Erik looked out across the water for a moment, eyeballing Planks and Meridian’s sailboat. The sun was high now, within an hour of noon either way, casting everything in a stark brightness with few shadows. But the glinting of its reflections on the glass portholes of their vessel blinked against the golden cliffs of the bay, and the boat’s dark, mossy green hull stood out in contrast against the sky blue water.

He had been thinking about their dingy, and how they must have been dragging it around behind their boat wherever they went. Beau didn’t have one, and when they needed to go ashore, they’d find a pier where they could dock Trinity herself.

Erik didn’t know what kind of considerations had to be weighed to make that choice one way or another, but he did wonder what he would have chosen if he were in Beau’s shoes.

He remembered Beau calling this place Drake’s Bay, and they were far enough away from any accommodations here that going ashore would really only be something they did to stretch their legs and get some space. Though they were technically near it, San Francisco wasn’t even visible from where they were.

So that was another decision Beau had made that Erik found himself second guessing.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad one, the landscape was fantastically gorgeous. But Erik might have parked the boat as close to town as possible.

Sometimes a man – or a small group of men in a short girl’s body – needs an old parking lot full of food trucks, you know?

But this bay was striking, even in the noon light.

It looked like someone had taken a giant ice cream scoop to part of California’s coastline where there were grassy rolling hills, and had cut right through those hills and pulled a long, beautiful ball of land up and away to stick in some cosmic cone and hand it to a happy giant space child to eat. And what was left filled with water from the ocean.

He figured it was a product of erosion. But if he hadn’t had just enough knowledge to consider how those cliffs had formed, preserving the curvature of the hills they bisected, he might have thought the shape of the bay looked like some sort of meteor impact crater. But a meteor would have created an encircling ridge that just wasn’t there.

The Murmuration was talking about how they met Erik and the Ampersands at Aunti Zero’s Coffee Hut, overhearing them talk about the latest antics of their headmates publicly and wandering over to say, ‘hi’.

And since Erik knew the story, he’d taken a moment to look at some of the things he knew were truly outworld constructs, the boats, the cliffs, the water. And focusing on those instead of the lurkers and the web, and whatever else his brain was trying to serve up, helped to ground his thinking.

“So, yeah, anyway,” Murmur said. “When we sat down at that table with them that day, we had no idea that they’d give us space crabs.”

Everyone laughed. 

Erik detected maybe a little ruefulness in his own chuckle.

They’d already gone over the events of Ashwin’s book, to catch their new friends up on the history of what they’d been talking about, and as a prompt to tell the story of how Erik and Beau had met. And Erik didn’t know if the two singlets believed any of it, but that didn’t really matter, so long as they were entertaining the stories without protest or ridicule.

Both Planks and Meridian seemed to take it all in stride and with innocent curiosity.

They’d even told some of their own stories.

Planks was sure that he’d once encountered an as yet unidentified sea monster, and Meridian swore that every house they had lived in was haunted.

Boats could be haunted, too, but it seemed to Meridian that sea ghosts knew that they were part of a crew and the good ones would keep your boat in working order and watch your back like a good sailor.

“Yeah, tell us more about those crabs,” Meridian said.

Murmur looked at Erik.

“What?” Erik asked. “Oh, sure. I guess I’ve actually seen what they maybe look like, thanks to my delightful brain.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Murmur said. “But who knows, really? We should compare notes, right?”

“Yeah, sounds good.”

“So,” Murmur said. “We’ve only seen ‘em in our dreams. We don’t see things like Erik does. And my memories of our dreams are kinda fuzzy. But, I mean, it’s like the name Ashwin or Goreth picked for ‘em really fits. Cuttlecrabs. They look like a cross between cuttlefish and crabs, sorta. They have a beak like a parrot, six pointy crab-like legs, and a bunch of short tentacles around their mouth, and eyestalks. Their eyes have hourglass pupils, even. At least, they do in our head. And they can change color and texture, and have a flashy light on their bellies.”

Erik nodded, “That’s about right. They also smell like the wrong kind of sea shore. Like, nothing you’ve smelled around here on Earth, I’m sure, but unmistakably ocean anyway. I don’t know if that’s like, my own brain just making something up, or if it’s their own memories of themselves they brought over from the Sunspot.”

“Fuckin’ wild,” Meridian said. “I wish I could see them myself. Have any of you all thought about drawing them, or making animations or something? I could see all this stuff making for some great web shorts.”

Erik couldn’t stop himself from glancing up at the universal webbing above them all.

“Eh,” Erik said. “The way the Ampersands are going with their writing and art, it wouldn’t surprise me if they eventually broke into doing that. I’d definitely help out somehow. But I don’t know what I could do, ‘cept maybe voices. But Murmur’s way, way better at voices than me.”

“Listen,” the Murmuration said, blinking repeatedly as if through glasses, shoulders hunched and back arched so they could look up at everyone else as they spoke in a hurried run on, “that reminds me, I’m having a big party for all my clients, my fourth anniversary as an accountant, you know, and even though you do your own tax return, which you shouldn’t do, I’d like you to stop by, being that you’re my neighbor and all.” Then they held that pose and kept a straight, guileless face.

Everyone stared at them for a few moments, trying to figure out where they’d heard that from before.

“Jesus Christ,” Planks said. “That was fucking spot on!” He looked at everyone else in excitement and pointed at Murmur and said, “Louis Tully!”

Murmur broke character and shrugged, saying, “It helps to have fictives of all the obviously autistic characters. When we relate that intensely, it just happens.”

Erik squinted at them and asked, “Brock’s autistic?”

“They are in our head, yeah,” Louis’ introject said.

“I mean, I guess I can see it,” Erik admitted. He gestured at the Murmuration. “Anyway, see what I mean? I can’t best that.”

“You don’t need to?” Meridian said, making it a question maybe to see if Erik would accept it. “Your own voice is still distinct from theirs. And these shorts would be about your life, too, right? You’d get to contribute. And your own set of perspectives would be important for that.”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Erik. Who amongst your friends literally sees lurkers and shit like that, huh?” Meridian asked.

“OK. OK. Yeah, you’re right.”

“I mean, I thought this whole discussion was about how you are literally experiencing multiple realities at once, and even sharing one of the weirder ones with your friends that the rest of us can’t even touch, let alone see, right?”

“Well, yeah, but –”

“There you go,” Meridian said. “You’re a nexus of the multiverse. It’s good.”

“Huh.” It seemed to him like he’d had that thought himself before, but now that Meridian was saying it out loud, he wanted to argue with it. He decided not to. He didn’t want to end up invalidating his own experiences and everything he’d said that morning by doing so. But there had been some kind of problem he’d been trying to get at, and this wasn’t quite it. Maybe seeing Goreth and being reminded of how they were going to see their Grandma today had been the thing to clarify this. Maybe his brain had been trying to tell him something by that vision. He adjusted the way he was seated and leaned forward, squinting at the Murmuration’s feet where they rested on the floor of the pilot’s station. “Maybe it’s something else I feel like I’m missing. I find myself wishing these aliens had come through the gateway in my head, you know? Or maybe, I could actually talk to my ancestors, right? Like, face to face like I do with these cuttlecrabs or my own friends even when they’re not actually here.”

“What do you mean?” Meridian asked.

“Well, OK. When I went below to get Beau’s tablet, I saw Goreth and talked to them, but they’re not actually here.”

“Oh, that’s what was going on!” Planks exclaimed. “Cool!”

“You should see how my visual cortex tries to fit a dragon that might be longer than this boat into that tiny little cabin,” Erik told him. Then he turned back to Meridian and said, “But, what I mean is that, you know, I know there are people like me who are in touch with their ancestry, even when they don’t really know where they’re from anymore, and I guess I’m jealous. But it feels even worse when I’m seeing amazing shit come from my friends who have lineages, you know? And I don’t even get a peep of anything that comes from where I come from. Except for my own mom and dad.”

“That’s real,” Beau said.

“Shit. Got it,” Meridian said, and then stared off at the stretch of open sea that was visible at the mouth of the bay. “This is going to sound corny as shit, but I think you need to go hug some trees, man.” They blinked at Erik, and asked, “You’re all headed up North from here, right?”

“Yep,” Beau said. “The plan is to visit Washington after this, then come back down to return to Portland.”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” Meridian said. “There’s the National Redwood Forest up here in California, on your way. But, also, Washington’s got some damn old trees, too. Take some time to go and find an old tree and just hug it. It can be your ancestor for however long you need. Even if it’s a tree that isn’t actually older than you – but some of them definitely are – it’s got connections to the Earth that are ancient. Predate civilization. Might give that fantastic brain of yours something to hang onto.”

“I think we can swing that,” Beau said, nudging Erik’s knee with his own. “Might be good?”

Erik tried to imagine hugging an old tree, and tried to think about how that would feel, and felt self conscious about it. It really wasn’t what he was trying to get at, he thought, but as embarrassing as it might feel to do, he’d certainly embarrassed himself with worse before and he was willing to give it a shot anyway.

Part of the whole point of this trip, really, was to introduce their alien walk-ins, Rräoha and the Collective, to the Earth itself. Show them around. Let them see what a planet is really like. And introduce them to a wider range of people, animals, and plant-life, too. See how different things lived.

But, for himself, after having his own life so heavily impacted by this aliens-from-outer-space shit, he was really yearning to plant his feet in the soil of the Earth itself and cling to it with his dear life. And being on a boat wasn’t doing that at all. Hugging an old tree might just be it.

“I think we’d like that a lot,” Erik eventually said, referring to his whole system in a way he usually reserved for deep discussions with Murmur and the Ampersands, and maybe Beau now.

“My Nan is smart,” Meridian said. “It’s her idea, really. Or someone’s, and she told it to me when I was small. It’s never failed me when I’m feeling at a loss.”

“Can I ask?” Erik looked up at them. “I mean, this feels like the whitest thing I’ve ever asked, but we’ve got these aliens in our heads and we’re supposed to be introducing them to people and explaining how the Earth works.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Who are your ancestors?” he pushed himself to say.

“Nooksack,” Meridian said. “Up near Kweq’ Smánit, or Kwelshán, up in Washington.” They shrugged. “I could say more things, but I’m not sure how relevant they are. I’ve been away sailing long enough, I’m not really up to date on their politics anymore. But, yeah, we’ve been there forever, if that’s what the cuttlecrabs want to know.”

“Well, the Collective seems to be mostly interested in talking to more people and pulling one over on birds,” Erik said. “Also trying new food. But I think Rräoha, over in the Murmuration there, might be eating up anything we all have to say about being different kinds of people. Gem’s a Monster, apparently.”

“Yeah,” Murmur said. “That’s with a capital ‘M’. Probably the closest thing to a queer person the Sunspot has. A bit of madpunk, too. They tend to live on the edges of their society and have a much shorter life expectancy, on purpose. But it’s not at all like an ethnicity. I don’t know if the Sunspot even has ethnicities. It’s very alien.”

Erik nodded, “That.” He looked up at Planks and raised his eyebrows and said, “Only if you’re comfortable saying.”

Planks laughed and said, “My dad’s Thai and my mom’s white. I grew up in Seattle, so I wish I could talk about Thailand, but I really can’t. I’m working on it, though.”

“I gotta ask again,” Erik said. “Where did you get the name ‘Planks’?”

Planks scratched the back of his head and chuckled, “I worked in a kitchen. A night club with fancy pub food.”

“I thought it was a boat thing, like nicknames sailors give each other,” Erik said.

“Dude, in that same kitchen, I used to work with a guy named Poops,” Planks said. “Do not ask. In some ways, kitchens are more like boats than boats are.”

“Gotcha. Somehow I’ve only ever managed to be barista, myself. It’s like being waitstaff that get burns and can’t cuss about it.”

“OK, that’s a thing Rräoha is struggling to understand,” the Murmuration said. “Jobs. And, like, all we do is contract design work from home. We can make our own hours, so it’s often like we’re just doing art on a whim, except when we gotta make a deadline. But when I explain to gem that some of our friends have to hurt themselves to make rent or eat, Rräoha starts asking so many questions I can’t even answer them all.”

Erik looked at Meridian and asked, “Before sailing, what did you do?”

“Paperboy,” Meridian said. “And then when I was done with the boy phase, pizza delivery.”

“Really? People still deliver newspapers?”

“OK. I wouldn’t call them newspapers. You know those coupon inserts you sometimes find in newspapers? Well, somebody up in Whatcom county thought it was a good idea to have those delivered separately to everyone’s houses, whether people wanted them or not, and I got to get paid to do that.” Meridian shook their head. “It was a shit job. Paid crap. But I hate to say it, it was kind of funny just how mad some people got when they caught me throwing these things into their yards. This one guy held his arms like this and just kept jumping up and down with rage while I drove away. Like one of those guys from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

The name for them popped right into his head, “Gumbies!”

“Yeah, those guys. Just like a Gumby. So glad I don’t do that anymore, but I wish the owners coulda seen that guy’s rage.”

“Wait,” Planks said, leaning toward the Murmuration. “So, the Sunspotians don’t have jobs and they don’t have ethnicities? How does that work?”

“Well, I don’t really know about the ethnicities thing,” the Murmuration said. “I just know they all live on this generational starship that’s hardly any bigger than Washington and Oregon put together, and neither Rräoha nor Ashwin have said anything about different cultures and that sort of thing. And as for, like, survival, everything’s automated.”

“That’s not entirely true, Murmur,” Erik said. “Ashwin’s said some stuff about their Elders on the Network. Like, they have whole worlds there, and come from different eras of the ship’s history. And that thing’s been flying through space so long it’s supposed to be older than our recorded history. But, yeah. I think it’s more like internet groups. They got rid of biological lineages, and families and communities form around common interests more than anything. Fandoms.”

“‘Elders on the Network’?” Meridian asked.

“Yeah,” Erik said. “Except for the Monsters, when people’s bodies die there, they ascend to the Network. It’s this virtual reality space where they can exist and create their own worlds and keep living and maybe even play god all they want.”

“In a way, it sounds like the inworld of a big system, like ours,” the Murmuration said. “Except we don’t have an inworld quite that elaborate. But some systems do.”

“I know a lot of science fiction authors have written about stuff like that,” Meridian said. “But, that does sound really alien to me. I have trouble imagining what that must be like. Everything around you has been made, by other people. Nothing grown. No Earth. Do they know anything about their home planet?”

Erik shrugged and shook his head, “Not much, if anything. Kind of why they want us to show them around here.” He gestured around at the cliffs surrounding the bay, past the glitches in reality he was seeing too. “Though, I don’t know if the Collective in my system is seeing anything free of my hallucinations. Not sure how that works yet.”

“Is there any way we could talk to them?” Meridian asked.

“Probably not through me,” Erik said. “I don’t work that way.”

“No, your Collective has fronted and talked to us,” Murmur said. “You might not remember it much, but they do actually do that with you. Their voice is really different, too. I think they like your vessel better for some reason. They hate fronting over here.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah.”

Erik could hardly believe it. He didn’t have any memory of that, like Murmur said. But, he accepted it anyway. He tried feeling around in his mind for their presence, but couldn’t find anything, though.

“I don’t think I could call them forward,” he said. “Especially during one of my episodes, when my brain isn’t working at all the way I want it to.”

“We might be able to get Rräoha forward,” Murmur said. “But we’re feeling performance anxiety about it. Like, showing off for others makes us feel fake.”

“I get that,” Beau said.

Erik nodded, and said, “That makes sense. I sort of feel the same way talking about my hallucinations, even when they’re right in front of me.”

“It helps if you can grow up in a culture that cultivates these things instead of shaming them,” Meridian said.

Erik rolled his eyes and let his head follow, then nodded at Meridian, “I bet!”

Meridian drew their mouth out into a wide, thin line, and said, “I don’t think any of us here did.”

“Yeh.”

Beau slapped his thighs and declared, “I’m thinking about lunch! How ‘bout the rest of ya?”

—

Erik stretches and then reaches down and uses his hands to support himself as he pushes his butt up off the deck carefully to relieve the pressure on it without jostling his cuttlecrab too much.

After a few seconds, he sets himself down again, and the cuttlecrab doesn’t even seem to notice anything happened.

He’s kept his eyes on the little hallucinated creature the whole time he’s done this.

“I’m going to need to get up and walk around in a little bit,” he tells it. “But you’re like a cat. I don’t want to disturb you.”

“Where we exist and how you see us is an agreement between you and us. This one’s avatar is merely a projection of your Network,” it replies. “It could hover, or perch on your shoulder, or simply exist in your mind. It is up to you.”

“Yes,” Erik agrees. “But I do like having you in my lap.”

“Understood.”

“You keep saying ‘Network’ when I think you are referencing my brain,” he tells it.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To us, it is like the Network of the Sunspot. It works in a very similar way,” it replies.

“Huh,” he grunts. “I guess that’s not any worse than calling myself a system.”

“We do not understand.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says.

“Understood.”

“I think I’m going to stand up when Beau comes up here,” he says. “But, before that happens, I want to try something, if you think he might take a while about it.” He considers the possibilities of what he’s thinking, and wonders if it will be much of a problem if he’s completely zoned out when Beau comes to talk. At first he’s really worried about it and about to call off the idea.

In a way, it’s just a frivolous whim. A hint of a possibility that he’s now remembered and is curious if he can even pursue, inspired by the conversations he’s spent the day having with the others. And it wouldn’t be a huge loss if he gave up on it.

But, then he tells himself that he’s the one having an attack of madness here on the boat, and even though his goal is to apologize to Beau for his outbursts and lack of control, he does have a boundary that needs to be respected. And that’s that regardless of anything else, his health must come first.

And if this worked, it might improve his health. Or, at least his sense of selves and his place in the world.

Beau should understand. And if he can’t, that would be a problem down the line.

He doesn’t want to be zoned out, or out of control, when Beau shows up, but if he is it will be a test.

He works his lips in a physical expression of attempting to think deeply about it, but he’s already made up his mind, and he nods.

“You say my psyche is like the Network for you,” he says to the cuttlecrab. “Does that mean that you can explore it like the Network, too? Like, visit all the nooks and crannies of our collective mind?”

“Only the areas where you have collectively given us permission,” it replies.

“But, you do perceive those areas as if they are places?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I find that really neat,” he tells it.

“You said you would like to try something,” it tilts its body up as if to look at him better.

“Can you teach me how to do that?” he asks.

For a while, it doesn’t respond, and continues to watch his face. He figures that it’s thinking. He doesn’t even see it twitch, let alone flicker its light or change color. But it eventually does talk.

“We think so,” it says. “The state that your brain is in now will make it easier. But you will need to let one of your other selves take over. Or you will need to let your body sleep.”

“I’m good with that. We all know the ropes,” he says. Then he looks over at where his other self has been sitting and sees nothing there. He must have gotten up and gone away with his cuttlecrab while they were talking. “Might have to do the sleep thing.”

He scoots himself over to the low outer cabin wall, to lean against it, still in the shade of the temporary shelter. And then he lets his head drop, cuttlecrab still firmly in the lap of his crossed legs.

Closing his eyes, he asks, “How does this work? I’m aphantasiac. I can’t visualize anything, except when I dream or hallucinate.”

“Do you sense our weight on your lap?” it asks.

“Yes.”

“Begin to ignore the other senses from your body, and focus on that weight. Focus on this one’s presence. Relax. Like you are falling asleep. Prepare yourself for sleep, but focus on this one.”

“OK.” But then he asks, “How do you understand how a human psyche works? How do you understand to give this advice?”

“They are your protocols,” it replies. “We are merely reading them.”

“Weird.”

“The words you hear us speak to you are the words you give our thoughts.”

“Right.”

“Relax. Focus. Don’t speak anymore. Then follow us. Follow this one, but without your body.”

He allows himself to nod.

Then he feels the feet of the cuttlecrab begin to move. Tapping on his legs as it changes position and starts walking. Except, instead of scuttling off of his lap and across the deck, it climbs into his torso, right at his solar plexus.

It doesn’t hurt at all.

It wouldn’t be right to say that it tingles or tickles or creates any sort of discomfort besides surprise. But it does feel like wiggling, like something moving deeper and deeper inside him. On par with how he feels his own emotions and those of his headmates. And it just kind of makes sense.

So, he follows the physical sensation with his attention, and feels himself falling from his consciousness into a dream with a cuttlecrab leading the way.

He’s maybe too delighted by how easy it is, thrilled to feel like the way is already paved for him, feeling like he’s being pulled by the wake of his little companion, too wonder much about how astonishing it is that he can do this at all.

—

“There isn’t much here. This is the center of everything.”

He floats in darkness.

“Our own Network Space is in the back, where you have let us reside.”

“Your ‘Network Space’? Do you mean your headspace?” he asks.

“Yes,” replies the Collective.

He now feels as if he is sharing his consciousness with all of them. There are many cuttlecrabs here, even though he cannot truly see any of them.

“I’d like to see that some day, but I want to see if we really have a gateway,” he says. “Do you know where our gateway is?”

“What do you mean by ‘gateway’?” they ask him.

“One of my selves said he saw it once. It’s supposed to be a passageway between our psyche and – I don’t really know. The rest of the universe? Other systems? I’m not sure. I want to see what’s beyond it if I can,” he tells them.

“We have not seen this,” they reply. “Perhaps your other self can lead the way. Do you know which one of you it was?”

“No.”

“Ask.”

“Just ask?”

“You are in the center of everything. If you ask with the intent to be heard, the others will hear.”

He hesitates, but then asks loudly, mentally directing his question to everyone, “Can somebody show me to the gateway?”

There is no actual sound but he still hears his thought very clearly.

“I don’t understand how this works,” he tells the Collective.

“It is a dream,” they reply.

“Huh. You dream?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“What’s that like for a hive mind?”

“Like you, we are always dreaming.”

“Hi!” 

He feels the presence of his cheerful self arrive, and has the sense of what he looks like from a memory of his body’s proprioception. There’s the vague idea that a similarly shaped person is near him. And he senses that person’s presence more strongly than his own. But he feels he senses his alter’s personality and emotions more strongly than that.

“You’re the one who found our gateway?” he asks.

“Yep! Know right where it is, too.”

“The Collective seems to think you can lead the way,” he says. “Can you do that for us?”

“You bet! Let’s go.”

His cheerful self moves and the Collective follows, flowing a receding wave all around him. He thought he only had a sub-Collective of four cuttlecrabs, but there seem to be so many more now. But, in this dream state, it feels natural to just accept what is happening for what it is. The mass of them makes it easy for him to follow.

He is entirely cut off from all sense of what is happening to his actual body, and momentarily he worries about this, but then he’s distracted from that by what he suddenly actually sees.

He hadn’t really known what to expect. Perhaps because of his contact with aliens and hosting some of them in his own system, he’d half expected to find the gateway in some sort of spacescape, with nebulae and galaxies surrounding some sort of swirling black hole. But he had also been dismissing that idea as coming from outside influences.

It would have been really cool though.

Instead, he finds himself stepping onto the thick shag carpet of his old childhood bedroom. The bedroom he’d had when he was a toddler, shared with his sister. All various shades of pinks and purples with sky and navy blues. 

His sister’s American Girl doll collection is all put away on shelves higher than he can reach even now, all second hand but lovingly taken care of, fixed up, restored where needed. She also has a mound of plushies on her bed. 

There is a Stitch pillow in his crib. Almost a plushy, but just two pieces of silk screened fabric, cut out in the silhouette of an extremely ADHD alien genetic experiment, and sewn together with stuffing inside of it. Safe for babies.

His parents had thought they had another girl, so they figured his sister’s decor and toys would be enough for him. But now, in retrospect, that Stitch pillow seems like a prophetic omen in more ways than one. And sitting there in that crib, it made all the other blues in the room feel like they belonged to him, too.

His cheerful counterpart is there, too, dressed in his favorite glittery tutu, fishnets, hand decorated boots, and jean jacket. He can pick out every detail, every golden threaded rubber band used to hold each of his braids in place. And when his counterpart turns to talk to him he catches a glimpse of his old Ghostbusters t-shirt under that jean jacket.

He looks down at himself and sees he’s wearing his Other hoodie, the one with what looks like a broken Japanese doll looming over the horror movie lettering of the word ‘Other’ with a capital ‘O’, all white silkscreen on a faded black. He can smell his BO on it, and touch the fabric and feel its weave with his fingers. He’s wearing the same boots as his cheerful self, of course, but his black tulle skirt.

If this is a dream, it is the most vivid one he’s ever experienced. It feels like he has entered his own past.

Except that a wave of cuttlecrabs, with their alien ocean stink, surges past him from behind, headed toward his counterpart and his old closet door. They cover the floor like gigantic, What-A-Burger sized cockroaches.

This brings his view back up to his cheerful self who says, gesturing, “It’s our closet!”

The door is closed.

He seems to remember that it spent a lot of time closed when he was a kid. His sister seemed to prefer it that way. She’d said there were monsters in it but that they didn’t know how to use door handles.

“Seriously?” he asks. “It doesn’t feel like a gateway. It’s just a closet, Erik.”

“Nah. Put your hand on it,” his cheerful self says.

The Collective part to give him a walkway to the door, which he uses so that he can follow his own instructions.

He stops short enough that he has to lean forward a bit to place his hand in the middle of the door, which he does. And he finds that it is warm and filled with vibrations of some sort. It’s almost like he can suddenly hear a low, harmonic humming when his skin contacts the painted wood. He can tell that the vibrations are crisscrossing the mass of the door and creating standing waves, like in a pool of water.

He doesn’t understand how he can perceive this, other than that this is supposed to be a dream and in dreams he can often perceive and know things he wouldn’t be able to in real life, except maybe when he’s psychotic.

He is, in theory, psychotic right now.

His mind wonders and he tries to speculate how this would work neurologically, but he’s not his neurologist self. His special interest is horror movies and cryptids.

He turns to his cheerful self and says, “You do know that neither of us can be the final girl.”

His cheerful self shrugs and says, “Maybe it’s a Jordan Peele movie.”

“You’ve been paying attention,” he observes.

“We all do, and you know it.”

“So, you’ve never opened this?” he asks.

“Even Jordan Peele movies look like hell to live through,” his counterpart says.

“True.”

“And we’ve all been terrified of that closet since our sister told us what it was.”

“What did she tell us it was?”

“A closet.”

He rolls his eyes, “Oh, right. Of course. With monsters in it.”

“Exactly.”

“But this is the closet in our head, not the real one,” he says.

“Yep! But, you know. Since she said there were monsters in it, most of us thought that maybe our minds would put monsters in it,” his cheerful self explains. “But, I got to thinking. The monsters maybe have to come from somewhere. Like, if it’s just a little closet, they wouldn’t all fit, right? So maybe it’s like a portal. I mean, that is a trope, right?”

“Sure is.”

“And you know, we’re queer now, and queer people are just another form of monster, so why should we keep the other monsters out?”

“That’s kind of what I’m thinking, too,” he admits. “But also, it would be really funny if we opened this door and just found a pile of pride flags on the other side of it.”

“Yeah.”

“I think,” he says, “the longer we talk about this, the more ominous this is going to feel, and the more likely our subconscious is going to spring actual monsters on us, and I came here intent on opening this door. Do you think we should hold a vote on it or something, though?”

“I’ll go ask!”

He raises his hand to forestall the action, but his headmate is already gone, and all he can do is wait.

He looks down at the Collective swarming the entire floor of his old room and finally takes the chance to ask, “How are there so many of you?”

“You gave us permission.”

“I did?” he asks.

But the Collective doesn’t get a chance to answer, because his cheerful self is back saying, “It’s unanimous! Open the door!”

He gestures to the floor and asks, “Should they get a vote, too?”

“We will overwhelm anything that threatens you,” the Cuttlecrabs respond.

“Guess we know their vote, either way, then,” and he moves to open the door, glancing back at his cheerful self before placing his hand on the knob.

He waits for a crescendo of music or something. Maybe just sounds coming from the rest of the house that this room is supposed to exist in. But there’s nothing except the shuffling of cuttlecrabs and the sound of his counterpart smiling and nodding.

Before he can hesitate any further, his hand snaps shut in a firm grip on the knob and twists it, pulling the door open wide in a swift and final movement. He steps back to allow it to happen and turns to face the closet.

Standing right on the other side of the door, back of his right shoulder facing Erik, speaking to another man of completely different stature, fashion, and complexion, is a barbarian prince with sickly white skin and ivory colored hair. He’s tall, wearing dark and alien crafted armor with a huge, ominous black sword strung to his back.

The other man looks like a veteran of some U.S. war, possibly Vietnam.

They are on the other side of the door, but they’re not standing in a closet. 

The landscape on the other side of the door looks like an endless cinema set, with a high warehouse ceiling and various set pieces from all genres of movies arranged on the floor in an almost convention style pattern for as far as the eye can see.

And both of them tower over Erik. But he’s used to that.

The people beyond them that wander between the set pieces all look like they could come from different parts of the world and different productions. All different eras of humanity are represented.

He thinks he recognizes a couple of them.

The veteran sees him and nods in his direction, alerting the barbarian prince to his presence, and the prince turns to give him an appraising look with eyes that have pink irises.

“Ah. Another one,” he says. “The lords of chaos never cease to be amused by my bewilderment, it seems.”

“Two,” says the veteran. “But what are those things crawling all over the floor?”

—

“Hey, Erik, Sweetheart.”

Beau is gently pushing on his shoulder, as he opens his eyes and blinks against the early afternoon sun, shaded as he is. The glare off the water and the other areas of the boat, and from the sky itself, is very bright in contrast to where he’d just been.

You’d think his eyes wouldn’t have to adjust so much with just eyelids closed over them. But here they are, making that demand.

“Yeah?” he manages to ask.

Beau settles down in front of him, sitting his butt on the deck and resting his elbows on his knees, and gives Erik a concerned but reasonably friendly look. He seems confused.

“Sorry, I fell asleep,” Erik says. “I think I needed it. But I’m glad you got my message.”

Beau blinks, “You did send a message! Through the Murmuration. But your cellphone’s in the cabin. I saw it in the head, actually. How did you do that?”

“Leave my phone in the head and forget it?” Erik asks.

“No, silly. How did you tell the Murmuration you wanted to talk.”

Erik remembers everything vividly, including the dream he’d just had, and just tells the truth like he’d intended, “Cuttlecrab telepathy.”

Beau shakes his head and says, “I honestly do not believe it.”

“You don’t have to,” Erik says. “But it happened anyway. Can you tell me what a fireship is? I’ve been wondering for the past couple of hours.”

Beau frowns and asks, “Why do you ask?”

“I think you called me one,” Erik tells him. “You were really angry. But maybe I heard wrong.”

Beau looks out over the bay at the cliffs of Marin county and squints. He picks up a piece of shell that’s on the deck somehow, and throws it overboard. Then, after a few moments he says, “Well, I don’t remember it, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t. It’s a real thing, and I shouldn’t have called you that. Nobody’s a fireship. I’m sorry for calling you that, whether I did or not. Genuinely sorry. I will not allow myself to do it again.”

Erik studies him for a while, trying to figure out if he should trust his boyfriend. He does feel reassured by Beau’s words, though, and there are no nagging doubts. His head feels clear.

He looks around.

There’s no cuttlecrab, no lurkers, no web.

Seriously? It’s over? Just like that?

That would make this the shortest, wildest episode of psychosis yet.

He sighs and says, “Thank you. I think I really needed this rest, badly. But, can you tell me what a fireship is?”

“Yeah,” Beau says. He swallows. “It’s a boat or a ship used in battle. It’s loaded with explosives or flammables and a skeleton crew that usually abandons ship at the last moment, and it’s rammed into the enemy lines to try to break them. Do as much damage as possible.”

“Oh, that’s a trope! I should have known.”

“It’s an ancient tactic is what it is,” Beau says.

“Yeah, still,” Erik says. “I may have picked it up from one of my special interests and hallucinated you saying it.”

“Could be, I guess. I can’t rule out one of my other selves saying it, though,” Beau admits. “The Captain can be a real obstinate hard ass. Real thick in the head about people, too.”

“Was my meltdown in the cabin really that bad?” Erik asks. “I remember it being really bad. And over carrots of all things.”

Beau shrugs and shakes his head, and says, “Maybe? I didn’t perceive it that way. I mean, you did make a damn mess, but nothing that couldn’t be cleaned up. And we did talk about this kind of thing. Before we set sail, we made plans. If you had that kind of reaction to anything, you’d need time on your own to work things out. Planks and Mer are real cool about it, too. They like you, Erik.”

“I don’t think Murmur has seen anything like that from me before,” Erik tells him.

“Yeah. They were able to hide in the bow, and seemed to understand better than the rest of us, though. They were the ones to remind us what was up after I directed you up here.”

“Oh, good.”

Beau squints at Erik’s middle and asks, “Have you been wearing your binder since yesterday?”

“Yeah,” Erik admits after a moment of self consciousness.

“You gotta go take that off, man,” his boyfriend says. “Totally get it. But I’ll tell Murmur to give you room up front to do that. Planks is a good man, it won’t phase him. And the rest of us are trans, so, you’re good.”

Erik checks his own sense of fear and discomfort and finds that, besides the physical aches and pains he’s now feeling from his binder and sleeping slumped against the cabin, those feelings are all cleared up.

“Yeah,” he says. Then he looks back up to Beau and asks, “Did I say anything really bad to you? I know I thought a lot of stuff, but did I say any of it?”

Beau shrugs with his nearest shoulder and says, “Maybe? Didn’t hurt none, and I’m paying it no mind, either. I knew what was happening with you. You were upfront about it the whole time. And even if you hadn’t been, you’d warned me.”

“Normally,” Erik says, “I can experience all of that without having a shitty meltdown about it, though.”

“Yeah? Well, we all have our limits, and I think I maybe pushed yours. Didn’t mean to. Not consciously. Still real sorry about it, though. But, now we know where they are.”

“Gotcha. Thank you.”

“Erik,” Beau says.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve seen some really weird shit in my life, maybe even one of Meridian’s ghosts,” Beau tells him. “Ever since I’ve met your friends, the Murmuration and the Ampersands, I’ve experienced the weirdest. Y’all have something going on. And I’ve been wondering if maybe I wasn’t becoming a little psychotic myself, assuming it can be a spectrum sort of thing. You’ve said all people hallucinate a little, right?”

It’s Erik’s turn to shrug, and he says, “I make it a policy not to rule anything out when it comes to humans and other people. But, it’s only psychosis if it meets certain clinical criteria and it distresses you. I think I need to stand up.”

“Here, let me help you.”

They both stand up, Beau giving him a hand, the boat swaying less than he’d expect from the movement, and Erik gently lets himself stretch all of his limbs and his back before saying anything more. He says then, “But lack of a diagnosis doesn’t mean you’re not really experiencing a thing. Diagnosis is a tool, and an oppressive one.”

“Yeah,” Beau nods. “What I’m saying, though, is that I maybe wasn’t really believing all this alien visitor shit. But, Erik, the Murmuration just told me that you’d sent them a message via the cuttlecrabs, somehow, and that you’d specifically asked to talk to me so that you could apologize, and that you wanted to know about ‘fireships’. And that’s maybe a bit too complicated for guesswork, and no one saw you signal the Murmuration or anything, and then I let you confirm it all without prompting. And…” He trailed off, shaking his head and adjusting his pants.

“Bet we couldn’t repeat it under laboratory conditions, though,” Erik suggests.

“I don’t think I need to,” Beau says.

“Neither do I,” Erik admits. And they both share the kind of moment of silence where agreements and solidarity dwell and grow. Then he ventures, “But my subconscious sure does have a fucked up sense of humor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I just had a dream,” he ventures.

“Yeah?”

“You know how I was talking earlier about maybe being a gateway system and also wishing I could have something special about myself that came from me? Or like an actual connection to my ancestors?”

Beau nods, “Of course.”

“Well, I dreamt that one of my headmates showed me to our gateway and we opened it.”

Beau takes the prompt, “What was on the other side?”

“The Eternal Plane of Eriks.”

Beau falls gracelessly to the deck, wracked with the most gratifying, beautiful, gut punching, infectious laughter Erik has ever heard.

He looks down at his boyfriend and finds himself smirking and giggling to himself. 

And eventually, Beau is able to push himself back up to a sitting position and wipe his eyes of tears, to say, “That’s possibly the most perfect thing I’ve ever heard. I love you so much.”

—

His memory of the ultimate meltdown is anticlimactic but still disastrous and embarrassing.

As far as he can tell, it had nothing to do with an hallucination or delusion. Just stress and one of his autistic boundaries.

He can eat nearly anything, if he detaches his emotions from whatever it might be. He’s not unique in this. Some autistics are like that. Autism seems to be a neurotype of opposite extremes after all. Some need to make sure none of their food is touching and have very restricted diets due to sensory issues. Others are like Erik and can eat nearly any mixture of things, even garbage straight out of a dumpster.

But what Erik can’t eat is carrots.

And on that day, he couldn’t even handle the smell.

The bowl of carrots and the peeler that had been handed to him, because he hadn’t yet warned Beau of this problem, had sent him straight into a full blown meltdown, and from there every stimulus had made it worse. Every tiny vocalization, every movement, every glint of light drove coherent thought and action further from his mind, and replaced it with rage.

At some point, he’d managed to climb outside in the middle of his fit, and became relaxed enough to hear and process Beau’s words without flying even more off the handle. And Beau had followed him.

And that’s when the word ‘fireship’ had entered his consciousness.

—

Later, when Beau’s friends are getting ready to leave, reeling in their dingy and saying their goodbyes, Planks stops to give him an appraising look.

“Erik,” Planks says. “Maybe I should be the last person to say this, but I don’t think you should dismiss your Eternal Plane of Eriks as subconscious bullshit, you know? It’s a good story, but I think there’s something real there. I mean, you’ve just spent the day telling us all about how your hallucinations are real in a way, anyway, but I think it could be more than that.”

Erik studies him back for a bit, while everyone else waits to see how this exchange will go.

Planks shrugs and says, “Maybe I’m overstepping. Sorry.”

“Nah,” Erik says. “You might be right. I just think I’ve got to spend some time processing it with the rest of my system.”

“Yeah. Makes sense.”

“I gotta agree with Planks,” Meridian adds. “Normally, I’d say it was your subconscious pulling a prank on you, and sending you a message, and that’d be important enough. But after the telepathy shit you and the Murmuration pulled on this boat? Even if that was some sort of stage trick.” They gesture at Erik. “It might just be the universe itself punking you. Either way, we gotta tell this story to the next crew. Please let us.”

“Keep my name out of it?” he requests.

“Aw, but that’s the whole fun of it.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Eh, go ahead. What I do know, though,” Erik tells them both, “is that it is an experiment I’m going to try to repeat. A lot.”

“Tell us what the results are?” Planks asks.

“Ab-so-fucking-lutely.”

“You gotta admit, it is really funny,” Meridian says.

“I was the first one to say it,” Erik says.

“He was,” Beau confirms.