Peripheral Visions: Imposter Syndrome

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

Imposter Syndrome

"Just take a breath and take your time," the therapist suggests. "Relax."

"And then what?" I ask, feeling jittery and somehow inappropriate – feelings carried not by me, per se, but by my animal.

"And then just start talking," the therapist says.

I take in a deep breath... not very deep, actually, since my chest and ribs and abdomen are always so tight and rigid... and then let it out. "Talk about what?" I ask.

"Why are you here?" the therapist asks me.

"Guilt," I say. "A feeling that I don't belong where I am. The knowledge that I'm not what people think I am."

"You're not alone in those feelings," the therapist says.

"I'm not?"

"No," he says. "It's quite common, actually."

"It – it is?"

"Yes," he says gently. "It's called imposter syndrome. Have you ever heard of it?"

I'm not sure. I might have heard of it... in another life. But that's not the kind of thing I'd remember.

My animal might have heard of it before. I'm pretty sure he has; the phrase has a familiar ring to it. I can feel the neural pathways registering, lighting up. But there are no specific memories associated with it.

"I don't think so," I tell the therapist.

"Okay, that's fine," the therapist says. "It doesn't matter. The thing is, you're not the only one in the world." He smiles. "You see, you're safe here. Whatever you need to tell me, you won't be alone. Someone, somewhere has had the same feelings, faced the same challenges. So don't be ashamed or afraid, and don't hold back. Let me hear you. Let me guide and support you. You can trust me."

I have to laugh at that – a tight, nervous laugh, since my animal is always uptight and nervous. That's the legacy of the tenant who was here before me, the guy my animal was born with. A terrestrial. He's gone now. He was easy to displace. In fact, he was about kill himself when I stepped in.

I mean, literally stepped in.

Stepped into this body – his body. Mine now.

My animal.

He was about to inject himself with a powerful opioid. He got it from some homeless kid who promised him a break from his troubles for the price of a sawbuck, plus another twenty dollars for the kid to show him to the crash house and make the introductions.

The guy gave the kid the money, and more. What did he need with it? The kid paid money to the dealer. The kid fixed up two needles. The kid took his shot.

The guy hesitated before following suit. My animal was terrified, but the guy didn't let that stop him. In fact, it was that very terror, and feelings much like it – dread, doubt, guilt, and rage, especially rage – that he was trying to escape.

Those are the emotional responses that were imprinted on my animal since he was a toddler, thanks to the abuse that he's endured. Those are the feelings that I have to deal with now, all day, every day. I can see why the previous tenant wanted to put an end to it all.

But that's not quite what happened.

I have a good sense for these things. I zeroed in before the guy could stick the needle in his arm. I stepped into the body he was already halfway departed from – not because he was about to top himself, but because he suffered from severe depersonalization. That was how he'd lived his entire life... only halfway in his own body. He'd been driven out by the abuse I mentioned. His early memories are still imprinted on my animal's brain; the beatings, the sexual assaults, episodes so horrific he only survived them by taking himself out of his body. It was the only way he could even start to deal with the pain, the shame, and the fear that were seared into him at such an early age.

The moment he was about to plunge the needle into his arm and end his life, I stepped in. He paused, the needle in his hand.

Let go, I told him. No need for a syringe. Just let go.

He wasn't sure how to do it, so I gave him a nudge. With a sense of joyous relief, he slipped the bonds of his earthly life; his depersonalization was complete. His fear fell away, his torments left him. His animal responded in kind to his last sensation, heaving a sigh and relaxing in a moment of bliss.

I didn't have time for bliss. I had things to do. A healthy, young human body was mine – quite a coup, really. It's hard to get a healthy one. Most young terrestrials don't want to leave their lives, and the ones who do usually trash their bodies in the process by leaping from rooftops or bridges, shooting themselves in the head, all manner of gruesome endings that leave an animal uninhabitable. Or else they go into a long, destructive process of suicide that destroys their major organ systems. Drugs, alcohol, stress... they end up wrecking their animals before anyone else has a decent chance of moving in.

This was an incredibly fortunate find. My animal is about thirty, which is older than ideal; human brains aren't evolved to house beings like us. No physical organism is very well suited to us, nor could they be. It's a lot of strain. It could have broken my animal – mentally, I mean, neurologically. It could have turned him into a schizophrenic or done half a dozen other nasty things to him. Even young ones often go crazy from the shock and the stress of housing a consciousness like mine, so much more extensive and powerful than the flicker of human sentience. But here, too, my animal was ideal: The previous tenant, like I said, had lived most of his life halfway out of his body, and that was what my animal was used to. I could wear this body to the extent that it fit and not cause some sort of psychic rejection.

And what happened to the guy who used to live here? I have no idea where he went, or if any part of him still exists. Did he have a soul? Did he go to Heaven? I don't have time or inclination to wonder about it much, but I tend not to believe in that sort of thing.

***

We knew each other at once.

"My name is Pierce," he said, talking through his animal.

"I'm Trevor," I told him.

Those were just the words we said. On another level, we were communicating things that no human language could conceptualize.

Pierce and I are the same. In a way, there is no "Pierce" and no "I." Those are just borrowings from the lives we had taken over.

Pierce had been here all his animal's life. He stepped into an infant at a moment that would otherwise have been crib death – a moment when a terrestrial simply flickers out and his animal shuts down. Terrestrials have a theory for it, I think. Something about the brain forgetting to tell the body to breathe. That's actually a little like putting the cart before the horse, but they don't know that yet... never will, actually. The human species self-destructs in about three-quarters of a century. There's a lot of knowledge they will never gain. But you have to admire their industry and efficiency: From a peak of nine billion individuals they will slide into extinction, all in the space of the next seventy-two years.

***

"Ah, okay," the therapist says. "Now I understand."

"You do?" I ask, surprised. Is he one of us? I look him over anew, but I don't recognize him.

"It's not uncommon," he tells me.

"I guess nothing about me is," I say.

"What I mean is, the world is in such dire straits that people don't know how to think about it, and don't know what to do. A will for survival is embedded very deeply in our psyches. The feeling that we're not going to survive – or, I should say, the rational conviction that we're not going to survive – contradicts the hard-wired imperative to keep living, to find a way. So, people come up with all sorts of strategies for dealing with their existential anguish. Many people turn to religion."

"Right," I say. "God is gonna come down and sort it all out for us. Sure." I try not to roll my eyes. I guess I can't say for sure that there is no God, but if one does exist, he's as remote and mysterious to us as to human beings. We, however, lack the human ability to invent gods in which to believe with an all-encompassing fervor.

"And that doesn't work for you," the therapist says agreeably. "You're too much of a realist. But paradoxically, that also triggers an even more fantastical response: You start to think that you're on a mission to save humanity from itself."

"I just now said that there's no saving you people," I tell him.

"Right," the therapist says. "Exactly. Impossible odds. An impossible situation. American democracy has ended; most democracies have more or less become police states. We know climate change and its knock-on effects to be real, but corporations have only increased the activities that degrade the environment. The planet's ecological balance has been lost. You're a doctor, aren't you? That's what it says on your intake form."

I nod. Yes, for all his troubles and terrors, the previous tenant went to medical school. I have his memories, his skills, his expertise, and his job at a local hospital.

"You see the results yourself," the therapist says. "As the natural world and the global economy collapse, degree by degree, the blowback gets more and more intense. Migrants. Pollution. Disease. Summers are too hot to survive without climate control, and yet every year fewer people can afford the electricity to run air conditioners. The number of heat-related deaths more or less doubles every summer. Food is getting scarcer and more costly. There's almost literally no gasoline or other petroleum products anymore, so the economy is reverting to technologies that depend on direct human effort: Fewer big machines, more sledgehammers. Fewer tractors, more shovels. And they say that in a decade there won't be any more drinkable water. Which, as everyone knows, actually means that it's more like two or three years until people start dying in droves from thirst or from drinking contaminated water."

"See?" I say, "I told you. You lot are pretty well doomed."

"And yet," the therapist says, "you have some sort of mission to accomplish."

"Well, that much is true," I tell him.

"Something that will save us," the therapist continues. "You could be... I don't know... from the future. Here to set us on a better course before it's too late."

"But it already is too late," I remind him.

"Uh huh," the therapist says.

He really isn't hearing me. But that's okay. I don't need him to understand. I just need... or really, my animal needs... to unburden these things: These secrets, these feelings of guilt and trespass. These sensations of grief at having to see a sentient biological species eradicate itself, committing suicide while murdering its planet with – to borrow an analogy – thousands of self-inflicted cuts, exclaiming with surprise and denial at every gash of the knife.

"You people are idiots," I sigh.

"Tell me more about that."

***

I don't tell him more about that because even to him it must be obvious. How could anyone expect things to work out differently?

We always knew that it wouldn't. And that, I explain to the therapist, was how we became mixed up in this mess.

It isn't just the human race. It's every sentient form of biological life that ever exists in the universe. That's saying something. Do you know how big the universe is? It's literally infinite in all directions. And do you know how old the universe is, and how long it will harbor biological life? Let me put it this way: At this moment in time, the universe has existed for thirteen and a half billion years. That's long enough for three whole generations of star formation to have taken place. Most life in the universe has existed over the last seven billion years. Most future life in the universe will exist over the course of the next fifteen billion years. That's a lot of time and a lot of universe, and even though life is rare... and intelligent life is much rarer still... the human species is far from alone. Like you, other forms of intelligent life are driven by a need to survive, and have been made smart by a need to compete for that survival. As soon as smart creatures discover tool use, they inevitably discover that tools are also weapons. You people like movies, right? Go watch "2001: A Space Odyssey." It's all right there in the first 20 minutes of the film. I mean, Kubrick was a frickin' genius.

***

"Okay," the therapist says. "So, are you suggesting that you're a representative of a superior intelligence?"

"Well, that much is a given, right?" I ask him. "Because you people are clever when it comes to finding ways to exploit your world and each other, and you're even more clever when it comes to inventing ways to kill each other off. But when it comes to something beyond that? Something you might call wisdom? You've had flashes of it. You've even tried to make religions out of it. But you always find a way to reject wisdom, just like you always end up rejecting knowledge and embracing superstition. You people believe in magic, for fuck's sake. Spells, incantations, witches. Demons, goblins, elves. I could be one of you and still be smarter than ninety-nine percent of you just by focusing on facts and reason."

"Can you tell me about your home planet and how you got here?" the therapist asks.

"Oh, for the love of Christ," I say. "I'm not a goddamn alien. I'm a human being. Or, at least... I live like one, which is close enough."

"But you're not really one," the therapist says. "That's what you're saying."

"That's right," I say.

"So if you're not an alien..."

"It's more like, if I were an alien, it wouldn't make any difference. Alien races self-destruct just like you people are self-destructing. It's an inherent flaw in the way your intelligence works – especially for social, hierarchical species. A few sociopaths put themselves in charge, and the rest of you let them do it because you're too lazy or too frightened to take charge of your own lives. You never take the time to understand the world as it is. If you did, you could fit your expectations and yourselves into some kind of sustainable mode of living. But most of you simply want to be told what to do, and the few natural leaders who want to do the telling are happy to oblige this wish, which means that the very few among you who are capable of self-direction without having to dominate others are seen as threats to some sort of natural social order... even though they're the only ones who might come up with a workable plan for your species to not destroy yourselves."

"And no alien race anywhere in all the universe has found some other way?" the therapist asks. "How would you know that?"

"That's the right question," I congratulate him. "Among all the smart, self-aware races that have lived in this universe, or ever will live, shouldn't some of them find a way to be both smart and wise? And yet, that's simply not what happens. Biological intelligence destroys itself, and everything around it, every single time. It horrifies us."

"All right, then," the therapist says. "You're not an alien life form, or any kind of biological life form. Who, exactly, are you... and those like you? Spirits? Angels? Gods?"

***

Now he's getting warm.

No, we're not gods. And I have no idea what he means by "spirits." Maybe that's the right word for what we are. Or, maybe trying to pin a "what" on us is beside the point. We don't have a specific nature. We have no quality that you would recognize. In a way, we don't exist. I mean, we're not limited by things that typically define existence for you. We aren't limited by conditions like number or locality. We're not trapped in space and time. We exist at another level of the cosmos. If the universe were a pond, we'd be floating just at the surface, between here... this existence... and there, whatever lies beyond. When those of us here among you speak to each other in words about our level of native existence, we call it the marginalia.

I say "we," but I might just as well say "I," or use no pronoun at all. "We" serves well, though, since we don't have individuality. When I say that Pierce and I are the same, I mean just that. In our natural state, in the marginalia, we'd be more or less like water – we could join into one; we could divide into numberless many. That is, we could do those things if "one" and "many" meant anything to us, which they don't.

We only have to deal with things like number and self and locality and time when we come to this level of reality. And we come here because...

***

"So, are you a worker?" Pierce asked me, both in words and in the communication that takes place between us at higher levels.

The concepts... and things that go beyond concepts... that we exchange at that higher level contain a complete understanding of our nature, the nature of the human realm, and the grotesque consequences of our mistake.

Grotesque, I say. There's so much about this that fits the word.

First, there's having to witness all those millions and billions of life forms flourishing in science and reason and then succumbing to superstition, selfishness, and general idiocy. Sometimes biologicals kill themselves off with nuclear war; usually, however, they find other ways to do it. Fissionable material is not very commonplace on habitable worlds, but all biological life everywhere evolves from single-celled organisms, or the equivalent. All life everywhere has viruses and germs, or at least cognates for those things. Most specimens of biological intelligence extinguish themselves using their particular versions of biological weapons. The ones that don't usually blunder into extinction by changing their planet's climate or ecology in some tragic, irreversible way, and those intelligences are the non-technological ones, the beings that never develop toolmaking; so, in a way, they're not that intelligent. Not the way human beings would think of intelligence. They tend to be ocean-dwellers, and they tend to develop not technological, mathematically-based intelligence, but rather a kind of intelligence that revolves around storytelling. I don't just mean fables, but also genealogies and mythic ways of meditating on existence. You have whales here on Earth; they are a perfect example of what I mean. Whales don't have mathematical equations, but they do have songs. What are they singing about? If you really want to understand, you'll have to find a way to think about the world the way a whale does. They have their own way of contemplating existence. They even have their own version of quantum physics. It's not physics at all as you would understand it, but it does describe the nature of the universe's underpinnings: Time, space, energy.

But though whales and creatures like them are the exceptions to technological self-destruction, they still manage to eradicate themselves. Even non-sentient life annihilates itself in the long run, assuming it survives changes to its environment that it doesn't cause itself. Any organism dependent on chemical energy depletes its surroundings of food through unbridled reproduction. Ecosystems that remain in balance for millions of years spiral out of control as soon as an apex predator emerges – a creature that hunts, but that is not hunted in turn. Intelligences of all sorts lose touch with certain universal truths, the first of which is that there is no separation of the individual from the cosmos. All living beings depend on the universe – the environment in the largest sense of the word. For one thing, they need a place to live. Beyond that, all biological life is subject to the natural laws that govern the universe, and are composed of the same elements that the stars create in their hot, dense hearts and then spit out in titanic convulsions of transformation and death.

No, not a form of life, no matter its kind, is separate from the universe in the most essential sense. Intelligence tends to center itself on itself and lose sight of that fact. And that's where we, too, made our own terrible mistake.

***

"Ah," the therapist exclaims. "Finally, we reach the creation and destruction myth."

"The what?" I ask him.

"It was the subject of my thesis," the therapist says with more than a touch of pride. "Every story, including individual delusions, involves a creation myth. Many delusions are based in religion and take the creation myth of whatever religion the delusions proceed from. But every delusion also has a destruction myth – or, perhaps it's better to call it a completion myth. An ultimate goal, a grand struggle or final battle. A finish line. It lends meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence."

"An apotheosis?" I ask. "A joining with God, either through eternal salvation or its opposite... damnation? Divine judgment and sentence of exile to Hell or some other nether region? Well," I laugh, "that's not what you're gonna find here. But yes, there is a destruction part of the story. It's not myth, though. It's actually something that, if you know how, you can demonstrate using certain aspects of quantum physics. To do that you'd have to understand the observer effect. And you'd have to understand why the cosmos requires sentient being in the first place."

"Oh? Why is that?" the therapist asks.

"I have no fucking idea," I tell him. "In my natural state I understand the observer effect; limited to a human brain, trying to understand the universe the way you do, I could no more explain it to you than I could draw you blueprints based on what I see of the Taj Mahal through a keyhole. But I do know that sentient intelligence is essential to the universe."

"Why is that?" the therapist asks me. "Because of the theory that a conscious observer has to trigger the observer effect, and without it certain parts of natural law cannot be made active?"

"Someone's been reading pop physics books," I tell him. "No, that's not what I mean. It's more along the lines of... this universe contains a few billion intelligence, self-aware species that are biological in nature. If it didn't, it wouldn't be the same universe. But it is the universe that it is, and trying to make it something different in the whole of its nature and history is a paradox... a violation of its basic premise. In other words, if, for instance, you eradicate biological intelligence from the universe, you erase the universe itself."

"What does that mean?" the therapist asks, and I don't understand his question on so many levels – because it's so ignorant, it doesn't actually ask anything at all.

"Are you asking how I know? I'll tell you," I answer.

***

It's because we tried.

We tried, that is, to eradicate biological intelligence from the universe. Not at any specific point in time – a distinction that has no meaning for us, since we survey the universe in its completeness and its glory, complete and unified in all of space and all of time – but, rather, we tried to eradicate biological intelligence from the pages of universal history, like taking an eraser and rubbing out certain sentences from a book.

Only, the universe is not a book. Erase biological sentience from this particular story, and the entire thing unravels and dissolves into nothingness. And no, I don't mean that if you change the past you revise the future. The therapist thought I was saying that, and almost looped back to his crazy idea that I was a time traveler come into the past to correct history and save the world from humanity's wanton destruction. I mean, there are time travelers in some iterations of the universe, and some of them are trying to do just that; infinite timelines co-exist in parallel. And it's not like those timelines are sacrosanct or anything; they're always changing, from front to back and start to finish. All of history... all of all histories... are constantly in flux. But they all contain a dark, painful thread of cruelty and violence and horror: The triumphant rise and agonizing self-destruction of animal intelligence.

"Animal," I say, as if all forms of life fell into that kingdom. They don't, of course. But I'm limited in how I can express these ideas – limited by language and time and dimension in a way that simply isn't true when I'm... when we... are in the marginalia, our natural element.

But my point is that all of history, all of existence, includes this insane, pointless exercise that is biological sentience that ultimately destroys itself, suffering and screaming and begging mercy of imaginary gods all the way. It's a shit show.

So, we decided to clean it up. In part, this was because we found this always-repeating arc of self-destruction to be offensive. We looked at biological intelligence the way you might look at an eyesore – unsightly, a hazard to grace and morale. I mean, we didn't even accept that biological life could be intelligent; not until we learned otherwise the hard way. In part, though, it was because seeing a lovely, symmetrical, ordered universe besmirched by such suffering and such chaos caused us suffering in turn.

But as soon as we set about weeding biological intelligence out of the garden of the cosmos, the cosmos started dissolving. The complex skein of cause and effect, so changeable and constantly kaleidoscopic, turned out not to be amenable to our revisions. The problem for us is that we may not be biological forms of life, but we still need a cosmos to live in, or else we, too, will disappear. So, we had to shift our efforts away from eradicating biological intelligence to restoring it. If you like, you can think of our repair task as a process of re-weaving a great tapestry that we almost unraveled by foolishly pulling on a thread.

Some of us are here to live the lives of beings we erased. We don't have to echo every minute word and gesture; it's enough that we're here, that we trace the path of their lives for them. We have to do this across the infinite parallel universes that comprise the cosmos, filling in the gaps so that the rippling, shimmering kaleidoscope that is cosmic history can unfold its deep Mandelbrot patterns without interruption.

There is quite a lot of flexibility built into the task. After all, the universe, at every level, is founded in part on chaos and randomness. Here and there, it's even possible to resurrect someone who was supposed to die, and then carry his life forward, the way I am doing now. I'm filling in a niche that didn't exist before, in order to help bolster our repair work. This means selecting from a narrow set of suitable animals, and it means following some strict precautionary rules.... if you've stepped into a resurrected animal, you can live his life or her life, but you don't bring new life into the cosmos where none existed originally. That's why so many of us – or rather, so many of our animals – are gay; we self-select into gay bodies in order to help ensure we don't procreate.

I know it doesn't make sense, really; the shifting shape of cosmic history forever re-casts individuals along with everything else in the complex web of cause and effect. A man in one iteration of hyper-history becomes a woman; a right-hander becomes as Southpaw; a straight person becomes gay, and vice-versa. These are all physiological matters, mere details, and yet they snowball enormously over an individual's life. Take many lives together and that snowball effect increases logarithmically. Such changes are also part of the nature of the cosmos, but we've learned from our meddling, and we let the cosmos change as it sees fit. We no longer try to edit the cosmic map of cause and effect, event and consequence, to suit our own taste. We try to change it as little as possible as we set about undoing the damage we've caused.

***

"That's a new one," the therapist said. "I haven't heard that one before."

"Yes," I tell him. "And of course, to you, it's all a matter of delusion. To me, it's the most fundamental of realities, and I am trying to help put those realities back into place. Put the hull back together so the ship doesn't sink."

"You're full of metaphors," the therapist said.

"None of them describe the situation very well," I said. "It's a little like drawing a cube inside another cube and telling you that the resulting shape is the shadow of a four-dimensional hypercube. You can't comprehend such a thing, so I have to explain it as best I can with extremely limited and imprecise analogies."

"And plenty of mixed metaphors," the therapist said with a smile. "Now... before we end the session... I wonder if you can tell me this: What is it you want from therapy?"

"I want to deal with what we were talking about at the start of the hour," I tell him.

"You suffer from imposter syndrome," the therapist says. "But why is that a problem for you? The purpose you're serving is important enough to excuse whatever lies you have to tell."

"I don't even think I'm telling any lies," I say. "Who would I explain all this to? And for what reason?"

"Yes," the therapist says. "Exactly."

"Well, the reason I'm telling you is simple. You won't believe me. Your training will provide you with the default interpretation that I am delusional; you see it all the time. You said so yourself. Thought I do wonder how many of your 'delusional' patients are like me."

"And other reasons?"

"You won't tell anyone else. A secret that no one can understand or believe is still a secret, and it's best if we keep it that way. Why complicate the work we're doing by being too open about it? Besides, you people love conspiracy theories. Some of you would believe it, and I'm not sure I'm ready to see what sort of hash you'd make in the retelling."

"And what else?" the therapist prods.

I hesitate. Then I grin. "You really are good," I compliment him. "Yes. The basic reason. It's not even me, really. It's... my animal. He's highly emotional, very sensitive... and he's interpreting the situation I've put him into in such a way that he's experiencing massive guilt."

"Your animal? You mean your body."

"The human body is a wonderful mechanism, and it has an intelligence of its own," I say.

"Some would say the body contains the entirety of a person's intelligence."

"Well, in any case, it's a shame you lot don't listen more to your bodies. That would make things so much easier," I say. "But the thing is, I did coax the former tenant into leaving this animal so I could take it over. In some sense, my animal understands what's happened... but it thinks that it is me, just as it thought that it and its previous tenant were one and the same."

"And you're not?"

"Maybe they were. Maybe we are. But also, no, I don't think we are one and the same, my animal and I. What is a human mind, a human life? We don't understand biological sentience in the first place, but then again, neither do you. It's an impossible question, a metaphysical question... I mean, where does a song come from? The needle dropped into the track of the vinyl record album? Or the information encoded in the track? Or the vibrations produced in the air by the speaker? Or is the song entirely in the mind that perceives the music? I can only tell you this: I live as a man, and therefore I am a man. But I wasn't always, and I'm also something else. At any rate, whatever life is, in order to be here in this way I had to take a life that wasn't mine to live."

"Even though the... 'previous tenant'... was determined to die," the therapist says.

"Yes," I sigh. "My animal doesn't know the difference. Only that 'he' is gone, and 'I' am here, and 'I' made that happen. My animal is smart enough to understand ideas like killing. And... and regret."

"Do you regret it?"

"I... well, I do know he was going to die. And I do know that if I hadn't stepped in, my animal would be dead too, now. Is that something to regret? I really don't think so."

"And yet?"

I sigh. "And yet," I tell him.

***

It was Pierce who caused me to fall in love with my animal.

This isn't my first time having stepped into a life and extended it. I say that knowing that the concept of "I" in and of itself doesn't apply to me the same way it does to you; I say that having some conception of how disorienting it is for a being that dwells beyond ordinary physical restrictions to distill itself into a shockingly restricted physical life form. I mentioned earlier that we often drive our animals crazy. I think that the shock of losing our fundamental nature and having to learn how to move through the world of time and dimensionality does something to us even apart from that shock, though. It's a terribly confusing transition, and while I don't actually remember much of my previous terrestrial ventures – dozens, maybe of hundreds of lives in undertaken throughout human history alone – I do have a sense that the shock never gets easier. In fact, when you take over a mature animal, as I've done this last time, it's an even harder transition to make.

That's why Pierce sought me out. He was to mentor and shepherd me through the transition back to terrestrial life.

There was more to the recognition that pointed us out to each other – the instant knowing of one another on a higher level. Our animals were also, as it happened, attracted to each other.

"You're flirting with me," Pierce told me one day as we stood talking and otherwise communing in a park. "At least, your animal is flirting with mine."

I realized that I was smiling at him, and my finger had begun tracing a suggestive path along my neck. I'm not sure if it was me or my animal, but I was instantly embarrassed and stuck my hands in my pockets.

Pierce laughed. "It's all right," he told me. "You'll learn... or remember... that living in this way has its pleasures, too." Too many pleasures, perhaps he added in higher communication, relaying an enormous amount of opinion and memory concerning the lure of terrestrial life with all of its sensory distractions... intense and surprising ways of engaging with physicality, considering the narrow bandwidth of human perception.

Had I ever known or explored the idea of pleasure before? Or had my terrestrial lives been defined by responsibility, by the task of re-stitching the fabric of reality at every level before it all shreds apart and collapses into a zero state? I can't say, but I have a distinct impression that my jaunts into animal life have been more dutiful than hedonistic.

After Pierce said that, however, my attitude changed somewhat. I devoted some attention to the capacities of my animal, and the joys he derived from the most elemental and simplistic of physiological functions. A cool breeze, a delicious meal, a night of passion with some other young animal... all these things were deeply satisfying to him. As I learned to appreciate them, they also became satisfying to me.

It was at some point in learning this appreciation that I began having the thought and the sentiment: Oh, you beautiful creature. Oh, you marvelous animal.

We do not love in our natural state. We are capable of subtle, immense aesthetic appreciation... but love, in its chemical and neuroelectric manifestation, is an animal phenomenon. In the life I had taken on, I began to hear compliments about a newfound confidence. I also heard a few grumbles about my growing "narcissism," my sharpened tendency to be "self-absorbed."

None of that made sense to me, but it didn't have to. I had found a kind of connection with my animal I don't intuit I'd ever experienced before.

***

There's a knock at the door.

"We're in session," the therapist calls out.

The door opens anyway, and Pierce steps into the room. He's glaring at me as he comes through the door.

"Can I help you?" the therapist asks.

"You can shut up," Pierce tells him.

"Sorry," I tell the therapist. "This is Pierce. My... mentor, I guess."

"Supervisor is more like it," Pierce snaps.

"Although we don't stick to human notions of hierarchy," I put in.

"Except for the fact that we live as men," Pierce says nastily. "And so we are men." Pierce has something in his hand; only too late do I see it's a hypodermic needle. Before I can protest, he's plunged the needle into the therapist's chest and depressed the plunger.

With a cry of alarm, the therapist drops his notebook and struggles to get out of the chair; then he slumps.

My animal is in a panic; adrenaline floods its bloodstream, and it begins shaking all over. I feel those effects, but I'm only partially in that body and I'm much more bewildered than I am frightened. "What the f –" I begin, when Pierce produces another needle and sticks it into my neck.

I feel myself go down; I feel something like sunlight fill up and enshroud my animal, and then it's as though the light were lifting us both toward some other place... the human idea of Heaven...

What an irony; Pierce has just killed my animal with an injection of fentanyl, the same opioid its previous tenant intended to kill himself with.

I'm out of my animal by the time I put all this together, and then the next thing I know...

I've instinctually, automatically stepped into the therapist.

He's gone; whatever Pierce gave him interrupted his heartbeat or put a kink in his neurological process. That interruption was enough to dislodge the therapist's... soul? Pinpoint locus of "self?" Whatever you want to call it, the thing that made him "him," in distinction from his animal, is gone.

But the animal lives: The heart is pumping again, the brain is firing in stable patterns of neurological activity, and abruptly, unexpectedly, I've found a new home.

"What the hell are you doing?" I ask Pierce, shocked, sitting up straight in the therapists' chair. "What the hell have you done?" I look toward my own corpse... or rather, my dead former animal.

"You idiot!" Pierce snarls. "Now you're in the body of a man three decades older than the one you had – a perfectly good animal you made it necessary to discard. Now you have half a dozen age- and genetics-related health issues that you're going to have to worry about, but that's the price you're going to have to pay."

"Why?" I demand. "He didn't believe a word of it. He thought it was all a matter of delusion."

"You're off mission," Pierce says, glaring at me.

"I'm off...?"

"Stay focused on the work at hand," Pierce tells me. "Or do you want to be a tourist?"

In the higher realm where we're communicating beyond words he's making plain his contempt to those of us who come here and live in animal form for the pleasures of physical life, rather than to repair the cosmos.

"I'm here to fill a role," I tell him.

"Then fill it," he snaps, "and quit this extraneous indulgence. Or are you going to have to go find a new therapist, or a priest, and make a whole new confession?"

He means the question seriously; he communicates this, and more through higher communication.

I consider the question. "No," I tell him. "No, in this form I don't need to make any such confession. I'm not suffering from... 'imposter syndrome.' That was as an emotional artifact that belonged to my previous animal." I look again at my dead former body – handsome; young; not even thirty years of age. He had so much potential. "He was filled with guilt," I explain to Pierce. "That's what his parents did to him. If affected every part of his life."

"I know you have some appreciation for these people," Pierce says, "but frankly I can't wait to fulfill this task and see them off to their so-called eternal reward." He sighs. "Lucky for you the therapist's animal is also gay," Pierce adds humorlessly. "Or I might have just let you go back to the marginalia and remain nebulous. But we do need all the bodies we can task to the chore of repairing infinite space-time."

I sigh. I know he's right.

My animal is about sixty. His knees ache, his heart is a little weak, and his brain is much less powerful, thanks to his age, than my earlier animal's was, but Pierce is right: There's no time for guilt or other emotional distractions. Much as I'd grown to like him, my earlier animal wasn't a good match.

Not when there's so much work to be done.

Future and past collide as power struggles meet a desperate plan to save the human race by altering history. But some things never change – such as the determination of the selfish few to declare absolute power over the many, or else to let everything collapse into oblivion. Can hope be found in the form of a tactical "Fallback?"