At 4:13 pm, on Saturday, August 20, 2005, something terrible almost happened.

At Aunt Brenda’s house, the child of Emilie and Warren, a child who had been given a name that they would eventually renounce, was playing in the front yard while their parents helped Aunt Brenda prepare dinner for later that night.

The house was situated on a side street in a suburban neighborhood that was on the slope of a big hill. Less than a block away, there was a large arterial road known for how nearly everyone broke the speed limit while driving on it.

The road directly in front of the house seemed quiet and the child had been inching their play closer and closer to it, while out of sight of any adults.

And Phage, who had less than two years earlier become this child’s imaginary friend, was doing its best.

Usually it only came out at night, but today called for special attention.

Occasionally, it would participate in their games of make believe, but not by manifesting itself in any way. Not since that first night.

It typically preferred to act as a consultant, giving them advice and making suggestions. Sometimes it would share what it knew about how the universe worked. It had considerable knowledge in that regard. It had promised not to be their Tutor, but it found itself playing the role anyway. Still, they seemed to appreciate it.

And usually, they would act surprised and grateful for what it had to say.

Today, however, was a problem.

The child, or children (because there were two of them within the one body, which was a thing that could happen to humans too, apparently), had stopped listening to it.

They were wrapped up in playing dragon and princess, which could be said to be the game they always played, and the princess was determined to show the dragon how to make mud pies.

It was a sunny day, but it had rained earlier, and there was a very nice puddle in the dirt by the side of the road, with some excellent mud there to harvest for pies.

At nine years old, perhaps they were too old for mud pies. But the princess had pointed out that they had not made mud pies before, and it was high time that she should get to do so.

The dragon had been self conscious about this, under the impression that making mud pies was something only girls did. And that since everyone thought they were both a boy, it wouldn’t be right.

To which the princess had countered that they were at Aunt Brenda’s house, and between her and their parents there was no one here who would actually judge them for it. Unlike any of the rest of their aunts and uncles, or friends at school.

In fact, all their friends were still down in Tumwater, so they couldn’t possibly find out.

That was good enough for the dragon.

Phage, meanwhile, had been trying to coax them away from the puddle, but they wouldn’t have it.

As they picked up their Toyi plastic dragon and Scarlet G.I. Joe action figure to walk over to the puddle, Phage warned them that cars wouldn’t be able to see them when turning onto the road from the arterial.

It had just been a prominently shared thought, but the children had sensed exactly where it came from, because it had already been trying to pull them away from that direction.

“You’re no fun today,” the princess said out loud, using their body’s voice. And that was that.

Phage was shut out.

If it was forceful enough, it would be able to send either or both of them a message. But, unless the message was particularly attention grabbing, they would ignore it. They no longer considered it to be part of their game for the time being.

It had acted too much like their parents.

So, for a few minutes it watched and considered its options.

It knew that this was a disastrous place for them to play. It could see the webs of cause and effect that surrounded the two children and their body. It could perceive them in a way that most beings could not.

And the longer they remained near the puddle, the tighter and more tense certain strands became.

The two of them knew better than to play so near the road. But they knew it as a rule imposed by their mom, not a piece of wisdom gained through experience. That would change all too shortly. But until they gained that wisdom, it was a rule.

And ever since that night that they’d first met Phage, they’d learned how to push, bend, and sometimes break rules. It was a heady new power that they had whenever their parents weren’t looking.

It hadn’t been Phage who had taught them that, either. It had actually been something their mom had told them that had made rule bending click for the dragon, and then for the princess shortly after.

If there were conflicting rules, they found that they could choose one, and their mom had given them a cardinal rule that came from multiple sources. A very important one that would save their lives multiple times over in the future, but not today.

She’d taught them a little lesson about consent, and how it had applied to what nightmare monsters could and could not do to you. She’d told them that if you faced a nightmare monster and said, “No, you cannot hurt me,” then the monster could not hurt you.

Part of that lesson was telling them that they had sovereignty over their own body and soul, whether in a dream or while awake, and that they got to make their own rules about it. A good lesson, really.

And while this had prepared them to become worthy emissaries for Phage, giving them the command over themselves that they needed to draw their boundaries with it, this had also created a rule with which the two children felt they could override other rules.

Which is what they were doing now.

It wasn’t so much that their logic was sound. It was that they thought it was sound. And that they had slowly, over the following months, expanded upon which rules they would bend, twist, and break in the name of their autonomy and sense of control over the world. Which had been something they desperately needed, and still was.

They were usually very, very cautious about it. More so than their peers, actually. Comparatively, they were what people would call a ‘goodie two shoes’. They still couldn’t bring themselves to walk into a neighbor’s lawn to get a ball or frisbee, but they had their sights on that goal. So, a lot of the rules that they had chosen to break were arbitrary and silly rules that even Phage could acknowledge were pointless and there only to needlessly control them. Rules such as the requirement to finish their homework. They learned everything they needed in class, why should they take up valuable time at home reviewing it when they would pass the tests the next day anyway?

That one about homework was clearly a case where bodily autonomy overruled the demands of adults. Doing homework hurt.

This, however, was the first time that their choice of rule to break was leading them into clear danger.

Part of the problem was that they were used to the dirt road near their own house, which almost never had any traffic.

So, when the 2001 tornado red Jetta careened off of Alabama street and onto Ontario, accelerating madly up the steep but short hill there, its driver completely careless of what lay ahead beyond the crest of that hill, the dragon and the princess were oblivious to it and feeling the thrill of doing whatever they wanted to do, in the mud.

And the chains of consent that governed Phage’s domain constricted it to only a tiny set of possible actions.

When no one was around, or when surrounded only by people who wanted it to act, Phage could do some very impressive things. It could, in fact, keep a generational starship intact and full of life well beyond its operational lifetime by sheer force of will. It had already proven that.

However, on this world, where there were so many people who didn’t know it existed, and most of those people had a very strong sense of ownership over so many of the objects and artifacts of the world, it couldn’t do much.

There was a slim chance that Phage could reach out and interfere with the functioning of the Jetta.

The driver of the car might actually appreciate it, if doing so successfully prevented an incident that would fill them with horror and guilt.

But Phage could feel that they also loved their car dearly and were wrapped up in their misplaced sense of ownership over its current movements. There was a lot of will and emotion there to overcome. And quite a bit of ignorance.

It couldn’t take possession of the dragon and princess’ body and make them move. It could try. And they would feel it. But they were tacitly shutting it out. It didn’t have permission, and it would never violate that.

Or so it thought.

It considered that course of action a last resort in all potential cases.

Instead, what it ended up choosing was to reach into the VW bus owned by the children’s father, Warren, and alter its physics.

Both Warren and Emelie would be willing to sacrifice any of their possessions to protect what they thought of as their son, and there-in lay the subconscious consent necessary for Phage to successfully act. And since this would not involve directly interfering with the Jetta’s function, it would not violate that driver’s sense of autonomy.

So the hand brake on the bus deteriorated in less than a second.

It aged faster than any physicist would believe, and the bus began to roll freely backward down the steep slope of the driveway, just as the Jetta’s engine roared with a maximum influx of gasoline.

And before the driver of the Jetta or anyone else could notice what was happening, Phage thought loudly and clearly within the children’s psyche, “I will protect you.”

Then, as physics began to unfold in everyone’s favor, photons making it to retinas and neurons firing in time to motivate muscles to act, friction gripping tires as they landed back down on pavement after a brief jump, and momentum still pitting Volkswagen against Volkswagen, but far less catastrophically than it could have been, Phage considered that it might need help.

In this action, it had saved its hosts while preserving their rights to consent and autonomy, which it felt were vitally important for everyone.

But the complexity of this world, and its inherent violence, was more than it could handle on its own without somehow taking over vast portions of the planet that it was not willing to do.

It would not play god.

It knew the terrors and mistakes of doing that too well.

And, furthermore, critically, not too far from where it had first met the dragon and the princess, there was buried the device that had allowed Phage to visit them in the first place. And that device had contained within it something considerably more dangerous than a 1.6 ton vehicle with an inebriated driver behind the wheel.

It was something that could do to life on this planet what the Jetta could have done to the children’s body.

Planning for and securing the necessary help to deal with that might take a few years, but it could see that that would have to do.

Still, while children and adults alike ran about trying to make sense of the very loud and startling wreck that had just occurred, yelling at each other to make sure everyone was safe and miraculously unharmed, Phage began sending messages back home to find just the right set of candidates for this matter of intergalactic diplomacy.

To do this, it used a set of wormholes that it had moved, two years ago, with permission, from that ancient device under the ground into the children’s psyche, where the wormholes were now entangled with the bosons of their brain. The wormholes were just big enough to let a considerable amount of information pass through them.

Enough information to transmit a person.

If that person was willing to leave their body behind, or simply didn’t have one.

—

A little over eighteen years passed before that happened.

In that time, the children grew to adulthood, moved out, discovered who they really were and declared it to the world.

And the Council of the People deliberated and eventually chose to approve my appointment.

This was actually one of the faster decisions they’ve ever made.

Part of what made it take that long, of course, was that we all had to wait for the dragon and the princess to finally develop the informed consent necessary to grant permission for another visitor.