Standing in the noon day sun in the middle of Mau Rro, right on the lift platform, with the stylized copper rays around it, dressed in white and faded gold silken gowns with forest green trim, Sarah looked like an actual goddess to me. Like someone from Irish mythology, ready to turn into a swan or something.

Shit. I used to know those myths so much better than that. But remembering Earth myths and history was harder for me on ʔetekeyerrinwuf.

“You are not going to fit on this lift with me when you’re that big,” she said. “Not without suffocating me with your coils.”

“You literally can’t suffocate,” I said. “Also, I feel like you should be wearing a circlet or tiara right now. It’ll make everything better.”

She lifted her skirts and stepped back off the platform and walked toward me on bare feet, walking past me, “Why aren’t you looking at this over here? This is amazing!”

And I turned as she passed me to observe her examining the structures on the back half of the temple. The thing that really made it look like a temple of some sort, and not just a spartan and well curated mountain park.

Purple forest trees and snowy mountain peaks rose above from behind it all, obscuring a full third of the Forward Endcap, they were so close. We weren’t at the top of the mountain, just roughly three fifths of the way up.

You’d think there’d been Greeks on ʔetekeyerrinwuf for how often the golden ratio showed up.

With how much slope there was and gigantic trees reduced to twiggy little toys by distance below the Aft edge of Mau Rro, it was really easy to call it a mountaintop. We were just above the Winter snowline, though it was Summer here. But there was still mountain above us.

I want to talk more about ʔetekeyerrinwuf trees, but Sarah was walking toward the cracked three meter wide geode that was held in a circular frame at the back of the temple. A wide, low arch of marble was laid atop that frame in such a way that the whole thing looked like a stylized eye, with the geode as a pupil. But, then there were large pointy teeth arrayed on either side of the geode’s frame, spaced out to make the whole opening look like a mouth, too. The Mouth of Phage.

Along the top of the frame, there were more of those coppery, elongated septagons, arrayed like eyelashes, swept backward, away from the center of the temple. 

I’d asked about those septagons since my first night there, and I was told they were symbols of stars, and called ‘Scales of the Great One’. And after that, I kept seeing them repeated everywhere around ʔetekeyerrinwuf. It seemed like everyone used them as a motif in almost everything without even thinking about it. Or just as something like wind chimes.

The geode, which I don’t think was formed by any kind of geological forces besides the construction nanites, was a greasy dark gray. And the jagged, zigzaggy crack in it was a few centimeters wide at its widest point. It was filled with darkness, and that darkness glittered as if there were stars suspended in it.

I hadn’t examined it as closely as Sarah was now doing, yet, and I thought that those sparkles were just some kind of crystalline facets illuminated by the temple lighting and the sunlight.

Getting there, Sarah leaned forward to peer into the crack, still holding her skirts aloft, and said, “Oh. It keeps going back! It’s like there’s a little universe in there!”

I ambled over to look, saying, “Our Tutor could tell us about it.”

“No, I want to figure it out myself,” she said, studying it.

“You are a lot less dazed by all of this than I was when I first came here,” I observed. “I’m kind of jealous how coherent you are.”

“You’re here,” she said. “And I’ve had secondhand memories from you. I kind of knew what to expect.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“Is this a Network trick, or physical?” she asked, pointing at the rock full of stars.

I leaned in and looked with a single eye into the darkness, using everything the nanites could sense to show me what was in there, silently commanding them with Fenekere to scan it thoroughly.

“This is a Monster temple,” I said. “People who are disconnected from the Network. That’s physical. Very carefully crafted to make the crystals look like a genuine starfield with depth, and to get light into the crannies where you might least expect it. They probably used the nanites to do it, but that’s just my guess.”

We were both looking into it at the same time, my head just above hers. And when I’d added my own shadow, a percentage of the stars in there had winked out from it.

“Ah, yes. I can see that now,” Sarah said. “I find it reassuring that I’m touching something that is more real than me at the moment, somehow.”

“You’re as real as real can be,” I said. “You’ll have a moment today where it will hit you, I’m pretty sure.”

“I feel like you know what I mean, though,” she said.

“I do,” I said. “And I still mean what I just said.”

“Gotcha,” she stepped back, turning to me. “Wanna hug?”

“Oh, please, yes.”

I turned to her, and she stepped forward and wrapped her hands around my collarbone and laid her head on the right side of my neck. In return, I reached up with one of my foreclaws and laid it on her back, lowering my chin to hang my head over her.

“I think I feel like a ridiculous, froo-froo fantasy painting right now,” Sarah mumbled. “But this is so nice.”

We technically weren’t alone, but we had a reasonable amount of privacy. Not that I really cared all that much. Mutabenga was monitoring us in its Tutorly way, but everyone else had gone on ahead to their own things, to give me the opportunity to give Sarah her tour myself.

Astute and ever attendant Niʔa, in purple, had been the one to suggest it.

We both needed familiarity, and nothing was more familiar to us than each other. Everyone else would be distractions, and a danger of overloading us.

“I’m sorry I already picked my quarters without you. But I think I can move pretty easily if you want to live together or nearby, but somewhere else,” I said.

“Let me see them first, OK?” Sarah said.

“Sure.”

“Where are they? How do we get there?”

“Well, let me show you. Follow me,” I said and led her back out into the middle of the temple platform. Then, frowning up at the two hex willows that were blocking the view, I took her right to the Aft edge of the platform.

I think if we’d stayed where we’d been, near the eye-in-the-mouth sculpture, we’d probably have had a better view. But, the clouds were pretty light, and we’d just got around enough of the tree I could still point it out.

Antispinward, to the left of the Aft Encap from where we were looking, I pointed three quarters of the way up the side of the curved Garden wall. Floor? The Garden.

“See that huge crescent shaped lake there with the super jagged shoreline and the strawberry looking peninsula taking up most of it?” I asked.

It was all very faded into shades of light blue, being almost fully across the cylinder from us, but she nodded, craning her neck to look up. The sun made it even harder to see, if you had human eyes. Neither of us did. And when we tried to focus on what I was pointing at, our nanites compensated.

“In the crook of the lake nearest us, near the mountains, on the peninsula, there’s a lighter colored disc, almost more of a dot from here, amongst the darker trees surrounding it,” I said. “I mean, you can’t see the trees for the forest from here, but that’s what’s there.”

“Yeah?”

“That’s the city of Frra, and I currently live right below it. Third deck down. It’s pretty empty down there, actually. Not quite a Fallow Deck, but close to it,” I told her. “I wanted to live in something cave-like, a bit away from people, but a quick lift ride from the city center.”

“Yeah, that sounds like you!” Sarah exclaimed. “So, how do we get there?”

“I might be able to fly us there,” I suggested.

“Are you fucking with me?” she said, looking at the world around us and the altitude we were at, and the curvature of the habitat cylinder.

We were also both speaking English, still. She hadn’t accepted the linguistics memories, yet. But also it was a familiarity thing, something for us to use to cling to our world back home.

“I am pretty sure I am not,” I said.

“I do not want to try that yet,” she said, flatly.

“OK. We absolutely do not have to,” I replied. “The other thing we can do is return our nanites to the bin and travel via the Network, but that’s not recommended to new visitors. Sticking to your nanite exobody for now is a good idea. It feels more corporeal, and traveling the Network fully feels a lot like a dream.”

“This feels like a dream.”

“A lot more like a dream.”

“Ah, yeah.”

“So, anyway, I’m configured for flying, which means that my exobody is so much less dense than yours,” I explained. “I could just do the Network travel thing, while you ride lifts and trams to my quarters, using a projection to be near you the whole way. But I can also easily shrink this exobody down to something that will fit comfortably on that lift with you. I don’t have to be this big.”

She smiled and said, “I like you this big, but I like that last one best.”

“Thought you might.”

So that’s what we did.

For the record, I do not like being smaller than I am. Not one bit.

But I can handle it for short periods of time.

It makes me feel like it takes forever for me to get anywhere, a gigantic world around me taking forever to parallax by as I walk on tiny little legs. Which is a feeling I’ve had on and off my whole life walking around in that tiny human body of ours.

It’s gotten worse on Earth since I traveled to ʔetekeyerrinwuf and started combining memories.

Doctors and Psychiatrists would call it dissociation and derealization, maybe Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Those are all the terms I’d learned since commenting about it in high school. 

But it’s really just the same kind of effect where if you stand in a doorway and press your arms against the frame for a while, they’ll start to rise up of their own accord when you step out and relax them.

My mind overcompensates its perceptions for the change in actual scale I experience.

I’m big in my inworld, so when I front on Earth in our tiny body, I feel too small and like the world is looming over me.

And, here, on ʔetekeyerrinwuf, with its oversized architecture and gargantuan megastructures, I felt the need to be my full size even more. Maybe a bit bigger, even, than I would make myself on Earth.

As it is, I can brush my head on the mantle of an ʔetekeyerrinwuf door frame if I hold my head up more than is strictly comfortable.

But, I did it anyway. Squeezed myself down to a mere five meters long, from the seven I was before. This actually meant a lot less volume, and rearing up on my hind legs, keeping my wings tight to my back, I was able to give Sarah plenty of cozy space to stand on the lift.

She leaned on me anyway as it started to lower itself down into the floor.

The walls that rose up around us as we sank became the walls of the lift car, and a nanite clay ceiling irised shut above us once we were below the level of Mau Rro.

Then we felt the increased acceleration of the lift plummeting to the best tram to get where we were going.

“How far down are we going?” Sarah asked.

“Two and a half kilometers,” I said.

“Holy shit!”

“Well, I mean, we were on a mountain,” I pointed out.

“Will this lift take us all the way to Fra?” she asked.

“It’s ‘Frra’,” I said. “You gotta roll that uvular fricative, like Ashwin does it.”

“Frra,” she was actually pretty good at it.

“Anyway, no,” I told her. “This lift just goes up and down, and then we get off of it and get on an express tram to get to Frra.”

“They have regular trams and express trams?” she asked.

“Yep.”

She scrunched up her face, “You’d think that, with all of this technology and space, they would have made it so that all the decks were reconfigurable, and if you wanted to go somewhere different, you’d just tell your room to take you there, and your quarters would get up and go there.”

She was right. It was kind of bewildering why they hadn’t built ʔetekeyerrinwuf that way.

“I bet they had their reasons,” Sarah said. “Governments always do. But I bet they’re terrible reasons.”

“Accommodations are like that, aren’t they?” I observed. “You get lifts and ramps and no stairs anywhere for those who are mobility impaired, and everyone pats themselves on their backs. But if you’re bedbound and need your house to move on its own, you’re shit out of luck.”

We looked at each other for a few moments. She was frowning in thought.

“I think that came out sounding like sarcasm,” I said.

“It did,” she confirmed.

“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Yeah, I know how you think,” she nodded. “And you’re absolutely right. Some people do need their houses to move, and even if the technology is available, it often doesn’t get used that way until some rich fucker wants it. But,” and she gestured at the lift car we were in, “they didn’t even make it so this thing could go anywhere we need it to. It just goes up and down.”

“I think it’s because the people who made this ship had already been ascended to a Network for centuries and couldn’t remember what it was like to have a body that hurt,” I said. “They just didn’t think of certain things. And then, once it had been made, they got too distracted by other emergencies to fix all of their mistakes. And after a millennia or two, they didn’t have the resources to fix infrastructure on this scale without the risk of destroying the ship.”

She tilted her head while looking up at my face, and furrowed her brows, “That sounds like you’ve been reading up on your history. Or propaganda.”

“I don’t know enough about this place to be able to tell it apart, yet,” I said. “But, yeah. Mutabenga is a living wikipedia, but it’s also a person who has seen it all. Or, most of it. It wasn’t there before the Sunspot was built, just since a few years afterward.”

“Are the makers of the ship still living?” she asked.

“You’ve read Mutabenga’s book,” I said.

“Oh, right, yes!”

“Eh, the former Senior Captain of the Council, is someone I’ve met now,” I said. “You’ll get to meet them, too. They were in charge of picking the Founding Crew of the Sunspot. They went from dystopian born antifa revolutionary to defacto technocratic dictator to retired mystic and staunch plebeian. I don’t know if you can trust them, but you can definitely hear a lot of deep stories from them. They come off as a bit of a blundering fool sometimes. Or, maybe a bit like me, actually. But, like, more exhausted than I’ve ever been.”

“Like you? You mean, like they’re autistic like us?”

“Possibly.”

“And they were a dictator?”

“For a hundred and thirty thousand millennia, yeah.”

“Jesus Christ, what did we get ourselves into?”

“Oh, now? Only an anarchic panopticon of demi-gods,” I quipped.

“A panopticon?”

“Yep. The Network, which you are now made of, records everything. The Auditor, an algorithm on the Bridge, counts everything. And no one is allowed to look at anything regarding what you’re doing or what you’ve done without your express and explicit permission.” I paused, and then, very purposefully said, “Normally.”

“Normally?”

“There are unfortunate back doors and workarounds, of course, that I haven’t learned yet,” I said. “And if you commit a severe enough crime, the recording of your act gets flagged by the Auditor as fit for investigation.”

“Holy shit!” she exclaimed.

“Neat fact,” I said. “That’s an oath in Inmararräo, too. But they have a good replacement for ‘Jesus Christ’ that means something else. Try ‘Hailing Scales’.”

“Goreth! I don’t give a shit about how to cuss right now,” Sarah pushed herself away from me. “I want to know why you, Phage, and Ashwin didn’t tell me all this before I came here!”

“We did,” I told her, feeling my face make a sad dragon expression. “Or, at least, I remember trying to. You know how memories are in a plurality. I’m sorry.”

She scowled intensely, looking away at the lift wall, and appeared to be shaking.

I took the moment to check my memories about this. I really could have sworn I’d relayed this information to her after I’d learned it. But, then I remembered that I had had a realization it was all in Systems’ Out! Mutabenga’s book. Just not in the same words I’d just used. And I’d had that realization while listening to Mutabenga talk about why it had done what it did, prior to what they’re all calling the Nanite Innovation, which was the beginning of their most recent upheaval.

And I did remember going to Sarah to tell her about this, but it had been during the last time I’d re-merged with myself. While we were in our inworld, dreaming.

And because dreams are squidgy about being consigned to long term memory, she didn’t remember it consciously. Not very easily, at least.

I hoped it might come back to her. But mostly for my own benefit. She really just needed to process this herself, regardless, whether she forgave me or not, and I needed to give her the space to do so.

“Maybe I didn’t tell you,” I said, still not really sure if I had actually told her in that dream, even. It might have been a daydream, for all I knew. “I’m really sorry.”

“No,” she said. “It’s really all in that book, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Fuck.”

“Think about it, though.”

“I am.”

“We’re here, now.”

“I know.”

“Unless we deliberately commit suicide here, which is actually an option apparently, because we have guaranteed autonomy within the limits of conflicting needs…”

“Limits.”

“Yes. … within the limits of conflicting needs, we are going to be here for a long time.”

She looked over at me,”Yeah?”

“We’ll live and die on Earth, and get to keep those memories if we keep resyncing with ourselves. And, on Earth, we’ll have the memories of what we do here.”

“I know that.”

I looked at her as the lift kept dropping. We were going to get to our destination soon. Any second. Maybe before I said my next thing. But I wanted her to think about the gravity of what I was going to say, to see it on my face and the set of my neck and shoulders, the weariness I felt.

“What?” she asked.

“If we’re lucky. If the Sunspot exists that much longer. We’ll get to outlive human civilization,” I said. “It’s already older than that.”

Her eyes got really, really big just as the lift slowed gracefully to a halt and opened its doors.

It had moved really fast for a while there, to travel two and a half kilometers in such a short time. It had never stopped accelerating or decelerating the whole way. We’d felt the shift at the halfway point. It’s part of how I was able to time this last moment.

I stepped off the lift and beckoned her to come with me to the tram.

“You’ve dragged me to Hell,” she said.

“You don’t even believe in Hell,” I grumbled, “Let alone that abusive as fuck God.”

“Well, I think I do now.” She was following me to the tram anyway, though. “Shit. This place looks like an Earth subway. Like in Berlin, or that stop under the zoo.”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Yeah, sort of.”

A huge tram car was waiting there for us. There always was one. It would wait there for someone to step into it, and then whisk them off to where they were going. A new one replacing it immediately.

The lifts worked the same way.

That at least, was more efficient, time wise, than what anyone on Earth did. And probably took a lot more space, too, for all the diversions and bypasses needed to do that.

The door of the tram car was about the same size as any other door here, but that’s what made it huge by human standards. Sarah was dwarfed by it.

And the tram moved via a pulsating room temperature superconductor’s magnetic lock. A maglev, but unlike anything built on Earth yet. I remembered that room temperature superconductors were still looked upon as being as mythical as cold fusion.

Sometimes it seems like ʔetekeyerrinwuf is made up of all the slightly impossible ideas that science fiction authors have had over the past hundred and fifty years.

And by ‘sometimes’, I mean all of the time. Though, you can see there’ve been some surprises, too.

It’s how it all goes together that’s the thing.

And, also, it does seem that physics itself is universal, and that it shapes what is possible in a way that makes alien things strangely familiar, too.

The seats on the tram were diverse and configurable, what seats there were. There was also a lot of standing room.

Sarah plopped down on a seat designed for upright people with no tails, and it automatically conformed to her shape and size, startling her.

I curled up in the middle of the floor and looked forlornly at the seats that were configured for people kind of like me, that you leaned forward onto. They could be made to be big enough for me, or I small enough for them. I was very nearly the right size for the largest one there. But I was happy on the floor. It wasn’t the seats that bothered me. 

My expression was for what we were arguing about. Or the fact we were arguing. And that I ultimately sympathized and agreed with Sarah about all of it. And felt like a shitheel about it all.

I felt that I deserved to feel like a shitheel, but I kept that to myself, so as not to be manipulative.

I huffed.

“That’s not even air,” Sarah snarked.

“It could be, someday,” I said. “We could get new organic bodies, when we want them.”

“Fuckbuckets.”

“I could lay a real egg,” I said as petulantly as I could.

She barked with laughter at that, then looked really angry that she’d laughed.

“Alright, look. You’re right about all of it. I agree with you about all of it. I feel sick about a lot of it. Especially about not communicating more clearly and explicitly with you about what it’s like,” I said. “And I honestly don’t know what to do about all that except make the best of it.”

She looked at the illustrated wall of the tram, which depicted abstract representations of people working together to build a tree that was larger than a city. People who looked like a variety of animals no one has ever seen on Earth. It’s possible that each one was a portrait of someone specific. 

And she said, “How does this thing know where it’s taking us?”

“I’ve been sending it and the lift Fenekere commands.”

“So it’s not reading our minds?”

“It kinda is? But, no, I’ve been sending commands. It’s like talking, over txt channel, in my mind. It’s not even like sharing a body with you and arguing with our thoughts.”

She sighed, then set her mouth in thought. “I think I’m going to pretend that makes me feel better.”

“That’s how I do things,” I said.

“For now.”

“Yeah.”

A few minutes later she said, “Shit.”

“What?” I asked.

“It still feels like a better situation than living under our government at home,” she muttered without looking at me.

I opened my mouth wide and took a breath to talk and then remembered, once again, that I didn’t actually use air to talk, and stopped, confused. It would take me a while to get over that. If I didn’t think about it, my Network generated and nanite supported body would pretend to use air and give me all the signals that I was talking in the same way I always did, just with anatomy that fit me better. But if I thought about it, I froze up.

And if I thought about how my snout and tongue really weren’t very good for speaking English clearly, that made things worse. Because it didn’t actually matter if I didn’t think about it, and my English sounded just fine.

But, if I said something then, after thinking about it, I’d have something like an Inmararräo accent.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, looking startled about how worried she was.

“Mmm,” I said.

Sarah watched me try to find the courage to talk, biting her lip.

I think I started to look really upset and apologetic.

She shook her head, and said, “Don’t try too hard to talk if you can’t. It’s OK. I’m still your sister and I still love you. And I know what that’s like, even if I can’t read your thoughts right now.” She sighed, looking at the wall again, “This place.”

Something about traveling as fast as we were toward Frra, which was Antispinward from Mau Rro, was that it made us feel lighter.

The distance was pretty close to the same as traveling from Everett, Washington to Portland, Oregon. So, you can look that up on an Earth map.

And when I tell you it took us half an hour, you can calculate our average speed.

When we got off the tram, I was still fully non-verbal, and Sarah asked me if it was somehow vocal dysphoria.

I nodded, and gave her a really confused look for it, too.

Something in that exchange flagged Mutabenga, and it interjected, simply asking me privately, “Goreth, do you need assistance?”

I grinned like an autistic human trying to express ironic sympathy, showing as much of my teeth as possible. More of a melodramatic grimace, really. On my face, it must have looked like a full mouthed snarl, only my eyes weren’t squinting, they were wider than usual as part of the expression.

Whatever it was, Sarah hadn’t heard Mutabeng’s inquiry, and she was startled by my sudden change of expression. Her eyes bugged out just before she broke out laughing. Full body laughs that had her doubling up.

“You look like a cartoon!” she shrieked.

“Ack,” I said. Then I relaxed and blew a raspberry. And that seemed to loosen me up enough I could talk again. “Damn, that was awful,” I said.

“It was funny,” Sarah said.

“No, I mean, not being able to speak,” I said.

“Oh, right. Yeah, I hate that shit.”

“You really should learn the local language,” I told her. “Ashwin has popularized English, and wants to bring over other Earth languages. But it’s really so much easier to think and do everything over here if you understand and can talk in Inmararräo.”

“I was thinking about learning it the hard way,” Sarah said. “By immersion.”

“We’ve never been good at that. Remember our trip to Germany?”

“Yes, but I’m not stuck in our old brain here,” she said. “And I think you and Ashwin gave me a leg up by bringing Inmararräo back over with you. And I’m wondering if artificial memories that big are what gave us that migraine.”

“Huh.”

“Like, Ashwin coming over in the first place was one thing. I still don’t really know how that worked with our brain, and don’t think I’ll ever understand it. But if you and I change too much before we reintegrate, our brain has to adapt too much too fast, and it changes the blood flow suddenly and bam. Migraine.”

“That’s a damn good theory.”

“I’ve had it since the middle of that migraine.”

“Thanks for telling me about it,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying, even though I hated how snarky it sounded.

“Yeah, well. Let’s go see your quarters. I want to see them for real.”

“Lets.”

“Glad I could help,” Mutabenga said to me softly, then indicated it was giving us relative privacy again.

“What if I dismiss you as Tutor,” I asked it, “Would you still be friends with me?”

“My sibling Rräof faced that dilemma more than once, but we all have a lot more freedom now,” it said. “So, yes. If we are friends yet.”

“But you wouldn’t have access to my up-to-date medical records then,” I stated.

Understanding what I was referring to, despite the fact I was using odd words for it, it said, “Correct. And that is a valid consideration. Except that the Auditor would still have access. But it doesn’t really think or have motives.”

“Mmm,” I replied over the Network.

“Mmm, indeed,” Mutabenga replied.

The name Mutabenga is one that it had picked for itself shortly after it had hatched from ʔetekeyerrinwuf’s evolutionary engines, which were used for generating people, Network bound and organic alike. It meant ‘Popular Concepts of Revolutionary Actions” in Fenekere, the command language of the ship.

It had been a tool of propaganda for the Sunspot’s Crew, to teach the Children what they wanted them to learn. It had done that job for longer than humans had been using rocks, from what I understood, maybe even compensating for relativity.

And then, one day, it did something that ultimately led to the dissolution of the Crew as a technocratic governing body.

And if that seemed like a point in its favor, the other thing was that it had done that as a conspiratorial action with cooperation from a Founding Crew member by the name of Fenemere, who had originally been the one in charge of writing the Inmararräo dictionary for the Children of the Sunspot. Who had removed such words as ‘gender’, ‘weapon’, and other concepts that they wanted the Children to redefine on their own terms.

Like some radical leftist’s wet dream of a utopia, just after breaking free from an incredibly violent fascist dictatorship.

And creepy.

It was hard to figure out who I wanted to be friends with anymore, learning shit like this from the very people who’d done that shit.

—

“You did put a trans pride flag in here!” Sarah exclaimed.

“Yeah. The entire Founding Crew is effectively trans, too,” I said. “There’s a reason they tried to make a world without gender.”

She nodded. I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know already from Ashwin and the books nem was translating.

“Right, I was going to say,” I said. “Eh’s name is also a Fenekere pronoun, right? But, well, the Ktletaccete hoard pronouns the same way I hoard paper cup sleeves, and Ashwin has been feeding everyone English pronouns, especially neopronouns. Eh recently went from using their name as a pronoun to using ‘yem’, and then, now, they’re going by they/them. Even insisting people try to pronounce the ‘th’, even though that’s hard for a lot of them.”

“I want to talk about our quarters,” Sarah said, standing in the middle of them.

I’d left the floor, walls, and ceiling their default metallic finishes, but had replaced the trim with moss and forest green that both incidentally came really close to matching the green of Sarah’s sash and gown’s trim.

Around the walls, at irregular but thoughtful intervals, there were stalactites and stalagmites made of the same metal as the ceiling and floor. Each one reached three fifths to two thirds of the height of the wall.

Between them were low shelves with artifacts and books I’d been collecting in my explorations of the world around me. A lot of books, actually. More than I thought I could read. Most of them handbound, if not hand written.

I’d figured out on my own how and why the walls had no right angles, which had been bothering me at first, though it did make the place feel more like a cave.

It was harder to hang things on them. Or lean things against them, because they weren’t any of them perfectly vertical.

The rooms were planned and made by scrunching something called scutoids together.

Not actual scutoids, but the plans for scutoids, and then the outer edges of them were used as guides for the walls.

Scutoids are an irregular shape that has a pentagon on one side and a hexagon on the opposite, and a weird configuration of rectangular polygons, two pentagons, and one triangle between them.

On a flat surface, they really do not tessellate. You can’t put them together without deforming them. But, like, most life on Earth is absolutely full of them.

Tissues like skin are made of cells that are the shape of scutoids, and they make for a flexible method of wrapping organic and wobbly structures.

The Founding Crew of the Sunspot had made all of the quarters of their ship look like living cells, superficially.

All the hallways were shaped by the same method, too. And it actually helped a bit as acoustic baffling.

Mutabenga had pointed out, though, that if I needed a vertical surface anywhere in my quarters, I could add one. Anywhere. I could even adjust things so that all my rooms were boxy. I might lose some space by doing so without eating into the space of the quarters around me, but I could use that space in the walls for infrastructure, like ducting for nanite bins, or food storage.

By the time we’d been done with that conversation, though, I decided not to bother. The cave-like quality of the quarters as they already were had won me over.

Then, there was my bed. 

And an equally large nanite bin that doubled as a gaming table and a holodisplay.

And besides the extra large, deliberately creased trans pride flag hanging on the uneven wall opposite the door, that was it.

I’d purposefully programmed the construction of that flag to include the creases the cheap vinyl flags back home had from being folded, that you couldn’t safely iron out. They’re tradition. They’re Earthly.

“Where are the plushies?” Sarah asked.

I looked sheepish, “I think I was waiting for you to come here to live with me, so we could find them together.”

“They make plushies here?” Sarah asked. “You don’t have to have them made yourself?”

“They call them Fluffy Fauna, or the equivalent of that in their language,” I said. “Honestly, saying ‘they’ doesn’t feel right anymore already. I want to say, we call them that. But that doesn’t feel right right now, either.”

“Huh, yeah,” she looked around. “But I guess soft toys for kids is good for any organic life, huh?”

“Seems like, yeah. Only, the Ktletaccete also know that they’re for adults, too. They don’t seem to get hung up about stuff like that. At least, not the ones that live in this city.”

“Neat!” Sarah said, trying to lean into her enthusiasm about a cool cultural thing. I could still hear exhaustion from our earlier discussion lingering in her voice, and see it in her shoulders, the same way I felt it. But she kept it up, and said, “Where do we find them?”

“Topside?” I said. Shrugging, “Maybe even just one deck up. Everyone’s an artisan of some sort here. And there are collective studios, even. We just have to walk around, meet people, and ask about what they’re doing.”

“Like a big gigantic con, but without a pamphlet with a map,” she said.

“Actually, yes.”

“Fun.”

This was hard. Without sharing a body and a brain with her, I couldn’t get a very good read on her mood and emotions like I could before. Even when we were pretty strongly dissociated from each other, while in the same vessel I could at least feel her warmth when she was happy, or her kicking about below when she wasn’t.

Here, she was like an outworlder. A person on the street. Just as imperfectly unreadable as anyone else to my autistic sensibilities.

With that deadpan ‘fun’ that could have been genuine enthusiasm, actually, or pure sarcasm, I felt that gulf between us like never before.

She was holding her shoulders like she was cold and looking over at one of my shelves of stuff.

“Was that a sarcastic ‘fun’?” I asked.

She glanced my direction, skillfully failing to make eye contact, like we’d been doing, like we’d done our whole life with everyone else, and said, “No! I meant it! Sorry.”

“This sucks,” I said.

“The distance?” she asked.

“Between us,” I confirmed.

“It sucks a lot,” she responded.

“May I request something for us from our Tutor?” I asked her.

“You ask that like Ashwin does,” Sarah replied.

“New habit,” I said.

“Probably a good one,” she told me. “What are you thinking?”

“I wanna know if we can have something like our in-system communication back,” I said. “I don’t know what it would be, but I think we’d be a lot happier with it.”

“Please.”

“OK,” I said. “Mutabenga?”

“Yes,” it replied. It hadn’t been a questioning tone. Though Ktletaccete don’t use tones quite the same way English speaking humans do, even autistic Earthling dragons, so I didn’t assume anything.

“Would it be possible for us to communicate somehow similar to the way we did when we shared a body? Me and Sarah, I mean? I’m guessing the Network can do all sorts of things,” I said in English, for Sarah’s benefit.

“Oh, yes, definitely,” it replied in English. “I can list for you several options, from default channels of communication that you haven’t been taught how to use yet, to fully reaffirming your function as a system.”

Sarah frowned at the space where she imagined Mutabenga to be and asked, “You’ve been studying English for a year now?”

“Much less,” it replied. “Perhaps a couple weeks.”

“Our weeks?” she asked, taken aback.

“We don’t do weeks here,” it replied. “Yes, your weeks.”

“How?” she asked.

“Similarly to how Goreth has learned Inmararräo in a matter of hours,” it explained. “Only, I reach temporary Accord directly with Ashwin, and nem shares nems linguistic skills with me.”

“Temporary Accord?”

“We have words that roughly translate into ‘merge’, ‘fuse’, ‘recombine’, etc. And the one that is most common for the practice translates best to ‘Accord’.”

“Oh, right! Like in your book.”

“Yes, exactly.”

I sat back and listened to them discuss this, because it seemed to be going right where we wanted it to.

“So,” Sarah said, “you’re able to do this Accord with Ashwin just to get the skills for how to speak in English?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re able to do this without becoming more like Ashwin?”

“No. Of course I become more like Ashwin, and if I share my memories with nem, nem becomes more like me,” it said. “You and Goreth are still separate people, and yet you have shared your lives and memories and emotions with each other, correct?”

“Some systems have a really hard time doing that, but yeah. We’ve been co-conscious for most of our lives,” Sarah said.

“It is the same exact thing,” Mutabenga said. “Only it is facilitated by the Network of ʔetekeyerrinwuf, not the neurology of your brain.”

“Of course.”

“So, what does that mean for the two of us?” I asked.

Mutabenga appeared as a Network projection in front of us just so that it could shrug, which is a very interesting thing to see with its avatar. It appears as a silver sphere about the size of Sarah’s rib cage, that hovers at about two meters high. And below it is a ray of swirling dust motes, sparks, and illuminated gasses cast directly downward, spreading outward as it goes. The result looks a little bit like an upside down exclamation point.

It shrugged like a human for us, with an area of its rays of dusty light, at right about where you’d expect shoulders to be, pulled outward and lifted up briefly, and then it said, “Whatever you both agree to make of it. Whatever one of you does not wish to do will not be allowed to be done, of course. But as you are now entities of the Network, you have full access to its functions, and are full and equal citizens, to use one of your words, with the rest of us. This also means, barring unforeseen incompatibilities with your psyches, you should be able to do everything a Ktltetaccete system has ever been able to do.”

“Wait a minute,” I interjected. “I seem to remember some worry that because we were Earthlings, the way our minds functioned might be fundamentally different from yours, and that there might be some danger in trying certain things without a lot of caution.”

“That was an earlier theory, yes,” it replied. “But, as we’ve examined the situation and your vitals, with your consent, we’ve concluded that those specific dangers do not exist.” It paused, and then asked, “May I divulge an observation that may distress you depending on your sense of identity? I will need both of you to consent.”

I hesitated to answer.

Sarah beat me to it with, “I think we need to hear whatever it is, regardless. I consent.”

I nodded and gestured to her with my snout, and said, “I do, too. She’s right.”

Mutabenga lowered itself a little, as if bowing or crouching, or taking an invisible seat, and continued, “To accommodate your arrival, the Network took the information that is you, that the Tunnel passed to it, and generated conscious avatars for you to inhabit. It did so using the tools that it had. You did not have a nanite terminal on Earth, so that information was not perfect, not like a reading of sensory equipment available to the Network here on ʔetekeyerrinwuf. This may sound alarming, but it is the same process in reverse of what happened when Ashwin came to you. While Ashwin was supported by the gifts of Phage that had been bestowed upon itself, you were supported by Phage itself, with the help of its child, Niʔa.”

“What does this mean?” Sarah asked, sounding about as cautious as I felt.

“You are you. As you as you can possibly be,” Mutabenga said. “Phage and Niʔa were able to translate your information almost seamlessly to something the Network could read. But for all intents and purposes, according to all of our scans, you are Ktletaccete, just like I am.”

I knew what was coming long before our Tutor got to saying it. I’d already learned that it had this habit of couching what it had to say in leading questions followed by preamble. It did that specifically to help you come to the conclusions yourself, I’m pretty sure. It wanted what it had to say to be less of a shock than it worried it might be.

I know some humans who do that sort of thing, too. Heck, I’ve done it.

But when I heard the phrase, ‘you are Ktletaccete’, an electric tingling chill rippled through my being and I felt forever different in a way I still can’t describe.

Maybe it all really hit home in that moment.

Maybe, though, Mutabenga’s instructional technique had worked, because I didn’t experience any derealization or depersonalization. I still felt like me. I still felt like I existed.

Up until that point, thanks to my nightly recombinations, my nightly Accord, I deep down considered myself to be the same person as my counterpart on Earth. I had all my memories from there and I had all my memories from here, in either place.

Coming over had felt seamless, like passing through a curtained doorway. A blink. A slight interruption in the most superficial of surface thoughts. Enough to make me forget what I’d walked into a room for, that kind of thing.

And going back had felt the same, as far as I could remember. Except for that one migraine.

And I still felt like the same person.

But the last tiny traces of my Earthly concerns felt like they’d been burned away in a tiny supernova that had just occurred in my chest and cast its remnants throughout my being. And that what replaced the star that had been there was not a neutron star nor a black hole of ultra compressed concerns and stress, but something that had rushed in to fill the space.

Something far more ancient and alien than I had ever known before.

And like I said, I can’t describe it. I didn’t just describe it. I’ve just described something kind of like it, and when I reread it, it’s wrong.

Sarah went over to my bed and sat on it, looking down at the floor.

I looked at Mutabenga and said, “Can you send me written instructions for everything we might need? I think we need some more privacy.”

“Yes,” it said, and then disappeared while my mental Network inbox pinged.

Then I walked as quietly as I could over to my bed. 

Sarah was just on the edge of it.

I climbed up behind her and curled up on it as if I was going to go to sleep, and then I moved a foreclaw and placed it gently atop her right hand. I lifted up my left wing to bare my side and create a sort of shelter.

After a few moments, she registered what I was suggesting, and got up onto the bed with me, curling up between my tail and my ribcage, or my nanite clay simulation of a tail and ribcage, lying on my left foot and leaning on my shoulder.

Then I lowered my wing as much like a blanket as I could.

Like another damn fantasy poster. Like hundreds of them ever designed and sold on Earth.

I tried to ignore that memory.

This was who and what we were.

Not that commercial bullshit we didn’t have to worry about anymore.

We were twins, sharing our bed as closely as we could to the way we had since we were an infant.

Sarah and Goreth. 

Us vs the universe itself.

Us vs the strange, disabled, painful human-like body we’d left in Portland.

Us vs ourselves.

Taking a rest.

And we remained quiet like that for several hours.

After it seemed like maybe I had fallen asleep and woken up again, Sarah murmured, “I think Abigail is in love with us.”

“I know,” I said. “I was there, too.”

“She’s really cute.”

“I agree.”

“And smells weird.”

“Yeah.”

“I think I could get to like it if I really wanted to.”