#The Tunnel Apparati Diaries

[fenmere]

Another bit of dialog we're proud of:

“Are you still skeptical?” Phage asked.

“I’m not skeptical that you’ve created a whole new headmate for me, no,” Sarah replied. “But I want to be skeptical about all the rest of it. I’ve got shit to do, Phage. You know that. Being disabled is a full time job, and our division of labor kind of really sucks sometimes. And this body sure isn’t OSHA or ADA compliant. It’s a fucking hazard.”

[ashwin-the-artless]

Here's a bunch of press release style description of my novel and its sequels, complete with release dates. If you are trans, autistic, and/or plural, and into science fiction, you may appreciate what we've made.

The Tunnel Apparati Diaries Book Release

With the guidance of Mau (a.k.a. Phage), Ashwin Pember, recently ascended Ancestor of the Sunspot, projects their mind to Earth via the Tunnel Apparatus. Only, they do this to become the new headmate of the twenty-seven year old autistic transgender plural system of Sarah and Goreth Ampersand of Portland, OR, who think that Phage is their old imaginary friend.

Unfortunately, Sarah and Goreth struggle to manage their already difficult life.

They’ve been leaning on their housemates and friends for support, but playing host to an alien being challenges them all.

Furthermore, there's an important reason Phage came to Earth in the first place, and it needs Sarah and Goreth to cooperate with Ashwin in order to achieve its goals.

The Tunnel Apparati Diaries tell the story of how the Sunspot Chronicles came to be translated and published on Earth, but what does this mean for humanity?

Because there’s a probe full of construction nanites left somewhere in the mountains of Washington State and someone needs to take responsibility for it before it falls into the wrong hands.

—

Release Dates for the Tunnel Apparati Diaries:

Book One: The End of the Tunnel - July 31, 2024

Book Two: The Sun Also Hatches - October 21, 2024

Book Three: The Dragon in the Dining Room - November 27, 2024

Available at http://www.sunspot.world or http://www.lulu.com

—

The Tunnel Apparati Diaries take place on Earth between the years of 2023 and 2025, in Portland Oregon, and follow the lives of Sarah and Goreth Ampersand, Erik, and the Audreys – a friends group of transgender plural systems – after they make contact with an alien visitor to Sarah and Goreth’s psyche, Ashwin Pember. 

Soon it becomes clear that this is not a product of their trauma or mental illness. It is a real event, actual first contact, and the fate of the Earth is on the line. But the personal impacts of this contact end up taking priority.

Their personal accounts, each book written by a different system member (Ashwin, Goreth, and then Sarah), explore the challenges of building community and relationships while being multiply disabled, transgender, queer, autistic, and experiencing a consensus reality that does not match that of most of the rest of the world.

It is a sequel and a possible entry point to reading the Sunspot Chronicles, and the two series together combine themes of plurality, neurodiversity, biodiversity, and the exercise and protection of personal consent and autonomy in the face of past and rising fascism. Every book has its own unique focus and take on building and keeping found family and community here on Earth and out amongst the stars. And what it means to be person, whether human or otherwise.

Written by different members of the Inmara Fenumera, an autistic transgender plurality living in the Pacific Northwest, the Tunnel Apparati Diaries offer genuine personal insight into the lived experiences of diverse plural systems (people living with DID, OSDD, and other forms of plurality), but with a strong dash of wish fulfillment, light romance, and adventure.

The Future is Plural. It deserves good plural fiction.

[ohthatphage]

Making Friends with Entropy

I just wrote this three chapter story for request via @a-system-of-giving and their AO3 plural writing exchange. It's original, as requested, to be released on AO3 under the Vanderkemp's names (a group of system members who are our AO3 voice), but with my voice and narration.

It is perhaps a little too canon to the Tunnel Apparati Diaries. It's basically the prequel.

I don't know if I can publish it to AO3 without it functioning as a promotion for that writing. So, I'm publishing it here first, and then to our own website, completely free to read. And then, after reviewing AO3's policies, we might post it there as archived work.

If it looks like doing that may be a risk to them, and against their policy, then I'll write something else for the exchange. There's time, and this work represents 9,267 in one day. Shouldn't be a problem.

I'd like to thank @ashwin-the-artless for starting the Tunnel Apparati Diaries and then coaxing me to write for myself.

First chapter is in this post. Second and third chapters will be reblogs, and then Fenmere will reblog that. Enjoy!

Chapter 1: Bedtime

In the early 21s century of Earth, on a small farm in Thurston county, Washington, in the United States of America, the social construct known as Jeremy Schmidt spent one late evening pushing a plastic truck around on the carpet with city streets printed on it that he’d inherited from his father.

It wasn’t his favorite game.

He would rather have been on his mountain in the back yard, bathing the sky with gouts of flame and scaring errant knights away from his twin sister, who was mysteriously human.

He was not supposed to be awake.

It was 11 pm, and a school night.

A few years later, he would learn that most of his classmates stayed up much later than that, but he was not yet socially aware enough to pick up on their conversations. He was still too preoccupied by making sense of other things, such as why his hands didn’t have claws, or what his tail was doing when the Sunday school teacher was busy trying to convince everyone that they all had another bigger father or something absurd like that.

He thought every seven year old’s bedtime was 8pm. Similar to how he thought he was a boy.

Which is to say that bedtime and boyhood, and even humanity, were rules imposed by adults, and everyone like him was expected to follow them.

In any case, he couldn’t sleep that night, and instead of lying in bed with the lights off, terrified of all the darkest corners of his room, he was taking his mom’s advice in a way that she probably hadn’t intended.

But, he had just figured something out, and was pretty excited about it. And playing truck on the floor was his way of testing this idea.

When an adult gives you conflicting rules, maybe you get to decide how to interpret them and which rule takes precedence in a given situation. After all, rules don’t just come from adults, they also come from the world itself, such as the rule that if you trip and fall you will, nine times out of ten, scrape your knee and hand. And if you have a good sense of rules, maybe better than anybody else, you can explain how you were following the most important rules.

And the way this situation worked was this.

He was afraid of the dark.

He was supposed to get enough sleep for school. That was a rule.

But if there was any darkness near him, he couldn’t sleep. That was also a rule.

So it was ultimately up to him to figure out how to sleep at night.

And for a while he did that by sleeping with the lights on.

So his parents left his room’s lights on when he went to bed, and he’d been sleeping with the lights on since he was three. But, every other birthday, they’d coax him to try sleeping with one more of his lights turned off, because it was supposed to be healthier to sleep in the dark.

So, now, he only had his clip-on reading lamp on the head of his bed turned on as a nightlight, and his parents were telling him that after his next birthday, he was supposed to switch that out for a softer, genuine plug-in nightlight that would be placed in the wall across the room from his bed.

But the thing was, he was pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping at all at night. Just lying in bed absolutely terrified.

His parents claimed he did sleep, and that they checked on him and he didn’t notice. But he only ever remembered being awake and being extremely sleepy all day, and it was getting worse.

And his parents could see that he was struggling. And though the way they usually did things was to tell him what to do, and then restrict his privileges until he did that thing, after long enough, sometimes three or so years of fruitless restrictions, they’d sometimes try to help him meet their goals for him.

So, recently his mom had given him another rule, and this rule had sort of made things snap into place for him.

Initially, she hadn’t worded it like a rule.

It had been a conversation that had happened earlier that night, in fact.

At seven pm, he’d been told that his mom wanted to talk to him about something before bed, she wanted to help him with a trouble he was having, and he should be ready to talk to her at seven thirty. They gave him this “heads up” because they had long ago figured out that he needed time to “shift gears” and adjust to change from the usual routines. And, to compensate for this conversation, he’d be allowed to doddle a little on his way to bed, because he might need to be brushing his teeth at 8pm and instead of ten to eight, and tonight that would be OK.

He’d found that he was eager to have this talk, so he was ready five minutes before the time it was supposed to happen. And he spent that five minutes talking amongst himself about what the subject would be.

Which is to say, he talked to his imaginary twin sister about it.

She had no idea what the subject would be, either, but she was worried it was going to be about their eating habits.

He pointed out that if their parents wanted to talk about their eating habits, they’d schedule this talk for before dinner, not after it.

And she said that made sense.

Then she asked if she could talk to their mom, too, but he shook his head quickly and sadly, and said, “She doesn’t know about you.”

“And she doesn’t have to!” his sister, who didn’t have a name yet, replied. “She’ll just think I’m you!”

“That scares me,” he said, though. “She might figure it out. You talk different.”

“I do not!”

“Shsh.”

He’d realized at the last minute that they were both using his mouth at that point, and didn’t want to explain what kind of game he was playing to his mom if she’d heard.

But he was glad for the little conversation anyway, because it had helped make that five minutes pass more quickly.

Then his mom came into the room and sat down on the floor with him.

“Jeremy?” she said. “Can I ask you something I’ve asked before?”

He pretended to look up at her face and nodded, eyes blinking closed.

“What is it exactly that you’re afraid of at night? Is it the dark itself? Or what’s in the dark?”

Oh, it was this conversation!

This had been a conversation he actually wanted to have, but he was also, he was realizing, kind of afraid of it itself.

So, unfortunately, he fell silent and his mind went blank. He couldn’t even feel his sister thinking or having emotions. So he looked down at the floor and sort of shook his head and sort of shrugged.

“Are you afraid of having nightmares if it’s dark?” his mom asked.

He vaguely remembered his first nightmare. He’d been really small at the time, and all he could remember was waking up screaming, and both his parents coming into his room to see if he was OK, and then asking him if he had a nightmare. And he thought he could remember nodding eventually, and that’s how he knew he’d had a nightmare.

After that, he’d had nightmares he could remember. Recurring nightmares about being chased by his grandma’s dog, or falling off a cliff, or finding only darkness in his parents’ closet.

Maybe it was that last one that made him afraid of the dark. But, also, he knew that when it was dark and there was a shadow on the floor or in the corner, he was always certain that it was dangerous. That maybe there was a monster there.

Whatever a real monster actually was. Like, maybe a triffid or that invisible thing on the alien planet, or a troll, like in the movies his dad watched and laughed at. But different. Real.

Oh, he was thinking again! He did kind of like it when a prompt from his mom got his thoughts going again.

“I think it’s monsters,” he found himself saying.

“Ah,” his mom said, glancing toward his door, presumably in the direction of his dad. She gave him a sad, rueful smile and asked, “Are they like the monsters in your dad’s movies?”

“Kind of?” he said. “But more like the monsters that want to be in my nightmares.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” he explained. “When I have my falling off a cliff nightmare, I’m being chased by something, but I can’t look at it or it will be real. And it will get me. And then there’s the cliff. And I can’t stop myself from going off the cliff. And then I land in my bed and it shakes.”

“Oh, I’ve had that very same dream!” his mom exclaimed.

“Really?” he didn’t believe her, but he let her tell him she did. He knew better than to outright question his parents. And maybe she’d say something cool anyway.

“Oh, yes. It’s actually really common. A lot of people have that same dream,” she explained. “I’ve been reading a book about dreams and what they mean. And that one’s supposed to mean you’re avoiding something. Or something like that. But, there’s a cool part in the book about something called lucid dreaming that I think could help you, and something my grandma, your grandma’s mother, told me. It might help you stop having that nightmare, and maybe you won’t have to be afraid of the dark anymore.”

“Really?” he asked again, actually looking up to her eyes this time. He was hopeful. This sounded actually cool. Like maybe he’d be taught a super power. Even if he was also skeptical about it. But he only glanced at her eyes for a split second, long enough to make that emotional contact and check her sincerity, but not long enough to make him hurt.

“Yes, I think so,” she said. “My grandma told me that the secret to beating a nightmare is to turn and face it. If you have something that is chasing you, you need to stop and turn around and face it, and tell it to be your friend. Because it’s only a dream, and if you do that you take control and it can’t hurt you.”

This sounded totally bonkers to him. The idea of doing that made his heart race. He couldn’t at all imagine doing that.

“But what if it gets me?” he asked.

“Tell it that it can’t,” she said. “Say to it, in no uncertain terms, ‘you cannot get me, you are not allowed.’ Make it a rule.”

“No uncertain terms?” he asked.

She nodded, “No uncertain terms. ‘You cannot get me, you are not allowed.’ In fact, you can tell it I said so. It’s my rule. Your nightmares aren’t allowed to get you.”

“I don’t think they care about you,” he told her.

“Well,” she said. “The important thing is that it’s your rule. It’s your mind, and your dream, and you make the rules. That’s how it works. It cannot hurt you if you don’t want it to.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” she nodded. “This works for falling off the cliff, too. If you still can’t face the monster behind you, when you fall off the cliff, you can fly instead. Just spread your arms wide, close your eyes in your dream, and imagine going up instead of going down. Imagine the ground falling away from you.”

“How do I do that though? I can’t control my dreams!” his voice maybe got a little loud.

“Well, you can, though,” she said. “It’s a skill, but you can learn it. That’s what the book I’m reading meant by ‘lucid dreaming’. It’s when you realize you’re in a dream and that you can do anything you want.”

“How?”

“Well, usually, what you do is before you go to bed every night, you tell yourself that you’re going to have a lucid dream,” she said. “It doesn’t usually work right away. But it helps, and if you do it repeatedly, you’ll eventually start to make it work. And then, you keep a lookout for things that tell you that you’re dreaming, like a monster chasing you.”

“What do you mean?” he felt like he was supposed to ask this question when she paused, so he did. He knew what she meant.

“Well, monsters don’t actually chase you when you’re awake, do they?” she asked.

This was becoming a long conversation and he could feel the darkness closing in as the night fell. It felt dangerous.

He shook his head, but then stopped and said, “Kensington chases me.”

“Yeah, but only when you have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a carrot in your hand, right?”

“Yeah, like I’m still a toddler or something.”

“He’s a naughty airedale,” she said.

“Only when I have a sandwich or a carrot, though,” he agreed. “But in my dreams he just chases me.”

“Exactly,” she said, patting his knee. “So, if he’s chasing you when you aren’t holding food, you know you’re dreaming, right? Or if you’re being chased by something that you don’t even know what it is because you haven’t looked at it.”

“Yeah.”

“Also. Can you tell you’re not dreaming right now?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m definitely not dreaming right now!”

“That’s another way for you to check,” she said. “Some people have a hard time telling whether they’re dreaming or not, because their brains work like that. Maybe sometimes they actually dream when they’re awake, too. So it makes things complicated. But because you know you’re awake when you’re actually awake, if you ever find yourself wondering if you’re awake or in a dream, you’re probably dreaming. But, then, ask yourself if you’re being chased by something that can’t be real, just to make sure. And if the answer is yes, then you know it’s a dream, and then you make the rules.”

“Oh.”

And that’s what she’d told him.

The important part was, “And then you make the rules.” That was so crucial. That’s where the actual power lay. That was permission. And it didn’t just come from his mom, but from a book and from his great grandmother. So it was extra right.

But, and as he brushed his teeth he thought about this, it was the part about how some people dreamed when they were even awake that made everything click into place for him.

Because maybe the monsters behind the darkness he felt were there when he was lying in bed were really dream monsters. So, he should have power over them if he faced them.

Which was why, at 11pm, he was brazenly playing with his truck on the printed town carpet with only his bed lamp on.

He was playing innocent, to try to lure a monster out so that he could face it.

He’d started at 9pm, after laying in his bed for a while thinking more about what his mom had said. It had taken about that long for him to formulate his plan and then work up the courage to carry it out.

And after he forced his body to move and climb down out of his bed, he played with a few different toys, getting into the routine of them to let the time pass, because, it turned out, the monsters weren’t brave enough to face him, apparently.

But he wasn’t playing make-believe with his toys. He was just pushing them through the motions of play, like he used to do as a toddler. Making the wheels spin. Feeling the changes in friction against the texture of the carpet as he made them turn corners and skid. Transforming them into robots and then back into cars and trucks, and appreciating their construction and the way the hinges worked.

And his sister just watched, because that’s usually what she did.

And time did pass really quickly then.

And it was around 11pm that he started to wonder if monsters were even real.

But, the really important part about 11pm is that that’s when his parents finally fell fast asleep and were unlikely to hear him talking to someone or something. And while he didn’t know that, I did.

So that’s when I stepped out of the darkness.

[theinmara]

Release Dates and Schedules for the Tunnel Apparati Diaries trilogy - https://sunspot.world/release-dates-and-schedules-for-the-tunnel-apparati-diaries-trilogy/ Excerpt: Book One: The End of the Tunnel - July 31, 2024 Web serial updates Wednesday and Saturday from July 31 through October 16 Paperback available July 31 from lulu.com Large print, hardback, pdf, and ebup editions available by August 24 Book Two: The Sun Also Hatches - October 21, 2024 Web posted by: Inmara Ktletaccete Fenumera

[fenmere]

An Earthling returns from the Sunspot to talk about it

from the second book of the Tunnel Apparati Diaries, the Sun Also Hatches, by Goreth Ampersand of the Inmara (coming mid October)

“Well. Maybe tell us more about it,” Peter suggested. “What was the Sunspot like?”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling and huffed a breath, tears brimming in my eyes, and went over the events of the previous day in my head. Just visualizing them.

There were two days to pick from, really. One where I had talked to Karen and where I’d watched from the side as Sarah took us through an afternoon with friends and having dinner and writing. And one in which I’d been somewhere else entirely. And they both felt as real, as a part of my life, as each other.

And since Peter had asked about the Sunspot, that came more naturally to the front. Those memories were ever so slightly more vivid and ready to relive.

“I met so many people,” I said. “And not all of them were on the Network or in nanite exobodies.”

“What are nanite exobodies?” Abigail asked.

I held up my left hand, looking at it, and said, “Well, like thi – Ah. Hm.” I let my hand drop into my lap and said, “As you can see, I have a whole new set of reflexes already. Especially when I’m thinking about the Sunspot.” Then I explained, “It’s the same thing as the nanites we destroyed last year, that were in the ground, in the communications probe that we never dug up. Only, the Sunspot is full of them. And people use them to make bodies they can walk around in. Like in, uh, I mean, so many movies.”

“Oh. OK.”

“I had one. I was shown how to make it almost right away, so that I could feel more real,” I told them.  I decided not to derail my first point by saying that I’d been my draconic self. I wanted to, but I also wanted to describe the people. So, I said, “Anyway, not everyone had one of those. There were still living people, in living organic bodies. And they were all different.”

“Neat!”

“No, I mean. Ashwin has explained it, and I think they’ve told you about it, or we have. But I don’t think we’ve really gotten the idea across. Metabang’s book kinda does, but there’s so much it takes for granted, having lived there itself the whole time,” I rambled. “No. This was bigger than a furry convention.”

“Heh,” Peter chuckled.

“At a big furry convention, you’ve got like fifty wolves and fifty dragons, and a smattering of birds, opossums, foxes, and unrecognizable fursuits, and then just a bunch of humans wearing ears. There, on the Sunspot, every person looks like they’re from a different species. Every one of them chimerical. And they’re all just walking around, visiting each other, enjoying their days, and making all sorts of artwork.”

[fenmere]

The print edition of this book is such a satisfying and visceral way to read this story.

We weren't originally going to do a hardback edition, but we think now that we will, as that will be more archival.

Paperback will be released on July 31st, in less than a week!

Hardback may take longer, since we're experiencing computer troubles.

We chose a cream paper, to make it easier on the eyes. And we believe that the font we chose makes for better readability at the size it is printed at. We have dyslexic dysgraphia, which makes these choices critical, and it's very easy for us to read with no strain on our 49 year old eyes.

We'll do a large print and an epub edition as well, released along with the hardback.

But back to the paper. It's thick and smooth and luxurious, which is probably why the book is around $19. This is a choice that Lulu has stuck us with while other publishers are opting for thinner, fragile, cheaper paper.

This stuff is smooth and wonderful to touch, and quite hardy.

If you wanted to get a book that you could truly enjoy, but also trust the text body would be well preserved, you could hardly do better than this.

We have some quibbles with the paperback cover, but they’re really minor, and part of why we'll add the hardback casebound edition as well.

[ashwin-the-artless]

My book!

Proof arrived!

We're legally publishing it under the name of my system, the Inmara, to keep things simple, but I wrote this (with the help of the rest of the cast) and it is my voice that is the narration for the story. There is so much to fix. But it's also very exciting to have this in hand! Looking at this, we are fairly confident we'll meet our print release date of August 24 without a problem.

[fenmere]

Coming July 31st, 2024! (probably)

A sequel to the Sunspot Chronicles.

It's definitely not The Day the Earth Stood Still meets The Doom Patrol, but, before anything really happens, Erik of Aunti Zero's Coffee Collective thinks it could be described that way.

Narrowly rejected alternative titles: Phage goes to Portland, A Sunspot Pember in America, and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nanites

Authors' bio (my system):

Born in the mid '70s, the Inmara are the daughters of a couple of printers living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. They used to work as a graphic designer and are intersex, ace, autistic, biromantic, polyamorous, trigender, trans, and a plural system with a high therian count. They've wanted to write novels since they were 14, but ended up making a webcomic titled Harmless Free Radicals in their early 20s. In 2015, while outlining the closure of that comic, they discovered that they were trans and plural, and quickly worked out they were autistic shortly after that. And that's when the novels started pouring out. They've written and self published most of the Sunspot Chronicles, a web series about plurality, gender, and familial relations on an alien generational starship. With the Tunnel Apparati Diaries they hope to craft a new entry point into the series that can also work as a sequel, and maybe to bring the story down a little closer to Earth. When not writing books, they live in an apartment with two of their girlfriends, a teenager, a cat named Tuck, a paralysis demon named Phage, and a computer with the latest version of Blender on it.

[fenmere]

This is our first proof copy of the End of the Tunnel!

We've already made a bunch of fixes and corrections to it and sent for another proof. There is a really good chance we're going to be able to release this printed book on July 31st, the same day we start publishing the web serial version of the story!

[fenmere]

The End of the Tunnel, by Ashwin Pember of the Inmara

What if being trans, autistic, and mad was OK, actually? (it is, but you know what we mean)

What if all the things that your headmates claimed to be were true?

What if you knew the location of alien technology that could reshape the surface of the Earth itself?

Would you use it? Or destroy it?

What if psychic powers were real but weird and kinda nerdy?

What if your headmate could actually make water boil faster?

What if you had a wormhole in your head?

What if you could escape but it meant leaving everyone behind?

What if you weren't human at all, but you kinda looked like one?

What if your friends believed you?

---

A web serial and novel, coming July 31, 2024 to http://www.sunspot.world/

[fenmere]

So.

Twenty-four years ago today, around this time of day, I sent all of our friends and family an email containing this (somewhat regretable) comic, here:

Shortly after that, we made a website for the series, and I updated it a couple times a week for several years.

If you read the first five comics, you might see some subtle themes of plurality, which we all thought was just a joke at the time, but also secretly wished was true.

Anyway, both Ian and Brenna were our systems most frequent frontrunners during our career as an illustrator and cartoonist.

I drew my last comic sometime in 2016-2017, I believe. Maybe 2018. It's there on the site and you can check the date.

We've moved on to writing novels.

We've written a lot of novels.

We're not nearly as prolific as Wildbow, mind you, but his work inspires us to just write every time we binge on it.

And somehow we've got 11 books done, and a handful nearly finished. And we don't see ourselves ever stopping while we're alive.

Maybe we'll go back to doing comics some day, but with prose you can tell more story in a shorter period of time. And that feels good.

Anyway, our latest book came out today, and you can order it or start reading it here:

http://www.sunspot.world/

[fenmere]

Characters of The Tunnel Apparati Diaries

Phage

( @ohthatphage )

Phage appears in all of our stories. And in our stories, as it is in our system, exactly what it is is kind of a mystery, even to it. But it only resides where it has been explicitly invited.

It seems to be a conscious manifestation of the fundemental processes of physics itself. Maybe entropy. Maybe whatever it is that makes entropy happen, or chooses how it happens.

In our stories, echoing how it seems to work in our system, it is capable of growing as a person and having a very detailed and nuanced personal life. But only for any very localized instance of itself. And any instance of itself that tries to connect with and use its greater powers will lose some degree of its memories and connections to what makes it a person.

It's a sliding scale. The larger the area of its influence, or the larger its effect, the less of a person it is. And the more of a person it is, the less power it can exert on the world.

In real life, it's stuck in our head and very much a person, and if it can inluence the flow of entropy it's only in deniable ways, such as effecting the roll of dice sometimes. But for our stories, we've amped up it's influence and abilities, because that’s more fun.

Even though it expressly insists that it isn't any sort of god or diety, it keeps playing the role of one. And one that is very active in the world.

And part of the whole point of that is that over the course of the stories, it is learning some valuable lessons and coming to conclusions that any actual god that might exist clearly hasn't come to.

Mainly that life is profoundly unfair to any living being, and that that should be actively changed. Unfortunately, it has a limited capacity to uplift life in the universe and must work slowly with those it encounters.

It's basically a parental figure that's doing the best it can after way too long being abusive.

And one of the ways it is trying to make amends is by leading the people of the Sunspot to make contact with other peoples and to facilitate mutually beneficial communication between them.

So, in the Tunnel Apparati Diaries, it has been exploring the Network of Tunnels (Ktletaccete ansibles), and found that someone in another Exodus Ship has been dropping Tunnel equipped probes off on planets that could develop civilizations. And Earth was one of them.

So, when Phage came to Earth, the nearest person it could successfully contact was a seven year old plural system (named Jeremy Schmidt at the time, but that’s their deadname and it only appears in supplemental material like this). They were a binary system at the time, twins who thought that one of them, the girl, was an imaginary friend.

They grew up to be Sarah and Goreth and transitioned almost as soon as they left home to go to college.

They invited Phage to join their system that night they'd encountered it, and it has been trying to help them survive their life ever since, while also vetting them and Earth for potential future contact with the Sunspot.

The Tunnel Aparati Diaries start when the first Ktletaccete comes over to visit.

While on Earth, Phage's abilities seem more limited than on the Sunspot, which scares it and makes it nervous, because it doesn't fully understand why.

It can still do some things, though.

Its powers have a range of only around a hundred meters now, for instance. And it can't really affect anyone who doesn't at least subconsciously consent to its actions.

But it can travel between complex systems, residing in chaos that is big enough to house its identity and memories. Humans are best for this.

And it can increase or decrease decay and the flow of energy in anything within its range, which results in a kind of telekinesis.

It also can perceive things no human could perceive, even with technological assistance.

And, it can move one end of the Tunnel from the matter that it is entangled with to a new Network, including the human psyche.

And so, for a number of possibly questionable reasons, it moved the Terran end of the Tunnel into Sarah and Goreth's brain, effectively making them a gateway system.

This did some important things. It made it so that anyone who came through the Tunnel would not enter the original probe, which is burried under the ground and which contains a tank full of construction nanites. In this regard, it was a securty precaution, to prevent Ktletaccete from other Exodus Ships from coming to Earth and having the power to do something bad.

But also, it means that anyone visiting would have Sarah and Goreth’s brain and their shared memories to function as a ready translation device for interacting with the rest of Earth. Which is what makes any sort of diplomatic mission possible at all.

Phage is smug about this decision, even though it also causes some problems.

Oh. And also, during the course of the Sunspot chronicles, Phage has had a child, named Ni'a (the chaos of life), who also exhibits its powers and abilities but has lived their life with their own physical body and has a much closer connection to mortal beings because of it.

Ni'a usually tries to smooth things over wherever Phages makes a bumbling error.

And Ni'a's existence taught Phage a critical thing: by examining how Ni'a came into existence and could be what they are, Phage discovered it could grant other people access to its powers by unlocking their connection to it.

And now it's trying to decide if it has an ethical obligation to do that for any lifeform it encounters. So far, it's restricting itself to linguistically capable beings that it can learn to talk to, so it can ask if they want the powers in the first place. And it's putting some thought into who it approaches first.

This is part of the reason it has attached itself to a plural system on Earth.

Members of a plurality tend to have more intimate experience with being interdependent, sharing a single body with others. Over time, it's easier to coach them to be mindful of imbalances of power and to consider the consequences of their own actions.

Well. At least, that seemed to be true of the mostly untraumatized systems it knew on the Sunspot. It's hard to find people on Earth who aren't deeply hurting and resentful of all sorts of things, even their own existence.

[fenmere]

Ok, we're going to start an editing pass on The End of the Tunnel today.

So, before we do that, let's introduce one of the cast!

Ashwin Pember

(aka 'ashwin minbäoni)

Ashwin is the narrator and actual author of the book. Which is to say, @ashwin-the-artless lead the cast in writing the book while also crafting a character that was a fictionalized self insert -- as we typically do for our books.

Ashwin’s blog is written in kayfabe, and can be considered canon and supplemtal to all of our storied. So, this post is about nem in character (not our headmate).

English name: Ashwin Pember

English pronouns: they/them, nem/nemself

Inmararräo name: 'ashwin minbäoni

Inmararräo pronoun: nem

gender: what's a gender?

Orientation: ace while on Earth (sexually attracted to other Ktletaccete, not humans - but also their hosts' human body is muddling things with dysphoria)

Background:

Ashwin was conceived some time after the Pembers originally hatched, getting nems identity and name from the hero of a story that their Caretaker read to them.

They were a member of the system throughout the events of the Sunspot Chronicles, but aren't named in any of those books. Then, when the lifespan of their vessel came to its natural end a couple hundred years after the events of Outsider, they played a large role in acting as nurse and custodian for the rest of their system.

Ashwin is one of the rare Ktletaccete who has not yet discovered their Art (a lifelong special interest or passion that neurotypical Ktletaccete develop in adolescence). After a full Ktletaccete life of roughly 450 Earth years and 90 Earth years more of living as an Ancestor (Crew) in the Networks of the Sunspot, nem is anything but inexperienced and unskilled, however.

They do have a tendency to feel as if nem is still a child because of this lack of Art, though.

So, when Phage (the character of @ohthatphage) started exploring the network of Tunnel Apparati that link the Exodus Ships together, and discovered a Tunnel on Earth, and called for volunteers to help it make contact with the people there, Ashwin was the first to stop forward.

It turns out that the first Earthlings that Phage encountered and chose as liaisons (Sarah and Goreth Ampersand) were plural. And they had plural friends (Erik and the Audreys), thanks to the tendancy of people of the same neurotype to find and cling to each other out of sympathy and solidarity.

Since Ashwin had been the member of a system and also had experience ushering nems younger headmates into the world and culture of Ancestry on the Sunspot, they were an easy choice for Phage and the Council to approve as ambassador to Earth.

But it turns out that by going through the Tunnel to Earth, Ashwin has projected their consciousness into the psyche and system of Sarah and Goreth, and must now adapt to human neurology. This has the benefit of bypassing the need to translate English, once Ashwin's presence has grown enough to access the linguistic centers of their brain, but some things still don't fit. And Ashwin is left with physical dysphoria whenever they front alone.

So, it takes them a few weeks to get to the point where they can front and talk to people, and that’s where their book starts.

They have a goal, too. Nem isn't just on Earth to try to find their Art and get to know humans. There's a critical diplomatic mission to fulfill.

The reason there was a Tunnel Apparatus on Earth in the first place is that 22 million years ago, one of the Sunspot’s ancestor ships was traveling through Earth's region of the Milky Way and dropping probes onto planets that looked like they might develop civilizations. The motives of this ship are unknown (it no longer exists to be asked -- something happened to it). But the probe not only has a Tunnel Apparatus on it, but also a tank of construction nanites (part of how it remained functional for so long).

Those nanites pose a risk to Earth. They're programmed to only respond to commands from Earthlings. No Ktletaccete or anyone else can take them away from Earth. But the first Earthlings to learn how to command them or how to replicate them will have the power to transform Earth into their own vision, or reduce it to grey goo.

Ashwin's job is to help Phage vet and train a group of Earthlings to make the right decision before someone makes a terminally bad one.

Sarah, Goreth, and their friends just might be those Earthlings.

[fenmere]

The End of the Tunnel - book one of The Tunnel Apparati Diaries

We are currently on track to release this book on July 31, 2024. (with a backup release date is 08/24/2024, if it gets delayed)

So now we're going to talk about what we've written, what we love about it, where we're at in the editing process, and why we wrote it!

---

While we've been writing the Sunspot Chronicles, which takes place on a generational starship that has never been anywhere in the universe remotely near Earth and is full of nobody human, we've been developing a kind of kayfabe in which the chronicles have been translated and localized to early 21st century American English. And we've always kind of wanted to write the story behind that kayfabe: how did the Sunspot Chronicles get to Earth?

The Tunnel Apparati Diaries answers that.

This is a sequel series to the Sunspot Chronicles. It takes place nearly five Earth centuries after Systems Out!. However, we think you can have a good experience reading it first. And even though the Sunspot Chronicles isn't quite done yet, what is published is more than enough to set up this series if you want to read them in chronological order.

But it also tries to do something else we think is really important. And we think we're getting it done quite well, too.

It portrays some of the weirdest kinds of plurality that humans do experience, openly and honestly, showing even how it sometimes but not always relates to psychosis (treating psychosis as something also worthy of respect on its own) -- and then does this by taking a major Hollywood trope and turning it on its head to end it right for once.

It is unapologetically a science fiction story.

It's not a psychological thriller with science fiction hallucinations and delusions that could be real or could be metaphor, and it doesn't end with the question of what is real left open for interpretation. Well, not quite.

There is definitely nuance and possibly some implied intrigue, and some question about what has actually happened within the science fiction setting of the story.

But, while there is some tension about questioning whether the humans are really experiencing contact from an alien civilization, that's used as a setup for the story development, and a framework to examine various different ways that people can perform reality checks and why they might want to do so. It's a theme, not the plot itself. And the question is answered definitively - there are psychic aliens on Earth now.

The first book, the End of the Tunnel, is the preceding incident for the series, while the following books provide rising action and a set of very personal climaxes for two of the characters.

It also takes the nigh magical technologically assisted transhumanism of the Sunspot Chronicles and contrasts it with the bitter restrictions of Earth and the queer joy that pockets of openly trans people get to experience by simply being themselves wherever it is safe to do so.

And it poses the question: If you could leave your human body behind for something you could shape into whatever you needed to be, but at the risk of destroying the world, would you be tempted?

And a whole bunch of other questions that logically follow that as the story develops.

Honestly, we're a little scared of it all. We're taking some risks with these stories, and haven't been able to find all the help editing them that we'd really like. But we're doing what we can, and rushing it forward now to get it all out by the end of the year.

The first book has been read by two people, and we've taken their advice to improve it. We've got a lot of polishing to do on it to make the edits flow seamlessly without disrupting the continuity, but it definitely reads better than it did before. It has had two sensitivity readers that have given us their thumbs up, too.

But, we're pretty sure that the work we have to do on it can be done by our first deadline, unless the month goes badly.

So, our goal is to release the full text as a printed paperback via lulu.com, and to release the online version chapter by chapter, free to read, on our website, starting July 31st. Probably two chapters a week. Maybe faster.

Then, when the online copy is done being released, hopefully the second book will be ready to be published. And then the third one after that!

You'll be able to read them, or order hardcopy books, from here:

We'll try to do some more personal posts about the cast, to introduce you to them, in the days leading up to July 31st.

[fenmere]

Self induced culture shock

excerpt from chapter six of our third book of the Tunnel Apparati Diaries, the Dragon in the Dining Room, by Sarah Ampersand of the Inmara (due to be released in December)

---

I pause at the sliding glass back door, standing on the porch with our cloak draped over our left arm, hat jauntily tossed back up onto our head, cane in right hand.

And there’s our reflection, ghostly imposed over the darker interior where relatives are conversing jovially.

What I see is something that is no longer familiar to me. Not that our body ever really was.

I see a tall, fat woman with a side cut. Which is fine. That’s what we want the world to see. But it’s not me. Not any more.

It really, honestly has nothing to do with being fat or intersex or trans, or any of that. It’s the little details in the face, the hands, the hair, some of the proportions. This body does not even look related to me. In any way.

I exist in two places now, as do Goreth and everyone else in our system. Here, on Earth. And thousands of millions of lightyears away, on the Sunspot. And on the Sunspot, we are Network entities that can choose the shapes of our own forms.

Transition has been important and lifesaving and a huge relief. But the shape I see in a reflection on the Sunspot is more me than my body has ever been. And every night, I reconnect with myself to swap and merge memories, so that I can continue to live as myself in both places at once.

If I think about what that’s like in terms of what my consciousness is and how I remember experiencing it, it gets confusing. It would be much scarier if Phage hadn’t gifted me with its type of existence in the universe. There’s something about no longer having a ‘ligament of separateness’ that makes it all OK.

Except that less than twelve hours ago, I remember traveling with Goreth via Network channel to the temple of Mau Rro where the Tunnel Apparatus is kept on the Sunspot with the memory of Ktletaccete food on my pallet, and thinking today would be a bit of a shock.

And so it is.

These people I see on the other side of the glass are so fleeting.

[fenmere]

Out of context dialog:

“You and your multiple consensus realities,” Brock snarked.

“I will fucking lecture you again,” Erik snapped back, lightly. “You know you want me to.”

“Hypeshare it, shortstack!”

“Later.”