Soph was playing hyper-dimensional sports with Laplace and Zavis.

She spent quite a lot of her time embodied. She spend quite a lot of that time in her favorite body avatar.

But avatars are bodies. At least, hers was to her. It went deeper that the superficial appearance-avatars the disembodied-minds sometimes used, sometimes even clipping their arms/manipulators/tentacles through scenery and walls, as if to show their disdain for the the laws of physics that their shared-virtual-environment was still loosely based on.

Yes, her body was real to her. Even if it wasn't made of real atoms, because bodies hadn't been made out of atoms for a very very long time (do you think Soph is made out of money? The expense of instantiating a real physical body in the real physical world would be astronomical, and Soph wasn't quite super-ultra-mega-hyper-rich to be able to even think about affording that. And even if she was, she could think of a million better things to waste her hard-earned or easy-earned or undeservedly-earned value-exchange-credits on)

That is why Soph was now embodied in her favorite avatar, embedded in 5d-space, and was trying very hard to block a rainbow-colored ball hyper-sphere with her right blade.

She missed.

"Score!", shouted Zavis.

"Your avatar has longer manipulators. Not fair", grumbled Soph loudly. But she was in a good mood.

"So get longer manipulators yourself. Even the score", suggested Zavis.

"Then you would make yours even longer. I refuse participate in this arms race", said Soph, then tittered as she realized she made a pun.

"Bahahahahaha!". Laplace gave a hearty, belly-laugh. "See. I told you you'd feel better"

And she did.

Being in the moment, flowing with her body, focusing on her lived-experience rather than her thoughts really did help.

She didn't quite know Zavis. They were a friend of a friend who joined the hyper-ball game.

Soph didn't think she was in the market for a new friend. But she was happy to have someone to play with.

Zavis was called they instead of he or she because Zavis was agender (or their current avatar was agender. Or they felt agender at the moment. Soph didn't particularly care. Genderstuff wasn't very interesting to her, and if something important about Zavis' gender-presentation changed in a way that she needed to know about, like the pronoun they would like to called, it was up to them to inform her).

Soph self-identified as a girl (though perhaps without the very slighly creepy overtones the word might have in the human language. Well, in some contexts, anyway. Language is very much not universal).

She was perfectly happy with her gender-identity. She was definitely not in the market for the thousands or millions more unusual or custom gender or gender-related identities, made for those who felt it was important to them to define themselves or express themselves in that particular way.

And, to be perfectly frank, she was a body, she was a mind, but she didn't quite feel like a gender. Genderstuff was never particularly important to her, now that she thought of it. It was a comfortable default. It was a comfortable way for others who cared more about gender than she did to relate to her. She didn't feel the need to think about it more than that.

Her girl-identity didn't limit her or restrict her. It was just there, as a reminder she was OK with herself and that, for now, she hadn't felt the need to explore that particular space further. And if she ever did, maybe she would create a new identity for herself. Because identities are descriptive, not prescriptive.

But in a way, identities are prescriptive, too.

An identity is comfortable.

An identity is stable.

An identity holds you together.

An identity helps you decide what to do, out of all the possible decisions you could make. It helps with decision paralysis.

An identify is like a comfy, worn shirt that you wear on days when you don't want anything special to wear. An identity is your default.

Soph-74-the-girl-by-default was happy with herself. Then she was smacked in the face by the rainbow hyper-ball.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"Come on Soph, pay attention!", shouted Zavis. "That was an easy block"

"Sorry!", she shouted back.

She focused.

She rolled the ball along her left tentacle, spinning it up as it went, then smacked it with her blade, sending it hard on a curved trajectory aimed squarely at Zavis' mid-section.

"Gah!", they shouted, blocking the ball at the last possible moment. It deflected into a wall. "Nice curve!"

Eventually, they settled at both Laplace and Zavis throwing hyper-balls at her, while she did her best to deflect them with her manipulators, tentacles, or blades.

She wasn't quite quick enough to deflect them all, so with their permission, she put on Tron-style forcefield-partial-armor-plates that allowed her to block and rebound some of the throws with her arms and her body.

When she had enough of that experience as well, she accelerated her reflexes and her time-perspective. She kept accelerating until she could deflect all of the shots at her, finally grabbing one of the balls in mid-air, and, in a expertly timed throw, redirecting it to hit Laplace in the shoulder just as he was distracted by another ball passing on a neably trajectory.

"Soph is almost certainly cheating", said the Arbiter in a slightly-synthetic voice, as typical for a non-sentient entity.

"I noticed!", said Laplace, slighty out of breath. "But I was having too much fun to call you out on that"

"I wasn't sure", said Zavis. Unlike Laplace, they didn't appear to even be winded yet. "I thought maybe you were a ballet dancer or an experienced-sports-player, or had previusly hyper-trained your motor-reflexes under time-acceleration, or any other number of possible things. It would have been rude to assume you were cheating"

"Oh, she is cheating all right", said Laplace. "But now, it is our turn to cheat"

"Administrator override! Execute program 142-dash-E!"

And he accelerated to impossible speed, hyper-balls of all colors and sizes appearing at the end of his manipulators just at the right times for him to throw, smack and direct them into Soph.

"Gah!", she cried, raising her hands futilely against the volley. She noticed her own acceleration-cheats were no longer working. Thankfully the balls were relatively soft, and as they hit her body and face, it was more her pride that was stung. But she did relish the little stings of not-quite-pain. She tried to cheat and got caught. This was her punishment.

Zavis looked on in wonderment for a moment, then joined in on the fun. Laplace must have shared his hacks/priviliges with him.

"Laplace is cheating. Laplace-is-cheating-laplace-is-cheating-laplaceischeating", the Arbiter kept repeating ever faster, until it fell over, smoke streaming out of its synthetic skull. "la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-", it continued for a short while, until its electronic brain short-circuited in a shower of sharks.

After Soph had been sufficiently humiliated punished taught that if you cheat you better not get caught, the three of them lay down in the sports-hall-turned-into-a-ball-pit together.

"We should fill this with water", said Zavis conversationally. "The balls float, don't they?"

"I don't like getting wet", said Laplace. "It's a phobia. Well, not quite a phobia, but I haven't felt the need to have it corrected. It's become a part of my personality. A quirk".

"I would be embarassed, I think", said Soph. "I think I've had enough childish fun for one day. I'm a grown woman. I have an existential crisis to resolve".

"Ha!", said Zavis. "Told you she wouldn't change her mind. Pay up".

Laplace made one the universal signs of financial-transaction with his hand at Zavis. If anything, he seemed happy about it.

"You made a bet about me?" Soph asked, trying and failing to sound appropriately scandalized. Really, she found she just didn't care too much.

"All in good fun", said Laplace. "Besides, in is part of my culture" (he made a sign of the Predictors with the same reverence that a human might make a sign of the cross) "that we resolve our disagreements on probability assessments by betting. How else would be calibrate ourselves? How else would we know we are honest with ourselves?"

"Bleh", said Soph half-heartedly. She wasn't a fan of the Predictor culture.

She trusted her instinct, and her instinct flowed and ebbed and rarely settled on a final answer, rarely thought in terms of numbers at all.

It kept secrets from her. It lied to her with truths, and told her truths with lies.

It flowed her into a state of mind, and Soph rarely knew if this was the literal truth, a metaphor, a way to test a hypothetical, or something else entirely. Her instinct didn't seem fit to inform her. Maybe it didn't know itself. Maybe it didn't matter. She would know what she needed to know at exactly the right time, no later, no earlier.

It showed her all the wonderful and horrible things. Soph loved it.

She was, in some sense, a passenger, just along for the ride on the journey into her own mind, but she still loved it.

She was concerned, though, that if her instinct ever lost touch with reality, she would become not just insane, but dangerously, delusionally, self-righteously insane. Because she had learned to trust her instinct, and if it failed her, she would be utterly lost.

Is she on to us?

Shhhh...