“I’m a system, now,” Cassy said. “What the kids call ‘plural’. You know, with DID, or something like it.”

We’d waited to continue this particular discussion until we were someplace safe with Greg and Ayden. That had meant standing around in silence, with occasional attempts to rekindle old work banter, at the corner of SE Alder and SE Grand. And it had been quite a bit of a walk there. And then after that, also, answering worried questions from Greg and Ayden on the drive back to Greg’s house.

I had also noticed that Milk was riding in the engine compartment of the truck, but I didn’t point it out to anyone. I hadn’t felt like talking much at all, honestly, and Cassy had fielded most of the questions.

Eventually, that conversation had come back to where we’d been when Felicity had handed me that bombshell that I was still holding gingerly in my mind.

Greg’s house was a small bungalow, almost a mobile home, nestled in a tiny property in the middle of a nearly rural suburbia. Which doesn’t really distinguish it from most houses and neighborhoods in Gresham, honestly. The “dining room” was a linoleum covered section of the living room next to a sliding glass door. And the kitchen was demarcated from that by a counter.

We sat around the table with tea. Even I had some. It was pleasant enough as a sensory experience. Something I could focus on when trying to avoid coherent thought.

I was also literally hollow. To take my Synthia guise with any solidity, I needed to focus that solidity on my outer edges. It felt weird.

Cassy elaborated. She knew her stuff about neurodiversity, but this was a corner of it that wasn’t part of her special interests. Just something adjacent. Though I could tell by her feelings and tone of voice that that was changing.

“I need to read up on it some more, of course,” she said. “But also, I don’t think I work the same way as most other people. Like, of course I don’t.” She looked at each of us, but I was looking at my tea, dreading where she was going with this. She continued, “Anyway, the more important thing is that when I eat another monster, it eventually becomes an alter. Or a headmate, I guess. So, right now, I’ve got Felicity and a couple of little enthalpiphages I ate a few days ago. And, psychologically, they’re separate from me. But they’re still kind of me. We don’t just have the same body, the same human body. As far as we can tell, we have the same emanation. The same emanant energy, whatever you call it. Which isn’t like before, when Felicity was riding me like she did other humans.”

“That’s all weird to me, but I guess it makes sense,” Greg offered.

Ayden just nodded, working his mouth and frowning.

Milk was in a glass on the kitchen counter and remaining silent, soaking up all this new knowledge and feeling very satisfied about it. I didn’t trust it, but I still didn’t feel threatened by it. I didn’t think I was physiologically capable of feeling afraid of it, and that concerned me.

Cassy just clearly didn’t care about it at all.

“Chord is on his way,” she said, pushing her mug around on the table. She seemed far less hesitant to admit that than I felt was warranted. “Eventually, I’ll have a Chord in here. Felicity and I are planning on teaching him a few things. We’ll have to see how that goes.”

“Shit,” Ayden said. “What does that mean?”

Cassy shrugged.

I felt I had to ask, so I pushed myself to do so, “Will he be able to front freely?” Then, for the sake of Ayden and Greg, in case they weren’t familiar with that term. “You know, take over and do things?”

Cassy smirked and gave a small, single chuckle, “Nope. I’m pretty solidly in control. I don’t know if it’s because I’m not actually traumagenic, and we don’t work based on triggers and that sort of thing. Or what. But, this is my system. I’m the host and I’m in charge of it. But, they do have their own wills. I can’t stop them from being assholes in my head. I just don’t have to listen to them.”

I looked pointedly at her and concluded, “So you let Felicity speak to me back there on the trail.”

“Yeah…” she admitted.

“I think I’m going to say ‘no’ to her proposal. Or is it your proposal?” I told her.

“What are you talking about?” Greg asked.

Cassy looked at him, “Well, Felicity is pretty happy with her new situation. She’s safe. She’s untouchable by Chord, even when he becomes an alter. And she kind of likes me, I guess. She says she’s finally in a situation where she can be friends with Synthia without being compelled to betray her. I can keep her from doing that, if need be.” She folded her lips into her mouth for a moment and glanced at me. “So, she also thinks it would be a good deal for Synthia, too.”

Greg frowned.

“I don’t get it,” Ayden said.

Greg asked, “How so?”

I sighed and answered for Cassy, “She eats me, and then I become a headmate. She’s a pretty powerful emanant now. She’s gained a lot of energy from eating Felicity and Chord, and a lot of knowledge. And, she’s really well hidden, basically stealth, with the emanant equivalent of a wave motion gun for feeding. Anyone who gets too close to her is in serious danger.” I was still looking down at my tea, and I tapped my fingernails on the laminate table top. “I would be quite safe in there with her. Safer than I am now.”

“Oh, that sounds like a really shitty deal, though,” Greg said. “I could never do that.”

It was my turn to shrug, “I’ve been eaten before, now. I was gone. Milk remade me. So, like, existentially? I could endure that.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t be you,” he said.

“No, I would be me, and that would be the problem,” I looked up at him. “I would have all of my memories and motives and reflexes, but I’d be in the body of an obligatory teratovore. Cassy could do the eating, of course. But, I’d have to be OK with that, and I couldn’t do things my way anymore. Even though I’m not even sure what that is now.”

“You are still you,” Milk spoke up.

I glared at it, “I haven’t been acting like me.”

“Yes, you have,” it contradicted me.

I scowled silently. I didn’t have the energy to verbally banter with anybody, let alone the guilelessly blunt Milk.

“I wouldn’t sweat that too much,” Cassy said, glancing sideways at me. “It kind of makes sense.”

“I don’t know,” I grumbled. “There’ve been a lot of memory stealing and altering teratovores at work around here, and I fell prey to at least three of them, by my count. For all I know, I’m really not who I used to be. Especially after what that one did. It could easily be lying.” I gestured at Milk.

“Well, yeah, but OK. How have you been acting differently?” she asked.

“Charging into danger heedlessly,” I said. “I do not do that. And at the grain silo, I found myself walking right into it even though I didn’t want to. It was like someone was controlling me without my consent. Maybe Fate Vine.”

“Hm,” she nodded.

Greg and Ayden both watched us discuss this with wide eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was acting like this before I got eaten, so I don’t know.”

“Well,” Cassy said, playing with the table top with one finger. “My therapist once pointed out that we don’t really know what we’re capable of doing when we encounter a situation we’ve never experienced before.” She shrugged with one shoulder. “And from what I’m learning, I think that applies to emanants as well as to humans.”

I furrowed my brow and looked at her, and acknowledged, “OK, yeah. I can see that. Nothing about the last two months have been typical for me.”

“Don’t doubt yourself too much,” she suggested. “Wait a while, and see what your new norm is. At least, that’s what my therapist suggested. Don’t make big decisions when you’re in a crisis.”

I surprised myself with my own laughter. I fell back in my chair, lifting my head and let out a string of giggles and guffaws that were honestly really satisfying, but startling. And it took me a few moments to realize why I was doing it.

By the time I spoke, both Greg and Ayden were smirking and looking at each other, too. And Cassy was smiling and feeling satisfied with my reaction. It was kind of infectious. I guess the tone of my laughter hadn’t been derisive in any way.

“That… OK,” I said. “Be that as it may. That being an excellent reason all on its own to say no to Felicity’s idea. The real reason I’m saying ‘no’ is because I made a promise to you all.”

“Oh?” Greg asked.

“Yes. And I still plan to keep it,” I said. “I’m weak, but I’ve got a lot of options right now. I can do things I would never be able to do as part of Cassy’s system. I have Milk’s lineage. It’s older than me, and manifested in a time when the vacuum for new emanants was big.”

“I can take on many adaptations,” it confirmed. “And so can Synthia.”

I nodded in its direction, “And I have the knowledge of all my own tricks and Fate Vine’s. If I’m not wrong, I can have my way with computer systems like I never could before, if I can get the energy to do it. And I can influence bureaucracies in a similar way. I can secure you income from almost nowhere. I can keep the police off your backs. I can make sure your housing is secure. And with Cassy’s help, I can keep other emanants from fucking with you. Together we can survive what comes tomorrow, if I remain what I am right now.” 

I left out how Fate Vine’s memories taught me how to alter the minds of humans. That would be a last resort, if even that. Saved only for our enemies, which I guess we actually have. Though, I suppose, altering the path of bureaucracies might entail doing that on a group level.

I’d have to think about that.

The idea left a bad taste in my mouth. But I’d do what I needed to do to uphold my promises to these humans.

It’s just.

I had truly changed in the last couple million years, and in the past couple months.

I found I wanted to be equals with these three. And failing that, I wanted to be family with them, however fleetingly in the case of Greg and Ayden. If I could figure out a way to preserve their memories on the advent of their deaths, I think I would with their permission, and I suspected I might be able to.

Greg let out a big breath, and Ayden held out a hand for him to grab if he wanted. Greg took it. Then they both gave me exhausted, worried, but relieved looks.

“I think I’m ready to believe that,” Greg said. “And holy shit that would help.”

Ayden squeezed Greg’s hand and then let go and said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

Cassy nodded slowly in that way that moved her shoulders forward and back again, with hooded eyes as she considered what I’d said.

I glanced at her and said, “Sorry Felicity, but while I do trust Cassy way more than I ever thought I would for a teratovore, I do not trust you and I don’t think I ever will. I’m not sure I want to share a head with you.”

Cassy, or Felicity, shot me a hurt look.

“However, you’ve opened my eyes to a lot about the world I’d been ignoring for way too long,” I told her. “Thank you for that.”

She gave me a wry, pained smirk, and said, “Well. Eyes are kind of my thing.”

She wasn’t exactly wrong. And her influence on the world hadn’t waned as much as any of us had thought. She couldn’t jump to anybody else’s psyche anymore. Not for a while, at least, not while Cassy still had a human body and couldn’t figure out mitosis or adaptation. But the ripples of Felicity’s presence continued in a chaotic way.

In the following months, as the new administration terrorized absolutely everyone with its incompetence, raw hatred, and wild audacity, while I focused on feeding by being a customer at grocery stories – when I was not hanging out in a power station – we all saw Felicity’s glyphs spread and become more numerous.

Eventually, we even saw them on TV clips that were shared on social media, from across the country.

People were speculating on what they meant.

Too many groups and graffiti artists took credit for them, and none of their reasons made much sense.

The consensus was that they were the new “Kilroy was here” or anarchy symbol, something anybody could make that was a vague reference to its original meaning. In this case, maybe a meaning that was like the common yearning for a meteor to strike.

A meaning that said, “Monsters are watching.”

Which, of course, dovetailed “nicely” with the monster hunt that eventually did form half a year later.

A new kind of monster hunt. One where science itself had finally been allowed to not only prove the existence of emanants, but learn to begin to harness and exploit our energies.

And between Chord and the memories of Fate Fine, we were uniquely prepared for that. We survived it and thrived in a weird way that deserves its own book.

But that’s not how I finally came to trust Felicity.

Whether we worked on big things or small, regardless of whether we were doing anything to alter the course of history, it was the day to day work of living with her, through my friendship with Cassy, that finally did it.

Chord took more work.

It was after all that when, one day that the four (or more) of us were enjoying a sunset from Ayden and Charlie's front porch, Chord turned to me and said through Cassy’s mouth, “You could have just reported my scheme to the Overlords of Portland, you know. They would have crushed me for you.”