Before we brought over our next visitor from the Sunspot, and even before we ironed out a new contract with Phage, Sarah and Goreth and Phage all agreed that they should introduce me to a movie.

And not necessarily one that they liked and respected, actually.

They were divided on it. Each individually as well as between them. Sarah, herself, had mixed feelings. Phage was ambivalent about it, but respectful of what it had been told was the movie’s cultural significance. And Goreth wanted me to see it for what they said were ‘important reasons’, but that also it was nostalgic for them.

Even though it was a fairly big room, and we just had the one body, we somehow dominated the living room with all four of us, enough that Peter and Abigail retreated to their room to let us be alone on the couch with our popcorn.

It wasn’t that any of us said anything. It just seemed like they suddenly found the living room crowded when we walked into it.

Peter grinned, and said, “Enjoy your movie!” at least.

But, then what happened was this.

We sat down on the couch, while Sarah was saying, “I think you only find this movie nostalgic because of Robin Williams. Only, we only saw it once and I can barely remember it. I just remember that a lot of it was off putting.”

“Maybe,” Goreth said. “But I remember it being something that’s relevant to what we’re experiencing. And, also, it had some kind of social commentary that might be good.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sarah said. “Just. I don’t see how you find it nostalgic, that’s all.”

“Where’s the remote?”

“On the T.V. stand where you just left it.”

We all stared at the remote, sitting there just below the T.V., with our two eyes.

“Why did I leave it there?” Goreth asked.

“I don’t know,” Sarah replied.

We kept staring at it.

I used our left hand to grab a piece of popcorn and put it in our mouth, and we chewed on it.

“OK, this is ridiculous,” Sarah said. “Let’s get that remote.”

It was probably Goreth who put the popcorn aside and used our cane to help us get up to go back to the T.V. to get the remote, as they said,“Remember how, just a few years ago, we’d do all this without speaking out loud about it?”

Grabbing the remote with our left hand, Sarah replied, “Yeah. But I don’t think that was healthy.”

“Heck, no. This is more fun, too.”

“I’m so glad we live with people who don’t question it.”

“Yeah.”

We plopped back down again, threw the cane aside, within reach, and transferred the remote to our right hand.

It took Goreth some work to use it to turn the T.V. on and then search for the movie. The remote wasn’t really built for typing letters, despite the T.V.’s graphical interface allowing for it.

“The Fisher King, with Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams,” they said.

A screen appeared with the title of the movie, the year it was made, and a still from one of the important scenes.

For my friends back on the Sunspot, a T.V. is not a holoterminal. It is more like one of our walls. It’s a flat display. Except, it shows color by shining filtered light at you, rather than altering its surface’s reflective properties. And it is not like you can control it by speaking to it, or thinking at it. If you move here, you’re going to have to use the remote, like Goreth did.

Anyway, in the middle of this title screen, superimposed over the faces of the leading characters, were the words, “Directed by Terry Gilliam.”

“Oh, right!” Sarah exclaimed. “No. We’re not watching this.”

Once more, we sat staring at the screen for a while, thinking about the memories Sarah and Goreth had about this movie. Goreth was pretty quickly in agreement with Sarah regarding it, too.

“I’m going to explain out loud, so Ashwin can make long term memories about this, OK?” Goreth said.

I made their mouth smile in a human way, in assent.

“So,” they said. “The reason I thought it would be good to watch this movie is that I seem to remember it having what we call the Don Quixote trope. Which is a story element where one of the characters, usually the hero, believes they are fighting some great and magical power, or that they have magical powers themselves. And everyone else around them just thinks they’re hallucinating and having delusions. Erik high key hates this trope, by the way, and with pretty good reason. But there are maybe a couple movies he recommends for it, and I can’t remember if this was one of them. But, after what Terry Gilliam did a couple years ago, almost certainly not anymore.”

“Right,” Sarah said.

“Dude’s a raging transphobe,” Goreth said. “And I’m starting to get flashes of scenes from this movie that are probably going to be hard to watch. I’m certainly not in the mood for it anymore.”

“Likewise,” Sarah agreed.

I more or less understood what they were saying, of course, because I was strongly co-conscious and felt like I was them at the time. My memories of the night now have us being more separate, unless I really focus on them. But then focusing brings Goreth forward, and I’m probably just accessing their memories through co-consciousness then.

We did end up watching a little bit of something, though. After a lot of deliberation.

“There are other movies that could work,” Goreth said. “We could watch Sucker Punch, or I Kill Giants, or Pan’s Labyrinth.”

As they thought about and spoke about the movies, we all shared memories of them and quickly felt like the gists of them were well understood by all.

I probably would have benefitted from actually watching them myself. Second hand memories like that have a habit of not transferring over without reinforcement of some sort. But both Sarah and Goreth had various feelings of repulsion with each suggestion. Mostly out of just not wanting to rewatch something.

I remember getting the impression that Pan’s Labyrinth would be the most relevant and timely movie to watch, with world politics as they were, as well as the way it played with dual realities. But also, perhaps, the most traumatizing and triggering.

Sucker Punch would have lots of extremely meaningless and flashy violence, and not much substance.

And I Kill Giants came down on the side of the dominant consensual reality and the importance of getting mental illness treated somehow, healing in a particular way, according to Sarah’s thoughts. But not in the absolute worst way. She still kind of liked it.

We collectively sighed.

Then Phage spoke up, “Let’s watch something new and different.”

“Good call,” Sarah said. “Cartoons.”

“Yes,” Phage agreed.

“And I know just the one,” Sarah declared, using the controller to switch over to Peter’s Netflix account and pull up Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.

“I heard there was a trans reading of this,” Phage commented.

“There is,” Sarah confirmed, and hit play.

What ensued would have been extremely confusing to me if I wasn’t watching it along with Sarah and Goreth. The opening song was in a language that was foreign to everyone there, without subtitles, and I understand it is called Japanese by English speaking people. The images looked hand drawn and painted, but they moved. They were animated. Which, of course, I’m totally familiar with, because that’s an ancient artform on the Sunspot, but the style was just so different from anything I’ve seen. And Sarah internally commented on how there were a lot of credits, the names of the people who had worked on the project listed screen by screen before the animated play began.

And then there were the opening scenes of the actual story, and the introductions of the characters, with words that flashed for much too short of a time on the screen, so Sarah paused the show for us to read them each time. And that slowed it down a bit.

It started with Scott having a dream about a girl with pink and blue hair.

“Ramona Flowers,” Sarah said. She hadn’t seen this before. Nobody in the system had. But she’d read all about it on Tumblr.

Then Scott actually ran into Ramona in real life, the outworld as we call it, a couple times. And managed to get her to answer the question, “Are you really the person in my dreams?”

To which she confirmed that she was.

And he asked, “Isn’t that weird?”

And she said, “It’s not weird at all. There’s just a really convenient subspace highway running through your head.”

And Goreth ‘lost it’.

They ended up laughing over the next line, so Sarah had to reverse the recording so we could hear it again.

It was pretty obvious why Goreth had laughed. When Ramona mentioned the subspace highway running through Scott’s head, we all immediately envisioned the Tunnel in our head and nearly ended up focused entirely on our inworld.

And Sarah had an accusatory thought toward Phage.

And Phage had thought, yup.

And it was easier to just laugh out loud at the whole thing instead of contemplating the coincidence of just happening to pick a show to watch that had a line like that in it while having what probably could be described as a subspace highway in our own head.

Anyway, the next line was about miles and kilometers, and I got curious about measurements of distance.

So we paused the show again, and Goreth took the time to look up the wikipedia articles on miles and kilometers and read some of them out loud for me.

Of particular interest to me was the standard used to define kilometers. Or the whole metric system.

“This is so similar to how we do it, and we can convert this,” I said. “We can do calculations. Look up time.”

So, Goreth keyed in ‘seconds’, and started reading that article out loud.

It was based on a fraction of the duration of an Earth day, which was not at all useful for me. But, almost immediately the article explained that Earth scientists had found a way to define a second based on the property of an atom. And that’s what I needed.

“Can you help me remember that?” I asked out loud. “I think we might need it later.”

“What do you want to calculate?” Phage asked.

“How old I am in Earth years,” I said.

“Four hundred ninety seven point six four five three years, rounded off at the moment,” Phage said.

We all sat there looking at the phone and the frozen T.V. screen for a while, hardly a thought passing through our collective mind.

“Is that a real number?” Goreth asked.

Phage took a little while to respond, and then said, “Yes.”

“I mean, that’s really how old Ashwin is?”

“Yes.”

“In Earth years.”

“Yes.”

“Not three hundred and twenty years old?”

“That was Sunspot years, and an estimate.”

“So, we’ll get to see Ashwin’s five hundredth birthday, in Earth years.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Accounting for relativity?” Goreth checked.

“No. Experientially. Accounting for relativity, Ashwin hasn’t hatched yet.”

“Oh, right!”

Phage remained silent, letting us all process that.

I felt really weird about not having hatched yet, even though I pretty well understood the principle. The Tunnel allowed information to violate the curvature of space/time. But only so far and up to the point that it might cause a paradox of some sort, at which point the information would revert to a more predictable state.

And the Tunnel, when housed in the Tunnel Apparatus, would automatically close from the feedback caused by such a loop, to prevent any significant damage to its architecture or the people using it.

I had no idea what would happen when the Tunnel was housed in a human brain, though.

But the result of that was that Phage and I were existing in a bubble of causality that was relatively fragile to the rest of the universe. Just, as I said earlier in this book, the chances of our current observational lightcones intersecting with our future-past observational lightcones was so miniscule and distant as to be something no one ever really had to worry about.

And I want to be clear. This is not what Erik would call ‘a Checkov’s gun’. It will not be fired later in this book. Obviously, I still exist to write it.

The Sunspot is not flying in the direction of the Earth, and it will never get here.

Being reminded of this did make me feel a little less real, though. Which may have triggered derealization for both Sarah and Goreth, too.

We all felt a bit swimmy, as Sarah would put it.

Goreth wanted to do a grounding exercise to counteract the derealization, so I started recounting important moments in my life for them.

And this worked for me, of course.

“My first memory of consciousness was looking at our projection in the holomirror. We had grown enough that our body looked different, and we thought we saw a stranger, and our brain created a liaison for them. Me,” I said. “We were thirteen years old.” I visualized this as I said it.

The others remained silent as I did this, but I could feel them still present with me as I took the front to talk and think.

“Sometime in our fourteenth year, we saw the name ʔashwin in a book we were reading, and the character there felt so much like me I came rushing forward to point it out to the others. And that’s how I got my name.”

We call that ‘fictionkin’, Goreth thought.

“We were already living on our own when Mutabenga let us know that our neural terminal, which we didn’t have yet, would let us each access the Network separately and we would be able to see each other online, in Network spaces, more vividly and more tangibly than we could imagine at the time. We would be able to affect the outer world separately, simultaneously, as individual people,” I said. “That was the very same day we were offered the chance to participate in an experimental neural terminal and we gave our consent. I spent a lot of time on the Network after that.”

I could still remember lying on our back in a park’s forest clearing, looking up at the sky while our Tutor had told us about how the experimental nanite neural terminals would work. I remembered not at all being able to feel the nanites creep into our body to make the connection. They were too tiny to feel or see. And it was the next day that we started to be able to visualize the Network as if it was part of our inworld. It quickly became as vivid as the outworld in the following days. I was able to remain independently conscious outside my vessel for months at a time. I very quickly stopped identifying our vessel as my body.

“A lot of things happened after that,” I said. “I also remember the day our Caretaker, Jana, ascended and became Crew. I was one of the many of us who waited in the Network to greet yem when yem left yems body for the last time. Our vessel remained in our quarters, asleep.”

How did you decide to come here? Sarah asked, internally. What was that like?

This time, that memory came easily, and I was able to recount it while visualizing some of it.

“When word came that Phage had discovered a string of Tunnel Apparati deposited on inhabited planets, and that it would be possible to visit the worlds of other Outsiders, aliens, I was the first to step forward to volunteer to do that,” I said. “I requested it. We’d gotten a taste for cultural contact with Outsiders via the Dancer, and my reputation and experience as a Pember made me bold and eager to participate. Phage gave the OK from its end, and the Council immediately approved it from the Bridge of the Sunspot. I was an easy political choice.”

Lucky.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I wore a nanite exobody in the shape of my true form to Mau Rro, the Mouth of Phage, where the Tunnel Apparatus had been moved. It is a Monster temple in the Ring Mountains facing the Aft Endcap, and traditionally where prospective Monsters go to converse with Phage before taking their vows and rejecting their neural terminals, then to become protected dissenters and honorary Crew according to the old ways. Allowing the Monsters to be custodians of the Tunnel Apparatus was a conciliatory move on the part of the Council for millennia of systemic oppression directed at the Monsters.”

We’re going to want to hear a lot more about this. This is good. It’s like having our own novelist in our head, with the stories already written.

I experienced it, I replied. This is my life.

And mine, Phage added.

I recalled how I had ridden the lift to the center of the temple, the ceiling of the lift irising open and its walls falling away, below the floor of the temple, as the lift came up to be even with it. The floor was a polished stone under the open sky of the Garden. There were large, brass Scales of the Great One inset into the floor mirroring the great spokes of the Garden. The entirety of which would be visible from where I stood if it had been a clearer day. Behind me, there was a cracked boulder mounted in a ring and an ornate housing. Within the crack of the boulder could be seen darkness and sparkles of light, like stars.

We don’t normally get to see stars unless we go down to one of the shipyards to open the outer doors to look at them as they wheel around the Sunspot with the spin of the habitat cylinder. I’d done that, so I knew what they looked like. And I’d been to Mau Rro before, too. But I didn’t bother to go and examine the boulder this time.

Instead I had walked Aftward to the shelter on the far end of the platform that comprised the temple. There were two gigantic hex willows planted to either side of the Aft end of the temple, their indigo colored translucent leaves fluttering in the mountain breeze, with six, huge, ceramic Scales of the Great One hanging from their branches at varying heights, mimicking raindrops that were each three times as tall as I was.

The temple looked out over Tenmouth Sound, forests blanketing the ground between me and the waters, with the Katofar mountains on their peninsula beyond that. The Aft Sea visible on either side of the peaks of Katofar, and the unfathomably scaled Aft Endcap rising up above all of that, the sun intake in the middle of it, ready to devour the day’s sun.

The Tunnel Apparatus was in the newly built shelter there, at the edge of the temple platform. There had been a tablet pedestal there for chatting with Phage via text and voice for anyone without a neural terminal, but the Tunnel Apparatus could now do that and more. Unlike the pedestal, the Tunnel Apparatus needed to be protected from the weather.

The shelter was transparent and water-phobic, so that it did not obscure the view of the Aft Endcap or the lands and sea of the Garden around it.

Accompanied by the Council and everyone who wished to witness my journey hovering nearby in the Network, I walked physically alone to the console.

There, Phage met me in its own nanite exobody, which it pulled from a nearby bin.

Its child, Ni’a, accompanied it. They both looked very similar. Almost, but not quite, humanoid.

We stood in a triangle, with me facing the Tunnel.

Phage spoke by vibrating the air molecules around it directly, using no technology provided by the Sunspot to do that, as was its nature. Its exobody was a courtesy to anyone who watched with physical eyes alone.

“Where will you go?” Phage asked, voice like quiet thunder.

“I think,” I replied, already at ease with this being I now considered an old friend. “I would like to go where I can finally discover my own Art.”

Phage looked at Ni’a and they nodded.

“You might lose the gifts that Phage gave you,” Ni’a said. Their voice was soft and rich, like life itself. “And you might not be able to fully return. The physics of this have been altered to make the journey possible for anyone who is not Phage.”

I closed my eyes and considered the life I had led up to this point. It had been so long, but nowhere near as long as it could be aboard the Sunspot. However, no matter how I tried to test myself, I felt OK with the consequences.

“You can return,” Phage said. “And that way, you will be able to see your family again. But you will also remain on the other side, and you will become two people.”

“Oh,” I heard myself say.

“You do not have to be the first to go. You can revoke your consent up until you step through,” it continued to explain. “But in trying to maintain a safe contact with these people, I have misstepped and created a very temporary solution. The window of contact is short and chaotic. It could be just a few days, or a matter of decades. And you may experience death over there. However, I have friends there now that I would like to help. And it’s possible you could help, too.”

I nodded and let that information soak into me.

It elaborated, “These friends suffer from an unidentified chronic illness that, in conjunction with their social status, threatens their life. Your experience here helping your Caretaker transition to Ancestorhood and with your own vessel’s death, may be of use to them. Also, they are plural, like you were.”

My old Tutor, Mutabenga, detached itself from the Network crowd around me and approached. It said, “I think maybe you can find your Art on this new world, ʔashwin. The Sunspot has given you everything it possibly can to prepare you for something like this. And I speak on behalf of your fellow Pembers and the entire Council when I say that you have our support and our enthusiasm for your choice, should you do this. We will miss you, for however short a time it may be. But we may also follow you!”

I turned to it and said, “Thank you.”

I remember when this had all happened that time had become muddy, non-newtonian. The harder I tried to push through it, the more resistant it seemed to my movement, paralyzing me. But if I rested on my inertia, I kept moving toward my destination. It was just a perception of the intersection of derealization and executive dysfunction, but it felt very tangible. My decision had already been made, and resisting it was not going to happen.

I found myself turning back to Phage and Ni’a and saying, “I consent to the consequences. I am ready to travel to this world.”

Phage smiled, and said, “Then let’s go.”

And we stepped through the Tunnel.

It was like entering any other Network space.

It had an address, and all I had to do was command my Avatar to go to the address, and my nanite exobody slumped to the floor and started slinking toward a bin, and, in the blink of an eye, I

was a topless Goreth, standing in a poorly lit morning bathroom, trying to shave their face while leaning toward a dirty mirror, suddenly feeling dysphoric in a way they never had before.

—

The T.V. was still paused on an image of Ramona Flowers saying, “I don’t know how far that is in kilometers.”

Even though there was only one body there, and it was on the sofa, it was almost as if I was standing in the middle of the room, and my three friends were around me. Sarah and Goreth on the sofa with their vessel, and Phage lurking in a corner like a shadow full of stars.

This wasn’t how we saw it. It was more like the very first hours of accessing the Network through my neural terminal. Imaginary projections of ourselves as seen from the point of view of our vessel.

But it is how I remember the moment. As if I saw the room from the middle of it.

“What’s happening to us?” Sarah asked.

“I think we call it first contact,” Goreth said.

“I’m having a hard time believing it,” she replied.

“Even after reliving all of that?” they asked.

“We should make a new contract with Phage for you,” I interjected, not moving.

“Yeah,” Sarah said.

“Sure,” Goreth agreed.

“I eagerly consent to that,” Phage said.

“Let’s write it on paper in both English and Inmararräo,” I said. “To make it feel more real for you.”

“I’m not sure it will ever feel real,” Sarah countered.

“Well,” I said. “Imagine how it feels to me.”

“What I’m thinking,” Goreth said, “is that I don’t want to find myself living through one of those movies where all of this isn’t really real. We’re transgender. We’re plural. We have been living with Phage most of our life. I’m a dragon. We’ve been telling the world and ourselves all of that for nearly two decades now. We’ve fought for it. We’ve lost family and friends over it. Some of it is even recognized by the government. Do I exist? Do I perceive myself as who and what I am? Yes. Do you exist, Sarah? Are you my left half? Am I your dragon side, and you my girl side? Yes. Is Phage the monster we befriended in our childhood bedroom, and who has helped us walk in the dark and taken class tests for us when neither of us could be present? Yes. There is so much we have experienced that the rest of the world says that we can’t. And we know the world is wrong. And now we have Ashwin and their memories. How can we tell them that they are not real?”

Sarah sighed, “OK. Let’s get our backpack and write up that contract. I have ideas for it.”

“Good. Doing that.” A heave of body, cane as fulcrum, and we were stumbling toward the backpack where the art supplies were.

“Then, let’s binge the rest of this show afterward?”