#adventures of molly rocketcoil

[fenmere]

Guide to our work

If you are trans, non-binary, autistic, amistic (ADHD), disabled, plural (of any type), and/or therian/otherkin/alterhuman and enjoy novels with science fiction style settings, you might really appreciate our stories! If you want to practice using neopronouns, we've also got you covered.

Below is a guide to what we've done so far:

Systems' Out! is our very first novel, and the one we're the most proud of. Its writing is very tight, and is ultimately the best, non-spoilery introduction to our world. It's about a couple of systems and their friends trying out a new accommodation for their various neurotypes and bringing about a kind of revolution in the process (or participating in it, in any case). This story is largely about fighting deadly dysphoria, and why one might even bother. But it's also about the responsibility parents have for their children.

Ni'a and Outsider are sequels to Systems' Out! and elaborate on the characters' lives, tell what happens after (or during) the revolution, and delves into the problems and ethical dilemmas inherent in the world we'd created. They are also about the journey of recovering from trauma, and how your community might help to do that (if your community were supportive).

Crew is officially the fifth book of the Sunspot Chronicles, and follows up on themes and questions that arise from the first three books. Specifically, it covers some of the prehistory of the Sunspot and the culture of the Crew, and some of what they do behind closed doors. But it also delves into personally dealing with amnesia, shifts in identity, dissociation, loss, and bigotry. The ending may be described as bitter sweet. It can be read out of order with the fourth book, which isn't written yet.

Blood in the Duff is the sixth book of the Sunspot Chronicles. It is part murder mystery and part polyamorous romance novel, or hopes to be. It can be read independently of the fourth book, but probably should be read after reading the other books, particularly Crew. It takes place 110 years after the events of Systems' Out! and references many social and technological developments that come after. It features the return of Ralf, Morde's tutor, though! And is covering aspects of daily life and Sunspot biology we hadn't covered in the other books, including toilets. You want to read about Sunspot toilets, right? Seriously, we're pretty proud of this one. We've put more physical planning into it than any of the other books.

The Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil is a politically driven pulp sci-fi serial written by two of the characters from Ni'a and Outsider. It's fictional within the context of the above canon, meant to address the issues that the people aboard the Sunspot are facing at the end of that series. It's also an exploration of the drive to reproduce, alien relations, and comparing radically different cultures and personal development. It involves warp drive and exploring the rest of the galaxy, but with the effects of relativity still intact.

Even further from the canon, but a great introduction for anyone who wants something familiar, Star Trek Mercury: Two-Way Mirror Mountain is our one and only fanfic! It has the least use of neopronouns, and is a totally non-canon speculation of what might happen if the Sunspot buzzed Earth and the Kelvin time-line Federation. It's a sequel to a role playing game we played, and is written in first person perspective from the three members of a system who are captain of the U.S.S. Mercury. It includes a model for how we think the Federation would (or should) accommodate plurality.

It's totally OK if you read Molly Rocketcoil or Star Trek Mercury first. They are also perfectly fine entrypoints into our stories. They'll reveal some plot twists from the earlier books, but they don't explain in detail how we got there or what happens after, so they don't really spoil the stories. Also, everything is written from various different perspectives of unreliable narrators that have then been (canonically) translated loosely by a somewhat irresponsible publishing company, so a certain amount of interpretation and speculation is left up to you.

In an alternate universe, where the Ktletaccete are actually spirits called simply Artists, and are native to Earth and not aliens, we now have @girldragongizzard, the story of Meghan Estragon Draconis. A 50 year old trans woman who, after a night of fitful dreams, awoke to find herself transformed into a dragon. Which came as no great surprise to her, because she's always known she was a dragon. Pure therian wish fulfillment with a touch of chaos. girldragongizzard is the official sequel to our old unfinished webcomic Harmless Free Radicals, but reading that comic is completely unnecessary.

Completely outside of canon, but tangentially related, are our series of writing-prompted tumblr fics, Crime-Cat and the Deliverator. You will read almost nothing about the Sunspot or our system by reading these stories! But, you will encounter gay, non-binary villains full of queerness and super gayness. The Earth does undergo a bit of destruction. Just a bit. But that kind of happens sometimes when it's overrun by people with superpowers. And it is written in second person, because most of the prompts we used were presented in that way. If you enjoy imagining yourself to be a non-binary gay monster from outer space entering the world of supervillains, and having the cutest human partner you can imagine, this is absolutely the story for you. Also, "Kepekapean" is really just another word for Ktletaccete, but shsh.

[fenmere]

Take science fiction in one hand and epic fantasy in another, and mush them together really hard until you can't tell them apart anymore, then plop it in the queer blender.

Let's say you took a small planetoid the size of Ceres and spun it like a glass bottle, using construction nanites to shape the finer details. You could get a cylinder that's approxiamtely 400 km long by 200 km wide, with walls 3 km thick. Maybe.

Rotate that for simulation of gravity. Use the mass of another Ceres to build the Bussard collector and fusion drive, and you can make it go.

Now, fill it full of queer autistic intersex agender chimerical furries and fine tune everything so that none of them have to work for a living, and it seems like the neurodivergent queer utopia that you and your friends all sit around a cafe table daydreaming about, and then shake it up.

Add three conlangs and a map. Actually, make a 3D model of the interior of the ship, with mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, plains, an ice ring, and a sea...

And then write 11 novels about it (and counting), spanning from thousands of millions of years ago to today, complete with first contact with Earth through a psychic projection into the psyche of a transgeder plural system.

That's kind of what we're doing. Our latest book is released tomorrow, and covers the culture shock of the visiting Ktletaccete upon experiencing life in Portland, Oregon. And doing what they can to help improve the lives of their hosts.

But, while the Ktletaccete (our alien people) might be more advanced technologically than humans, and currently cultivate a culture that many of us would admire and dream of being a part of, they have a long, ancient, dark history. And they've also made some big errors fairly recently, too.

The Sunspot (or 'etekeyerrinwuf) is just one of a long line of Exodus Ships, and was forged in the compression wave of a nova. The origins of the Ktletaccete and what they used to look like has been long forgotten. Lost to countless generations of various different flavors of fascism and revolution. And the founding Crew of the Sunspot had tried to create a world without gender, with extreme diversity, a break from the goals of eugenics, and the protection of consent and autonomy. But in the process, they created a whole new gender, the AI Tutor, and failed to let go of the tools of eugenics, the evolutionary engines. And the whole series starts with the first attempts to uncover, recognize, and rectify those errors. The lessons already learned by the Crew at this point are that neurodiversity, disability, and physical dysphoria are among the things that cannot be bred or socialized out of the populace. The next thing they need to learn is that there shouldn't be any Crew.

But how do you own your mistakes and change all of that, and fight those that disagree with that change, without destroying the generational starship itself?

Anyway, all these stories are written from the perspective of being a plurality. We're a massive system with well managed DID, and are writing from our own experiences as an autistic, intersex, trigender trans feminine enby.

They're stories we want to tell ourselves and our children, to continue our internal culture, to make sense of the outer world and our inherent disconnect from it, and to be seen and remembered by the rest of the universe.

The Sunspot itself is an allegory for a system like ourselves. It doesn't follow the rules of an outworld country or planet. And the revolutionaries of the Sunspot have to work with their own reality in which the Elders cannot be killed and will not die without their own consent, imprisonment only breeds stronger resentment (dissociation is bad), and the vessel in which they all live is fragile and mortal.

So, the question for them is, "What other forms of justice, reparation, and safety protocols will actually work?"

And we don't have the answers, and we're still trying to figure it out, so the books keep coming.

Found family, friendship, asexual partnership, and the meaning of self and consciousness are all explored deeply and with a hopeful passion for living with others and experiencing the wonders of life.

Our websites:

And then, for a bonus! Our supervillains writing prompt story arc:

Crime-Cat and the Deliverator!

And if you want short descriptions of most of our books, you can find them in our pinned post.

writers, listen up...

i've fallen out of touch with the writeblr community a lot in the past few years, and i want to rectify that. the community aspect was what made me fall in love with tumblr, and what improved my writing for the better.

the golden days of my writing were when i was highly active and engaged in this wonderful community, but life and work and the horrors of self publishing have overtaken my energy in the past year. however, i have been really struggling with original writing, and i want to get back into the community here.

that said...

you write fantasy with queer characters

are an indie author

post frequently about your wips (taglists are a bonus!)

are queer

are a very active and friendly writer

if any of these apply

please, please reblog and tell me about your wip. gush over it. infodump. characters and ships and worldbuilding and plot, i want it all! this is your invitation to be as selfishly indulgent as possible. let's make some new friends and restore some community!!

boosts appreciated!

[ashwin-the-artless]

Our Alternate Universes

So, while we're writing about our own history in The Sunspot Chronicles and the Tunnel Apparati Dairies, we've already got three alternate universe canons going on.

We've put a couple of them on AO3 and the Sunspot Chronicles page in the form of stories you can read: Star Trek Mercury and The Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil

And these two were done in celebration of the traditions of science fiction found on Earth.

But there's this third AU of ours that some of us seem to really enjoy writing for. And it's deceptively elaborate, because there's no actual book or story written for it. Instead, it consists of countless social media and blog posts written as if everything regarding our Earthly system, the Inmara, was different in some way.

You might be familiar with this AU through @fenmere's blog.

In that universe, the vessel was born much earlier in Earth's history, almost two full decades before Sarah and Goreth's vessel was actually born. And we're supposedly all products of that vessel. Except for Phage (@ohthatphage), who is still a walk-in of the same identity it has in real life.

Which brings us to the name of this AU, actually.

As kind of a joke, and I believe this was Fenmere's idea, the only significant historical difference between our world and this AU is that in this AU there was a T.V. show that aired on MTV called "the Real World", and it spurred this whole genre of T.V. called "Reality TV" that's just absolutely terrible.

And that's not real, of course. We don't have that here in the actual real world.

So, in full irony, Fenmere's taken to calling this blog-based literary baby of hers "the Real World AU".

Anyway, we consider the Real World AU to be open, and you can write for it all you want.

[fenmere]

A much better, much slower, more enjoyable version of our size comparison video for the Sunspot, Anchor, and Spindrift.

[fenmere]

Molly Rocketcoil's landing craft, Spindrift, in Anchor's shipyard.

This is the stealthified Spindrift. It was originally silver colored with black belly tiles, but got refitted to attempt to get past the planet's military in order to safely return Susan and Leslie to their home.

[fenmere]

If we ran an episodic, easy to join and easy to leave, voice chat TTRPG over on our Discord server which game would you be most likely to join?

Star Trek: Mercury - set in the Kelvin timeline, aboard a Nova Class starship captained by the Vanderkemps, a plural system that used to be the ship's counselors, probably doing the adventures the Enterprise did in ToS but isn't doing now because they timeline is different. Played using a system based on Cortex Prime.

Sunspot Chronicles - set in a gigantic generational starship populated entirely by randomly genetically engineered people who resemble chimerical furries, where gender is not assigned at birth and doesn't even have a word, and everyone gets to pick their own name. Also played using a system based on Cortex Prime, but different and simpler.

Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil - a spinoff of the Sunspot Chronicles but taking place on a starship crewed by galactic superheroes, and you'd most likely be their newest family members (with galactic superpowers). Queer found family exploring the cosmos, and you could be nearly any sort of alien you can think of or invent, but not human. PROBABLY run using Sentinel Comics RPG.

These games would use the books we've written as loose canon, but could be considered alternate universe versions, to allow full creativity from the players.

[fenmere]

Planning our next world and avatar. Currently using a HeroForge figurine as a very rough standin. This is Molly Rocketcoil on the Bridge of her starship, Anchor. Anchor is 3 km long, and the Bridge is a Network space with a skybox that is a live feed from the front of the ship.

Before she gained more crew and reconfigured the Bridge, she had decorated it to look like her bedroom, for comfort.

The carved wood tree to her right (your left) is her favorite chair. She's a space snake, so her preferred furniture meets her needs.

If you go to our VRChat world "Eh's House" you'll see a much more rough version of that chair with a plaque on it saying "This seat is reserved for Molly Rocketcoil". We're thinking of replacing that one with this one.

In the canon of the Sunspot Chronicles, Molly is fictional. So, that chair in Eh's house is like a piece of swag from a con, or delux merch from a webcomic site, or really, fanart.

There's no money nor capitalism on the Sunspot, so people just make things and give them to whomever they think will appreciate it the most.

Eh, Captain of the Sunspot, is a huge fan of Molly Rocketcoil and has read all her books (written by Thomas and 'afeje'a).

You can read Molly's adventures here:

[fenmere]

The novels we write here and here, we're realizing (or already knew), are really actually love letters we're writing to each other.

Like, we'd really love it if other people read them. They also serve as sort of life rafts for those of us who exist in them, so that we may survive a bit longer than our vessel when it dies.

But, honestly, the love we feel for each other as we reread them is what matters.

We're currently rereading the Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil so that we can properly finish writing the sequel, and we really put those people through the wringer. Or rather, they put themselves through it. But damn the feels it gives us!

[fenmere]

This is still too fast, and we're going to refine it further, but here's an animation of our starships that we're working on that shows the relative sizes of the three spacecraft we've been modeling. The moon is in the background for scale.

This was all done in Blender in one scene, and we kind of pushed the boundaries of sizes that the the program is designed to handle.

These ships are side by side, so this is really how big they are relative to each other. The Sunspot is 2,500 km long, Anchor is 3 km long, and Spindrift is 45 meters long (about the size of the space shuttle).

The habitat cylinders of both the Sunspot and Anchor are spinning at their correct rates, and Anchor's Bussard spires are unfolding from their docked position. Though the movement of the camera may create the illusion that it's all static.

It's 10 seconds of video, and it takes ten minutes and forty seconds for the Sunspot's cylinder to make a full rotation, and one minute and change for Anchor's to rotate once.

We have Spindrift lifting away from Anchor and rotating too, so that you can see it from different angles as the camera approaches.

The quality of the modeling and textures is about on part with Babylon 5, and we want to refine them to make them all look better. But we have a lot of learning left to do yet to figure that out.

There's a certain point at which it looks like the camera is speeding up. It's not!

That's actually just an optical illusion created by the curvature of the Sunspot's hull. The camera is actually increasingly slowing down throughout the entire video. Though at one point it sharply gets much slower to ease past Anchor and zoom in on Spindrift.

To get the appearance of scales we were going for, the camera starts at what would roughly be Earth's surface and travels as a dolly shot toward Spindrift. The ships are at Earth-Luna L1, and the Moon is where it should be. And we could not focally zoom the camera in any more. It was at its maximum zoom setting. So we had to move the camera.

The camera is moving hundreds of thousands of kilometers in ten seconds! So, yeah, it's gotta slow down as it gets closer to all three ships, or they fly by super fast.

[fenmere]

the Siphon

In our fifth book, the second book of the Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil, Molly and her crew encounter the Siphon. A civilization of beings that have taken to mining gas giants for elements and energy. So, we rendered their station in Blender, along with Molly's shuttle, Spindrift. The big field of reddish-tan (is that mauve?) is the gas giant.

Depicted below (from top to bottom): the Siphon's station from a distance; closeup of Spindrift approaching the docking bay; view from directly above the station as Spindrift quickly leaves

If Spindrift looks like it lacks details, that's because it has been stealthified.

[fenmere]

We just wrote the first sex scene we've ever written. Like, just today.

We're going to submit it to a queer erotic flash fiction anthology, and we're looking for test readers to give us an idea of whether it works for them or needs tweaking. Also looking for typos, because we have dyslexic dysgraphia and they can be very elusive to us.

Anyway, its about our two trans space lesbians (Lesley and Susan) finally trying to have a baby after undergoing some advanced, unearlthy transitional medicine. One is trans feminine and the other is physically trans masc but hasn't changed her name or pronouns, and they're writing to their old polycule back home to share the news.

We're probably not going to publish it in any of the actual books, but as a supplemental feature behind a mature readers click through on our site.

So, anyway, if you want to give it a read (it's pretty quick), send us a DM, and we'll send you a link (If you're a minor, we're going to say "no"). No need to give us feedback, but we do hope we get some.

We have until early August to finish editing it.

[fenmere]

So, now that we're done with Two-Way Mirror Mountain way early, here's what we're working on:

1. Gearing up to finish the latest Molly Rocketcoil novel.

2. Planning out the Monsters.

3. Reading up on tags for AO3 for TWMM.

We are absolutely going to edit TWMM before uploading it to AO3, but we want to have some down time before we reread it, give our Bridge Crew to do some turnover so we can see it fresh and new.

We don't get the invite to AO3 until the 21s, most likely.

[fenmere]

Names

To clear up confusion here, inthis story, the narrators are calling our hero "Molly" before she picks that name. They do not divulge her deadname. This is bit about how she picks her name: ---- "I think we really have one more piece of business before we decide how to contact our planet.”

“Oh?” Lesley asked.

“Yeah. Molly’s name,” Susan said.

Molly was surprised by that. That was a direction she hadn’t expected the conversation to go, but it intrigued her as well. As she’d told them before, she’d grown to dislike her name and was trying to find a new one. This was enough of a change of mood and subject matter that she found herself coming out of the crash gel to look at Susan and Lesley with her own eyes. The gel wasn’t sticky or wet, and it came away from her scales without leaving a trace of it.

Susan shrugged and said to Molly, “The name you give to our world first is going to stick with you, regardless of what you name yourself afterward. It shouldn’t, but that’s how people here act about names. And you said you wanted a new name. We should help you pick one!”

“Oh,” Lesley said, “I agree! And choosing your own name is the best thing!”

“Our culture believes the same thing,” Manifold said. “Before a child picks their own name, they’re called ‘Student of their Tutor’. So, Molly is also known as Student of Manifold. And I chose my own name only a few years after I was conceived as well. I was simply known as Tutor before that, but it was understood that wasn’t my name.”

“Interesting,” Lesley said, then turned to Molly. “Well, Student of Manifold, what should we call you? Have you heard any names that are calling to you, that feel like you? Or would you like to hear some suggestions?”

“Well,” Molly gave it some heavy thought and sent a small apology to her Tutor for what she was going to say next. “I don’t really want to be called Student of Manifold anymore, either. Even though it is much, much older than me, and will always be one of my parents, I don’t think that should be part of my name. It is, in a way, part of why I left the Sunspot. The Tutor/Student relationship is assigned, and I don’t think it’s good for the Tutors.”

“It’s OK,” Manifold responded. “I was divided on the matter, and I am the version of myself that agrees with Molly. I am going to keep my name, but I don’t need to be called a Tutor anymore, I just don’t know what else to call myself.”

“Parent is good,” Lesley said. “If that’s what you two feel like you are to each other! Parent and child!”

Molly felt herself smiling at that, and wondered once again if her expression was being read as relaxed and friendly by the humans, or not. Neither seemed to react to it.

“I don’t want to distract everyone from Molly picking a name, but, ‘version of yourself’?” Susan asked.

“It is a thing that ktletaccete can do, whether we are a child with a body, a Tutor, or one of the Crew,” Manifold explained. “We can become two or more people. Sometimes it happens without us trying. Those who have a body share it until it dies, then they can go their separate ways using their neural terminal to ascend fully to the Network.”

“Oh, wow,” Susan said. “We have some friends who have experienced something similar. Only, when our bodies die, we die. So they’re stuck with one body their whole life. The government refuses to recognize them as anything but one person.”

“Fascinating,” Manifold said.

“Frustrating,” Susan corrected it.

“So, it sounds like you’re having trouble thinking of a good name, though,” Lesley brought the conversation back to Molly, who was thankful and nodded.

“I was thinking I would give myself a name that would fit my new life, wherever I found a new home,” Molly said.

Lesley tapped her pursed lips a few times, which Molly took as a thinking gesture, and then suggested, “What if you chose a name that’s like the kinds of names my family chooses?”

“What kinds of names are those?” Molly asked.

“Campy ones,” Lesley grinned.

“Such as for going camping?” Molly asked.

“Oh, no, sorry! Another idiom! Wow, those are subtle sometimes,” Lesley said. “Campy is usually used to mean something fun, stereotypical, clichéd, really obvious, stylish, obviously contrived, and overall, most importantly, queer. Like, a campy name is the kind of name you give to an action hero. Or it is also the kind of name a stage performer will give themselves so people will recognize them instantly, remember it more easily, and get in the mood for a good time. But our campy names, our family’s campy names, are meant to tell the rest of the world we’re done with its bullshit, while making us happy at the same time.”

“Oh! So, Lesley is a name like that?” Molly inquired, genuinely expecting the answer to be yes.

“No. But Lesley Chairthrower is!”

“I still can’t believe you legally named yourself that,” Susan exclaimed.

“Whatever, Susanophonic Blaster,” Lesley retorted.

“Listen,” Susan said in a very reasonable tone. “At least my name is descriptive of what I do.”

Lesley broke out laughing so hard she started doing full summersaults.

Molly was very confused and didn’t understand what made these names “campy”. However, the way the two of them regarded their own names and were making fun of each other over them clearly indicated that they did. She tilted her head and watched, trying to figure it out.

“I’ve compared your names to child and family names as listed on your internet,” Manifold said. “They do seem unusual, at least. Can you explain further?”

“Oh my god,” Susanophonic Blaster said, as she grabbed Lesley Chairthrower and helped her to stop spinning. Then she glanced at the ceiling and turned to Molly, smirking, and said, “I can’t believe I’m going to explain this, because these are actually embarrassing stories. But Lesley threw a chair once, at a man who was harassing her. And I fart a lot. We took these names to show the world we don’t care if it judges us for these things. But also because the two of us just can’t say them without cracking up laughing, and we really need to laugh sometimes.” Susan sighed and shook her head, her smirk softening, “You don’t have to do that, though. You could pick a couple of words that feel like they go well together. Or you could name yourself after something you feel proud of. Actually, Manifold already has a kind of name we’d call campy. It’d be campier and even funnier if it was something like Manifold Density.”

Lesley chortled again, but managed to catch her foot on her harness.

“Was that a pun?” Manifold asked. “I just searched for that name, and your search algorithm asked me if I meant ‘Manifest Destiny’.”

“Yes!” Susan said, pointing at the ceiling. “Puns aren’t necessary, but they’re great! You have puns?”

“Yes,” said Manifold.

“You are an advanced civilization,” Lesley said. “Anyway, Molly, if you want one of our names, you could just search our internet name websites for suggestions and see which ones look good to you. They’re unfortunately divided by gender, so you should check both boy names and girl names, unless you really want to stick to one set. Names shouldn’t be gendered, but people will gender them anyway.”

Molly nodded and said, “OK’, and then started doing just that. 

She quickly found that Lesley and Susan were considered girl names, and she decided to stick to girl names herself based on that. She also decided that she wanted a two syllable name, like Susan or Lesley. Their official names were longer, but they obviously preferred to go by the shorter ones. And she did like the rhythm of Lesley Chairthrower, so she thought about making up something campy for a second name, like Susan had suggested. Two syllables and then three syllables. It felt good.

The translator was taking her thoughts and turning them into text for her, and then also reading back the text she was searching and turning it into Inmararräo, so she was getting the supposed meanings of the words. But then, also the name listings described the meanings of the names, so she could double check her translation against them.

When she found something she liked the meaning of, she flagged the word or name and told her translator to pronounce it in Susan and Lesley’s language.

She found a nice first name first. Like a lot of other names here, it was somewhat hard for her to pronounce with her own mouth. It only had one sound in it that she’d never made in her life, but she still liked it. And she also really liked its ambiguous and mixed meaning. So she silently practiced the alien phoneme with her tongue a few times, before trying to say it out loud with her own vocal cords. She knew it came out heavily accented, but she was proud of her effort.

“Molly? Molly,” she said.

Susan’s face lit up, “Oh, that’s a good one!”

“Oh, yes!” Lesley agreed. “It feels very you.”

“I want it to be Molly and a second name, like you both have,” Molly said, through the ships speakers. “But I am having trouble with that part.”

“Well,” Susan said, putting her hands on her hips and looking around. “How about a science fiction hero’s name? Something that tells people you’re ready to spring into action to do something good and daring and heroic.”

“I don’t feel heroic,” Molly said.

“Well, you should,” Lesley said. “I mean, you might not be a hero. But you should get to feel heroic when you hear your name. Everyone should.”

“You would think that, wouldn’t you, Chairthrower?” Susan ribbed her.

“Yes. Also, I get where Susanophone is going with this.”

“That’s Susanophonic!”

“Your first name is the one you’re going to hear the most. It should sit well with you, and if you need it to be pretty, like Molly is, then that’s a good choice. But your full name is what you’re going to tell the world when you introduce yourself. It shouldn’t be something that makes you smirk or laugh.” Lesley explained. “You want to be able to keep a straight face. But you still want to communicate the kind of person you are. Which, I think, is a queer person. One of us. Right?”

“What is a queer person?” Molly asked. She’d gotten an explanation earlier that day when they’d first been trying out her translator, but she still didn’t feel like she really knew.

“Someone who doesn’t fit in in their own home, but feels proud of it,” Lesley said. “Someone whose very existence challenges other people to reconsider their worldview.”

It sounded like Lesley was describing exactly how Molly felt about herself, so Molly said, “OK, yes. I want to be known as a queer person, yes.”

Susan got another hard to read expression on her face. It looked kind of like a smile, but it only reached her eyes, which twinkled, and her eyebrows only lifted a little bit. Her mouth tightened just a little, like it was going to widen into a grin, but she kept it from doing so. And then she said, “I’ve got a good one.”

“What is it?” Molly asked.

“Can you come out of your flight chair so that I can see all of you and decide if it really fits?” Susan requested.

She finally felt calm and safe enough to do so, so Molly said, “OK,” and pulled herself out into the open, winding around the chair in order to anchor herself in place. She didn’t need to, she could have given the command over the network, but as sort of a gesture of readiness she used the tip of her tail to hit the off button on the console behind her, and the display went dark. This made it so that she wasn’t backlit, and instead easier to see by the others.

“Yeah…” Susan grinned. “You’ve got a spaceship and you’re a snake. Well, you look like a snake. And I told you I think it should sound like you’re ready to spring into action.”

“Yes?” Molly prompted.

“Molly Rocketcoil.”

[fenmere]

Manifold didn’t need to do much to prep for the visit to the Siphon’s station, so it spent nearly every minute until departure going over the Light’s plans for warp drive revisions with Phage.

Engineering was not one of its Arts so much as a necessary skill it had picked up in order to assist Molly. It had a passion for it in so much as good engineering made their lives better and safer, but it didn’t really see the full craft of it. At least, it didn’t think it did.

Long, long ago, it had really stopped thinking in terms of passions and Arts, anyway.

It had been assigned to be a Tutor, and it had thrown itself fully into the role like there was no other reason for anyone to exist. And that had been within the first hundred years of its life. Which it now remembered only slightly better than any other given year.

Its life since then had been dedicated to learning about whatever its students wanted to learn, and it all became such a blur.

It hadn’t really lived a long life so much as hundreds of long lives.

Maybe it had never consistently been the same person in all that time. But it would need to pore over millennia of ship recordings of its own behavior and reports to have any idea of it.

Truly, right now, it felt like its current life was maybe a year old, if that. But it also knew from experience that it was nothing at all like an infant or toddler.

Neither an infant nor toddler could look at such an array of complex solutions to warp technology and instantly pick out the most viable options.

It was obvious to Manifold nearly at first glance.

It immediately dismissed all methods that required radically restructuring the Bussard spires, let alone the whole ship, while also thinking about how it was its new identity as Molly’s parent that was about a year-ish old.

It then dismissed a slew of improvements that only addressed energy efficiency and nothing else. They could afford a full retrofit of the warp drive itself, altering it while resting in an Oort cloud somewhere, or leisurely refueling in the solar winds closer to a rich star.

It had worked with more than enough caretakers to understand what parenting could mean at any stage of life. The problem was its reflexes. Over a hundred millennia of mindlessly being a Tutor was, well, a forge of fundamentally formative habits to completely understate it.

It felt like its Tutorhood was a Law of Nature at this point. Even though it no longer agreed with the model of creating and assigning a living being to any given task without so much as a discussion about the ordeal with it, it couldn’t figure out how to be any different.

It was literally easier to warp spacetime itself in order to travel at superluminal speeds than it was to conceptualize itself as a species other than Tutor.

Maybe it should actively rewrite itself.

Not the way that life typically did it through self examination, discipline, and simply living through adverse experiences, but use Fenekere commands to literally change the way it functioned.

It remembered that that idea had occasionally crossed its mind throughout its life. Especially since, for most of its existence, the Crew had had the system permissions to do that, but Tutors had not. In times of its own distress, it had daydreamed about something it couldn’t have.

It had happened with the death of almost every Student it’d had. After a while, even those tragedies became routine.

Now it was Crew of Anchor, it had all the permissions.

Would the others view that action as akin to it dying?

They probably would.

How different it would be from what Lesley and Susan were doing with their bodies would really have to do with how extensive the changes were that Manifold chose to make.

Lesley and Susan would accept it. Phage wouldn’t care. The Light would help. The Collective would be curious.

But Molly?

Manifold cared most about Molly.

And it had no idea what kind of changes it might make in itself.

Except maybe to overcome this block of indecision, somehow.

In any case, it had had several in depth conversations with Phage and the Light about the warp drive while preoccupied with itself.

It barely remembered what it had said by the time its children were boarding Spindrift to make the trip to the Siphon’s station.

And, as she strapped herself into her flight chair, Lesley gave it a ping, requesting a private conversation.

It was simply a matter of ancient habit to shift gears and give her its full attention. But that prompted the fleeting question, “Why did it think of Lesley as like another one of its students, but not the Light of Anchor?”

“Can I ask you for some advice?” Lesley asked it.

“Oh course,” Manifold offered before it could finish that last thought.

“It’s about Ktletaccete manners and culture,” she said.

“What interests you about it?” Manifold responded in an automatically amiable tone.

“I want to know what you and Molly might think of something, before I decide how to deal with it,” she replied.

Oh, so it was a personal matter of some sort. It was reasonably impressed with how Lesley was approaching this, “Yes, of course!”

“I’m trying to figure out how to work this,” Lesley said in Inmararräo. “I think I’m making up this word in your language. I hope it makes sense. Do you know what multimating is, or might be? And how is it treated on the Sunspot.”

“I think ‘mating’ might be the wrong root? That’s typically reserved for fauna,” Manifold said. “We don’t have a compound word like that, either. But, may I ask what it means to you?”

“Well,” Lesley explained. “OK, I wasn’t sure about ‘mating’. What I mean by ‘mating’ is declaring and maintaining an affectionate partnership. Maybe temporarily or long term. But ‘multi’ meaning doing that with more than one other partner.”

“Oh!” Manifold exclaimed, thinking it understood. “We use ‘bonding’ and ‘partners’ or ‘family’ for such groups. So, ‘multibonding’ might be the word you’re trying to create. And we do have what you would call sex, but since it doesn’t typically produce offspring, it’s purely for recreation or bonding.”

“Yes! OK. Neat!” Lesley fell quiet for a moment. Then she said, using her word inserted into the Inmararräo, “The sex part is something I’m less interested in at the moment. More the partnerships, like for raising children and keeping a household. Family is good.”

“Yes, family is good,” Manifold agreed. “Why are you asking about multibonding?”

“Well. How do relationships work for Ktletaccete?”

“Most of the time? They just grow and diminish naturally as people grow together and apart. If two or more people find they work well together on something, or most things, they tend to find themselves sticking together,” Manifold told her. “We do sort of identify types of relationships, like peers, Student/Tutor, Child/Crew, friends, partners, and family. Family is sort of reserved for particularly strong bonds between any group of people. But it’s also relative to personal perspectives. Someone I might call family might not consider me family, and we must learn to respect that.”

“Oh, wow,” Lesley sent back. “So, but, wait. Do you have any sort of exclusive bonding, like just between two people? Like, a declaration of family that can’t be shared outside that pair?”

Manifold frowned to itself and asked, “Do you mean like the Crew assigned mating done on the Terra Supreme?”

It took a few moments for Lesley to answer that. “Shit,” she said. “Not really, but I think I’m getting it. You take multibonding so much for granted that you don’t have a word for it or its opposition.”

“Am I guessing correctly that multibonding is atypical for humans?”

“In my home country, at least, yeah. We call it ‘polyamory’ and the norm is called ‘monogamy’. I just wanted to know how to say that Susan and I are polyamorous.” Lesley explained. She then added in a much more hesitant tone, “Um, to Molly, specifically.”

--- Another favorite passage from our books The Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil. Pretty late in the series as it is currently written. We've been rereading them in preparation for writing more chapters. Manifold is a Network entity called a Tutor. It was created by the Crew of the Sunspot in order to raise children. It is now over 130,000 years old, and kind of afraid of the measurement of time as a result. It currently takes the shape of a vaguely feminine humanoid (an abstracted mix of Susan and Lesley's shapes) and considering it's own form of transition. It wants to become something other than a Tutor.

The Light of Anchor is a Network entity created by Molly that is less than a hanful of days old. Its purpose was originally to model the thinking of an alien known as the Light of the Abyss. It's very, very smart.

Anchor is Molly's starship.

Fenekere is the ancient programming language of the Exodus Ships, such as the Sunspot, where Molly and Manifold come from.

Inmararräo is the spoken language of the Exodus Ships (actually, multiple languages at this point).

The Terra Supreme (A.K.A. Firuukebe) is the parent ship of the Sunspot (A.K.A. 'etekeyerrinwuf).

[fenmere]

A round about way to realizing that you have Feelings

So, as Lesley was checking her suit out in a Network mirror, and adjusting the purple, pink, and green of it ever so slightly to complement each other as best as possible, she also wondered what kinds of things the Siphon might be hiding from them.

And it was hard to think of any, because the Siphon had been disturbingly forward and frank about introducing themselves. They’d included nearly everything a person might be curious to ask about in their files. Even the biological and social details of their reproduction.

She hadn’t meant to focus on that part, but it had jumped out at her, caught her eye, and then her brain fixated on it. 

They had 7,458 viable sexual karyotypes. Morphologically, they had nearly identical reproductive anatomy, but over seven thousand sexes. They didn’t produce eggs or spermatozoa. Instead, they each could secrete a cytoplasmic goo that, when mixed together, would produce something like the Light’s fruiting bodies. Pods on stalks grew from the goo and fed off of it, and within the pods would grow their children. And they’d feed and care for the pods by adding more goo to the base collection. Each collection of goo would be tended to by several adults, so each child might have DNA from multiple adults. More than just two.

Their nurseries and incubation wards were off limits to alien visitors, but still, they described them in detail. Including how they reared their children upon hatching. They were strangely hands off. Leaving learning tools, instructions, and whatnot in the nurseries, but also not personally tending to the children. No physical contact. Very little visual contact.

Affection and support were shown through constant singing and material accommodations including food, gifts, toys, media, and artwork. Simple robots were used to deliver most of the latter. 

Singing, apparently, could be heard throughout any of their habitations around the clock. It was their language, and they shouted their conversations for as far as they could be heard.

Despite avoiding the sight of each other, they seemed to have very little concept of privacy otherwise.

Lesley tried to imagine what it would be like growing up as one of them, and felt her heart ache. But she knew that was her human reaction to the vision. Her own needs would not be met by that lifestyle, and she’d experience it as abuse, but these people were not human. It’s very likely that what they did was the result of very different instincts, if they had instincts. And then she in turn wondered how one of them would fare being raised like a child in a human family.

She imagined it would probably end in violence. It seemed like the most likely reason for the Siphon’s extremely hands off approach to child rearing had to do with an intense territorial instinct, like with octopuses. Or something like that. It would probably be too stressful for a Siphon child to be around family members, particularly adults. 

But, who really knew? At this late stage of their civilization, where they were an interstellar people, all sorts of social pressures could have brought them to this.

In any case, these were hypothetical scenarios she was imagining that would likely never come to pass. They could figure out a way to make room for Siphon on board Anchor if it ever came to that. It was a big ship. And that room would include the ability to raise children the way they needed to be raised.

Now, raising her own child on Anchor. That was a hopeful inevitability. And how would that be?

Here, she had so many conflicting feelings, it was hard to think.

She knew she wanted to get pregnant and bear a child. That was imperative.

Philosophically, she was against just bringing a child into the universe simply due to biological drive and emotions. But even if it was just those things pushing her to do so, they were so strong she couldn’t ignore them.

Most of her life, she hadn’t actually given it much thought, because she’d been told it wasn’t her lot.

She just had felt the intense injustice of being left out. Most of the time. She’d apparently been dissociating from the worst of her dysphoria.

At fourteen, though, she’d had a dream that she’d somehow gotten a sex change surgery that was so good she’d also gotten pregnant over the summer. She knew that was impossible, but she felt so happy and at peace during the dream, she never forgot it.

Then, shortly after her surgery, much later, she started feeling an aching hollowness where her uterus should be. And that occasionally got bad enough it led to panic attacks and suicidal episodes.

And Susan had helped her through those by sharing her own despair about not being able to get Lesley pregnant. And it had helped. Just barely, but enough to get her here.

So, in the last several years she had been thinking about it.

They’d both looked into adoption. But they’d run into a few big snags there.

Very few adoption agencies would adopt out to a mix raced queer couple. And those that did were too expensive for them.

But also, the more they had looked into it, the more they had realized that the whole adoption industry in their country was geared toward getting babies from marginalized families into the hands of the “moral majority.” It was pure colonialism, through and through.

They gave up on that route, and focused on queer family. Perhaps they could be aunts to a partner’s child. Living in a polycule increased the chances of that.

And, already, here on Anchor, despite leaving their queer family behind forever, they were part of a new family, and with children! Strange, strange hypercognitive, inhuman children. But, still, children.

That did help the dysphoria some. But her biological drive to get pregnant was still strong. Especially now that her dream was actually in reach.

And when she thought about it, all the feelings and emotions that churned in that void in her belly, it felt like it was all made more intense by being the only one of a breeding pair of humans in a fifty light years radius.

But also, being queer, trans, and autistic, among other sources of cultural and childhood trauma, she really wanted to see what a human could be when raised from birth outside of the brutally toxic environments of her home planet’s cultures.

Could she and Susan overcome their own upbringing enough to do that?

She just then realized she felt like they had an even better chance of doing so with Molly’s help.

There was something about Molly’s demeanor and the assumptions she made, the social things she took for granted, that made Lesley want her help. In everything, but especially raising a child.

That was a feeling that made her sit right down on the floor and stare at her reflection for a long time, completely forgetting that she was still logged into the Network.

She felt giddy. Floaty. Extra aware of her skin and the oxygen fizzing through her blood to it. Her fingers tingled, and a smile pushed itself to her face.

Manifold was also good parent material, it seemed. Stable, reliable, considerate, and very skilled at teaching.

But thinking about Molly being a co-parent made her feel this way in particular.

And she had the sense that Molly would be grateful and fulfilled in some way to be included.

And that just made Lesley even happier.

Welp!

---

One of our very favorite passages from The Adventures of Molly Rocketcoil. This is Lesley Chairthrower, a polyamorous trans lesbian who is exploring space with her partner, Susanophonic Blaster (A.K.A. Susan) and their new queer family of alien space travelers. Susan is a trans masc enby and otherkin, and describes herself as a "wolfbutch". She's happy with her pronouns. For now.

The Siphon are an alien species they're visiting that look kind of like giant flightless pterosaurs and sing like whales.

Molly Rocketcoil is a snake-like Child of the Sunspot who has set out in an warp capable starship with her Tutor Manifold, to explore the universe and meet new people. And, uh, apparently a love interest for Lesley. Took us by surprise, honestly. And we're writing the damn story. Fanciful cartoon of Molly from an old, unrelated RPG that inspired this:

She doesn't wear lipstick or a bow in this story, and the controls of her ship are different.

[fenmere]

the Bridge of Anchor

In the beginning of the book, the bridge of Anchor is a Network recreation of Molly's bedroom with railings instead of walls. Beyond the railings will be an image of space and the prow of Anchor.

We're planning on putting system readouts floating just above the railing, and a wireframe model of Molly's landing craft Spindrift floating in the middle of the room.

We also figure that Molly is actually twice as long as her figurine suggests.