know how.”

Abigail slowly nodded and said, “You are pretty complicated people, and you’re only getting more complicated by the day, so I can see that as a problem.” 

The way she said it sounded like she was quoting a romantic comedy. Only, I don’t know of any romcom where the protagonist is openly plural.

Sarah furrowed our brow, but instead of retorting with anything, she very deliberately and demonstrably ate cereal at our housemate, making a thing out of chewing it.

Abigail then made a show of placing an index finger onto the corner of her lower lip, looking up at the ceiling with her eyes, and said with exaggerated enunciation, “Also. It sure does seem rather late in the arc of your current chapter of life to meet someone new in the next few pages or so, let alone the next week.” She dropped her hand and straightened up, spearing us with her gaze, “What are you going to do about it?”

Sarah scowled and swallowed our mouthful of cereal, and said, “Meet more people, like everyone across the whole universe keeps telling us to do.”

Abigail lifted her left index finger and said, “That’s good advice.”

“I hate it,” Sarah said. “But, it’s right. And I think we’re starting to have the energy to get out there more, too. Goreth’s talking about starting up a little hobby club of some sort to meet at Aunti Zero’s on the days we don’t go there for the Collective.”

“Are you really calling your little squad the Collective?”

“It’s not really a ‘little squad’, Abigail. I think we’re nearing about two hundred people now,” Sarah said. “Counting the whole Murmuration and their introjects.”

“There are four bodies,” Abigail said. “And one of them is Erik. That’s little.”

“It’s the right size for a squad,” Sarah retorted. “Perfect for an RPG.”

“How would that work?” Abigail asked. “With two hundred people?”

“Oh, come on.”

“OK, but the hobby club is a fantastic idea!”

“Erik and Beau agree.”

“I bet you’re going to end up doing a queer science fiction club,” Abigail pointed and then picked up her cereal again.

“That’s the plan,” Sarah said.

Abigail shook her head, looking into her cereal, “It’s gonna be really hard to not talk all about your experiences, while surrounded by relative strangers, while in that club.”

“You have no idea.”

“I bet Ashwin will have to correct people about their conlang ideas, and Phage will correct them on their physics,” Abigail said, then nodded to herself and took a spoonful of cereal.

“Conlangs?” Ashwin interrupted to ask.

“Hey Ashwin,” Abigail said, lazily. “Yeah. Constructed languages. It’s a hobby that a lot of sci-fi people do. Make languages. I think it’s kinda neat. Tolkein was a big conlang geek. The geekiest.”

“Why do you think I would correct people about their conlangs?” Ashwin asked.

“Oh, come on.”

“Do, I do not understand.”

“Ashwin,” Abigail said. “You are a language nerd.”

“I supposed I must seem like one…”

“Anyway, move over,” Abigail gestured with her spoon. “I was talking to Sarah, and I still want to talk to Sarah.”

Abigail is the only person we let order us around that way as a system. Somehow, as bossy as she makes herself sound, she also does it so casually and carefree that it doesn’t seem to bother most of us. And it’s a little funny.

Ashwin narrowed our eyes to give Sarah back her last expression and slipped back into the back.

Sarah took a sharp intake of breath and held it, clenching our lips.

“So. What are you hoping for?” Abigail asked.

“What do you mean?” Sarah asked.

“What kind of partner do you want? Who do you want it to be?”

“Oh, shit,“ Sarah said, placing our mostly empty bowl down and rocking in our chair, turning our head side to side, clenching the chair seat with both hands.. “I’ve lost track of how many people are in our system now, and there might be more that I don’t know about, though that’s not supposed to happen. And all I can tell you is what Goreth and I dream of.”

“Yeah? Well, that’s good enough for me,” Abigail said. “It’s still really your body. You’re my friends. Well, you, Phage, and Ashwin, now. But I know it’s you two who are the lonely ones.”

Sarah shook our head more quickly, looking down at our knees, and said, “I really think Goreth needs another dragonfriend. Though, they have a penchant for certain kinds of women, too.”

I nodded gently to that, but otherwise let her keep the front. Honestly, I tended to like people who were like Sarah. And I’d just call my relationship with Sarah good. But we do think of ourselves as siblings, despite how we share absolutely everything. And that made declaring our relationship as anything else feel really weird.

Also, physical contact with another body really, really felt like something we needed more of. Not necessarily sex. Just, so much more affection that we got.

The idea of curling up with another dragon, though, one of our snouts on top of another, tails entwined, sharing the heat of our bodies, really got to me deeply.

When Sarah mentioned the idea of me having a dragonfriend, I couldn’t help but remember pressing my head against that of my counterpart every time I did a recombination.

OK, I made us take a deep breath and let it out as a loud sigh.

“Me?” Sarah said. “I don’t know. I’ve always kind of wanted a husband. Like, literally, someone with a ring on his finger that I could point to, and call him stupid things like ‘hubby’, ‘huband’, or ‘huzbuzz’.”

“Huzbuzz?”

Sarah chuckled ruefully, still looking down, but rocking less, “I don’t know. I made it up.”

“It’s fucking cute.”

“OK.”

“You are so straight sometimes,” Abigail said.

“I know.”

“How are you going to find all of that in one person?” Abigail asked, as if she was asking Sarah for her plan. And she waited expectantly for it.

Sarah huffed air out our nose and squinted, “I’m thinking about going to the Sunspot myself, like Goreth did, or does. Maybe tonight.”

Abigail looked shocked, absolutely sobered up, and a little shaky, and said, “Oh?” kind of quietly.

“I’ll still be here, to be with you and Peter. Goreth’s still here. We’re here. Right now,” Sarah emphasized. “But, they’re also there. Right now. And I hate not doing what they’re doing, and not being there for them, and they want me there, too. I think we need to be together over there, as well as here.”

Abigail looked so stricken, and her head was making little circles, but she said, “That makes a little sense. Yes, I can see that makes a lot of sense. You should.”

“Abi,” Sarah said, reaching across the table and up at our housemate. “I’m not scaring you, am I?”

“Maybe a little?” Abigail said. “It’s just. I guess I also really wish I could go with you, too.”

“Oh.”

“I wonder if I could think more clearly over there.”

“Goreth says they feel a lot less like themself over there, even though they also feel more like themself,” Sarah said. “Something about accommodating too many disabilities and being away from everyone and everything they know.”

Abigail worked her mouth, shrugged, and shook her head, “I just sometimes wish that everything I imagine could be that real for me, too, you know.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “I know that feeling all too well.”

“Well,” Abigail said, taking a sharp breath in through her nose. “You should know. You kinda are already in a polycule right now, if you want to be. Doesn’t have to be romantic or anything like that. Doesn’t have to change anything, whatever you want to call it. But you’re our family.”

When she said ‘family’ it triggered something in us, and Sarah slumped and we cried together. It surprised both of us, took us entirely off guard, and I know I wanted to feel self conscious about it. But once the tears started coming and we relaxed, the crying was all we knew. It might have been relief, but it also felt like loss, and yearning. Definitely confusion.

Abigail quietly ate the rest of her cereal, and occasionally repeated, “It’s OK.”

We hugged her before going to bed.

Peter and Abigail were not the kind of people we thought we were attracted to. Not for either of us. We’d never before visualized ourselves being more intimate with either of them.

We didn’t like Peter’s aftershave at all, for one.

And Abigail just always seemed like so much her own person.

But when she’d said that bit, that last thing that night, we both realized how much we did love them both. And just how good it felt to hear her call us family. Especially without Peter there to make it an Official Gesture of Support.

When Abigail had said it, just then, it had sounded like she was clinging to something she was afraid of losing.

As we fell asleep, we quietly argued with ourselves about what to make of it, through tears.

We were both in agreement with each other, in how we were struggling with our own doubts and reservations. We had the same doubts and reservations, too. We maybe felt more like a single person together at that time than we can remember. Not that that’s something we wanted to feel. But it’s fun when it’s temporary, and we learn again what it’s like to be the other person. 

But that night, we felt like instead of being divided vertically, we were divided horizontally. It was us against our confusing feelings.

And then Sarah decided definitively to go to the Sunspot that night.

She needed to rip the bandaid off immediately and swiftly, to show Abigail that she’d still be OK and still here. Before her own feelings made her even less likely to go.

And, in seeing how Abigail looked like she was going to lose us and miss us dearly somehow, Sarah also had realized she felt like she was losing me to the Sunspot, and she told me that. 

And keeping me was even more important to her.