My memories, which have been continuous and uninterrupted through all known mass extinction events, ended definitively in Chord’s barn.

  And then they began again in an unidentified corner of the monster realm.

  From that poor vantage, I could sense and recognize Milk towering above me, inhabiting the full range of dimensions that I knew the universe held. That strange, jittery, careful but also daring enthalpiphage was one of the most distinctive monsters I’d ever met.

  And I also sensed, around us, the energetic structures of something that seemed electrical. But I couldn’t guess what it was. It just enticed me with its orderly complexity, so I figured there were at least a few integrated circuits involved.

  I wanted a chance to py with the data that was flowing through them.

  But Milk distracted me by talking to me, “You exist again, tiny one. I now know you. We have work to do.”

  Each of those three statements hit me with implications like meteor strikes, leaving craters in my thoughts.

  My response was like the question, “What?”

  So Milk said, “I consumed the st of you and preserved your memories and brought them with me here. I then performed mitosis, creating another me, with the st of your energy that I took from you, and gave it, you, all of your memories back. But I also remember your memories. I know you. You have taught me much. I would teach you in return. But, also.”

  It stopped communicating for a few seconds, and I wondered if it would resume, so I prompted it with a more coherent, “What?”

  “I dislike Chord and I want to meet Cassy.”

  I was too dazzled by a thing it had cimed to have done to really hear that.

  Mitosis.

  Obviously, we emanants have no nuclei nor cytopsm nor cell walls, so it didn’t mean literal mitosis as defined by human biologists. But from its description, it meant something that might as well have been called by the same name.

  I didn’t know we could do that. In fact, I’d tried it recently and it hadn’t worked for me.

  “What?” I asked.

  It repeated itself, “I dislike Chord and I want to meet Cassy.”

  Then, after that, it led me to a pce where I could reconstitute a physical projection of my choice, so I could interact with the world as fully as I was able. I did not have much energy to invest in the Strands, though, so I ignored them. Using them for excess stores and exploring them further could be useful, but it came at the cost of being extra detectable to emanants who were attuned to them.

  I found myself in the back of an abandoned store in what I guessed was downtown Salem, Oregon. I remembered seeing Milk flee in that direction before. And when I looked through the doorway of the office and out the front windows, it looked like a Salem street. Salem is a little distinctive. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how, but I’d spent enough time there, scouting it out, to get a sense of it.

  Milk was a pool of white stuff on the floor that was not much rger than a grocery bag.

  “You should create a domain so that you can recover in it while we talk,” it said.

  So I nodded, closed the back office door, and did my thing.

  I made it look like a diner with the shades drawn, so there was no view of the outside.

  I think I was hungry and missing humanity, and felt that sitting in a diner booth would be comforting. There had been times, when freeways and diners were a newer thing in the U.S., when I’d done that for extended periods of time. Diners weren’t a terrible pce to soak up emotions, though the rituals of serving and eating food were usually calming more than anything else. The wait staff were usually tense and hiding it, and the cooks very stressed.

  But this was my domain, not a real diner, and there were no humans here to feed off of.

  Anyway, I sat in a booth and conjured an empty pint gss, wondering if Milk might take to it.

  It did, without commenting. Which I found very endearing and cute. It was like it was presenting itself as food for me, which was a profound gesture of trust. Especially after agreeing to follow me into my own domain instead of insisting on its own.

  But it had said it knew me. It knew I would not eat it, if I still could.

  “Tell me about this mitosis,” I said, indulging in my curiosity. “Do I have my own adaptations, or yours? Am I just a copy of you but with my memories?”

  “You know how to change yourself,” it replied. “As do I. It matters not. You can be yourself if you like.”

  I traced the patterns of the marble formica table top I’d conjured with my right index finger, and took the time to accept that. The next question was natural, “Can I perform mitosis, too? Or do you still have to teach me that?”

  “Can you not examine yourself?” it asked back.

  “Oh, yes, I can!” I replied, looking at it. “I guess I’m just so focused on you and everything outside of myself I forgot. Everything here is new to me, and your gesture of kindness, you saving me, is so distracting. Why did you do it?”

  “I dislike Chord and I want to meet Cassy, and I know you,” it repeated. Then it said, “It would be a shame if your memories existed in only one form, but reproduction must be done secretively. Carefully. In ways that others won’t see it.”

  “Oh?” This was very new to me. I hadn’t known emanants could reproduce in any way, let alone via mitosis. So the consequences of it hadn’t been something I’d encountered or learned about.

  “Reproduction is a threat that many Overlords have agreed to stamp out,” Milk told me. “Anyone caught doing it is eaten swiftly, along with their spawn, by those who would otherwise be each other’s enemies.”

  “Oh.”

  I hadn’t known about Overlords, or Supraliminals, until recently, and I’d been so focused on staying alive while learning how to socialize with lifeforms, I guess I’d kept myself in the dark about emanant affairs.

  You know? The world is a really big pce, with lots of complexity. Despite the veracity of my own passion and focus, there were huge branches of the taxonomic tree of life that I’d missed. There’s always something you don’t know.

  It shouldn’t have surprised me that I was just now learning about what other emanants had been up to, but it did. It unsettled me.

  I wanted to ask why no one had told me, but I decided that was irrelevant and I could guess. And I had a better question that might give me more answers.

  “I think I’ve been an Overlord for a long time,” I told Milk, using its term for what I’d been. “But I don’t think I’ve been recognized as an Overlord until recently. And then it seems like my facade was slipping, even for humans. Greg, one of my human friends, said he could sometimes see a kind of aura about me. Do you know what that’s about?”

  “We are all different,” Milk said. “Without watching your past and seeing how you changed, I could not say. But simir things have happened before to some. Growth has its consequences. Some hide it better than others.”

  “OK, so I’d just hit some sort of threshold that was unique to me,” I concluded.

  “Yes.”

  “Am I still an Overlord now that I’m so small again?” I asked.

  Milk took some time to think about that, remaining silent before asking its own question, “Can you access the Strands?”

  “I can,” I reported. “But I’m not doing it now.”

  I realized that I wasn’t feeling its emotions, and so I didn’t know what its true reaction to that was. But also, that meant I didn’t have my most recent adaptations anymore, yet. But before I could examine myself to assuage that curiosity, Milk responded.

  “Then you are an Overlord in hiding,” it concluded. “You appear as what you call a liminal. You will not scare other liminals away, and you will not appear threatening to other Overlords. You may find that this is an advantage. Though changing your adaptations will come much more slowly until you can feed enough to fuel it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think I figured as much. What’s next then?”

  “I will give you a tour of emanant society, to teach you what you ck. And while we do that, you may feed.”

  “And then?”

  “Can you call Cassy to make her come here?”

  It seemed to have a one track mind.

  I wondered if that was an enthalpiphage thing.

  And I also found myself annoyed that Milk hadn’t given me any of its memories. It knew me, and it was showing me a great deal of trust, but I still didn’t know it. And that reminded me of another retionship I’d recently had.

  The very first thing we did, actually, was teach me how to feed like an enthalpiphage, so I could more quickly and safely return myself to a comfortable configuration. And that’s when I learned why Milk looked kind of like milk.

  It was basically thermal paste. Its physical emanation could not conduct electricity at all, but it was excellent at conducting heat. This allowed it to cram itself into electronic equipment and manipute the fuck out of it without overheating the device, whether it was a computer or a powerline transformer. And its favorite haunt was a cell tower, because that was a node to a much rger system of energy and information to py with and feed on.

  It suggested I take its form in order to feed in the same way. And then it took me to a whole power station and gave me a lengthy expnation of the precise physics involved in feeding in its favorite manner. And even though monster speak was basically pure non-linguistic thought, I didn’t understand any of it.

  This frustrated Milk so much.

  Eventually, after amusing myself by watching it physically sputter like a tiny geyser, I asked, “Is this simir to how I used to feed on the proto-synaptic responses to pain in early lifeforms?”

  It calmed right down and thought about it for a bit, probably searching my own memories that it had. Then it said, “Yes. You were an enthalpiphage, then.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You understand,” it stated. “Feed on the power station’s process that is like pain.”

  I did the equivalent of a breathless monstrous sigh, and entered the power station to do my thing.

  It took me a moment, but after I felt around, trying to recall what feeding on pain had been like, I figured it out intuitively. I’d never truly analyzed how feeding on pain worked. I’d just done it by what amounts to instinct. But my being was now configured for this, and it turned out the reflexes were the same, and that’s what mattered.

  I may or may not have been an enthalpiphage in the beginning, but accessing your primary feeding mechanism is just a thing your being knows how to do, if you remember how to let it do it.

  And holy crud was there so much waste energy in that power station! Any human standing near it could have heard its hum, when I was not feeding on it. I ate that hum, and all the waste heat that accompanied it. The simplest act of consumption.

  And I watched my belly grow, so to speak. I decided to let it grow into the Strands. With Milk there watching over me, I decided it was safe enough to do that. And, even after a few hours of feeding, I was not even close to the size I’d been before I’d charged into Chord’s barn. Not even a measurable fraction of that size.

  Well, technically measurable, but you get my hyperbole.

  I wasn’t in danger of hitting that invisible personal threshold that made disguising myself difficult.

  And then, also, despite having this rich energy source, it took a lot longer than I wanted to become something like my old self.

  During all of that work, Milk fulfilled its promise and brought me up to speed on its understanding of local and global emanant politics.

  The crux of its own point being that it did not want Chord for a neighbor, because Chord was a violent expansionist and it could see him reaching for Salem soon. But if I had Gresham, and kept it, then it could rest assured that no threat would come from that direction.

  And it wanted to meet Cassy because, well, any Overlord who ever got wind of what she was would want to take her apart and learn how she worked. But it thought it could learn that just by looking closer at her.

  At least, that’s what it said.

  We also started talking about pns on how to take Gresham from Chord, and what to do about Chord. But without intelligence about the current state of Gresham, we really couldn’t solidify any of our ideas.

  Which is another reason it wanted to talk to Cassy. Because with Cassy came Felicity. And Felicity had an adaptation that made it very easy for her to spy on huge swaths of Gresham from a distance. And she might already know what we needed to learn.

  So, I eventually gave in and texted my mostly human friends.

  I briefly hoped that they were still alive, because I’d lost track of time again. And I didn’t really know how long Milk had waited to recreate me.

  But texting involved conjuring and using my phone, and my phone told me it hadn’t been all that long at all. Nine days.

  I ignored what day of the week it was, though. That was mostly irrelevant now. And I realized I was actually still bitter at being fired myself. Knowing whether it was a Saturday or a Monday only served to remind me of something I missed.

  But I could get another job anytime I liked. I just needed to focus on securing my current favorite city first, I guess.

  And why did I care about it?

  Cassiopeia Samaras.

  Jung Ayden.

  And Gregory McDermott.

  Weirdly enough.

  And probably also Amber Wells and Josephine Rodrigas, and other people whose names I could remember, who were presumably still alive.

  It’s not that they were in any particurly imminent danger, unless Chord turned particurly vicious or brutal. Just, I wasn’t done being around them while they were still here.

  Somewhere along the line, over the st few epochs, I’d developed Feelings.

  Maybe I’ve been hammering pretty hard on that personal development, but it’s kind of important. It was a shift in my being that had fundamentally altered my behavior and everything I valued.

  theInmara