"Because you are who you are in a way that you aren't 'the spouse of' or 'a person who likes these things'?"

"But in what sense does it mean anything to say that you are an alternate universe version of someone? Are there metaphysical True Identity tags floating through the aether along behind us?"

"Who knows?"

"Well, I'd like to."

"I dunno, I don't know if floating tags are a thing but I feel like there's something--pretty basic about identity. Maybe I believe in the non-metal kind of soul or something."

"It would be strange if in addition to all the extant verifiable kinds of souls there were a metaphysical kind."

"Strange compared to everything else?"

"The fact a lot of strange things have happened doesn't mean we should put particular weight on lots of equally strange things happening, I don't think." Shrug. "Maybe someone'll walk through the door with an explanation."

"Mm, no, but it does make strangeness much weaker evidence against something."

"I cannot imagine a model of identity where 'alternate universe version of' is a basic unit of reality, and I do not want to think I share a soul with Midnight, and luckily there does not seem to be any evidence for that."

"As you like."

"There's also a person who Emma thought was sort of you and Edie in one person."

"...Well, if someone was gonna have a set of us as normal twins and then chimerism happened, I guess that's plausible."

"I suppose we could check whether she was a chimera."

"How?"

"Demons!"

"I sort of guessed! ...Maybe I'm just not immediately figuring out how that does it because I don't know what kind of spacefuture genetics technology you have to analyze tissue samples and I haven't seen the inside of one of my era's since I was twelve."

"We could pretty trivially do it, if you can't just conjure for criteria like 'genetic chimera' to start with."

"Okay.

I miss Papa."

"I can imagine."

"He'd be so excited--Hank would be so excited--"

"Will be so excited. We'll get 'em back."

"I hope so."

"I am very sure that if our current plans don't work someone'll walk through the door with one that does, eventually."

"Okay."