It is recognizably a bedroom, at least. There is a bedside table, it's just on the opposite side from what he's used to.

He's under a full-body weighted blanket. The bed is very soft, and tall, and wide enough for one person, but you'd be hard-pressed to fit two.

He groggily mumblesighs, streeeeeeetches like a cat, wiggles, throws the weighted blanket off, and literally flops out of bed.

Only he's not doing any of that.

The (male, ?mid-twenties?, 5'10", slight-built) person who is not Minaiyu gets up, grabs some clothes including jeans and a T-shirt out of an organizer, and gets dressed. He seems to be making a fair effort to be quiet.

Other than the bed, organizer, and windows, the room contains a bookshelf overflowing with a desultory library whose titles are illegible in the dim dawn light, a portable floor fan plugged into the wall but not apparently turned on, and a high, sturdy standing desk, on which there sits what someone from a civilization with laptops might recognize as a three-inch-thick laptop (with pinches in the form factor presumably so you can still pick it up), and scattered notebooks and pens.

There's also the presumably-light-fixture set into the ceiling, and the grates in the ceiling and floor that look like they're for heating and/or A/C.

With increasing frequency, the person who is not Minaiyu shakes his head, his arms, as though trying to throw off some strange vestige of sleep.

Fuck fuck fuck--

--okay, okay, don't panic, panicking is not helpful and giving your new host physical panic responses is definitely not helpful. Focus.

(The body takes a deep breath without the host willing it. This might be a bit unnerving in its own right, but it's better than the alternative.)

Okay. So. Bloom where you're planted. Where is he planted?

He seems to have lucked out on the physical form: not far off from what he's used to. (A bit tall, maybe, but not horribly so.) The clothing looks machine-made (which is a very good sign, even if it does mean that knowing how to build a spinning wheel is unlikely to be useful here), the room appears to have electric and HVAC hookups (even better sign), and...oh hey, looks like that's a computer: seems like this place is probably basically up to speed on technology, though there's always something to be said for triangulating off what other places have come up with. And he's getting semantic bleedover on the language, excellent, that'll make things a lot easier.

(if he had to get run over by a truck at age 23, he couldn't have asked for a much better result okay, no, panic is unhelpful but it's also too soon to be relieved: he first needs to get his feet under him (so to speak))

He does not want to be snooping on this guy's life without his knowledge any longer than he has to: that wouldn't be a good start to a relationship where they are going to have to trust each other. He'd better get on with things.

He'll follow the host's lead on how quiet to be: presumably there are sleeping housemates or something.

Hello? he signs, in the local language.

He shrieks like a seabird. Gaha'eka (elsewhere known as Bywayeans) don't build themselves prepared for this.

There are two response shrieks from elsewhere in the house.

Xakda fumbles for a pocket mirror in the drawers of his organizer and stares into his own eyes, groping in his mind for where the intention to sign 'hello' to himself, came from.

Welp. He was hoping for a freeze response to startlement, but he knew he was taking a risk. He's not sure he actually had any better options.

he's acutely aware that he's going to spend the next several decades replaying this and the next few minutes over and over in his mind, and probably like four years from now he's going to figure out what the better option would have been

honestly he is under enough stress right now and it was not really the best moment to look in a mirror and see something that is clearly not his own face, he just got used to what his adult face looks like

There doesn't seem to be a point in being quiet anymore.

"Sorry, sorry!" comes a voice from Xakda's own mouth. "I-- I didn't-- there didn't seem-- oh no you don't have a word--"

He takes a ragged breath.

"My-- my name's Minaiyu. I..." they don't have separate words for dying and departing, he guesses that makes sense if they don't know about the afterlife situation "...died, and then I woke up here. That's...what happens to people, when they die, they wake up in someone else's body, in some other universe.

I-- I'm so sorry, this must be such a shock for you, it was a shock for me and at least I knew, that this was something that could happen, you don't even have a word--

--I wouldn't have dumped this on you, if I'd had a choice. It was an accident. I-- I want to make the best of this, for both of us."

"Sir-r?" The voice on the other side of the door sounds to Gaha'eka ears like it's trying not to sound any of { approximately three years old, confused, petulant, scared }.

We don't know how our children will come off to people from other worlds where childrens' inborn first concern may not be method-acting adulthood as seriously as possible from as young as possible, and there are so many mortifying possibilities that we're kind of afraid to think about it.

"I don't know what's happening either, kid."

"Xakda?" This voice is clearly adult, and ?female?, and confused and baffled, and a little on edge.

"Uh, good morning, Sinber. I don't know how much of that you heard, but I to my knowledge didn't say any of it. It sure looks to me like I'm going insane, or like I really have been half-possessed by some foreign soul*. Feel free to stand by if you want while I get ready for work to make sure I don't start, like, breaking stuff, but as far as I can tell I'm not going to have to miss work over this. Sorry!"

(This is Xakda's fault somehow.)

*There is a common word, soul, in natural languages on Gahai, that has none of the woo-woo connotations of that word in English, and all of the mechanical connotations.

". . . Noted!" says Sinber.

(That sounds more compassionate in the local dialect.)

"So, Minaiyu. Hi. That was my coparent, Sinber, and his-by-somebody-else son. We live together with our other son here. It was my idea. There are lots of benefits, Sinber agrees, but it's not ideal for these circumstances, I apologize.

Sorry also about your death, and sorry the reception isn't all it could have been. Do you, like, have experience, being in someone else's body? Because you're right, I've literally never heard of that as a thing that could happen. I mean, very occasionally multiple people in one body, but not - suddenly, with - like this.

Where are you from?"

('Insane'? It...seems to have connotations of both 'delirious' and 'neurodivergent'? What a weird pair of concepts to combine. Presumably Hakda--no, wait...Xakda was referring to the delirious bit?

Well, Xakda doesn't seem to be insisting that Minaiyu's a dream-figment, so it's probably not the most pressing concern.)

"Uh, not...personally? I have...or, well, had...a pair of acquaintances who are twin-souled, and when I was eight there was this ten-year-old in Peace River's End who ended up hosting a subsistence-farmer kid who'd died of diphtheria, someplace called--" Tashayan does not have the phonemes for this, but he thinks if he leans on some of the extra phonemes from the new language he can probably actually pronounce it properly this time "--Kreltz, I met them a few times when we were in the same museum tour-groups...and of course I've read books on what to expect and all that, we-- we all grow up knowing, back home, that someday this is going to happen. I just...thought I'd have a few more decades first. And some warning, probably.

My world's called Rekka, at least in my language. More specifically I'm from Bluecoral Bay, in Tashay. First-south Thirtysixth-east, not that our coordinate system means anything to you I guess...east coast of the Continent, kind of on the border between temperate and subtropical.

And, uh, thank you. This is...not the day either of us wanted to have, I'm sure, but all things considered I think you're taking it pretty well? And it looks like you're not a subsistence farmer, so that's great news. I did the usual technological-bootstrapping training, but it's looking like y'all don't really need it. Though I'd be happy to share any tidbits y'all haven't happened to come across yet, or linguists who'd be thrilled to learn Tashayan, or anything like that.

...I promise not to break anything. Or, uh, I promise not to break anything on purpose, and to be very careful about breaking things by accident."

". . . Wait, how could you have known it was going to happen to you? If I were on Rekka, I imagine I would go 'okay, so our world very occasionally receives souls in this way - not even nearly as often as we lose them to death, but even setting aside that lopsided ratio - maybe there are a thousand things that can happen when people die and this is only one of them.' How did you know that wasn't the case? I mean, the evidence says that clearly you did know, you came prepared with the right kind of training for approximately the situation you actually ended up in" - and it sounds like such juicy training, too - "I'm just deeply confused."

Xakda at this point can no longer stall by checking his pockets, and must voyage beyond his bedroom door in search of coffee. On his way to the kitchen he passes the sitting room, where Sinber is reading sleepily in a beanbag chair and the three-year-old is lying facedown on the floor with his hands stretched out in front of him, clutching a book.

It's a couple hours before their wake-up time. Xakda grimaces and mouths 'Sorry'.

"Don't die, please?"

Xakda gets a handleless ceramic cup and starts filling it with water.

"Well, okay, I guess 'knowing' is a strong word, but...for one thing we didn't have anything else to prepare for? We do suspect there might be other afterlives out there, it would certainly explain some things about ratios, but there's not really anything to be done about total unknowns.

And the ratios do seem to be different in different worlds: you're not the first place we've heard of who had never heard of this before, and...I don't know any solid statistics but I've heard there are places where they definitely seem more common than they are back home? For all I know there might be worlds way at the other end of the spectrum where there are like ten people in every body.

In any case, now that I'm here I can be more confident I've got at least another life or two left in me, walk-ins--" (he uses the Tashayan) "--are about one in thirty thousand but a lot more than one in thirty thousand of those are on their third or more life. It's rare to meet anyone with more than, like, eight or ten, though, so clearly there's some sort of attrition going on." He grimaces. "All I can really do is hope it's not anything too awful...though there's some reason to believe it might be worlds inventing soul-transfer tech, taking over the process themselves, and thus ceasing to generate new walk-ins plus adopting any that hit them? We think it should be possible to do that, though we haven't got any solid leads on how to go about it yet...but we have noticed that we've pretty much hit, now, the highest tech level anyone's ever seen. The more optimistic among us think that means we're nearly to figuring out immortality and dropping off the map; the more pessimistic among us worry that maybe there's some black-ball tech so fundamentally destructive that it doesn't even leave behind a bunch of walk-ins talking about having died in a mass extinction.

...maybe y'all can invent immortality too. I hope so."

(He kind of regrets saying that part? It feels like it's too soon to think that too hard, he's still too ignorant and too precarious here, this life still could turn out to suck in ways he can't yet foresee, he can't quite let himself endorse a desire to stay here forever even as a rather large part of him hopes that he'll never have to roll the fucking dice again.

...but also he did maybe flinch a little at the 'don't die, please'. He does not, actually, want Xakda to die. And if, as he increasingly expects, he also does not want Xakda to die tomorrow, then by induction he wants Xakda to live forever.)

"Uh, and even if the truth is that all but one in every thirty thousand people cease to exist or something...one person, with the right information in the right place and time, can do a lot of good. I can't say I've ever endorsedly wanted to be someplace else's Amethyst Brightpath†, but I also can't say I've never thought about it, and I was willing to take on the role if it were thrust upon me.

...also it's just...good, in general, even in your first life, to know how you'd deal without having much help from industrial civilisation? Lots of people like knowing they could handle the basics of life themselves if they had to, it...makes people feel safer, gives them a sturdy foundation. And-- some people still become small mostly-self-sufficient farmers on purpose: it sucks a lot less when you have, like, modern medical care, and-- and you don't have to do it if it doesn't resonate with you." His breath hitches a little, thinking about a goodbye that he did not know would be the final one.

---

†he gives the translated meaning of her name, in accordance with her preference

Drinking coffee by the cup is not super common back home--caffeine dependence is an extra vulnerability in one's life, and if one is in a situation where one particularly needs a stimulant overlay, one would probably rather not bother with brewing a liquid--but he's had enough mocha desserts that he recognises the scent once Xakda starts making it. The jolt of energy from the shock is wearing off, he's noticed.

"Oh, caffeine, right? Is that what direction this tiredness is coming from, then? I'd been wondering if maybe we needed breakfast. Could well be both, I suppose. I don't know, can you tell?" Host/walk-in pairs are known to be disproportionately likely to share convergences, but that still leaves a large fraction that don't.

". . . yeah, I suppose you would also have informational access to the worlds people 'walk-in'-to Rekka from, so that'd be additional evidence that they're the standard and even maybe the only form of after-death experience in some large subset of worlds . . . and presumably those worlds get 'walk-ins' from Rekka - does Rekka get self_'walk-ins'? - or you wouldn't know that Rekka itself belonged to that subset. It sure doesn't sound like a fundamental feature of the universe, it sounds like something somebody put there, that human souls would for a period of lives wake up only as headmates of humans from vaguely adjacent worlds and not of writhing alien chimerae."

Xakda's thought process is indeed speeding up as he becomes caffeinated!

"People where you're from aren't generally addicted to caffeine? Why not? It's a . . . very basic aphorism, in my experience, that the drawbacks are embarrassing but wildly outweighed by the benefits. Some people do take pills for convenience, but eh, I like an excuse to have a hot drink every day. 'Breakfast', wow, haven't heard that word in a while. Actually never tried a routine with eating in the morning at all, myself, so it wouldn't be that.

I'm happy to be able to tell you that this society has just about invented immortality! The important people right now are still debating whether people my age and fitness have hit longevity escape velocity, but about 90%* of them are pretty sure we have. I've already had a few gene therapies that are, in sum, optimistically predicted to extend my life by twenty or so years. You're probably good - at least, as far as aging goes!

. . . Who's Amethyst Brightpath, if-you-want-to-say? Is my brain right in its incredibly uncharitable interpretation of 'lots of people', there, that in your home society it's considered, like . . . okay, to not carry around a compressed copy of your entire society's cumulative knowledge with you? Aside: I am so eager to swap notes about that when I get home from work - I'm a diagnostic tech, by the way."

He's putting on his shoes, waving bye to Sinber and the kid, though the latter is still insensible. Sinber is looking concerned but supportive.

"Sinber is a kidshaper, he's taking our kids to his school in a couple hours. Free tuition!"

*Gaha'eka, in general, use base-12, but it will be rendered as base-10 henceforth for legibility.

"Well, it'd be surprising if it were all one-way, right?

We think we've probably had a few walk-ins from our own world? But it's hard to tell: even the one who was only on their second life had been gone for centuries and recordkeeping was not as good back then, and most of them had been gone for millennia. And we think one of them was probably just from some very nearby world with the same geographical landmarks.

Likewise, we've heard occasional secondhand otherworld legends that might be based on historical walk-ins from Rekka, but, like, very few worlds that we know of have radio, a lot of them don't even have newspapers, it would be very easy for someone to share a world with a Rekkan walk-in and not find out.

Supposedly some fae have said that most dead fae have come back, reporting a single walk-in life with a human host and waking up back in the fae realm when the host died like they did when they first came-of-age. But I don't know how far I'd trust anything a fae said, and certainly not with the amount of whisper-chain on that: nobody's talked to a fae, at least not knowingly, in almost two centuries. Anyway, humans don't come back like that.

In general hosts and walk-ins tend to be a lot more similar to each other than two random people? We think probably it's easier to, like, successfully lodge in a host brain the closer it is to how yours was. Maybe there's some absolute cap where if it's too different you can't lodge in it at all no matter how lucky you are, and there are lots of writhing alien chimerae out there in the multiverse and we just never see them because they're not compatible with us."

He makes a pitying-and-somewhat-disapproving facial expression for a moment when he hears about the widespread caffeine addiction including in his host, then catches himself.

"I've only done caffeine a few times myself, on days when I had a shift at the medical centre and hadn't slept very well, but I've heard from people who've tried doing it a lot that if you take it too often your body habituates and all it ends up doing is bringing you back to baseline? And if it gets to that point it's not actually doing you any good, it's just a waste of resources you could've spent elsewhere and an extra thing that can go wrong if one day you can't get hold of it. Plus it makes a lot of people feel twitchy and nervous, and they know it's not really them but it's still unpleasant. I seem to be one of the lucky ones on that, though."

He pauses at the bit about longevity escape velocity.

"...oh. Wow."

He is...going to put whatever these emotions are that he is having (he'll be safe here, he doesn't have to roll the dice on the wilds of the multiverse again   this had better be a good place to spend eternity   what about the other 10%   gene therapy wouldn't have helped with yesterday, would it   if he'd been luckier, if he'd been more fucking careful, he probably could have lived to see his homeworld figure it out themselves, perhaps even as they speak his centuries-old loved ones are toasting an absent friend) on the list of things he absolutely does not have time to process right now.

"Amethyst was...the big thing was that she introduced us to steam engines. Like, we had a couple steam-engine designs kicking around? But they were just curiosities, they were so primitive as to be useless, and we didn't know it was possible to do better than that.

I remember...I was seven years old, and my household went out northwest to visit my uncle's household, and while we were there we went to a museum of industrialisation. And on the grounds as we walked in, one of the statues was a woman in some sort of foreign tunic, pointing at a locomotive and grinning, and a little behind her, holding her other hand, an amazed man looked on.

The plaque, and some of the exhibits, and some other bits from my family, told me about Amethyst's accomplishments. She was called Brightpath because where she was from, people chose second names based on their jobs, and she named herself after the better way she worked to show us. Lots of places have been at more or less the tech level we were at since time immemorial; who knows how much longer it would have taken, if we'd had to stumble across it ourselves.

...they also told me about artistic metaphor: she didn't, exactly, look like that. Like, she used to look like that, the statues and whatnot were based on self-portraits she drew, but what people saw when they looked at her was the guy who'd been standing behind her in the statue, Kotellu yet Shenedi.

Like I said, people tend to be similar to each other, but it's not absolute. Hosts and walk-ins are usually the same sex," he was going to say gender, but this language doesn't have a separate word for that "but not always, and...their souls were similar enough that they could share a brain, but his body didn't fit her very well, and it was rough for her. So a lot of artwork of them depicts them as separate-bodied people--usually holding hands--to show her in her true form.

...I'm glad your body is a lot closer to me: it's a little weird but I think I can get used to it. I'd like to draw you a self-portrait sometime when we're less pressed for time, though.

Uh, I wouldn't say it's 'okay' to not know bootstrapping, for one thing it'd be like not knowing algebra or something, and..." oh this language has a terrible vocabulary for talking about acausal coordination, huh "...it's not what we would want other people to do in our place?

But what I meant by 'lots of people' was, like, the 'even in your first life' part, that even if we were one of those worlds that had never heard of walk-ins we'd probably still do quite a bit of making sure that our tech level fails gracefully. The more complicated something is the more fragile it usually is, and often it's worth it to switch to using mostly the complicated thing, but it's not something to rely on lightly.

About seventy years ago we had this huge coronal mass ejection, basically knocked out our whole power grid, and...we didn't know that was something that could even happen, and we were very aware that if we'd had a couple more decades to get more entrenched on electrifying everything we'd have been extremely screwed? We've done a lot of hardening and decentralising on our electrical grid since then, probably we'll be okay when it happens again though we don't yet know that empirically, but...like, that's just one thing that can bite you if you take technology for granted."

He is not sure exactly what Xakda means by "diagnostic tech"--the connotations seem a bit vague--but he figures he'll probably find out firsthand soon enough, so he doesn't even add that one to the list of things to process.

(If Minaiyu had more time to reflect, he'd think about Xakda saying that people do not ever suddenly turn up with headmates here, and how the first explanation out of Xakda's mouth that Xakda came up with was delirium-or-something, and he'd ask about being less conspicuous in public. But he has a lot of other things on his mind, and he does not think to ask.)

He tastes the word "school". One-to-many-tutoring-place? He would not expect a three-year-old, of all people, to get anything positive out of in-person one-to-many tutoring: there aren't a lot of circumstances in which in-person one-to-many wouldn't be prohibitively overstimulating for at least one of student and teacher, and he's pretty sure none of those exceptional circumstances involve three-year-olds. Something for the list of lower-priority questions, probably.

Minaiyu stops doing the usual absent-minded human face-touching once Xakda puts shoes on, and in fact switches to absent-mindedly arresting movements Xakda makes towards doing so.

Xakda persists valiantly in putting on his shoes (and backpack) and is out the front door before Minaiyu finishes about the caffeine.

It's sunny, dry, and warm! The air is still and it's almost cloudless.

Xakda and Sinber, apparently, live on a little plot of { house, huge-two-door_garage, concrete, swingset, a couple young trees, and utterly wild grass } in the middle of a vast field of what Minaiyu may recognize as potato plants. A few little rolling hills stand sentry around the horizon, but mostly the land is pancake-flat. Other settlements - some with silos, some with other houses, some with just sheds - are sparse, and located outside of maybe a 3/4 mile radius. There's no road or railroad or anything going to Xakda's house.

He's almost to the garage, hand reaching for a mechanism set into one of the big shutter-doors, when Minaiyu starts about Amethyst.

And Xakda stops, and his hand will just hover there, unless Minaiyu does something else with it.

". . . Huh.

Sorry, you're probably gonna have to repeat all that stuff about about the coronal - the natural disaster?"

Smile. Slight laugh.

"You know, Minaiyu - Vaxi, this is so weird - assuming this is all real, assuming Amethyst Brightpath is real - I think most people, in this place where you've landed, would do decades of hard labor, maybe their whole lives, in exchange for a guarantee that they'd get to be somebody's Amethyst Brightpath when they died. Even after accounting for utilitarian concerns. But I think, that - after accounting for utilitarian concerns - I wouldn't. It sounds so - lonely."

Xakda snaps himself out of it and yanks the mechanism. The garage door snaps open, gracefully decelerating to a stop three feet above his head.

In the garage there are two aircraft. The close one is blue with a smaller cab and the far one is white with a bigger cab, but they're similar in design. Each is dual-propeller, the propellers mounted on wings double-folded like a bird's to fit in the space. They're sleek in a way that's suggestive of formidable power and efficiency, not design-for-the-impression-of-sleekness.

"...have you...made it as far as inventing laptops...without having any solar flares big enough to collapse your electrical grid," he says, in a tone of dawning horror.

"We are...definitely going to have to discuss grid-hardening measures."

At the loneliness bit he sighs, a wistful expression on their face.

"...yeah. It is."

He looks at the carplane, putting things together with the lack of paths around the house.

"You do everything by air? That-- I mean, I'm looking forward to the view, but you must have to be extremely careful not to run out of fuel or anything, huh."

He thinks things over for a few moments.

"...would you like to hear a song from my home? Even if I am a dream-figment--and I don't believe that, but I can see why you would, and I am very grateful that you're provisionally accepting me--but even in that case, then you'd have dreamt a whole song out of nothing, and that's something wondrous in itself."

"Well, you could hardly believe you were a dream-figment! If you believe anything at all, then you're clearly real."

Xakda steps inside the carplane and takes the pilot's seat - you could squish a second person behind him if you really tried, but it's obviously not intended so.

"Not necessarily from Rekka, but clearly real enough that I won't be embarrassed later for believing you made movements using my body."

He turns a key and the controls boot up. They're analog, though the plane is apparently newish.

"Please, do sing!" The command is vaguely compassionate, though Xakda does his best not to sound pitying. "If you can use my voice to actually sing, in front of just about anyone who knows me, I legitimately think they'll have way less of a problem believing you exist. Me too, for that matter."

He sings, a folk song about the eternal cycle of the seasons. Though some summers are wet and others dry, still the fundamental essence of summer-ness remains, giving rhythm to life. And though the winter is long, spring shall come again.

The song dates back about three hundred years, before the development of decent mosquito-control and subsequent expansion of permanent human settlement into central and southern Tashay. It was written for a climate significantly colder than the one he actually grew up in; the language, to a fluent Tashayan speaker, is comprehensible but noticeably archaic.

The cycle of the seasons may be a constant, but the song itself was born of far more transient circumstances. It was already substantially displaced from the space and time it describes, even before turning up in another universe altogether with a singer who'd probably been in the sleep-between-lives for centuries.

And yet. And yet. Summer's fundamental essence does remain. And spring will come again. Even here.

It feels...appropriately bittersweet, for this to be the first song from his home that this world ever hears.

It's not his best singing ever--he's still getting used to the new vocal cords--but it's passable.

Afterwards he gives a translation of the lyrics, focusing on preserving meaning without regard for rhyme or meter. Perhaps he'll think over more poetic translations later.

Well, fuck him. Apparently his soul can't sing.

Yeah, that seems like a fundamental issue you should carve out some time to work on. We don't care what else is going on in your life.

". . . Thank you. That was compelling." Xakda is holding off dwelling on it literally any further for time concerns and because part of him is still convinced Minaiyu will vanish when Xakda gets to work.

"You okay with me taking off now?" He should probably try to - accurately sketch out what Minaiyu can expect? No, that's impossible given Minaiyu's vastly displaced state of knowledge, but. Come on, Xakda should say something.

"Er, I work at Sain's hospital in Pyeth, which - Pyeth - is honestly -" he winces, he doesn't think of it like this that often "- sort of a zombie-city, like, 15,000 people, but, like. Has any factories!"

Minaiyu makes a puzzled expression as he feels out the layers of meaning in "zombie-city". It...used to be...a slum-but-with-neutral-to-positive-connotations...and then it died...and its remains are limping along in the form of a largish town?

...oh. Right. It's what always happens, historically, when people live too densely.

"...I'm sorry to hear that," he says quietly. "It...sounds like the problems have settled down now, at least?

--oh, uh, should I stay quiet during the flight? I don't want to distract you while you're busy flying a plane."

Xakda pushes the lever that starts the wheel-power engine, and steers the (two-wheeled) carplane out of the garage. He presses a remote to close it behind him.

"Oh, I'd actually forgotten we can talk during the flight! It'll be really short, though, just, like, ten minutes. But I will have questions."

Xakda pulls more levers, and in his peripheral vision, the wings of the carplane extend, lock, and rotate so the propellers are facing upward.

He holds down a button, and pulls another lever, and the propellers are loud but - once their ears adjust - not hellishly so.

"For example", he says, fighting somewhat to be heard over the blades, "what do you mean, 'the problems have died down'?" 

He flinches when the propellers kick on, but it does overall seem tolerable. The bone conduction and the lip-reading-from-the-inside help with talking.

"Whatever plagues killed the city!" he responds, likewise loudly. "They have subsided, right?"

Xakda runs his pre-takeoff check of all the readings on the dash, all the controls.

"Oh, zombie-city - I mean, like - it's kind of peripheral, its prospects are dead. It lost out to the last few decades of urbanization, but it's still limping along, you know?"

He furrows their brow.

"Why'd you urbanise? I mean, I guess with modern sanitation you probably could actually pull that off without getting yourselves killed or crippled, but why would you want to?"

Pre-takeoff check still underway! It takes an hour*.

"Huh? How else would a society get anything done, if important people couldn't live near each other? Not just for fast and frictionless socialization, but so they could work under the same banners? And so you can have places where someone who is important and ill actually has a helpful range of available on-call medical specialists? For example."

*the Gaha'e version of the English idiomatic 'a second' or 'a moment' is careful to actually err on the side of pessimism.

"Well, towns do have specialties in a lot of cases, but you don't...need to be huge for that? And people can live near enough to each other to be in-person co-workers without being right on top of each other: you don't live right on top of anyone.

It was more of an issue pre-industrial, I think, that's why people kept trying cities enough for it to be so clear in the history books how it always goes horribly, but once you have trains and telegraphs it's not that big a deal? Let alone modern communication networks.

But even if you're doing something that needs in-person...hang on, let me do the math..."

There is a little diamond grid in his mind's eye.

"...so if, for example, you have a network of Pyeths linked by north-south and east-west trains, that's over six hundred thousand people you can reach in no more than four hops, maybe like an hour.

But if you tried to pile six hundred thousand people all in together, it'd be awful. People aren't built to handle that, not just physically but psychologically. There'd be...so much stuff going on around you, all the time, everywhere you looked. It'd be overwhelming. And the visceral sense that crowding is dangerous doesn't completely go away just because you've invented respirators and disinfectants.

Although, I don't know, I haven't actually seen any of your cities, maybe they're less dense than the word makes it sound."

Xakda is silent for a few moments as they lift off. Then:

". . . Huh. I guess - it sounds theoretically possible? To only have cities as large as Pyeth?" His brain - his partition of the brain that's now both his and Minaiyu's? - keeps coming up with arguments for why it must be infeasible, like that all the transportation would be too expensive, but actually they're bullshit to cover up for how "It just feels wrong! How would you orient yourself? How would you know where the important places were, in the world? How would people know where to look for - achievements to celebrate, personalities to emulate?"

'No cities larger than Pyeth' does strike Xakda as the sort of disorienting subversion of a fact of life you didn't realize was conditional, that would be true of a real alien society, that he would never think of himself . . .

"Um, our biggest city has upwards of twenty million people, according to demographers' best estimates. It's most peoples' dream to live somewhere like that, and in that respect I am most people."

They're reaching a height that'd be dizzying if Xakda didn't reach it every day, the house and garage and swingset already scale models set into a finite, rectangular patch of green. Other patches, of slightly different greens, spread out around it.

With effort, Minaiyu refrains from staring around at all the tiny fields and buildings, and instead lets Xakda decide where to look. He really does not want to die in two vehicular accidents in the span of one subjective day.

He lets himself grin, though. Even with the constraint, it's incredible.

A harder-to-read expression passes across their face when he hears about the largest city.

"...twenty million. Wow."

He's struggling to imagine what that would be like, some vast hive teeming with people.

He very nearly asks why Xakda doesn't live in a city, if they're there and it's what he wants, but decides against it. It sounds like it's a sensitive topic; Xakda is going through more than enough stress today already, plus it's probably too distracting a conversation for mid-flight.

besides, what if the conversation convinces Xakda to move to a city, then he'd have to live in a city

Although...living there would almost certainly be miserable, but it would be a fascinating experience to visit a hyper-dense otherworldly settlement, even if he did end up spending a significant fraction of the trip curled up in a little ball of overwhelmédness--

--actually maybe he shouldn't think about that too hard: that seems like it might lead to dwelling a little too long on all the reasons he ought by rights be curled up in a little ball of overwhelmédness right now, and "curling your pilot's body up into a little ball" is extremely high on the list of things you should not do when trying not to distract them.

"...I'd like to see photographs of that city sometime," he says.

Xakda is functionally oblivious to the peril he is in as a "half-possessed" carplane pilot! It's not that he doesn't know enough to be scared if he let himself think about it, it's that Gaha'eka tend to freeze when terrified, and that's not generally very helpful when you're trying to get anything done as a fully socially atomized mad techno-philosopher in an industrial society. So, the Gaha'eka not among the high cognitive elite who can learn to actually use their visceral terror responses, learn young to almost unconditionally route around them. As the saying goes, "Be appallingly reckless or you'll never do anything."

For example, this morning, Xakda could have called his boss, explained the "possession" situation and that he wouldn't be able to fly himself into work for some indefinite amount of time, and been immediately fired and in a strictly worse situation, because he'd still need to fly to a job. If he'd lived in a city, with lots of available walkable jobs, and been afraid of dying in a carplane accident today, he might have quit his current position to work somewhere walkable while adjusting to Minaiyu. If he'd lived alone out in the country, instead of having made this arrangement with Sinber and all but promised Sinber it'd be great, he might have packed up today and moved somewhere with walkable jobs. But it isn't so.

Xakda probably can get this whole situation with Minaiyu under control enough to make it to work. And if he can't, there isn't much he could have done to salvage what he sees as his life, anyway. So Xakda tries his damnedest, all while cheerfully pretending he's sure.

People from other places might object that Xakda is "abandoning" his children to the possibility of his death, and Sinber to the possible burden of caring for them in his stead. Gaha'eka would be bewildered-appalled at that objection! Xakda necessarily has a higher obligation to the stewardship of his own life than he could possibly have to his childrens' provision (because "you can't do any job dead") and in this case (fairly often, in fact!) it's right for Xakda to tolerate a certain risk to his own life, so how could it not be right for him to also risk his ability to provide for his children? It's just logic.

"I'd love to look up some pictures of Abzu when I get off work," Xakda says. He would!

"By the way, what was your current job? If-you-want-to-say."

Well, with two people trying their damnedest to not die in a carplane accident, they should be able to get through this intact.

(The thought occurred to Minaiyu, though he did not dwell on it as much as he possibly should have (at the time he was vaguely expecting that the commute would be by some normal method, foot or tricycle or train), that he could ask Xakda to take today off. But he's disrupting Xakda's life so much already, and it's clear from how Xakda's acting that he especially highly values the routine of his work schedule, and Minaiyu wants Xakda to have the comforting familiarity of the work shift he was expecting when he went to bed yesterday.)

"I was a medical apprentice. Planning to spec into paramedics, but at my current level of training I'd be worse-than-useless at situations that fast-paced and high-stakes, so for now I'm more generally gaining knowledge and picking up speed."

Xakda rrrrrrrotates the wings aaaaand suddenly it's quieter and they're flying forward! Away from the sun - west - toward some hillier, cleaner, less frequently interrupted farmland.

"Whoa, just, like, a generalist medical apprentice? Did you live in a real ghost town or something, where they were so small and isolated they could only afford one apprentice tech for everything? Or - it must just be common for everything to be smaller, if cities are so small. Wizards, dicks, sorry, this is so impossible and I'm still kind of convinced you'll disappear once I try to prove to anyone you exist, how small was the hospital you worked at?"

"Well, we're not, like, completely isolated, but we are on the coast. So we don't have much in the way of centralised specialties, because there isn't anyone to our east so we're not a good location for it.

My primary affiliation was a local medical centre which was, like, maybe thirty people depending on how you count. I also did stuff with the big hospital two hops to the west; in the long run I'd probably be working mostly with them, paramedic patients tend to need the bigger facility, but potentially still helping out at the local place when they needed someone.

And...like, it wasn't like I was planning to become a cardiologist or something? Lots of stuff comes in handy in paramedics. Even stuff that isn't directly applicable still helps you get used to, like..." he almost gestures, but stops himself "...working with patients, interpreting complicated medical situations, knowing which drugs do what so you can factor it in when some later paramedic patient is on them, etcetera."

Xakda notices Minaiyu keep having to abort gestures and cringes sympathetically (hopefully completely internally to Xakda's mind, where Minaiyu can't notice and get reasonably offended at someone cringing in sympathy.)

"When I land, I'll peace out for a few minutes in the parking garage and let you try puppetting this thing, if you expect that be helpful rather than detrimental.

Thirty people? Then even assuming three constant eight-hour shifts there can't have been a guarantee of more than ten at a time . . . what could they possibly do with that? There are medical consultants without huge staffs but not treatment hospitals, not when you could possibly at any time have more than one critical patient. And consultants usually don't hire any subordinate employees - what would you need them for? I think Sain has about three hundred, admittedly only an order of magnitude, but it feels like an important one. Also - did I hear that right, cardi-ologist? Like, someone who - specializes in just the heart?"

Minaiyu feels a little sad that Xakda has already stopped thinking of his body as something that belongs to him. Well, it's for the best.

"Oh, I meant thirty at a time.

But also...maybe we're more like your consultants than your hospitals, just sharing a facility and a clerical staff and whatnot? At the local centre we mostly just handle the routine or otherwise non-urgent stuff. Vaccinations, monitoring chronic problems, some screenings, advising people on whether to see specialists--and yeah, there were heart specialists--stuff like that. Critical cases go to the big hospital: it's only about twenty-five kilometres, you can get there pretty fast in an ambulance.

That's why hospital apprentices usually start out at local centres: you have enough to deal with as it is just getting your feet under you, throwing you straight into all the everything of a critical-care hospital would just overwhelm you--"

He stops, looking thoughtful.

"...maybe y'all don't need that, the same way y'all like living in cities?

As for after landing...well, it would be nice to take a look around. I don't want to keep you too long, though: I know you have a schedule to keep, places to be and things to do..."

(He's not actively juggling as many other thoughts this time, plus the effort involved in 'letting Xakda fly the plane without interference' is making the issue more salient.)

"...am I going to have to pretend I'm not here, so that your co-workers don't think you're delirious?"

How incredibly rude of Minaiyu to make Xakda think about that bridge, which he has valiantly not been thinking about, before he has to cross it!

"I'll have to tell them at some point." Will he? ". . . I probably won't get fired if I seem twitchy, as long as I can do my job. I mostly don't need steady hands" thank wizards, he's assisted a surgeon before and this would have made that job incredibly dicey "I mostly just query patients verbally and do low-stakes noninvasive tests. There is the blood draw component but that only ever lasts a few seconds, I'm really practiced at it, and the worst that will happen if I fuck up and tear a vein is that I get fired, not that the patient dies or gets new permanent issues."

(. . . Your language has words for both 'sanitation' and 'iatrogenic'?

??????????????????????????????????)

"So I don't think I'll have to tell them today."

. . . That wasn't Minaiyu's question. Xakda cringes internally.

"Sorry, yeah, but I would appreciate it hugely if you would - play really-dead - at first.

. . . Actually, would you rather have a chance to look around in the parking garage - there's almost always a whole big stretch of parking garage where I don't see anyone who knows me and would notice anything weird - or that I run in right away and use my buffer minutes to slip a notice explaining this in my boss's mailbox before my shift? That might cut down on your time having to act like you don't exist later. 100% your call, though."

In the distance, Pyeth sparkles, concrete and steel and glass. It's only a few miles across, small enough that individual five-story buildings still stick awkwardly out of its profile, but even so - the way it's heaped upon itself, high and smooth and circular - is not suggestive of carefree, wind-scattered accumulation, but of gravity. A few roads spiderweb outward. Dozens - hundreds? - of specks cut straight lines through the space above-and-around it, like giant, peculiarly bullheaded wasps.

Only fifteen thousand people and they're still kind of crammed in together. What is it with these people?

...why is it 100% his call when he barely knows anything about this world.

(His memories flicker through a few of the nastier testimonies on record. The Tashayan word for "demon", in the sense of "demonic possession", is loaned from Rezbeki; all three of the people who had lived in Rezbek at one point or another were fervently in agreement that you do not want to end up in Rezbek.)

also it's way too soon to not do things that Xakda would appreciate hugely, they're stuck together and he desperately needs Xakda's goodwill

...although to be fair, while he doesn't know all that much about how the locals think of this, he does have the advantage of having read the textbooks...

"In the medium term I should be able to learn how to not have control of--" your "--the body, so if you think it's best not to tell them--and you know them a lot better than I do--that should get easier with time.

...maybe what we should do with those few minutes is neither of those things, and instead I'll try some of the exercises for that: it can take weeks or months of practice but sometimes it clicks right away. I might end up knocking myself unconscious, but..." he looks a bit dubious "...it sounds like there aren't a whole lot of critical moments in the course of your duties where me waking up disoriented at exactly the wrong time would be terrible?"

Embarrassing that Xakda could not think of the apparently-right answer himself!

"Sure, makes sense.

After thinking about it, though, I can't see a good-enough reason why I shouldn't slip a note to my boss about you as soon as I do have the opportunity. Unforeseeable awkward events like this are exactly why the mailbox exists."

Pyeth is getting closer.

Xakda wasn't trained for this!

It's...probably overall a good sign that Xakda is merely torn on whether to tell his boss rather than treating it as a firmly bad idea. Probably nobody will try to exorcise him.

(Although Minaiyu does kind of wonder whether the note would be more believable a week from now, when if he were a symptom of delirium the connection between Xakda's brain and soul would have snapped under the strain by then. At least by the same token, if they do end up hospitalised over this it won't be for very long.

But it would still suck to get Xakda hospitalised over this.)

"Okay."

Xakda is an . . . abrupt pilot. He spots the garage, gets it underneath him, sets the wings back into vertical position, and does not waste time dropping.

Boxy concrete buildings with gaping windows, and others faced almost entirely by dark-shining glass and ribbed with steel, rise toward the carplane, reaching full size - crowded, cheerful, reflective, straight, and proud. Minaiyu may notice the names of businesses, if he notices them at all, inscribed or posted above their facades in matter-of-fact, prim little serif script - helpful signposts for those who are looking for signposts, not advertisements to weary the eyes of those who aren't. There is little in the way of unnecessary color and decorative flourish. Pyeth speaks for itself, of course it should speak for itself; if there is anything unusual about this, Pyeth doesn't know so.

. . . Minaiyu may catch a glimpse, from above, of a half-obscured green park, with trees and a pond and a swingset and a REALLY TALL insanely realistic humanoid statue, painted in full stunning color, wearing jeans and a T-shirt and holding a shovel - and is that another REALLY TALL statue, yep, looks like another one!

On the roof of the parking garage, there's a red arrow, pointing to a larger-than-carplane-size gap in the side of the building's third-and-topmost floor. Xakda drops and levels with the gap. More red arrows spiral down toward an entrance in the 2nd floor, offset by a turn around the building. Peering inside and seeing that the inside of the top floor is mainly empty (and with a gray plane descending on him from above), Xakda gooses the turn.

Not only is his body used to the repeated acceleration, no one has ever told him that goosing is a thing, let alone a bad one, before.

Inside the second-floor door they slide, into cool shadow, as Xakda has decided that the second floor is sufficiently full that he shouldn't bother checking the first. Wheels, meet floor. Jerk to a stop, then clear out of the entryway, brake the propellors until they stop, fold wings, go look for a spot!

As their eyes adjust, it's actually decently lit in here. The carplanes are mostly similar to Xakda's. Some are significantly bulkier, designed to carry cargo or twenty people, and these are parked in bigger spots. Common colors include white, gray, all shades of blue-green. One is vivid purple. Xakda drives around (it's a level square drive, not a spiral, inside the building), finds a spot, parks, and absently takes off his backpack inside the cab -

". . . Oh, now's when I usually take my actual stimulant," says Xakda. "It won't kick in that much within the first three minutes, but it will a little. Do you want me to wait until you're done practicing?"

(Xakda would legitimately bet a decent amount of money at 2:1 odds that he is not noticeably cognitively slowed in habituated-unmedicated state with respect to the dopamine reuptake inhibitor relative to his drug-naïve baseline state, but not at 10:1.)

...Minaiyu decides that now is extremely not the time to ask about carplane crash statistics.

He doesn't have the spare bandwidth to pay attention to the signposts, but he does catch a glimpse of a statue or two. He is--at least once they land and he can think about things other than the balancing act of neither moving nor freezing--curious about them, and asking about their subjects does seem like a conversation much more likely to go well than the one about carplane crash statistics, but also not a top priority at this time.

Should he ask what drug it is? On the one hand, he's viscerally uncomfortable with sticking an unknown overlay onto his soul; on the other hand, given the already available information "it's some kind of stimulant that a-human-in-general-and-this-body-in-particular can take on a regular basis without running into blatant problems", there are pretty diminishing returns on further details; on the third hand, this world may well have taken slightly different pharmacological paths and the name might not link up with any of the pre-existing concepts in his mind anyway; and on the gripping hand, he really does not want to go anywhere near anything that sounds like it might be picking a fight with Xakda over whether-to-take-the-drug-at-all.

He'll set the question aside for the moment. Presumably he'll get a look at the label at some point, possibly today depending on how the practice goes.

"Uh, I guess wait? It probably wouldn't interfere, but only probably."

He's worried he's going to end up waking up mid-blood-draw or something, but...well, as the saying goes, 'danger lies also in the absence of action, not only in the presence'.

He tries, sort of-- yanking himself backwards, in a not-quite-physical way.

He's at a desk, much like the one in Xakda's bedroom. On the desk is a monitor showing what appears to be the view through Xakda's eyes. He's wearing a wireless headset, through which he can hear the background noise of the garage.

(The subtly off feeling that Xakda first noticed in his body upon waking up today is gone.)

He looks around. He's in a small room, mostly shadowy and undefined. Behind him is a cot; ahead of him, to the left of the desk, is a door.

He runs a hand through his hair, feels the familiar curls.

Okay! He was...not actually expecting it to go this well! Oh, it's a bit bare-bones, sure, but it's a very good result for a first try. Looks like they're in business.

He tries the headset microphone.

<Can you hear me?> says a voice in Xakda's head, clearly distinct from Xakda's own.

"Yeah! Wait -"

Yeah, Xakda tries, internally.

"I'm not sure if - did you get that?"

The pilot who parked after him, who has a wireless earbud in himself, passes by without appearing to notice anything strange.

(He did not get that.)

<I can see and hear from in here, but I can't feel the body, let alone move it-- at least, I don't think...> he waves his hand in front of his face, not that Xakda can tell. <...yeah, no, it's not moving.>

It is not!

"Should I be able to return-send? Also, is anything horrible liable to happen if I get out of the cab now?"

<It's not surprising if you can't, especially on day one. With practice you might be able to get the hang of doing it from out there. I have it easy because I've got this, like, headspace avatar: subjectively I'm just talking out loud, I'm not having to do any particular mental motions or anything.

I can't think of any reason getting out of the cab would pose an issue.>

So it's like that, huh? Xakda nods and exits the carplane to stare idly/sagely out a window (he doesn't understand at all).

For a couple of minutes, Minaiyu also looks out the window, albeit at slightly more of a remove.

Then it sinks into his subconscious that the immediate crises are over and there is nothing he needs to do right this moment, not even staying still so as not to interfere with Xakda's movements, and he finds he's trembling too hard to stand.

He curls up on the floor (tearing off the headset in the process), shaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed by a confused tangle of emotions. The past subjective-day (and who knows how many centuries or millennia it's been back home while he was unconscious) could have gone so much better and it could have gone so much worse and he should have fucking waited for that pleuritic truck driver to stop instead of betting his life that they correctly understood who had right-of-way and he was like this fucking close to getting into two fatal vehicle crashes and it's such a weird feeling to have an entire other language attached to his mind (even as he is grateful for the ability to readily communicate) and he literally does not even know what drugs he is on right now and all of his routines are shattered and there are so many people he'll never get to say goodbye to and projects left unfinished and places he'll never again set foot in and he is so utterly alone and never alone ever again and-- and-- and--

"Okay, Minaiyu, I should go in. You ready?"

"Minaiyu?"

"Minaiyu?"

Well now he's starting to feel like the passersby are looking at him. They aren't, Xakda . . .

Everybody hallucinates sometimes.

Xakda's Inner Critic: . . . About heart attacks or rabies.

Well, he takes the L, then! Time to go to work.

Down the elevator, through the street, through the hospital employee entrance, double-checking his backpack (and taking meds) as he goes.

Nobody he works with, great! Aaaaalmost at the terminal -

"Xakda!"

". . . Everything good?"

Sigh. No, Aleith, I cannot '~tell you anything~'! Even if I could tell you anything. And I'm even the type of person who can in fact ~tell~ any people ~anything~,

"Yeah, just - accidentally -" he can't say he woke up Sinber normal people live alone that sounds weird "- had a morning." Please just let me sign in.

Nod! Hand-salutation. He ducks into his own consultation room.

The first person he receives has been having mysterious shoulder pain for months, which he'd assumed was 'cramps', but then it suddenly got worse. It's easy to put Minaiyu out of his mind as Xakda practices a decision tree that is nowhere written down, because there'd be too much to write.

Range of motion? Not great. Muscle? Mostly there's too much give, but in weird places . . . definitely not cramps. And motion causes pain here, and here . . .  Xakda gets it X-rayed. Yeah, there's . . . certainly a problem! After twenty minutes of studying it, the sheet Xakda hands over to the treatment planners, along with the patient, centrally tells a story about the joint having slipped months ago, leading to bone wear and eventual tissue decay, with meliorating possibility-branches. (He does get a chance to corroborate with Nakoru on this one! Nakoru, unexcitingly, draws almost all Xakda's same conclusions, but still.) That patient's case being the first of the day would qualify for Xakda as 'frontloading his difficulties' but, gambler's fallacy. Then again, regression to the mean! Then again, this whole aphorism-heuristic is based on rewarding yourself for frontloading difficult tasks you have the choice of frontloading, and Xakda has no control over this. So never mind!

The next patient subjectively has some kind of . . . pressure? weird sensation? . . . going on in his ear, chronic although it was sudden-onset. He thinks it could maybe be related to some subjective balance problems he's been having lately? Approximately a half hour after 'Minaiyu' disappeared (ancient laboring sages, what was wrong with Xakda this morning), Xakda is twisting a camera-otoscope in the patient's ear with one hand, and remote-zooming the camera's-eye view on his desk monitor with the other.

Eventually Minaiyu feels...well, somewhat better. Done for now, anyway.

...he...didn't...warn...Xakda...did he. He winces.

He gets up, sticking the headset back on. Xakda does not look interruptable right now.

in fact if he had blacked out and woken up at this moment that would probably have gone pretty badly, you do not fuck around with sticking things in people's ears

He waits and watches. It's not so different from shadowing people at work, really.

(He tries to think of a way to phrase an apology that does not rub it in that Xakda hasn't had any downtime in which to do emotional processing, but he can't come up with anything. He'll just have to forge ahead, he guesses.)

After he checks for Nakoru (who is sadly tied up now) and ships off the ear patient, he'll spend a few minutes reading and notetaking case studies at his standing computer terminal. But during that time, his constant clock-checks and glances at his (open) office door, will signal to Minaiyu that this is not actually time Xakda has predictably free. Indeed, within a few minutes, a notification sketches out the info of his next patient. He barely has time to read over it before meeting them.

It's about two and a half hours after the start of Xakda's shift, when he relaxes a little (though not, if you knew him, as much as is usual for him), stretches, and, backpack loaded, locks his office door and takes the stairs down to the break area.

No windows, but it's very well- and warmly-lit. At first it may appear small and stark - tiny table, a couple vending machines - before you notice that the common space is not the main attraction, and the actual breakrooms are the surrounding sixteen-odd single-person private areas. Xakda enters one, throws his backpack on the table, closes and locks the door, and is immediately cut off from all light and sound from the outside world. He settles in and sets up his laptop. Begins some online shopping related to his and Sinber's planned home renovation. The first motions of this go very slowly and laboriously. Xakda is in denial about how the reason they are going very slowly and laboriously is that he is having a panic attack.

It's probably not an issue with quality of customer experience.

Probably.

Minaiyu feels increasingly awkward about not having apologised or anything yet as the hours go by--does Xakda even know he's watching right now, or just assuming Minaiyu's unconscious? he was specifically trying to avoid Xakda not knowing when he was watching--but he doesn't quite dare to speak up until the private room.

<Hi. I'm sorry about dropping out on you all of a sudden like that. Everything...kind of caught up with me.>

Oh, so it's going to start pretending to be real every time he's alone, conveniently never becoming real to anyone else, is it. That's a familiar pattern of delusion, even if this particular shape of delusion is alarmingly immersive.

Ideally you meditate it away on your own. Especially at age - well, at age fifteen, let alone twenty-five. But he strongly suspects he's not actually in a position to accomplish that, right now, so his next best option is 'insist on the reality of your delusion to such professionals as should be able to detect what you're imagining, if it's real, until your brain is satisfied with their refutations'.

Sigh. Ripple of creeping dread. He's too old for this.

He's still got 18 minutes of break left.

He packs up and hauls ass to the neuro wing. Thank twisted fate he knows Andor at all.

Uh.

<...hello?>

🎵 maybe it will go away on its oooooown 🎶

🎶 that's one of the shortest fragments he's ever experienced it speakiiiiing, skill be with hiiiiim 🎵

yyyyYes Andor's door is open! Fifteen minutes left, he's barely sweaty, and no one on the way noticed anything weird about the way he was running! "Sir?"

Why walk when you can run? A few broken bones per lifetime due to the natural clumsiness common to all primates who have just undergone breakneck neural evolution is hardly bad enough that you should waste minutes per day in order to avoid it! We fly carplanes despite the risk, don't we?

". . . Yes?"

Ah balls Andor probably doesn't remember him make it quick make it quick

"I am

having a weird - perceptual experience that might be of interest to you if you could spare literally ten minutes? I think I could pay enough to make it worth your time."

<...could you, I don't know, look at your hand and wiggle the index finger or something if you can hear me? I'm starting to worry that maybe the comm's broken.

--wait, hang on, is this about me?>

One of the other things that helps is not feeding the delusion in the privacy of your own mind, if possible, even as you talk up its reality to other people. He hasn't actually had a fear-hallucination this dramatically affecting in ten years, but the correct response is, nonetheless, ingrained reflex.

"- Sure, I don't expect any referrals from the juniors in the next ten minutes, though I'll have to kick you if someone does come." He names a price, invites Xakda in, asks what's wrong. A mini-contract for the one-off service is written, copied, signed.

"- so - this morning, there was - I don't know if there are any cases of schizophrenia or DID that are like this, but -" you idiot don't start babbling self-diagnoses based on zero actual research "- I woke up, and there was just - immediately this, like, partition in my mind, apparently with a totally separate personality, and name, and history - claiming to be from another world - memories that I couldn't access unless - it, or he - spoke, directly, using my voice, and I just kind of took it in stride as, okay, you must be from another world, then, this is obviously real, has to be -" strained laugh "- 'less it disappears when I get to work or something, and then it did, and it came back when I was alone, and it's back now."

"- could you summarize that again?" He's writing.

--any cases of what now--

--that-- it--

--that word that Xakda used when first talking to Sinber, what was it, "insane", that had connotations of both "delirious" and "neurodivergent"--

--and it turns out these people have a word specifically for people who are stuck in delirium, long term, and it's not like it's a word for talking about speculative fiction because Xakda is talking like it's a live possibility--

--if, somehow, that is a thing people can have here (are their souls more firmly attached to their brains or something?? is that a thing he can have now?)...

...then he's not going to be able to convince Xakda he's real by waiting a week and pointing out that they're both still alive.

He's in the really deep shit after all, isn't he.

He desperately wishes he had braked at that fucking intersection.

<You-- you asked me to play really-dead, so I did-->

He sighs, audible over the comm.

<...should I talk to him too?>

It's not quite the time in the interview, yet, for that -

He takes out a notebook and "doodles" (covertly writes where Minaiyu can see) - suddenly the room tilts, he's experiencing world-double-vision, treating Minaiyu as simultaneously real and not-real and it threatens to overheat his mind - while he summarizes haltingly for Andor, he writes

not yet

in a minute please

thanks

if you're real SORRY

He establishes that Xakda is oriented to place, time, person, establishes that Xakda is not confessing about any history of recent trauma or prodromal symptoms, does a series of syntactic-logic tests that usually definitively turn up psychotic thought patterns and a few that should be sufficient to detect the kind of cognitive disruption he imagines would be associated with hyper-abrupt DID, and it all comes out clean.

He doesn't tell Xakda so, not right away in case Xakda is in a delicate state and it makes something worse, but Andor, senior diagnostic neurologist of Sain, Pyeth, Gahai, notices he is confused.

"- you say the alternate personality is able to speak and make motions on your behalf - can you control when that happens?"

Their ten minutes is almost up, but, obviously, Andor will advise Xakda to come see him or somebody similar after his shift or on a day off, since apparently whatever this is he's been able to work through it so far.

"- yeah, actually, earlier in this conversation - he - was asking if he could. Talk. To you. Um. Do you want to have that happen with the remaining minute.

I don't anticipate debilitating problems from this based on how it's gone before?"

"- Sure." What in the name of Lesel is happening here.

On his notebook:

you're good to go now if you want

"Of Alternate - what has this morning been like from your perspective?"

"- Minaiyu. His name's Minaiyu."

"- Minaiyu, then."

Well. He's glad that him being real is also a live possibility in Xakda's mind. He got a sapient pronoun this time and everything.

He walks through the door.

"So-- I was in a vehicle crash, a fatal one, and when I woke up I was in Xakda's body. That-- that's not outside-context, for me, that's a known way death works where I'm from, we get a couple hundred dead people turning up every year-- I wasn't expecting it today, though.

Uh, anyway-- I introduced myself, explained the situation--found out y'all had never heard of this--we, we talked, about my life back home, some of the ways things are different here--

--I sang for him, a poem he'd never heard, in a language he hadn't known existed yesterday. I could teach people to speak it, given time. I know a lot more songs. There's a mnemonic one about the periodic table, if y'all don't know you might end up stranded on another world one day with nothing but the contents of your mind then-- then Xakda probably never had cause to memorise the periodic table, there-- there's probably other stuff like that, things that would be the same, that you could check, that I know and he doesn't..."

". . . Do you mind if I record you singing the mnemonic song about the periodic table now?"

It's possible Xakda made it up and then subconsciously invented an alternate story about it, but severe acute mental breaks usually don't end up memory-entangled with carefully self-composed lyrics that rhyme and scan and also correspond whimsically to the chemical elements. When Andor hears the way in which this song falls apart, or looks it up and finds its true author, or hears Minaiyu's particular excuses for not being able to sing it, he'll be able to better advise Xakda what to do next.

"Well, it takes a while--maybe ten minutes?--but if Xakda can find the time I'd love to, and if not now then whenever he gets a chance.

Uh, Xakda, what do you think? Can we at least squeeze in a verse or two?"

"Yes by all means please! I don't think he needs the whole song just enough data to be implausible as something I catshat for this purpose?"

"- yes."

He knows it's evil to have less fun as a diagnostic tech when the patient knows exactly what you're doing, but nevertheless, this is a lot less fun when the patient knows exactly what you're doing.

Once Andor has the recorder set up, Minaiyu sings the first four verses of the periodic-table song (an introductory verse and couplets for each of the first six elements).

Andor can't understand the lyrics, but it does rhyme and scan, and (to whatever extent Andor can tell) the phoneme patterns are suggestive of an actual language rather than a string of nonsense sounds.

(Minaiyu wonders, as he sings, what it's like for Xakda. It must be so strange, to feel your own mouth fluently shaping the syllables of a language you don't speak. Yes, Minaiyu has also spent a fair bit of time today feeling someone else speak a foreign language through his mouth, but he's pretty sure it's a different kind of weird when you can understand what they're saying.)

When Minaiyu finishes singing, he flips Xakda's notebook to a blank page and writes out a translation. He translates a couple bits of jargon literally for lack of better options, and Xakda doesn't seem to know the local words for elements 3, 4, or 5 so Minaiyu gives those in transliterated Tashayan (but those couplets sure do sound like descriptions of lithium, beryllium, and boron).

He thinks for a moment, then turns another page and writes a list of all 94 elements, in order, using local words where they come when he calls for them and Tashayan words plus a couple of distinguishing characteristics otherwise.

The level of effort evident in this apparently highly chemically proficient nonsense, which is what it almost certainly is, is alarming. Whatever kind of person does this, it's not the kind of person he'd thought Xakda was at all.

"Thanks, Minaiyu, for whatever it's worth. Which, if you exist to the extent this naïvely seems to suggest you do, is a lot.

When does your shift end, Xakda?"

"Twenty-two."*†

*Counting equinox sunset as zero.

†The specific rail line this time is given with reference to, is omitted, because there's a clear Schelling point for timekeeping in Xakda's workplace, namely the rail line Xakda's workplace refers to.

"I go an hour past that, tonight, if you want to come see me again and go over this, seventy percent this rate."

seems like a good idea to me if you're OK with it?

Questioning look!

"I'm, um." Shows notebook. "Writing a note Minaiyu can see so he can OK it.

He can currently speak directly into my internal monologue-stream but can't read off of it."

holy wizards have mercy just kill him, kill him now

"Ah." It's weird but not that weird, for this apparent severity of mental disintegration? It doesn't sway Andor's credence one way or the other, about Minaiyu's reality.

i don't think he knows I can't actually sing

anyway

you good with more of this after my shift?

(By the way, the reason it's fine for Andor to take personal, nonstandard clients "on the clock" is that, while some workplaces require employees to be available certain hours out of the day, the bulk of employee pay is, of course, always by commission, and bosses would never encourage their employees to be idle at work to the extent that they can still remain available. Andor is planning on skipping some company tasks, tonight, to see Xakda, but will also be skipping out on corresponding company pay, which is not a decision he always likes to make. If there's a company patient who needs to see him at exactly that time, which he's not on the whole expecting, he'll need to interrupt his session with Xakda.

Also, the obligate hours are a minimum, and Xakda under ordinary conditions would have worked long past his nominal shift end.)

Well, currently currently he can't speak into Xakda's internal monologue-stream, but that should be easy enough to fix if Xakda wants this conversation not to be out loud.

He leaves the front.

<Absolutely.>

That went...well? Probably? Hopefully?

- oh, right. There was a reason that fronting!Minaiyu took over Xakda's voice directly, wasn't there.

Well, he'll go back to work, then.

"Sorry," he says, at an opportune moment in a hallway. "I had forgotten about the singing thing . . . Love of all that is good, may we resolve this quickly."

Not much else happens for the rest of his workday, except he gets to co-diagnose with Nakoru a few times. Nakoru is better at suggesting unintuitive ideas, and Xakda is better at moderating between possibilities. They work well together.

On his second break, he asks for Minaiyu's opinions about the cabinets he's looking at online (he and Sinber have tasked him with this decision). Would Minaiyu go with the natively lockable latched doors, or the ones that are less securable but also quicker to open and cheaper?

"Resolve this" could mean a few different things and some of them are better than others, but he will try to be optimistic in his interpretation. And if Xakda is still thinking of Minaiyu being here as a temporary state of affairs, well, Minaiyu will do his best to ease the adjustment.

(He remembers hearing about what happened in Peace River's End when he was a kid. Tiv hadn't gotten access to the language, and had woken up that morning significantly earlier than Reteni. The adults of Reteni's household found what appeared to be their child huddled in a corner, confused and scared, screaming in a guttural language at anyone who tried to touch her.

He ran into them at a science museum a couple years later. They were laughing, fluidly switching off tasks, chatting with the other kids. (Tiv spoke pretty good Tashayan by that point, albeit with some accent.) All three of them agreed that the coolest part of the museum was the bit where you stood on it and it enveloped you in a giant bubble, but had different opinions on which part was second-coolest.

They were happy together, in time. He hopes he and Xakda can be happy together too.)

<What usecase are you thinking of?

Also, I don't have a good sense of how meaningful that price difference is. What's that in terms of your household's average living expenses? And how long would you work to make that much money?>

"To me, kitchen cabinets should be for oatmeal but also possibly secrets, but that's not a universal opinion. Um - cheaper cabinet is around 3gg, lockable one is 4.2ish, so the difference is 1.20gg or so - on a default-effort workday, I make maybe five times that?" It's sort of a strange method of value-anchoring - he himself would have just anchored off the ratio of the difference to the full price of the cabinets, and his own seeming moderate level of care about the whole expenditure - but he doesn't have the cognitive-energetic latitude to question that right now.

(Anchoring off price ratios doesn't tell you how many goods and/or services and/or leisure time you're giving up by buying the expensive one!)

<Well, if it is for secrets then by all means get a lock.

I know there are some households who lock up sweets and stuff like that when their children are too young to have the impulse control to handle unrestricted access responsibly, but I think it's more common to just arrange your food shelves in order of access-restriction with the most tempting things on top. That way the progressive unlocking over time mostly takes care of itself: the older you are, the more things you're tall enough to reach and the more things you can be trusted with.

Do you think a lock would be helpful with your kids? My default assumption would be that oatmeal does not require a very large quantity of impulse control to handle, but people vary.>

"How many sweets did people on Rekka have? That's a clever solution, I've just - it's not a - problem I've ever heard of! I mean, unless your kid's feeding-regulation circuitry is broken in a way that can't be fixed yet.

Thanks for the motivation-boost, anyway. I think I will keep open the option to put some secrets in that cabinet." He buys the lockable one.

<Generally not very much per day, but when you multiply that out by three or six months of pantry it works out to quite a bit on hand. You really don't want a toddler trying to eat it in one sitting.>

"Ah. Makes sense." He's never known anyone to do quite that much food-stockpiling or like sweets nearly that much, but if you combine the two, he can see the hazard.

He does his best to fill the rest of this break with further home-improvement-shopping and related chatter, then returns to the same uneventful workday. On his third and final scheduled break before the end of his obligate shift, though, he's out of shopping and a little out of trying-not-to-think-about-Minaiyu-as-permanent steam.

"I'm - sorry I've been trying not to think about you as permanent, if you are real. It's just - I know this doesn't excuse it, but from my perspective, you're either - a vivid but false construct of my mind, which is something I've experienced many times though not at this hypothetical level, but which I've read is a thing that can get much weirder than this - or some kind of absurd intervention by inter-universal forces that happened to happen to me specifically. You know?"

He thinks things over for a few moments

<...thank you. It'll-- take time to get used to, for both of us.

...I wouldn't say that I know, but I...know that I don't know? The probability-space must look very different to someone who'd never heard of walk-ins but had heard of schizophrenia.

--it's super weird that people here can get stuck in delirium like that, by the way. I have never heard of that happening anywhere. That kind of detachment from reality puts a lot of strain on a soul: normally it's not survivable for longer than a few days straight. Eventually the connection snaps and you're left with a soulless, comatose shell.

...I...understand, if you want to withhold judgment until after tonight? It remains to be seen whether I can convince Andor, given that he doesn't know for sure what your pre-existing knowledge base is and, like, for all he knows you might have memorised the periodic table and constructed a language to describe it in, but you know you didn't do that. At least, I assume you didn't. Even if you did, I'm sure there's more where that comes from: maybe you can get me some wood and hand tools and I'll show you how to build a spinning wheel.>

"Ha!

. . . What my idea would usually be, with going to Andor, is - either he'd be able to make you vanish, by talking me out of my own childishness like impressive diagnosticians tend to be able to do, or he'd be able to figure out what you really are? If he, like, gives up on the problem, then I'll go to someone else.

Schizophrenia - you're not trapped in a delusion, really? It's not, a box that separates you from the outside world. The usual metaphor is that it's a disruption in the ability of the 'projection apparatus' that generates the more abstract parts of yourself, to focus. You lose your coherent representation of reality, to this sort of hyperbolic subjectivity where you can't quite perceive, on a high level, faster than you can will, so your beliefs end up malformed and smeared with your desires and intentions. Depending on the case, that high-level part of you that's disrupted, can include your soul, but it usually doesn't.

Did you learn something different about it?"

<...yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about, and that description still sounds like the sort of thing that should kill you.>

"Less confusing than hemispherectomies or bilateral parietal lobe damage not killing you, though!"

<...are-- are you being serious right now? About the brain damage? That actually happens? You're-- you're saying people survive, but changed?>

"It's - debatable to what extent the person is changed? In the same way you don't change an autopilot routine by crashing the carplane that it runs on. But they can lose abilities, yeah? Like when people - stop being able to gestalt-perceive the left side of their visual field, or they'll acquire this incredible hour-to-hour or stimulus-to-stimulus variability in their ability to handle even mildly mentally strenuous tasks - it's actually kind of a fascinating area of concern? Did you never look into neurology at all? No judgment, at all." It took Xakda himself a while to get over the associated heebie-jeebies but it was so fascinating once he did.

<...okay, so--

--did y'all ever do the experiments where...like, you do surgery on a mouse's brain, and that changes the way it behaves? Like, it stops freezing or hiding when it sees a cat, or it forgets where to go in a maze it was very familiar with before? But if you do the exact same surgery on a raven, or a chimpanzee, they just go permanently comatose?

And the same with natural injuries, like, sometimes somebody drops a dog on its head and from then on it suddenly becomes forgetful or aggressive or something, but this never happens with people. People with brain injuries might end up paralysed, or lose senses, or get chronic headaches, or in a lot of cases they'll go comatose like the experimental ravens--the soul's already dead and the body just hasn't noticed yet--but never changes to anything fundamentally them, never cognition or temperament or memory or anything like that.>

"- No? Are you - this is a universe with regular physics, if you were worried about that.   . . . Are your ravens and chimps conscious, or have you discovered something else that your culture's stories track as fantasy-logic-relevant, that ravens do have but mice don't? Our ravens and chimps pretty uniformly don't pass the mirror test."

There is a possibility becoming increasingly, terribly clear in his mind.

<...wouldn't every universe think of its own physics as regular?> he says slowly.

<Do you mean...are you saying that...that brains here are just very-complicated-biological-machinery all the way up? That there's never a point, as a species gets smarter, where its members become something more than the sums of their parts, where a merely carbon-based-computer mind becomes a thing-that-is and which cannot be destroyed or fundamentally damaged? --or, at the very least, certainly not by the mere clubs and knives and poisons that could do it to a lesser animal.>

"I thought you thought my universe had physics that would actually be foreign in the same way to both of us, because they'd show up in the same kinds of fantasy books where it's literarily interesting to have souls be recognized by some gods as special cases - exceptions to the usual laws of physics ohno." He clams up.

Literarily interesting to have souls be recognised as special cases...

...yeah, that all sure does sound like a "yes", doesn't it.

<...I-- I'd thought that's the thing you were using "soul" to mean,> he says. <But you...don't actually have a hayi, do you.

...oh, oh, of course, we-- we would have no way of knowing, if-- if-- if y'all just cease like lesser animals do, then we'd never hear from y'all, you shouldn't judge the flaws in your protective gear based on the ones that make it back-->

He says something that, in context, is probably swearing.

<--for all I know most worlds are like yours and there's just one cluster that's different, maybe the flow of walk-ins goes "outward" in some hyperdimensional sense and nobody who makes it out this far is ever going to hit Rekka afterward and report what they learned...>

There's a pit yawning in his stomach. The multiverse is larger and scarier and more unpredictable than he thought it was, and it had been plenty large and scary and unpredictable enough already.

<...there's...there's clearly something more to you than the usual lesser animals, even if you managed somehow to build all of that something-more out of ""regular physics"". I never would have predicted that hayi-less creatures could form a civilisation like this. And...if, in the end, you consider me a real person, it would only be right to extend you the same courtesy.

Uh, I didn't...actually answer, did I-- ravens and chimps aren't conscious. A-- in the...paradigm that I am accustomed to, hayi are necessary but not sufficient for sapience. Ravens and chimps and some other species have them, but they never...well, no, of course you wouldn't have a word. There's a moment, usually a little after a child's second birthday, where something clicks and they-- become self-aware, go from being a smart animal to being a person. Other animals never have that moment, not that anyone's seen.>

". . . huh," he says. "We call that part 'sentience', and the part we call 'sapience' something else that happens when you're around five or six . . . " because that's the easy part.

The harder part comes slower. "Just to be perfectly clear on this from the start - assuming you are real, sorry but I've had some really convincing hallucinations, none as convincing as this but many subjectively more convincing than any before them - from my perspective, the situation is now that we figure out who was making exceptions for hayi on Rekka, and how, and trade with them or imitate their methods until stuff doesn't suck anymore."

<What happens at six?> He supposes this and the "soul" thing are just the sort of issues you should expect when attempting to use the language of someone who apparently has a fundamentally different mechanism of consciousness. assuming he's not a p-zombie

<If there's a "who", they're keeping very quiet about their existence. Or the spirits we have met are much more powerful than they claim to be, but that seems like a weird thing to lie about.

...I'll do what I can, but I don't know how much help I can be. We've known about the existence of hayi for ages, but our knowledge of how they work is very much in its infancy. And it's not like you can use local ravens as test subjects, even ignoring the controversy involved in doing potentially-fatal tests on greater animals. There's...just me, by the sound of it, and if an experiment ended up killing me it would cut off your whole line of inquiry.

...also it would mean I have to go find out what outside-context bullshit the next world has in store for me--and for that matter the inside-context bullshit--and I would really rather not with that. At least y'all have germ theory.>

"I'm sure we can do this without deliberately risking your life! That was not even on my radar. Please tell me that killing people to give their kidneys to those more in need is not a thing where you're from.

Um, at six - do five- and six-year-olds from Rekka - it's not obvious if you're not looking for it - but is there a known transition point where they start ever - asking why and not being satisfied with the answer, until they actually understand?"

Oh good, so Xakda wanting him to go away is conditional on him not being sentient.

or Xakda just doesn't have the implications, starting to unfold in the back of his mind, of the fact that mice can bounce back from being continuously dosed with deliriants for a week straight and ravens can't no, the organ-harvesting comparison implies an unwillingness to kill Minaiyu even if Xakda would benefit

<We definitely don't murder people to harvest their organs. The exact threshold of how confident you have to be that a comatose body is empty before you can harvest its organs is a matter of some debate, but it's generally set pretty high.

Hmm. There might be a transition point like that? I hadn't really thought about it that way.

I'd been wondering if maybe it was going to be the developmental stage where kids start voluntarily enduring discomfort in pursuit of abstract future goals, which for us is usually around nine or ten. Like, so far I've only done vaccinations on people older than that, because they wanted me better trained before I try to stick a needle into somebody who's screaming and flailing about it; whereas an eleven-year-old is usually happy to be there and will actively cooperate. Sometimes they even sign up for the rhinovirus vaccination cycle.>

". . . huh. It's probably not related to the 'hayi' thing, but our kids don't really have an uncooperative stage. I generally don't diagnose them because they're systematically different from and more fragile than adults, so it does make sense to - our economy - to have pediatric specialists even if not 'cardiologists'.

I think for us five or six probably is the age when voluntarily enduring discomfort in pursuit of self-conceived goals becomes possible, if we have a discrete point like that? Even though, before that age, kids just calm down and take the needle if the trusted-by-familiar-adults adult says to. I don't know nearly enough psychology to say for reasonably sure, though.

It's almost time for me to go back, sorry - I can ask Andor for some psychology reading recommendations after he declares you a not only medical but physical miracle, which is what I now on some level expect to happen?"

<Well, immediate goals are sooner, I think. It's somewhat harder to grasp the concept of "putting up with a needle-stick in order to lower the risk of experiencing a couple weeks of suffering months later".

Sounds good. Especially the ways that things can go wrong in y'all's brains: seems like that'll be a fruitful area of study.>

The implications-unfolding-in-the-back-of-his-mind are now pointing out that, in hindsight, he absolutely should not have allowed Xakda to dose him with a psychoactive without vetting it first, even if Xakda wasn't and isn't trying to kill him on purpose. Minaiyu could not reasonably have known, and in this particular case he's pretty confident that it was indeed an overlay and not a disruptor, and he will forgive himself, but also he's not doing that with the next mystery drug.

. . . He has more points of clarification about child psychology, but he really does have to get back to work now. So he does.

In the middle of his last work period, between tasks, he writes a note:

I told you to 'please tell me' your culture didn't have kidney thieves, but now I'm not sure I should have wanted that to be true. On the one hand, it's lots of seemingly low-hanging fruit for improving things if failure modes in the human-having planet multiverse - hey, by the way, uh, did Rekka have continents like this? [doodles of Gahai] - tend to be that obvious to people from other multiverses, and tend to not affect the people who live there that much, as you seem to have turned out fine. On the other, it'd be nice if human-having universes didn't have that failure mode? So I guess whether I'm happy or sad about Rekka's lack of kidney thieves depends on whether I previously thought that good human-having universes were the default, or bad human-having universes. And now I realize the thing about the continents is the actually important thing here, whoops. Anyway, your thoughts?

<Oh, your planet's in a multi-continent phase, that's so cool! Yeah, no, we basically have the one, though some islands get pretty big.

Honestly, at this point I cannot begin to guess the default goodness level of a human-inhabited universe, let alone chimerae. We knew the available data pretty much had to be skewed in some way and extent, but I don't think anyone was predicting the existence of potentially vast swaths of invisible..."lesser humans" sounds insulting. Of invisible hayi-less humans.

...I think it seems overall better if people aren't blatantly leaving money on the table? It makes for easier improvements, sure, but only because things were needlessly bad to start with. It'd be nice to think that people are largely doing their best with what they have, and it's just that they often don't have enough.

--we still might come across things that seem like obvious failure modes to each other, which we may or may not be right about. I guess we'll find out.>

It doesn't seem

But the mostly-black display he's constantly checking flashes a notification about the next patient, which cuts him off.

His shift ends. His motions clearing his workspace are as practiced as a very clumsy figure skating routine, although occasionally the angle of the light coming through the window, far higher than it usually is when he leaves, screws him up.

"Are you ready? Sorry about ghosting you earlier, but 'better a job you can't complete than a tragically unbeginnable feat'. I guess you wouldn't have that saying. Anyway, that's a saying. There's an opposite saying, of course, it's all about knowing when to apply which . . . My point is, I figure we can tackle the anthropics stuff after the appointment. Provided I didn't literally imagine you."

Nakoru, passing by his open office door, stalls and squints aggressively.

(Acoustics in Gaha'e architecture generally keeps sound vaguely in its place even when doors are open, but Nakoru was right there and he and Xakda have the kind of closeness where he's not entirely obligated to pretend he didn't overhear any of Xakda's business through his open door.)

"You know how it is."

(This is one of the local ways of conveying 'Please do not inquire further.')

"Oh, totally." He moves along.

He wonders, a little, if Nakoru is ever going to meet him.

<I know we both have a lot of conversational topics piled up, but yeah, one step at a time. Let's go.>

He does not shake as, things finally packed up, he makes his way back to Andor's door. He's quietly proud of that. Five years ago he would have been noticeably twitchy. It's still kind of dicey whether he's able to swing this level of apparent calm on any given fraught occasion. Not that he gets much chance to practice. He really doesn't.

Andor, at his big standing desk, has seven different books open to specific pages. One of the books is entirely about psychosis, one is entirely about DID, and a third is open to a section about DID. There are several decently well-proportioned cross-sections of the human brain on his whiteboard, at least one of which wasn't there earlier.

"You can come in!" He doesn't tell Xakda to sit. People sit down when they feel settled in. Andor himself generally just doesn't. But the desks in this consultation room are height-adjustable, and Xakda does sit, when Andor hands him six short-answer questionnaires. The questionnaires, of course, don't proclaim what they're about - the patient may guess anyway, but it'd be needlessly surrendering information that might subconsciously bias their answers. Most of the questions seem entirely irrelevant to Xakda's experiences, which is just part of the deal you get when you're being thorough. He fills them out, letting Minaiyu write whenever it seems to Minaiyu like more of a question for him.

Andor takes forty-five minutes to go over their answers, during which time they are shunted to a little single-person waiting room. Xakda says he's sorry but he's not in the right frame of mind to talk. He goes over some retrospective case notes of his own, working 'late' after all. He's glad he texted Sinber to announce the appointment as he made it.

When Andor recalls them (after an hour and forty-five minutes, rather than forty-five, because a rather more cut-and-dry company patient did show up in the meantime, who Andor wasn't technically obligated to take, being 'off the clock', but whom it would have undermined his status as leader to pass on to a more junior colleague while present), his demeanor is noticeably - professional. That's all Xakda can notice about it. He takes them to an EEG hookup and sets Xakda up, asks Minaiyu to go 'passenger mode' for the first set of readings, then takes another set with Minaiyu and Xakda alternately answering questions. After that are the fMRI readings. As with the EEG, Andor has done what just about anyone off the street can do, and paid for time with the machine (he is scientifically motivated, but also, the rate he named for Xakda is a commission function tying Andor's payout to the accuracy of his diagnosis by an elaborate custom too large for this margin to contain.) He takes the same set of readings, this time also bothering to distinguish Xakda/Minaiyu's visually- and auditorily-attentive states. Then another shunt to the waiting room, which turns out to last an hour.

Finally, nearly four hours after the end of Xakda's nominal shift, Andor's marginal expected headway dips below his marginal expected costs, and he recalls Xakda again.

He shows off a closed diagnostic-probability-spreadsheet envelope.

"So. We are past time! I'd understand if you want to take this as my verdict for this session and go rest for now," his tone of voice indicating that this is not actually what he expects to happen, "but would you - specifically Minaiyu - be up for more of an interview?"

During the waiting times, Minaiyu runs over mnemonics in his mind and (with the microphone turned out of the way, so as not to distract Xakda) sings to himself both educational and purely-entertainment songs and tears up a little about how he's never going to hear Korri yet Toredi's next album and reads over Xakda's shoulder and daydreams.

The MRI scanner is kind of cozy, apart from the noise.

It's been a long day, but he doesn't want to leave things unfinished and he doesn't want to disappoint (especially not the person who is considering certifying him as not-a-dream-figment).

He nods.

"Okay."

He brightens just slightly, out of professionalism and being unsure of Minaiyu's preferences.

The first question is, "Is there anything you know of, that you know but you think there's a reasonable chance our society doesn't, but could verify?" 

He figured that a question along those lines was going to come up at some point.

"The main thing that's struck me so far is that Xakda seemed to have no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned electromagnetic pulses†. A solar flare destroyed our electrical grid seventy-one years ago; we've since recovered, but that experience taught us lessons that maybe y'all haven't been forced to learn. I didn't see any solar panels on the roofs during the flight over here, which makes me worry that y'all are relying completely on centralised power plants with big transformers and long wires that may well blow if a flare dumps extra current on them without blocking-capacitors. I know there's testing equipment that can generate localised electromagnetic pulses, but I don't know how they're made.

Mostly y'all seem to have a slightly higher tech level than we do. I expect there are other exceptions, other places where we've pulled ahead, but I haven't yet seen enough of your world to get a better sense of where they are."

If only he were a math enthusiast, he might have the latest advancements in prime numbers or something to give them. Pre-industrial clothing is fascinating, but extremely useless for convincing a high-tech-level civilisation that you're a real person with real otherworldly knowledge.

---

†he translates this term literally

He nods. He really doesn't know what he was expecting. It should be unambiguous that he was expecting excuses, and this was an excuse, but - somehow he doesn't entirely feel like he was expecting excuses, or even like Minaiyu's answer was entirely an excuse? It's probably just been a long day.

"Xakda, do you know anything about solar-flare electromagnetic pulses, this natural disaster Minaiyu's talking about?"

"- No, nothing except what he's told me. I'm not under the impression that that means nobody in Gahai knows anything, though."

"I'd heard something about it from a long-ago co-cultist, in passing, but not ever looked into it myself."

He's already looking it up in the pricey science encyclopedia that's stored to disk on his pocket computer. Evidently, this is a known risk, with several probable historical examples having been recorded before there would have been any human-made electrical equipment for them to affect at all, and one known example from a time centuries ago, when equipment that'd exhibit weird behavior in a 'geomagnetic storm' was a rarity but nonetheless existent for people to write about. Apparently the main untested front-line prophylactic currently employed by power companies with high-voltage supply lines is to have a protocol for disconnecting everything quickly. The article doesn't say anything about further prophylactics. It's not ideal to have to ask Minaiyu before Andor knows, but it really has been a long day.

"If-you-want-to-say, Minaiyu, what were the main preventative measures? Starting with the ones that seem like they might come across as stupid to even bring up."

He readies his keyboard. He'd ask Minaiyu's permission to record audio, but really, the added strain, real or imagined by Andor, doesn't feel worth it.

(No, it does not even darken Andor's mind-threshold that he might be cowing alien!Minaiyu, or giving him an impression of unjust treatment, by being the sole Important Person present in the room and making all of the calls during alien!Minaiyu's first chance to make an impression on Gahai, as it were, of his own veracity.

Of course real!Minaiyu will know that he'll ultimately have as many chances to convince someone of his reality as there are people on Gahai. People don't just take each others' word for things, in an advanced society, at least not when those things are potentially worth insane amounts of money-and-clout and where the potential-value is obviously facially of a class in great danger of being mis-evaluated by slips of feeble, not-yet-grown-up human intuition, like 'visitor from another world suddenly shows up inside someone's head, resembling insanity in all but the subtlest ways that only particular people would know how to test.'

Advanced societies judge you a million times. The only kind of society that judges you once is a 50-minus-person hunter-gatherer band from the State of Nature. Which Minaiyu should know by now that Gahai is not. QED.)

(At the very least, Minaiyu's ability or lack thereof to convince Andor of his reality provides a lot of information on how feasible it will be to convince other people in general.

But he's pretty confident, at this point, that he can at least convince Xakda, who is by far the most important person to convince given that Minaiyu will be living with him for as long as Minaiyu is living on this world at all. If they end up having to stay closeted around all but a few trusted friends, so be it: he'd rather it didn't come to that, but he could live with it. And if, when the next flare hits, Xakda's household is one of only a few to have readied itself...well, then at least Minaiyu will have thrown some starfish into the ocean, not least of which himself.)

He very much does want to say, but under the circumstances he doesn't feel like it would make much difference if he didn't.

"Well, uh, I suppose the one that comes across as kind of stupid to even bring up is to just not use electricity if a non-electric version will serve nearly as well. Like, I know a couple disabled people who use electric washing machines--there exist situations where they can make a big difference--but I use a hand-crank, most people do. It's not like the washboards of the past where laundry took the whole day: hand-cranks are pretty good.

And even if you primarily use an electric version of something, you want to have a backup plan: like, you don't keep any documents that are at all important purely in hot-libraries-- no, wait, that's too literal a translation, probably doesn't make sense. Uh, at-all-important documents should have backup copies that are...towards the durable end of the convenience-versus-durability tradeoff, paper and/or microfilm rather than being purely digital.

And...possibly y'all didn't spec as hard into energy-efficiency, if y'all didn't have 'run all of your household's equipment off of your household's solar' as a goal to strive for and ideally exceed to give wiggle room? Have y'all stopped using incandescent lighting, incandescent lighting is terrible. It's much easier to get hold of enough power to run lighting based off of LEDs.

Y'all seem to have air conditioners, but have y'all figured out how to make reversible ones and use them for heating yet? It's a lot more efficient than heating-elements. Even better if you pull heat out of the ground for it rather than the air: it's more of a pain to set up, in my area we mostly don't bother digging the wells because we have a milder climate, but I hear it handles cold winters better.

I kind of mentioned already, but generally bigger pieces of equipment, with longer wires and more power going through them, are more vulnerable. It's the central transformers and high-voltage lines that blow, not things like individual household appliances. The ideal electricity is produced in small batches and travels small distances to its destination. Most households back home are pretty much independent, with grid connections being for backup and to contribute their excess power. That's...probably less feasible here, since y'all apparently like to live densely and a five-story building has relatively little rooftop to go around, but some is better than none.

And then there's stuff aimed at protecting the big grid, which we certainly aren't confident enough in to bet the continuation of modern civilisation on them given that there haven't been any more major flares since we put those measures in, but they're still very much worth having. Capacitors to block the extra current, telescopes and space probes trying to get advance warning so you can shut things down until it passes."

The alien Minaiyu's society has really weird priorities.

He's not an alien! He's an alter that we're proving isn't actually an alien so we can get this poor tired guy a diagnosis spreadsheet.

Given that that's our goal, what do we say now?

....ask him why the society has those weird priorities. There's sure to be lots of obvious incoherence in the ideological spiel backing the priorities of this strange fantasy society, and when Minaiyu gets agitated that you point out those inconsistencies -

- Xakda will also get agitated! I can't see either of them getting agitated anyway, but either way, I'm defusing a poor tired mild-mannered bomb here, not refuting the blasted Wizard Jaun. 

Well, okay, if you have to make him realize it himself - just go full-frontal attack mode on little technical details that he should know, given his subjective history, but almost certainly couldn't actually have researched in advance. 

Dude, that's not what you do when you're trying to talk around a delusive patient, that's what you do to test a claim for yourself.

Well if you yourself don't know why he's wrong -

PRIORS. And 'you don't make them trust you on priors'.

I'm no expert, but doesn't that necessarily mean you, the doctor, are supposed to have more than priors?

Yes! Most frequently, the more consists of a calm and confident disposition!

Tough skill today, Andor. Hurry up and find a different more.

He   ' finishes 'rereading' '   his typed sketch of Minaiyu's answer.

"- I frankly can't think of anything better, now, than testing your - Minaiyu's - technical knowledge, about things you ought to know about, and that it'd be hard for you to know about if you're only from here. It'll be messy, and easy for you to make plausible excuses, but if you make excuses for everything, you understand why that makes your case look bad. Are you game?"

<💭>Are you game. Top Twelve Questions To Ask An Exhausted, Almost-Certainly-Delusive-And-If-Not-Delusive-Then-Maliciously-Malingering Neuro Patient During An Increasingly Fraught Evaluation.</💭>

He can't quite stop himself from raising an eyebrow or two.

"...well," he says, "I can hardly turn that down."

a good grade in personhood absolutely is normal to want, and it had fucking better be possible to achieve

(He's mostly raising his eyebrows at the phrasing. The general idea is unsurprising: he figured it probably would come down to something along those lines, and of course Andor isn't going to want them to have a chance to go home and (for all he knows) research things first.)

He thinks for a few minutes.

He writes:

fair warning:

How reversible HVAC works = fairly common knowledge

LEDs also common

Physical backups of important info = strong norm

He saves his apologies for the end, now. Who knows how many he'd end up giving if he kept up with them.

He realizes the awkward fact of how it will be most efficient to do this.

What he returns with is, essentially, an assignment for Minaiyu to write down all he knows about how to scale solar power, make hand-powered washing machines efficient, and fragment power grids so as to protect against geomagnetic storm damage. Unknowingly echoing Xakda, he explains how nothing else would likely distinguish much between the Minaiyu with a truly coherent subjective history as an otherworlder, and the Minaiyu without. He'll obviously have to stay in Andor's office, but Andor has case analyses to do that he thinks will fairly distract his attention and minimize the sense of watchedness to bearable levels.

as if a fronting Minaiyu is ever not being watched okay, to be fair it does help to at least not have Andor staring at him

He's very nervous about the personhood certification exam, but a noticeable part of him is relieved that at least he gets to do it in writing. His speech is relatively clear and coherent, but speaking is inherently a much lossier method of conveying your thoughts than writing is, and that goes double for tired people and triple for tired-and-scared people. Possibly quadruple for people doing it in a language they didn't speak yesterday.

He writes. The modern electrical grid is too complex to be contained in any single mind, and especially not a non-specialist mind; furthermore, industrialised worlds--or, more likely, worlds in that narrow band between industrialisation and immortality--are rare. However, the crafters of technological-bootstrapping guides were aware that the reader might end up living in a fledgling electrified society one day (perhaps one that they'd played a vital role in building!), and that if they did, geomagnetic storms (and air pollution) would likely be among the very largest problems that society faced: he does know a bundle of tips to aid the aspiring decentralised-solar inventor. Some of the tips are known to Gahai already; some are not. Most obviously, the overview of household-batteries involves an unfamiliar battery chemistry.

Hand-crank washing machines are far simpler--indeed, simplicity is their main appeal--and he can provide enough information to pretty much fully reconstruct them.

As he gives the papers to Andor, half-buried within the anxiety is a little seed of something that...isn't yet pride, but has the potential to grow into it. If the people here really don't know some of this stuff, that means more than just proving he knows things that Xakda couldn't possibly have known: it means that, perhaps, together he and they can avert untold disaster.

I told you!

<💭>Um, no, actually, I know I've been at this research-verification thing for 40 minutes, and Xakda and Minaiyu are probably getting incredibly sick of the Epistemic Containment Cell, but something about this battery design is going to turn out to be impossible within the next 5, because this universe does not receive isekais. It's actually way likelier that this is an elaborate prank!</💭>

Fair enough. But in the remaining segment of the diagnostic spreadsheet that isn't taken up by 'prank'?

<💭> - could still be DID, he could just be a weird genius. </💭>

There are existing hand-crank washing machines pretty much like the ones Minaiyu has described.

There is no obvious reason that Andor can turn up why the batteries should not work, nor is there any evidence that they are an existing technology. The same goes for about 60% of Minaiyu's power-grid-geomagnetic-storm-risk-minimization tips.

He calls an old co-cultist, who has power-grid expertise that was self-developed, and thus is not anyone's trade secret. The co-cultist keeps begging Andor to stop giving away this info, because no matter how legitimately he thinks he got it, it's someone's insanely valuable trade secret and Andor will get sued.

<💭> He's probably right, but hnnnnng I have to know </💭>

He calls a second co-cultist, this one less personally well-known but with deeper expertise, and, by good fortune, a looser attitude toward propriety. This one says he knows of people working on a speculative version of one of Minaiyu's risk-minimization tips but not any of the rest. Andor has not explained where he thought the ideas came from, obviously, and Powergridguy is as confused and intrigued as you'd expect of someone looking at technical imports from another world.

(Powergridguy does not ask permission to use any ideas which he did not generate himself to increase his own clout or gold. Gaha'e attitudes toward propriety don't get that loose.)

Lacking any other obvious reliable routes for third opinions, he begs of Powergridguy the contact info of others whom he can call to cross-verify. Powergridguy happily obliges.

Those of the other people who answer Andor's call, are unanimous in confirming the foreignness of Minaiyu's apparently-foreign tips.

Seven and a half hours after Xakda's nominal shift-end (yes, kind of ridiculously late, they should really all be eating-and-then-sleeping soon, but if doing this right was going to take this long, very much best to bang it all out in one night) Andor hands over a final diagnostic sheet. It's kind of sloppy for a final sheet, he acknowledges, and Xakda/Minaiyu are free to pay him for the retrospective accuracy of either this one or the more put-together one from earlier (which he also hands over) but either way, he expects they'll want to actually plan their course of action based on the sloppy one, since Sloppy reflects huge updates to Andor's state of knowledge.

Old-put-together, at the highest given level of confidence (corresponding to the lowest level of granularity), has 45% of Andor's credence on 'usual-etiology DID', 15% on 'other, recent-acute-trauma-related', 5% on 'usual-etiology psychosis', and the rest on 'something else'.

Sloppy, at the highest level of confidence, has 60% of Andor's credence on 'prank', 10% on 'usual-etiology DID', 10% on 'other, recent-acute-trauma-related', and the rest on 'something else'.

Sloppy's lower levels of granularity, which break down each band further, give Andor's credence for 'isekai' - a sub-band of 'something else' - as 5%. He'd been about to write something lower, but then he'd realized he expected to end up looking dumber, on balance, if he'd written something lower than if he wrote '5%'. So he'd written '5%'.

He looks kind of amicably lost and apologetic about the whole affair. Also sleepy. He seems to expect the process to conclude promptly as they take the sheets, but politely awaits their feedback.

(He's teetering on the brink of utterly convinced, by now, that Minaiyu is exactly what he claims to be. But he is not saying that in front of Andor, because to Andor, that would peg Xakda as having self-diagnosis calibration ability no better than a dull child's, and it doesn't seem quite the time to write Minaiyu a note.)

Well.

On the one hand, Minaiyu is honestly offended that Andor thinks this is a deliberate lie. In some ways more offended than Andor thinking he was a dream-figment: being mistaken for an uppity persistent hallucination by a culture that apparently has entire conceptual frameworks for uppity persistent hallucinations was more disconcerting and terrifying than anything else, but being falsely accused of lying is a more familiar rage button.

also if the probability of the real answer is given at 5% and the probability of not being at longevity escape velocity is 10%, that does not say good things about their expected lifespan that is not actually how anything works, intellectually he knows that

On the other hand, Xakda knows that it's not a prank. And Andor's amicably-lost-and-apologetic vibes do a lot to defuse the insult of the spreadsheet taken in isolation. And it does not escape Minaiyu's notice that, in spite of what the-spreadsheet-taken-in-isolation would imply, Andor has now started addressing them in the plural.

He takes a couple of deep breaths and flexes their hands while he contemplates this, trying to calm down (or, well, at least calm down from the anger).

"...I take it I passed the test?"

"Oh, right - you would probably want to know about that.

Yeah, no one could - I called eight people and so far as anyone could tell, most of the things on your lists of power grid prophylactics and solar-power-scaling methods are previously-unconceived and not obviously-unviable."

He hands Minaiyu one of the lists he copied down, with the novel items marked.

Huh.

A little part of him wonders how Xakda could possibly even set up a prank like that, but most of him looks at the list and thinks, a bit numbly, that apparently this is what his new to-do list looks like.

He'll have to talk to Xakda tomorrow about how exactly they should go about getting this information to people capable of figuring out and filling in the rest of the details.

(for a moment, he is acutely aware that the clock is ticking, and nobody knows how much time remains)

"--thank you."

"The least I could do."

"Anything else you want to ask about, Minaiyu, before we go?" The adrenaline kept him going a long time, but now he's kinda flagging.

Minaiyu yawns, probably, or maybe Xakda yawns, or maybe the body yawns of its own accord.

"...are you fit to fly home after all this? Is there, like, a friend or a taxi or something that we could call?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm" - yawn - "fine."

He's ever flown a commute after two days of no sleep.

There's still Minaiyu to scare him. But Minaiyu scares him less than this morning, with respect to piloting. And barring Xakda quitting at Sain right now and trying to safety-check his piloting skills from the ground up, as it were, this is one of those cases where 'the best time to start practicing is in a year, after you've had a year of practice; the second best time to start practicing is today'.

"Highest power to you." Wave.

He hurriedly pays Andor the up-front deposit part of his commission. "Highest power!" He makes to head out.

Minaiyu is slightly dubious, but it's not like he actually has a good sense of how to judge whether someone is too tired to operate a motor vehicle: it's not something that comes up much back home. And Xakda is probably fewer kinds of tired than he is: he hasn't seen Xakda eat anything all day, he strongly doubts the hunger he's feeling right now is all false.

He leaves the front, feeling extremely glad that it turned out to be easy to do that. He really would not want to have to go through another flight at the front like that.

(Maybe someday soon they can go for a carplane ride in a passenger seat, and Minaiyu can look out the window in any direction he wants. That would be nice.)

<Okay. Just...I've been in too many crashes today, you know?>

Holy Deividdeh in spring, he hopes this flight is over with fast. 

"If it's . . . worth anything at all to you," he says, pushing his way out the hospital door to the cool night air of the city, now gridded with multicolored carplane beacons, "I've been complimented as unusually inclined to preserve myself. Spontaneously. Multiple times. By people who were not my parent."

<I'm glad to hear it.> He sounds sincere.

Well, that's good, he thinks, speedwalking.

. . . He really doesn't want to get Minaiyu's hopes up on the off chance this turn of events is destined for reversal, but probably his obligation to keep Minaiyu informed outweighs that concern anyway.

"I'm almost convinced you're real now. What you - actually from Rekka, possessed of a coherent, full history. Andor assigning 5% sage-scorned credence to you was not supposed to happen, he was supposed to have some explanation for how I was stupid for assigning any credence to you at all, and also, he doesn't have my internal experience that makes you seem like - just genuinely a three-dimensional person -" he fumbles for words. This line of reasoning was much clearer in his head.

Strictly speaking that is not the least insulting phrasing Xakda could have used, but Minaiyu knows full well that talking is hard. It's rarely a good idea to give a lot of weight to the exact words that came out of someone's mouth: the important thing with speech is the gist, and the gist of what Xakda said is very good indeed.

...oh no, now he's going to have to find words to say in response. It's not like Xakda can feel him smiling from here.

<Thank you. It's...it must be such a lot to take in, such an upheaval--like even more than the usual level of upheaval--when...when there isn't such a thing as "the usual level of upheaval" to you, when yesterday you lived in a world where this never happens, and there's no framework for how to deal with it.

I-- I hope we live a long and happy life together. That we build a world that will weather solar flares, and visit--what was it--Abzu, and make weird fusion cuisines, and speak to language enthusiasts in my mother tongue and have them answer back, and laugh at each other's jokes, and I don't even want to hope too hard that we can figure out how hayi work from here but who knows. I think things can-- it-- there's still a lot of things to sort out, and maybe there's still other big curveballs we haven't noticed yet, but-- I think things can be good, in the end.>

Oh, right, they were going to ask Andor about book recommendations to help with figuring out how hayi-less humans are different. Well, Andor was too tired to be piling that on top of him anyway. Minaiyu will bring it up the next time they're at Sain.

<💭>

He hopes we . . . together.

That's . . . not something you hear.

. . . People would call it, Idunno, "beyond presumptuous". "Ludicrously anti-Crusoe".

Like, sure, sometimes people have to work together in real time, but that's an unfortunate practicality to be engineered away in the limit. 

I'm going to see how I like it on Rekka. If I do, that's going to be one giant I-told-you-so from Xakda to everyone else.

</💭>

"Thank you. I hope - I hope we do all those things, too."

He doesn't say anything until he reaches the plane. 

"Is it alright if I play junkyard during the flight home? Oh, wait, you wouldn't have heard of junkyard. Music. Unless your translation - thingy -

- it's like - 'junkyard' is a frobnitz for music that's - lots of bright staccato high tones and empty space? I'm not really doing it justice."

<Won't know until I try, then. Let's find out.

And like, if it turns out I hate it, I can just not listen. It's-- I don't think I've really said, have I-- the subjective experience that I am having right now is of being in a little room, hearing you and talking to you through a headset and watching what's going on through a desktop monitor. I can take off the headset if I want, I can look away from the screen-- though in this case I'd definitely want to keep an eye on the screen, so that you can visually signal me if you want to say something.

But yeah, I absolutely want to try the otherworldly music.> There's a smile in his voice.

"That desktop setup actually sounds kind of nice. I don't know what compared to, though.

Alright . . . sounds like a plan."

He'll put the music on, navigate out of the parking garage, lift off.

(It doesn't sound like anything from Rekka. Or Earth. It sounds kind of like if you mixed the style and tone of this, with the melodic gravity of this, but there's more nuance, more depth, the music is exploring more dimensions of emotion and pattern, than anything Earthlings get up to.)

By the time the song is over, he's left the multicolored city lights far behind and is almost home. The lights are sparser out here, more modest, beckoning the adventurous with coy promises of solitude and mystery. The fields are mostly dead dark. And the moon's not up. Occasionally he glances upward, and then you can see the Milky Way as it really is - cloudy with stars.

It's terrible manners to ask what someone thinks of a song you've played them. If they want to say, they'll say. You have to leave them the option not to.

He - somehow feels like if he doesn't ask Minaiyu, Minaiyu will assume his opinion isn't welcome, or something. Or at least that it's not safe to assume it is welcome, even though they're - sort of doing co-cultisty things together, right, so they're basically co-cultists, and Xakda just played him a song and didn't ask him not to give his opinion on it. That . . . doesn't make Rekka sound like such a great place, but what does Xakda know - maybe they make a habit of asking each other everything all the time. Maybe it helps them 'coordinate'. Sages he loves that word, why did he only ever come across it in an esoteric economics newsletter

Anyway.

. . . Maybe Minaiyu's just terrified nigh-mute on account of having just suddenly been stripped of almost all his agency and much of the context of his accustomed context-dependent background knowledge.

That doesn't sound like such a fun state to endure in, either.

"What do you think?"

Minaiyu opens his mouth to tell Xakda about some of the other ways that setups for non-fronting people have been known to work, but now it is Music Time. He closes his mouth again: infodumping can wait. They have plenty of time.

(unless they don't but in that case they have bigger problems anyway)

He looks out over the alien world below and the alien sky above, and listens to the alien music, and grins.

("It is our greatest privilege," Randate of Toranis once said, during his seventh life, "to observe the multiverse in its full splendour."

Minaiyu would not have chosen to be cut off from everything and everyone he'd ever known. It's not that it's worth it. He does miss Rekka desperately.

But...it would also have been a shame, to never experience this.)

<I'm not sure yet. Like, it's definitely not repulsive, I'm interested in exploring further, but like, I think I would need to listen to it a few more times to figure out whether I actually liked it or not. Especially the bits where we were climbing altitude: there was kind of a lot of background noise if you didn't already know how the song went.>

He laughs a little. <I can see why you put this on trying to stay alert: it's got a lot of energy to it.

And the bit where it was, like, purple-grey and white and cloudy, and then you looked up at the...galaxy? --it was neat how that matched up. I don't know if you can see that. I guess even if you can see something, you might not have the same colours.>

"Energy? This? Compared to some other kind of music? What kind of music is more sedate than this?" Pause. "Uh, not trying to sound critical, just, kind of, going 'huh??' Also 'huh??', does everyone where you're from have music synesthesia that similar? There's overlap here, but not - replication."

That makes sense about the propeller noise. He almost wishes he'd had the music higher during those parts, but probably better to err on the side of underwhelming.

<Lots of kinds? I don't know how well I can convey it to you, I don't play any instruments, but...hmm...>

He hums the opening bars and sings the first verse of a solemn song about the dissolution of a household.

<Oh, lightheartedly ""arguing"" about the colour of a song is certainly not an unpopular conversational topic. Although people mostly, broadly tend to agree that higher pitches are lighter colours, and...like, I was in an ""argument"" once, and it turned out we were thinking of different arrangements of the piece, and when I played him the specific recording I was thinking of he was like "oh huh, you're right, that is blue".

And it's not everyone: I think I've heard on occasion that music-colour is the single most common convergence, but-- no, wait, hang on, that's not how...>

He rummages around in the vocabulary.

<..."wire-crossing"? Is that how you say it in this language?

Uh, anyway, even with music-colour it's better than even odds that a randomly selected person won't have it. There are so many other things you can be.

But like, Tayira and Maida formed in the same brain and I know they have the same colours, so I figured probably it helps with brain compatibility later on.>

. . . He probably shouldn't let their apparent propensity for torturing themselves through music kill his aspirations to visit Rekka.

". . . Huh. I don't have a reserved concept handle for when brain wires get crossed, but that's the common visual metaphor. 

. . . Why would people listen to music that's like that, with any frequency? Don't they want to - be having feelings that speed their way, rather than hinder - wait, you said formed in the same brain, not uterus. . . . DID, or something to do with hayi?"

He begins the descent.

<Well, okay, maybe that particular song is a bad example, that one's sad and lots of people do hate listening to sad music, but sometimes slow songs are about, like, cuddling or something.

Yeah, occasionally a brain forms two hayi, kind of like how occasionally an egg forms two bodies. It's about as common as separate-bodied twins. We figure from the statistics that probably the vast majority of twin-souled are natural, though we'd guess that some of them are infant walk-ins. It's hard to be sure which is which.

I don't actually have a very clear sense of what DID means: I think it involves concepts I don't have. I'm getting something about...splitting a person into pieces? And dissociation? And...I didn't get a great look at the stuff on Andor's desk and it did not seem like the time to ask, but it was saying something about trauma? I don't think it's a thing that we do.>

"Oh, right! I was gonna ask Andor for soul psychology reading recs! Well, I can totally do that in the morning.

DID is - I don't understand it as well as I do schizophrenia, and both are rarer than, like, being an 'agility-savant', which is super rare - but there's a decent body of literature on DID anyway because a few early psychologists learned important things from it. Apparently something can go wrong in the process of soul formation - physical-soul formation, I guess - such that people end up with multiple personalities. They're usually more like conjoined twins than separate-bodied, sharing wildly varying levels of brain-substrate, and usually not very happy or functional cohabitants - not that people on this planet are ever very happy to cohabitate with each other" maybe he shouldn't have said that, "anyway, mostly as far as people can tell it always starts in childhood. Hence Andor's bafflement.

. . . When you say 'infant' walk-ins, that's after two years old or so, when they become ensouled? Which is identical with becoming conscious? How can people not tell which is which, wouldn't you remember a walk-in? My memories of being three are spotty, but I think my brain saved all the really shocking or subjectively intense stuff."

Xakda's little plot of land floats up to meet them as he slowly lets off lift. 

Sinber's three-year-old is in the yard, close to the house, staring up at them. Xakda doesn't seem concerned about this. Maybe because of the electric blue reflective tether attaching the kid's wrist to the house.

<Yeah, I remembered while we were going back to the garage, but I didn't bother saying anything at that point. Probably for the best not to pile that onto him at the end of a long day, anyway.

Ensoulment happens about four months into gestation, and...as far as we know death still basically works the same for a hayi that's not a conscious person?>

That cohabitation bit...is definitely a concerning thing for Xakda to have said. Xakda hasn't seemed super bothered by that aspect so far...but on the other hand, he spent much of the day not thinking of Minaiyu as permanent. Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet.

He's glad Xakda doesn't know what facial expressions he's making right now.

Well. There's an obvious way to gently(?) probe into the matter.

<Is that why you only have one coparent? Or are there others that just happened to be away?>

"- I have two other previous-coparents [one word] but they don't live here? If that's what you mean. It's pretty unheard-of that even Sinber and me would live in one house. Do - Rekkans? - sorry, wish I had your language thing - usually live with a bunch of previous-coparents at once?" It's intriguing.

He snorts. <Sure, we can go for localised grammar.

I admit I was using "coparent" there in, like, a pretty broad sense, broader than I normally would although there's dialects where that use is standard. I'm not sure precisely where the boundaries are for your word.

But anyway...it's pretty rare for a household with kids to have fewer than three adults? That usually only happens if you're desperate, or on the other end of things if you're living off investments or something else passive like that and can afford to both be home doing domestic stuff throughout the day. Maintaining a household is a lot of work, and raising a kid is a lot of work, and so it's important to spread that out among plenty of people?

In my household when I was growing up there were nine people in total: five adults, four kids. My parents--in the narrow sense, the people whose gametes made me--my aunt and uncle, my...you don't seem to have a word for this, but I guess "adoptive uncle" isn't far off? He wasn't related to anyone else in the household, he didn't grow up alongside them, but he was a close friend and he lived there and pitched in...and then for the kids there was me and my older brother and my two younger cousins.>

His voice gets quieter.

<...yesterday there were seven of us left: my brother had moved out, and my uncle had died. I...I guess probably he might well have landed somewhere by now, if I have. I hope he's doing well.>

He shakes himself. Now is not the time.

<Anyway, uh...there's a lot of variation in the details, but that was basically a pretty normal household setup? Is it...normal here, to raise a kid all by yourself? That-- uh, no offence, but that sounds very overwhelming and also lonely.>

He managed to keep paying attention through the landing. He waves at the kid, who is doing his best to gather intel on the sir who has a full view of him without looking like a snoop.

Through garage door.

". . . No, kids have two parents! The kid gets shared equally between them. And usually passed around some to other people in the parents' moirail network, if they want recreational-child-timeshares [one word] of him. Adults just - don't live together?"

Garage door, shut.

"You said - there were seven of you left - that didn't include you, did it?"

He frantically tries to remember if Minaiyu ever actually said how old he was. He - thinks he'd just been assuming Minaiyu was his age - !

He pokes at "moirail". There's something here about a close platonic(?) bond, but it's complicated and he thinks a lot of it is flying over his head. Given the context in which it came up, he is putting it on the pile of lower-priority questions.

<Huh. I guess that's something? Still kind of sounds like a lot to juggle to me, and...don't get me wrong, clearly it works for y'all, but I'd have expected it to be very unpleasant for the child not to have a consistent home.

Seven including me. I certainly could move out, but I like it here...uh, liked it there...and there weren't any places I wanted to move to or people I wanted to move in with. And I didn't want to live alone either, which some people do but it's definitely not the norm.

...if-you-want-to-say, why do you and Sinber live together?>

He very much hopes Xakda wants to say--it seems likely to be important--but it also seems like it might be a sensitive topic.

"- We both used to live in Kal Seio, where he works, and then the apartment building we were living in closed, and because they're both in weird rebuilding phases, neither Kal Seio nor Pyeth actually had anyone who was renting anything that would be good for kids right that second, and we both already had kids, and we each separately found this one former-farmhouse gimmicky type place that would be perfect but there was no second one, so I was like, 'hey, it's actually big enough for two adults'. That was a year ago. It's gone better than he expected, I think!

Neither of us intend on staying here for longer than a few years, though. 

Sometimes you say things like that living alone isn't the norm, and it's like. Huh, yeah, that really is something I didn't realize was contingent about our society.

Wouldn't a consistent home be more - boring, for the child? Single parents, as far as anyone can tell, raise slightly duller children, because of the more fixed development environment. Like a captive animal raised in an unchanging cage - they get less stimulation and don't have to learn as many generalizable strategies. I have some ideas for trying to offset that effect, but Sinber wants to move out before the oncoming kid is one and I can't really argue.

Also, uhhhh, sorry I've left this til now, how old are you? I'm twenty-five."

He's still sitting in the cab, in the garage, seeming to have forgotten himself.

He starts with the easy response.

<I'm twenty-three. Although, hmm, maybe...> he prods at the vocabulary <...it's hard to do comparative timekeeping with any precision on semantic-bleedover† alone, but I think maybe your years are slightly shorter than ours? It might be twenty-four of your years.>

Well, the relatively easy response.

In Tashayan, "apartment building" has connotations of...desperation. It's where you live when you've just fled an abusive household, or you're very poor and living on government housing programs, or you're terminally incapable of ever trusting anyone enough to share a home with them--sure, it's a big decision, it's normal to take years of proving yourselves to each other before y'all make the leap, but eventually--but you haven't (yet) moved to some little remote cabin or something (and yeah, no, things are not going to go well for you in the next life, are they? or for that matter in this life, with so many fewer safety nets than usual), or at best you've just moved out because there was some other place you really wanted to be and you don't yet know who you're going to live with.

It's clear that it doesn't have those connotations here. It's still disorienting, though.

(The apartment building closed? Someone else decided to kick all of them out of their homes?? And yet living in a setup that fucking fragile is unremarkable???)

<...I wonder if the consistent-home thing is part of, like, the same package that makes y'all want to live in cities and never write songs about cuddling? It's...good to visit places outside the home, sure, as long as you don't spring it on the kid at the last minute, but it's also very important to-- to have a sanctuary, a place that's familiar and yours, and where you can lay your head down on the same bed each night. And it's important, especially for kids but also for adults, to have some days where you don't go anywhere.

I could...maybe see an arrangement where you rotate between a fixed set of dwellings at fixed times working okay? But because it would still be consistent in its own way, on sort of a meta level.

Yeah, it-- it's so weird to me that adults don't live together here. It-- teamwork's important? It's...good to share the workload of domestic chores, and be able to partially specialise so that each person is disproportionately doing the chores that they personally find easy or pleasant, and also it's good to...to surround yourself with people you trust, people where y'all can rely on each other for help when something goes wrong, people you can casually talk to or hug as you're going about your day, people who...are part of your sanctuary, and you of theirs.>

People that he will never talk to or hug again, a bed on which he will never again lay down the head he doesn't have anymore, and Xakda will never let him build sanctuary anew, will he--

He's trying very hard not to cry.

<I-- it-- it's not that-- we-->

His voice is audibly strained.

<--we do want to be alone sometimes, it's not like I'm-- a hive creature or something, even if the circumstances of when to do that or not are weird-- but even-- that's not-- the important thing--

I-- I-- I promise I will look away, when you need me to.>

Was now the right time to say that? Who knows! He kind of feels like it was simultaneously absolutely critical that he say that right now and absolutely critical that he not say that right now. But now is apparently when it is getting said, so all he can really do at this point is hope it doesn't blow up in his face.

---

†he calques this

"Thank you, for -

- obviously we need to work out some setup of being able to give each other privacy, I don't intend on you not being able to have at least as much of a career as I do - and -

- and having switching houses be predictable to the kids is important - and -

- yes, I wholeheartedly agree, it seems important to figure out is there some kind of unified logical reason that a society that recognizes that collaboration is important - something no one here seems to get, if you didn't get that already - ends up with people still living in the same house as their parents at twenty-three, because what."

He doesn't even know where to start with why that idea is outlandish. (To Xakda's tiny, parochial mind!)

"How did you - if you never moved out, how awkward must it have been when you were saving up to pay back your child-debt [n. the cost of raising you, which you obviously work like mad to pay back to your parents in your tweens and teens or how would you ever get on with your life, emotionally]? Or - that's probably my cultural-myopia talking, it probably doesn't even register as weird to y'all."

Xakda...wholeheartedly agrees...and the way he framed that, "recognizes" that collaboration is important...and he's offering to give Minaiyu large swaths of-- his time, his life, without even being asked...

...oh fuck, apparently Minaiyu is crying now.

And, of course, he can't talk while he's crying, and normally if you really must talk to someone while you're crying you sign to them but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that from in here and if he fronts presumably Xakda will cry and he doesn't want to do that to Xakda. Bad enough that he's doing it to himself, and bad enough that Xakda can sort of observe: you shouldn't cry in front of other people, it hurts them, you're striking them in the affective empathy as surely as if you had slapped them across the face...

<--thanks,> he manages to choke out. <talk-- later-->

He turns the microphone out of the way after that, but it was pretty clear from the sounds up to that point what was happening.

<💭>Obviously I don't actually have enough cognitive bandwidth to exchange information without unpredictably-to-me triggering the poor guy, but this still reflects poorly on me.</💭>

He exits the garage.

"Surprisingly, one of the senior neuro diagnosticians at my job thought there was a slight chance the alien spirit who appeared in my brain speaking its dialect this morning is real, after trying to figure it out for seven hours. So now I still think he's real! He's really nice."

"I'll be the judge of that, sir."

"He's - busy right now. He said he - had a virtual desk environment, in my head. But I don't know of any reason he particularly wouldn't want to talk to you, when he's not busy."

"That's not real," he says, simmering. "Sir." It would be easier to sir Xakda if he didn't all of a sudden act like one of the kid's less smart peers. What's he playing at???

He shrugs, opens his hands, knits his eyebrows.

"Anyway, you have to come inside now, sorry."

"I knew that, sir. And I wanted to come inside."

He undoes a lock on the kid's tether, waits for the kid to gather his backpack and notebooks, and opens the door. The kid runs in first and Xakda follows, locking the door behind him.

He looks up from the desk where he'd been taking notes on a video of a five-year-old giving a presentation and appraises Xakda's apparent aliveness. Raises his eyebrows.

He gives almost the same explanation he gave the kid - a little more detail.

"Highest power to you, then!" It's a foregone conclusion that he's curious, so Xakda would have been less terse if he'd had the spoons and mood for giving explanations right now.

But flaming holy texts, what???????

"Oh, and on break I ordered cabinets! They come lockable."

"- thanks!"

His familiar irritation at being unsure what in human culture the conversational protocol is for handoffs in these shared projects is of course drowned out by the renewed sense he's had all day, that he must be dreaming, or something. Xakda is weird but - in a specially, lovably straight-laced kind of way. This - "Minaiyu" - would simply never happen.

". . . sorry, but, ETA on when I'll be able to - talk to - Minaiyu?"

"Um, Minaiyu, sorry, is right now a good time yet?"

<I think I can manage,> he says, a bit hoarsely.

He goes through the door. It's an extremely weird feeling to suddenly not have the physical aftereffects of crying anymore. It...kind of helps, not to be dealing with that.

"Yeah, um, hi. You...might want to start by looking at this," he says to Sinber, "so you know where things stand right now." He pulls the list of electrical-grid improvements out of their backpack and shows Sinber that sample of things Minaiyu knew and Xakda didn't, with the marks of which ones were verifiably true and which ones were not previously known to Gahai but were plausibly true.

He'd believed Xakda when Xakda'd said that Andor'd said there was a legit chance, but - this makes it realer. He reads the list. He actually knows enough about power grid design to pick up on the foreignness and ingenuity of one of the items.

<💭>Holy fucking shit.</💭>

"Hi! I'm Sinber, I kidshape." He mentally turns over the sentence fragments his half-asleep brain overheard 'Xakda' say to 'himself'.

"I gather from what I overheard this morning that you're here because of some - life circumstance that's normal to people wherever you're from, but not considered - a happy surprise - ?"

<💭>Whoops, I entirely left that part out, didn't I.</💭>

He nods, wincing a little.

"This is what happens to us when we die. I was cycling back into town and a truck hit me: it was all very sudden."

A bit of wry laughter. "Would you be happy to roll the dice on a one-way trip into the multiverse? We knew even less than we thought we did about what I might find out here, but even the stuff we did know..." He shakes their head. "Things can get pretty bad.

And even if you get lucky and they're not bad in themselves, it's...I don't know, maybe you wouldn't understand. I get the impression that people here don't tend to get attached to places and people much? Maybe you'd handle being torn away from your homeworld better."

instead Sinber is going to cease to exist oh he is very much shying away from that looming mass of horror right now, and anyway maybe these guys are right that they can stop it

"- You know anything about the whole multiverse? How? What is it like, what are we like? If-you-want-to-say.

And if-you-want-to-say, do you expect not to be able to get back?"

He intervenes briefly - "- they don't know directly, only from isekais into their world, none of which have been like ours in that they and all their isekais have story-logic souls - also the continents on Rekka aren't our continents!" then recedes.

"What.

Sorry you -

- died -

- out of where you lived - that shouldn't have happened to you, a fucking truck, Sage Carlai's will, that - sucks -

- sorry I'm being - overeager - please feel free to just dip if this is more annoying than it's worth -

I think if I isekaid to a world like that - for example - I'd -

- well I'd obviously try and take whatever soul-protecting thing they had there, back here, just like if I was in a story isekai, I guess, but I don't know how well I'd do - what do you mean we don't seem as attached, if-you-want-to-say?"

He's opened a text editor. His head is spinning. None of this is real. He's dreaming. Xakda's insane.

He hopes he remembers any of this when it's time to give interviews to important bloggers. He won't be one of those next-to-useless, dull-witted witnesses who can't . . . He'll take good notes.

He looks at the digital notepad. A couple of memories flicker through his mind: re-listening to museum tours he'd gone on; a clip, now existing in this world, of an alien song.

"So-- it's not that I don't want to say: I would love to share stuff with you, to preserve as much as I can of the information that this world can only get through me. And I don't think you're over-eager: I can hardly even imagine what it must be like for you, to encounter the first otherworlder your world has ever seen...

...but also, uh, right now it has been an extremely long day, and I don't know what kind of, uh, 'story-logic' you're expecting but I'm expecting to be here for the rest of Xakda's life--barring brain damage, anyway†--it's not like I'll have vanished come morning unless something really terrible happens to Xakda in his sleep.

Maybe we could split the difference and talk about this over food? Or, hmm, the background noise of that might interfere with--

--I'm saying this in the wrong order, aren't I, um...I suggest, uh-- whenever we do talk about this I suggest an audio recorder."

---

†He quietly doesn't mention his suspicions regarding differential poisoning responses: it's not that he expects Sinber to poison him, but "expecting someone not to poison you" and "telling [someone who probably has a lot of excellent opportunities to slip stuff into your food (and whose first reaction upon meeting you was to view you as (1) not a real person and also (2) a possible threat to their ~spouse)] how to poison you and get away with it" are different levels of trust, and that latter one rather has to be earned  ↩

"All entirely valid! You're not, like, obligated to divulge anything at all, to me, I just thought - I was just pattern-matching for what'd happen next, if anything were to." He shifts as much of his eagerness as he thinks he can plausibly get away with into an embarrassed/earnest, was-tired-the-whole-time poker face. "Good night."

He nods. "Good night!"

He heads off to where he earlier saw the kitchen sink to wash their hands, since they haven't done a home-entering purification yet.

It occurs to him, belatedly, that these are the first steps he has ever taken with these legs of his own volition. Maybe that should feel more momentous than it does. Maybe it shouldn't: there are a lot of firsts like that, coming up.

"So," he says, hand-drying, "from what I've seen we haven't eaten anything the whole day. Even if there was something right after the parking garage in the morning while I was...distracted, that was a long time ago. And going to bed without food is a terrible idea: leads to a vicious cycle where you subconsciously try to sleep off the hunger, which just means it's been even longer since you ate, until eventually you have to forcibly drag yourself out of bed like ten hours later. Or at least that's what happens to me; I don't know how you being there affects things, but I don't feel like now is a good time to find out.

Also I am kind of curious to try the alien food. --also kind of nervous, but it's like with the music, I can bail if I need to."

He's so incredibly bewildered and abashed at the handwashing thing - did he touch something gross??? - and also guilty - Minaiyu hasn't gotten the chance to so much as walk around yet -

- that he does not verbally rail against the simulation masters, for dropping another mystery divergence-between-their-two-worlds, now, in the form of 'how eating works.' He just rolls with the punch as best he can.

"So, around here - Gahai, I guess, that's what we call this society - I don't think I ever said - 

- almost everyone eats right before they sleep because it's hard to keep yourself on a regular sleep schedule otherwise? And I'm one of the people who just eats all my calories for the day right before sleeping, so as not to ever have to eat away from home and also not to ever have to be doing stuff and also doing the most annoying parts of digesting food at the same time. So yeah, now is when I eat."

He starts grabbing dishes and food out of the cabinets - plate, bowl, oatmeal packets, jerky of some kind - and the freezer - frozen peas - and fridge . . . 

"How does it work on Rekka?" <💭>It's comparable to music somehow? Figures, that's about the signature Rekkan ?horrible?/?delightful? vibe.</💭>

Now that he's thought about recording anthropology interviews he feels an impulse to switch a recorder on before answering, but at his current (fairly low) level of knowledge of how local computer interfaces work, figuring out how to go about that would add too much friction to what is already a bedtime routine. He'll explain it again to a recorder later.

"...huh. I mean, sometimes people with weird work schedules train their bodies into packing all their eating into one or two occasions a day, and probably there are some bodies that just come that way, but most people spread it out into around half a dozen. I guess me having my food and sleep wires crossed won't really come up much, then, if they're already bound together temporally.

Usually there is one meal, one thing that's more complicated than just eating a handful of nuts or a can of peaches or something and that's usually served hot. It varies between households what time of day: in mine we traditionally did it mid-evening. You generally try to time it so that as many household members as possible are available as often as possible, so you can all gather around the dining table and do social bonding and also so you can share the effort of meal preparation. Usually we served one to three meal options--depending on how widely liked those options were, how effortful they were to make, how many stove elements they took up, stuff like that--and if that set didn't give full coverage--because, like, good luck trying to come up with something that seven different people will eat, let alone nine--anyone who was left out would eat something else instead.

With the smaller eating occasions people mostly find a routine they like and stick to it, with minor variations like eating some apple chips instead of a peach can and occasional tweaks when you find a routine you like better. Hence my nervousness at being faced with a different set of things someone might like to eat. Although I do like peas and most kinds of oatmeal, so things are looking hopeful so far.

...is digestion particularly annoying?"

He's frozen with his arm raised in midair, fridge open.

". . . Yes, having eaten in the last, I don't know, four to twelve hours or so, depending on the person, makes it aversive to . . . do basically any activity. For us."

Where does he even start.

Why so much time per day on food preparation? Their tech level is high enough that they should have cheap rice cakes!

What kind of person doesn't need to tailor their eating schedule to their work schedule?

But no, the priority is -

"You - you eat with your family?"

He thinks he's managed to not sound horrified! Maybe!

A few notes of Xakda's horror at the idea of eating with one's family did slip through, especially when combined with the way he froze up.

...it's by no means an unprecedented thing to be horrified by.

Experimentally, Minaiyu prods at the vocabulary.

There is really remarkably little in the way of convergence-related terminology. But Xakda does have a word for "food-convergent pornography". Not any other kinds of convergent pornography. Just that one.

Ah.

And...they don't have much in the way of terminology, they don't talk about it much, possibly Xakda has spent his whole life assuming that the way he feels about this is just How Things Are...

Lords and Ladies, it is way too fucking late at night for a conversation as awkward as what this one is shaping up to be.

Maybe he should just go to bed now. There's a cot in the observation room. He could leave Xakda to it. Give him some privacy. Figure out later whether Minaiyu even can try the alien food, what with Xakda being right there.

(was Xakda not going to warn him, when they were about to eat together, would have been tasting it alongside him...)

...he's already in too deep on this conversation to just cut it off for the night, isn't he.

Fuck.

(From Xakda's perspective, Minaiyu is making a series of discomforted facial expressions. Partway through, Minaiyu notices that the fridge door is still open and closes it.)

Eventually he has little choice but to forge ahead. He has a feeling it will take rather less than four years to figure out how he could have phrased this better, but on the other hand he has substantially more of Xakda's goodwill now than he did when he was first introducing himself.

"We...didn't have anyone in our household for whom that would be incestuous. If that's what you're thinking of."

" . . . Like there's no one you're related to by blood, or - some other thing - and even if there wasn't, it's - wouldn't it still suck about the same amount?

I'm missing something big here, I think, but I've got no idea what it is, sorry. If it's not important we can talk about it in the morning."

Xakda is missing something big and Minaiyu has a pretty good idea what it is. But Xakda has, thankfully, expressed a willingness to wait.

"...okay, look, uh, tell you what...in the, uh, 'virtual desk environment' there's a cot. How about I go to bed now, and you deal with the eating, and in the morning once we've gotten some rest we can talk about, among other things, whether we're family."

not that them not being family would be enough to make it okay, there is a reason you don't serve food at office parties and it is not just because people would have to take their masks off

"Super valid! I hope the cot is nice!"

That implies that Minaiyu still has to sleep even in the virtual environment, which logically should (?) imply he still has to eat too, but Minaiyu seems to not be in the mood to talk about that and Xakda is a horrible person and it would just be too awkward to press Minaiyu right now, okay.

He nods, giving a weak smile.

"Good night."

And then Xakda is alone.

(He takes off his headset and glasses, sets them on the floor next to the head of the cot, and lies down. The cot is surprisingly comfortable for how it looks; on the other hand, maybe the pseudo-physical manifestation of the abstract concept of Bed should be comfortable.

He'd been wondering, on and off, whether all of the emotional rollercoasters today would make it hard to get to sleep tonight. But exhaustion wins out.)

He eats and goes to sleep in an uneventful, anxious, exhausted daze.

When his alarm (quiet enough not to wake anyone else up through the soundproofing) goes off, he -

- remembers -

"Minaiyu?" Something was up last night, and he wants to ask about it before explaining about meeting his former-coparent Fairgame to acquire their son, a thing he does on this day of their least common workcycle.

Minaiyu wakes from a nightmare about harvesting potatoes by the light of an aurora, and for a disoriented moment he thinks Xakda has come to give him the bad news.

Then he hears the comforting hum of the central air conditioner, and his awareness flows back in. It's okay. They still have time. May or may not be enough time--could be hours, could be decades, who knows--but time, and he may yet get to keep an industrialised way of life.

...also apparently he's fronting again, when did that happen. He guesses he must have metaphorically rolled over in his sleep.

"Good morning," he says, matching Xakda's volume.

"I - got the sense, last night, just before you - signed off - that something I said bothered you - you said -" now he remembers - "that in the morning we could talk about - whether we're family?" <💭>???</💭>

He winces, then looks thoughtful for a few moments.

(...oh, of course. Minaiyu had expressed an endorsed desire to eat together, and Xakda, whose society had abandoned him to ignorance, who had lacked any substantial evidence to the contrary, had assumed that that constituted informed consent.

He finds he's not angry at Xakda at all, anymore. He's just sad at what was done to Xakda, or really what wasn't done.)

"...yeah, I guess I phrased that badly, huh. It seemed like the most succinct way of expressing in a way that would be intuitively clear to you why there was a problem, but that's not actually the crux and...I guess it must have actually been very confusing to you, given that a minute prior I'd been talking about eating with family like it was no big deal?

...Xakda, I get the impression no one told you...most people don't have their food and sex wires crossed. It's..." he shrugs "...I don't know, like one percent maybe? Two? Like, it's not rare, but it's not the default. I'm not like that, nobody in my family is.

So when we were making food plans, I assumed you also weren't like that, and that you would warn me--or at minimum find some excuse to bow out--if you were. And then I saw some of how revolted you were by the idea of eating with family, and when I thought to look for it the fact that you had a word for food-ero but not any other kinds of wire-crossed porn was pretty conspicuous, and I kind of had the rug pulled out from under me on what it was we were doing.

I-- I don't blame you, for not warning me. You were doing the best you could with the information you had. It-- it sucks that from the sound of it you were given sex education that wasn't up to the task of actually sex-educating you, and probably it wasn't their fault either because they were given shitty sex education too, up the line. It's...from what I've heard it's a pretty common failure mode for cultures to fall into, for them to be so secretive about sex that they end up collectively overlooking a lot of important information."

"I - let me make this clear, I wasn't trying to engage in a sexual act with you. By your culture's lights it might be true that I made a mistake by not informing you that it'd be slightly weird on a sexual level, like seeing me naked only less extreme, but you'd already seen me naked, just out of, like, necessary circumstance . . . and I assumed that you, like me if I was in your situation, were expecting to have to do lots of stuff on around that level of weirdness, just on account of sharing a body with me, and just wanted to get the process of adjusting over with instead of delaying it and painfully dragging it out, or deciding to diminish your time spent experiencing reality forever."

He finds himself not all that mortified, actually, just scatteredly, ?unendorsedly? incensed, because - there wasn't really an easy-to-jump-to perspective from which he'd done anything wrong. Maybe that's because -

"I think - I don't actually know, for sure sure, but I think most people around here wouldn't eat in front of their family more than, like, twice or three times as readily as they'd be naked in front of their family. It's just not something you do in front of people, and I - my brain is still having trouble reconciling the idea of a society that doesn't do it that way. Maybe from Rekka's perspective, what that is is Gaha'eka having our 'food and sex wires crossed', but - I don't think 'we' think of it like that. If that makes sense.

Also, uh, what's 'sex education'? Your kidshaper when you're 7 isn't usually talking to you about sex, around here."

He cringes back.

"...okay. It-- you make a good point about the nakedness, although also I did look away when you were using the toilet yesterday even if it was kind of too late by then. I-- it-- I still have a lot to learn about local social mores."

(And the way Xakda describes it does kind of sound like a local-social-more. Which does not explain why he has a word for "food-convergent pornography" in particular, but...maybe it's learned? There's some wiggle room for nurture even for something as thoroughly integrated into a soul as a sexuality, and also...well, define "soul".)

"I...I think...even if I'd known I maybe still wouldn't have wanted to do it last night? There...can be value in not dragging stuff out, but...there's more adjusting to do than I could possibly fit into one day, and it-- it's just too much to face when I was already overwhelmed."

Also you were talking about finding a way to give *each other* privacy, maybe we could take *turns* not experiencing reality, he does not quite dare to say. Honestly he maybe doesn't even dare to call Xakda's attention to Minaiyu's overwhelmédness at a time like this (it sounds uncomfortably like digging a hole deeper, like making excuses for himself, like lashing out), but it's too late, he already said it.

"...maybe tonight. I'll think about it."

He's grateful for the change of subject. He thinks. He's not really sure what his emotions are doing right now, except that he wants them to stop doing it.

"Um...'sex education' is an umbrella term for textbooks that...talk about different ways sexuality can be, or how reproductive anatomy works, or what to expect from puberty. Giving kids the information they need to understand what's going on in their minds and what will be going on in their bodies. It's normally very text-based, in order to, kind of...let kids approach it on their own terms. I guess that privacy is what separates it from, like, regular psychology and biology textbooks.

I think maybe your education methods are pretty different in general, though. We don't really do...'schools'. It seems like it would...oh this is part of the whole city hyperstimulation thing again, isn't it. If the kidshaper and the students can handle teaching all of the students together at the same time, then it's just efficient. I guess maybe it's kind of like a museum tour, but all the time for everything?"

"- I didn't actually say, did I, if you don't want to ever be here while this thing eats, that sounds great to me. I was only not suggesting that you leave because I - was afraid you wanted to be there.

Or - if you don't want to ever both be here for eating, if you want to switch off."

He painfully refrains from thanking Minaiyu for taking off while he used the toilet, because it's not yet clear whether establishing that he has a strong preference in that direction advantages or disadvantages them both in the long run.

He's still in shorts and T-shirt, unsure whether to change.

"Honestly I think I started shying away from suggesting switch-offs yesterday because I acquired this impression that you either really really didn't want to ever front, or really really wanted to be sure you weren't disturbing me, and I didn't want to - unsettle that.

. . . To be blunt, I want to get used to something more like 50/50 as fast as possible."

Yay, comfier topic!

". . . Huh, we don't have 'textbooks' that I know of. But yeah, schools are for efficiency. Very rich people just hire private kidshapers to work with their kids a couple hours a day, and less expensive wardens to make sure they don't shoot themselves for the rest of it. That's the ideal, but it's, well, pricey. Sinber is working obsessively [unambiguous compliment] around his constraints.

- Er, those constraints don't include doing all the kid-warden-ing himself, though, his apprentices do that.

. . . Do y'all do everything out of books?"

The task of changing clothes is hanging over him like an axe-blade, but it can wait for five minutes, and maybe Minaiyu will notice and propose his own solution in that time.

He's still having some lingering anxiety-and/or-something, but it...helps, kind of a lot, to know Xakda is already thinking what Minaiyu didn't dare bring up and is favourable towards it.

"Like I-- said last night, I'll look away when you need me to. But...I won't always know when you need me to. I...still don't really feel like I have a good sense of where the bounds of propriety are on the eating thing" was Xakda lying when he said that he, too, hoped they made weird fusion cuisines together, is that okay as long as they take turns trying the end products "and it's too soon to say what other bits of cultural quicksand are out there.

...learning to switch would be useful for lots of stuff, I think. When you have time I can talk you through some exercises; it often takes a while for hosts to get the hang of it, maybe don't expect anything big the first day, but generally they can in the end-- although I don't know how it's different without a hayi...it'd have to still be possible, though, right, otherwise Andor would've been surprised that I could. Maybe some of the stuff about conjoined twins will have relevant tips.

Education's...

...oh, if we're going to be doing the comparative-anthropology thing we should maybe put a recorder on? Y'all are definitely going to want records, and if any other, uh, personal topics come up during the conversation, we can clip those bits out before we let anyone else listen to it. I'm going to have to learn more about how to operate local computers..."

They absent-mindedly scratch a passing itch on their lower leg, which draws Minaiyu's attention to the fact that these are not the same clothes they were in yesterday. Xakda must have changed into lounging clothes after Minaiyu went to bed.

"...oh, uh--"

<--probably I should let you get your leaving-the-house clothes on first. At least, I think you were planning to leave the house today?>

He bites back the urge to protest that modesty norms when it comes to eating, as with nudity, have lenient exceptions for adults experiencing reasonably extenuating circumstances. There are more pressing things.

"Aaaargh I seriously wish we had time for recorder stuff but - yeah, I'm picking up Prodigy this morning and then - work -" as he did a dozen times yesterday, he considers and then quashes the thought of just quitting and living on savings, somehow, until they have this figured out, it'd embarrass him in front of Sinber "- Prodigy is my six-year-old, he has exactly the personality you'd imagine - or someone from here would imagine - of someone who'd name themselves that. He works, stocks shelves, but isn't completely self-transporting yet."

"Thanks, I'll - change, then, and - 

I can leave early-ish again tonight, and we'll have more time tonight than last night, to sort everything out and practice switching, and stuff, I keep forgetting.

Then after that - my three-day-break starts tomorrow."

<...I'm guessing sound would be okay for clothes-changing, just as long as I don't look, right?>

He turns around to face the back wall. (The cot is neatly made, and come to think of it the headset and glasses are back on his head. Nice of them.)

<We could talk about educational systems on break, maybe. Does your laptop have a recording function?

...what, he's stocking shelves at six? Is he, like, helping out around a family shop or something? I mean, I've stocked shelves too, but I was fifteen.

Oh, hmm...you did kind of say y'all's impulse control grows in faster, didn't you. I guess that would lead to different norms about what tasks are suitable at what ages.>

Even if merely "possessing impulse control" still seems like it should lead to a six-year-old with a job having the vibe of...

...well, something an apartment-dwelling kid would resort to.

He is not going to express concern until he has a better understanding of what makes these people tick.

<...oh this is going to involve more awkward introductions, isn't it.>

He sighs.

<Well, no way out but through.

...maybe in the long run it will turn out for the best that y'all's electrical grid was geomagnetic-storm-naive, even if I'm worried about whether we'll fix it in time. It sure does seem to have helped my case.>

He almost asks what Xakda's workcycle is so that he can know what to expect, but if they're aiming to "get used to something more like 50/50 as fast as possible", Xakda's schedule is about to go through some upheaval anyway. It's unpleasant, but in time they'll get through that awkwardness too.

(Yeah, the part of Xakda's brain yelling at him not to quit his job and the part yelling at him to give Minaiyu more agency haven't exactly learned each other's names and numbers yet. It be like that sometimes.)

(If Gaha'eka knew jack squat about certain other locations in the multiverse, they'd quickly learn to think of themselves as 'efficient, not coherent'.)

"Well, it's -"

"here, actually, I flipped on a recording device, it won't be inconvenient to do little recordings at work now that you mention it, I just - keep postponing things for a more perfect time, and I should stop doing that.

It's bewildering to me that you were still living with your parents - more bewildering than it originally was that you ate in front of them! It's a different kind of bewildering? 'Eating in front of people on a regular basis' isn't . . . quite within the distribution of expected subcultures around here but I could see it happening? 'Living with your parents past twenty as an abled person in an industrialized, civilized society' more makes me feel like . . . like that's a violation of game theory or something. I do not understand at all. Around here fourteen is basically unheard of, average is around nine.

. . . I'm done changing, by the way, thanks!"

"Probably it's downstream of y'all living alone in general?" he says aloud.

[Someone expecting to hear Xakda could easily mistake Minaiyu for him. But for future listeners of the recording, people who know to look for it, it's actually not that hard to tell their voices apart. They use the vocal apparatus somewhat differently.]

"If neither the parent nor the kid likes cohabiting with people, it makes sense for them to want to keep the length to a minimum.

And also...you seem to...move around kind of a lot anyway? Which I guess makes leaving home a smaller deal. Like, you casually mentioned you weren't planning to stay in this house long-term, and...when you were talking about how you ended up here in the first place it sounded like you got kicked out of your previous home through no fault of your own, and that that was basically just an annoyance to you? Whereas abrupt nonconsensual moving would be somewhere in the range of 'major problem' to 'outright trauma', for us.

I mean, lots of people do move out when they grow up, I'm not unusual for staying but my brother's not unusual for leaving. There's...kind of a window, I guess? When you're starting to seriously think about what you want your adult life to be like but you're not yet confident of the answers, it's easier and more appealing to change things around while you experiment.

Normally that kind of testing-things-out starts at fifteen, going until your early twenties although some people come to a conclusion sooner. You work at least one job so you can get a taste for what it's like operating in the formal economy, you shadow people at a bunch of different jobs with an eye to whether you want to apprentice with them, you maybe move in with distant family or friends or temporary housing for a while if you suspect you might like it better living in a different climate or in a town with a different specialty or on a farm, if there aren't any substantially younger kids in your household you probably help somebody with childcare and see what that's like.

People back home...occasionally leave their birth households sooner, but not...if everything's going well.

Hmm...you say 'in an industrialised society'. I wonder whether it's relevant somehow that our industrialisation was artificially kickstarted, if there's, like, more lingering subsistence-farmer influence on our culture or something."

". . . but how - how would you know, if you - before you - you have to try everything, or you won't have the faintest -

- maybe it is the subsistence-farmer thing. Did Amestyl - no, Amethyst Brightpath - was he frustrated about, like, cultural innovations he couldn't fully translate, that everyone from Rekka just assumed were arbitrary local customs from his home? Because, like - that's horrible! Sorry, I shouldn't assume - but it sounded like people are pressured into picking what they'll do for the rest of their life having barely feinted at trying anything! Don't y'all, even, switch jobs, as adults?"

"Uh, sometimes, occasionally even willingly, but--

--I feel like our cultural pressure is actually towards trying new things, I was just thinking that maybe y'all had developed an even stronger pressure towards it. 'How confident you need to be in advance that you're not going to like something before you just don't try it' is complicated and controversial, but like, we're intellectually aware that human psychology...or at least our psychology...is weighted way too far towards exploitation over exploration and that you have to consciously compensate for that at least somewhat.

...do y'all just completely not have the emotion of familiarity-comfort, at all, about anything. I feel like that's a pretty basic emotion-- uh, no offense, but...wow it is so hard for me to wrap my mind around what that would be like, it's so fundamental. It's hard to believe that culture alone can do that: maybe there's some sort of founder-effect-like thing going on--

--the thing that comes to mind is that maybe it's a purposeful bottleneck, that you're an isolated and forgotten colony world and so your founding population was heavily filtered for being the sort of person who would willingly move to another planet, but maybe that's wildly off-base."

He sighs. "Y'all would do so much better at being walk-ins than we do, like psychologically."

"What, you mean, like, a colony from somewhere else in the multiverse?"

Unthinkingly, he starts pacing.

"As far as we can tell, humans definitely evolved from life native to this planet - our close cousins are here and everything. Rekka is like that, too, right?

Or did you mean, the current population of humans fanned out from an old, multiversally-unusual colony bottleneck in our world history?

Are we really that unusual? Are all the worlds with hayi, that you usually get walk-ins from, are they . . . neurotypical by Rekkan standards? Or at least more so than us?"

He stops himself.

"Also, are you okay with continuing this out in the house if I go out and caffeinate and gather my stuff?"

"I was thinking within your universe, although for all I know I suppose it could be possible to physically travel between universes and we just haven't the faintest idea how. But it sounds like you have fossils and stuff, so that's probably not it. And yeah, Rekka has fossils and stuff too.

...oh, right, you have multiple continents here, maybe that could lead to a within-planet colony bottleneck if something happened to the people on the original continent. Although that might still be a thing you would have seen in the archaeological evidence if it had happened.

...I'm not sure how much we would have noticed if we were psychologically atypical for the rest of the multiverse, given how the whole brain-compatibility thing filters for walk-ins who are similar to us. And how it filters for low-tech-level people, people who were unable to medically prevent themselves from dying or at least arrange for a same-world host: if you live in a tiny farming village and rarely talk to anyone else, your information on what people in your world overall are like isn't that great. Like, both that you don't have that much information and that it might not be very accurate. And while I'd be surprised if culture stretches far enough to create a whole population of neophiles, it does stretch somewhat far.

Yeah, out in the house sounds fine, as long as that won't wake anyone.

--oh, um, could you show me how to pause the recorder? Come to think of it, I do have a private heads-up I want to give you."

"Oh, yeah, here -" he demonstrates recorder-pausing.

". . . What kind of variation do you see, then, among the small villages you get walk-ins from? Does it seem wider than the Rekkan variation understood to have happened on Rekka by Rekkan anthropologists, even if you assume it's all culture?"

He looks a bit awkward.

"I'm not a specialist; I mostly know the stuff that people thought would be practically useful to me later.

Off the top of my head...the natural tendency for pattern-matching to leak into parsing things as omens--even when they couldn't possibly actually be related to each other--often culturally crystallises into different collections of taboos. Some people are surprisingly willing to risk premeditated violence, though I think we suspect a lot of that is, like, different baseline levels of desperation, that when you're barely surviving a lot of things end up being life-and-death backed-into-a-corner stuff.

Hmm...

...oh, this one was probably innate, given that the walk-ins themselves were mostly not like their societies in this regard. There are some places that are...obsessed with faces? Almost all of the people seem to be facial-recognition savants, and they're hyper-attentive to facial expressions. I was warned that clear communication with people who assume you noticed the way their face flickered for a moment is more difficult, and that people who care a lot about being able to see each other's faces are probably going to have a hard time with masking.

...anyway, hang on--"

Click.

"--so, the caffeination thing reminded me...uh, caffeine is okay, whatever that other stimulant was yesterday is okay, but in general we're going to have to be careful about psychoactives: some of them risk dislodging a hayi from the brain, and y'all wouldn't have been in a position to notice which ones those are.

The usual rule of thumb is that anything where you're still lucid is safe indefinitely, anything where you're not lucid will kill you in about four or five days if you're on it continuously or without enough time to recover between doses, and some things where you're not lucid will sometimes kill you faster. But I might not know all the edge cases, especially since there might be drugs that we abandoned early in development upon figuring out they were toxic to us and forgot about them while y'all kept pursuing those paths. Some drugs I can probably recognise--especially from medical training--and give gos or no-gos on, but it might get tricky to recognise alien portrayals of chemical structures and...the distinction between safe 'overlays' and dangerous 'disruptors' is not a concept I was prepared to have to import."

He - actually forgot about how Sinber and the kid aren't usually up at this hour, even though the kitchen is sunny and his making coffee, etc. doesn't make zero noise. They've got their blackout curtains and soundproofing, which apparently will block out all high-pitched noise quieter than his distress shriek yesterday.

While Minaiyu is talking he begins the coffee process. As Minaiyu talks about hayi and drugs, he unconsciously frowns their face dubiously at the packet of coffee grounds.

"The faces thing is interesting - and yeah, the culture doesn't sound very revealing. No, like, people who are way better at dead reckoning than the rest - or at poetry? If-you-want-to-say. That's the first savant axis we discovered, the most obvious - you can be really good at either dead reckoning or poetry, but not both.

. . . and, huh. We don't have any drugs that make people less lucid, that we would use outside a context of wanting to anesthetize them? Does that make your worries about me continuing my usual stimulant cycle, like, totally go poof, or am I being a troglodyte?"

He doesn't answer the savantism question yet: they should finish discussing his vulnerabilities and turn the recorder back on first.

"Coffee is definitely fine-- or, I mean, it definitely won't kill me, we do use it. I...can't say I'm entirely comfortable with adding caffeine to the list of basic necessities of life, but as long as there's a three-month buffer at home and a backup bottle of caffeine pills in our bag, I think it'd be okay. I don't know how much buffer you're currently running on that.

The other stimulant yesterday sure felt like an overlay: I'd be very surprised if it's deadly. ...although that being said, I would like to know what drug it is, even if it's safe.

I think probably the main measure we should take is researching what anesthetics are in use around here, writing up instructions on which drugs are acceptable risks under which circumstances, and putting them wherever you normally keep your medical records. We might not be in a condition to make the call then and there at the time it comes up."

"Makes sense." He bumbles around packing for the workday. "What's an overlay? It was a dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor [one word], they make most people like twice as functional, have you never experienced dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor before and if so why are you not fangirling about it?" It's genuine curiosity.

Almost everyone fangirls about dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor when they get old enough to afford it or to be over their fears about it affecting their development (whichever comes last)!

He looks thoughtful.

"...yeah, I think that word parses. And those are-- well, they're pretty safe on that front and in themselves, though sometimes they're dangerous for unrelated reasons and there's a few that have additional mechanisms of action that are disruptive.

There are two basic categories of psychoactive, which--directly translated--we call 'overlays' and 'disruptors'. Overlays are called that because they only touch the surface of the soul: you're still there underneath, intact. Disruptors fuck with your sense of self or your ability to distinguish reality from unreality, distorting a hayi into a shape they can't hold for long. Best case scenario is it wears off in time and you make a full recovery, albeit shaken by what is often a very scary and disturbing experience; if it lasts longer than about four days--sometimes five, occasionally three in elderly people and other especially-fragile groups--the connection between brain and hayi will snap under the strain and kill you; if you're unlucky--and how much bad luck it takes depends on the drug--it'll kill you within hours, we think by causing brain damage that renders the brain uninhabitable.

I haven't done dopamine-reuptake-inhibitor before, no, though I also don't expect I'm getting the drug-naive experience since the body has had a chance to develop tolerance. It might have helped me feel less overwhelmed? Maybe the productivity boost would have been more noticeable if I'd had more to do.

--that sounds bad when I put it like that. It honestly wasn't that boring: I did choose to go into a field where I spend a fair bit of time observing hospital workers, after all. Though if I'm not going to be playing really-dead anymore, I'll want to ask the occasional question in-between patients, clear up points of confusion."

He grins. "Maybe once I pick up enough about how medicine works here, I can start offering second opinions."

<💭>! Second opinions!</💭>

He heads out. 

"I think I have enough time buffer even after grabbing Prodigy to slip a note to my boss making sure it's okay for you to work with me like that -"

And the other shoe drops.

"

- actually, I should, uh, probably just put in my next-nine-workdays notice that I'm quitting, huh, so we can figure out what you really want to do."

He was going to ask more about disruptors, but suddenly the task queue has a visible elephant in it.

Minaiyu looks surprised and concerned.

"That, uh...seems..."

He almost says 'rash', but maybe that's too insulting.

"...shouldn't we figure out what kind of setup we want first, and then quit if your job turns out to be incompatible with that? I was kind of assuming that the whole 50/50 thing would involve you switching to a lighter work schedule at your current job: is that not an option?"

For the second day in a row, he freezes on his way out to the garage. This time, it's in horror (unacknowledged) and bafflement (open). 

"Then I'd have to see the same people every day but I'd have lost standing with them! Don't y -

- Right, few job changes per lifetime. Here, if you can't do a job at least as well as you could before, anymore, for whatever reason, you quit and find something else where you don't have to drag yourself constantly over the nails of 'this person has seen me be more productive than I am currently being.'"

"...right, many job changes per lifetime," he echoes. "I guess it doesn't feel like such a scary leap into the unknown for you."

He almost apologises again for throwing Xakda's life into disarray, but it is increasingly clear that he does not actually comprehend how Xakda feels about having his life thrown into disarray, except 'not as badly as Minaiyu would feel in his place'. It gets annoying when people apologise profusely to you over something that you honestly did not think deserved profuse apologising.

...also there was the whole eating thing, with Xakda not asking for privacy because he was afraid Minaiyu wanted to be there. Sometimes apologising profusely to someone for impinging on them just ends up making them feel more pressured to let you impinge on them.

He's looking forward to having a firmer understanding of where the quicksand-pits are and where they aren't, so they can balance costs and benefits properly. No way out but through.

...well, almost no way.

"I wonder if it would help to add some sociology books to the psychology ones, like in terms of getting a better sense of things here."

He can understand finding it embarrassing to be less productive per work-hour. He supposes it's not hard to believe that in some cultures, that might bleed over to finding it embarrassing to be available for fewer work-hours.

"What sorts of jobs would you be looking at?"

Carplane entry resumes.

'What job would you look for next?' is always a fun question to contemplate, especially when it's not just a hypothetical.

He's always wanted to try kidshaping, but it'd just be an embarrassing thing to attempt while he's living or even coparenting with Sinber, who's been obsessively getting better at it for seven years in total. Plus it's not particularly easy to find a culture fit for one such as Xakda in that industry - kidshapers tend to be misanthropic auteurs just the same as architects and logisticians and mercenary-journeymen and . . . well, the same as a lot of professions you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps to make it in, because there's a lot of human capital to pack into your person but not much of a natural hierarchical company structure to the provision of the service . . . so, the same as a lot of professions. Perennial-sigh. There's a reason he's been driven toward hospital jobs, and it's not a love of the life-or-death stakes or a lust for the above-average pay. Hospital workers want to work with people.

But he is sick, he realizes, sick of the stress, the upheaval . . . sick of Aleith and his constant posturing. He's seen parts of the hospital industry he thinks he could run and love running, if he buckled down and gave his everything, but Sain-in-particular . . . isn't that.

There's an exhilarating sense of suddenly realizing that a heavy weight he's been carrying isn't part of his body, and that he might be able to drop it soon, if only he could find the right place.

He'll miss Nakoru, but he'd have traded Nakoru for Minaiyu any day.

His brain runs the familiar course of seeking any non-obvious advantageous alternatives over his central ideas for his next job - he could train in repair of electronics - but no, that's too much of a commitment - or try some kind of freelance medical consulting with somebody - no, he'd best keep it simple with this . . .

- his brain continues running down the tree -

(He rolls out of the garage.)

. . . yeah.

"Probably another hospital job, at a frankly more driven and sanely-run hospital - there's a small one in Pyeth that might be that. Otherwise I'd have to move. Probably far enough away that my pickups for Prodigy and my son with Raychis . . . and eventually my son with Sinber, would become long enough that according to contract I'd become responsible making the flight both ways, and possibly, depending on which way I moved, far enough away from Maith* that I'd have to resume that commute in whole or in part, too. I could reach out to Fairgame or Raychis and possibly work out a unified move with one of them, or at least move toward Maith. I'll have to look at a map and do all the math tonight."

For all the implied inconvenience, he sounds genuinely but not overly enthusiastic about the task, which is only mostly expert acting.

The emotions the expert acting is concealing aren't angst or annoyance-at-an-interruption, but a fear of confirming everyone's opinion that his living situation with Sinber was unsustainable.

"Um. I haven't listed my children indexed to my coparents to you yet, have I."

". . . Oh, and you said something about 'soci-ology'. Cardi-ology sounded overly specific, like, I once learned there used to be a word for freakin' myrmec-ology, but soci-ology sounds overly general - like, another word for philosophy, but framed as though it were somehow the speaker's special expertise. Am I obviously-to-you missing something?"

He waits for Minaiyu to answer before lifting off.

-

*for the interested, Maith is /maiθ/ (not /meiθ/), as Sain is supposed to be 'sign'; the convention of 'a' representing /a/, however, is not followed consistently in Bywayean/Gaha'eka names, which are just spelled to best-effort scan to someone who speaks English. For example, 'Raychis' is meant to be /reitʃɪs/, as 'Reychis' scans to me as /raitʃi/! (Erm, Xakda's X is an /x/, though.)