“Does that cover everything?” Dr. Rathpalla asked.

I nodded. “I feel like my mind’s just been rearranged. Everything makes sense now.”

So, there’s some backstory you need to be aware of. In case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, I was—and still am—fascinated by religion; its philosophy, its history, and its many manifestations across space and time. Despite this, there was one area of religious inquiry that even I wouldn’t touch with a thirty-foot pole, and that was the topic of free will. I went through life taking it for granted that free will existed, and I was perfectly content in leaving that supposition completely unscrutinized. This was because I was too afraid of what would happen if I did scrutinize it.

Meanwhile, free will was Dr. Rathpalla’s favorite topic. Heck, it was the reason he’d chosen to go into psychiatry. So, of course, when he’d discovered his and the other transformees’ abilities to multiply their consciousness within themselves—doppelgangering themselves; or, as I’ve been pretentiously calling it, doppelgennething—Ibrahim had delved into the mind-warping implications with glee. Ever since, he’d been waiting to share his thoughts with me.

I was presently bathing in the afterglow of our discussion, which had been glorious and riveting. Not only did I get to share my doppelgenneth experiences with Dr. Rathpalla, and he share his with me, we could also corroborate them with what he’d heard from the SHG’s transformees.

The end result? Together, we pinned down our observations and theories about wyrms’ multifarious consciousness, and, over maybe an hour of heated discussion, the two of us had managed to iron out a pretty good theory of wyrm psychology. We gave things names, invented terminology.

Having a set of rules to fall back on was incredibly comforting.

The first big hurdle was the ultimate nature of wyrm consciousness. Was it singular, like human consciousness, or was it a true multitude, with a wyrm being multiple selves in a single mind? This was hard enough of a question for human beings—even there, the matter wasn’t as straightforward as you might think.

The corpus callosum is a crown of fibrous, interconnective tissue in the middle of the brain that links the left and right hemispheres to one another. Obviously, in an ideal world, everyone’s brain hemispheres would stay linked, but, there were certain kinds of severe seizure disorders where severing the corpus callosum led to massive improvements in quality of life. Seizures were storms of excessive neuron activity, and cutting the corpus callosum kept those storms from spilling over from one hemisphere into another.

People who received this treatment lived perfectly normal lives, but if you spent some time examining them, something fascinating would happen. Without the corpus callosum enabling communication between them, the two hemispheres of the human brain would work independently of one another, to the point that they could disagree as to what the body’s senses were telling them. The left and right hands could quarrel with one another.

Shocking, isn’t it?

Though certainly an unsettling result, this phenomenon made perfect sense when you looked at consciousness as an emergent property of the human connectome—the connectome being the physical network formed by the brain’s interconnected neurons. If you split that network into two non-communicating pieces, of course you would get two different “minds”.

After much discussion, Ibrahim and I reached agreement that, despite the presence of doppelgangers, wyrm consciousness was singular, just like a human’s. But having that in common didn’t mean the two were the same. To the contrary, the difference between a wyrm’s mind and a human’s mind was in how the two species organized their states of consciousness.

In the human mind, it was possible for trauma and other sources of pathology to create multiple personalities within a single, fully connected brain. This generally happened during a person’s youth, when their brain was still developing. By the time pubescence set in, the human mind would start to crystallize. Once that happened, if multiple personalities existed, they could be set in stone, though the outcome was always somewhat unpredictable. In some cases, the consciousnesses would share awareness with each other. In others, each personality would keep their particular experiences under lock and key, inaccessible to the other personas. Of course, you could also have pretty much any gradation in between these two extremes.

Neurophysiologically speaking, the brain was like a path dug into the dirt. The more a particular set of connections was used, the more entrenched they became, leading to the habits and tendencies of people’s thoughts and actions. In the right situations, this could erect walls of a sort between different states of consciousness.

But a wyrm’s brain was different.

“It’s like a potato,” Dr. Rathpalla had said. “A sweet potato, to be precise."

I imagined other tubers would also work. Ginseng, for example.

"If a human brain happens to house more than one consciousness, it has to divide itself and its signaling patterns in order to accommodate them all. But, as our doppelganger experiences have shown, a wyrm’s brain doesn’t have that limitation. It can run all of the consciousnesses simultaneously. They branch off from the ‘main’ consciousness in metaphorical protrusions, much like a tuber.”

We decided to refer to those protrusions nodes; the main body of the tuber itself, meanwhile, we called the root. Naturally, roots plus nodes equalled tree.

As far as we could tell, transformees and wyrm could consciously choose to form a node. This would extrude from either the root consciousness, or from another one of its nodes.

“We can call the new nodes a progeny consciousness,” I’d said. “The consciousness that created it will be the progenitor consciousness, whether it’s the root or another node.”

These consciousnesses were nested—ordered in a particular way—so that any given node had control over all of its progeny, though the progenitor needn’t always utilize that control. We chose the term coupling state to describe to the extent of connectedness between a given node and one of its progeny.

At one extreme, a progenitor consciousness could be decoupled from its progeny. When that happened, the progenitor consciousness would be completely unaware of what the progeny was doing.

“That happened to me,” I’d said, referring to the incident with Joe-Bob and the feast of spirits. “At the time, my ‘root’ was in my body, and I decoupled from my other selves, so I had no idea what they were doing and got catastrophically caught off guard when what they were doing came back to bite me.”

At the other end of the coupling state spectrum, you had multiplicity. This was where the progenitor consciousness was in complete control of both itself and its progeny, receiving any and all sensory input from them (real or imaginary).

“To my knowledge,” Ibrahim had said, “all transformees have reported full multiplicity on their first experience of multiple consciousnesses.”

This, again, was exactly what had happened to me. When my first doppelgenneth appeared, my sense of self had inhabited both copies (the physical, and the mental) simultaneously. That’s why I’d been “seeing” two viewpoints at the same time.

Recoupling was the obvious choice for “the opposite of decoupling”, beating out my original suggestion of “undecoupling”. This could be done at any node in the consciousness tree; the root could force a progeny of a progeny to recouple, if it so desired.

“I’ve observed that decoupled nodes have to recouple with the root every once in a while,” Ibrahim explained, “and if you don’t do it ‘manually’, it will happen all on its own. That’s important, because when a wyrm—or transformee—recouples with a decoupled progeny consciousness, all of the progeny’s mental data (thoughts, memories, etc.) come rushing back to the progenitor.”

I’d known exactly what he’d been talking about. “Ugh, I hate it when that happens,” I’d said. “It’s so disorienting!”

“You’re telling me!” Ibrahim replied. “Everyone I’ve talked to hates it. It’s why Greg doesn’t bother keeping his root consciousness in his body anymore.”

That was the last piece of the puzzle: recentering. Most curiously of all, the root consciousness was not restricted to inhabiting the wyrm’s physical body. This happened in humans, when we (or should I say, they) dreamed. In a dream, you perceived your consciousness as being located in your dream-self, within your dream-body. On the other hand, when you woke up, your mind comfortably settled back into your physical body—at least, most of the time. Unlike humans, however, wyrms could do this whenever they wanted to—and I should know, because I’d experienced it for myself, such as when I’d been traipsing through Ileene’s memories, or working in my mind-offices.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Going back to the sweet potato model, for a moment,” Ibrahim had said, “recentering would be as if the tuber’s central mass suddenly flowed down one of its protrusions, with that protrusion suddenly expanding in order to accommodate the relocated mass.”

Dr. Rathpalla shared the comforting news that, so far, he didn’t know of any cases where a node initiated a recentering. Only the root consciousness seemed to have that capability.

“More generally,” he’d said, “it seems the root has executive control over all its nodes.”

“So, I don’t need to worry about one of my sub-selves trying to overthrow me?” I’d asked.

“Exactly.”

“That’s a relief,” I’d said.

And it really was.

Presently, I turned to face Ibrahim. Every once in a while, he slapped his prodigious tail against Ward 13’s vinyl floor, and it almost never failed to catch my attention.

“Thank you for roping me into this,” I told him. “In this past hour, I’ve felt more normal than I ever have since waking up dead for the first time.” I nodded, and then bowed. “It means a lot to me.”

For me, talking with colleagues about neurological conditions and mental states was a welcome return to the commonplace. Sure, the topic of our conversation was utterly loony—at least from the “things psychiatrists should talk about” standpoint—but I refused to let that rain on my parade.

“It’s my pleasure, Genneth,” Ibrahim replied, nodding in return.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “was the library you showed us in the soul-therapy practice session really the one you used for your Lassedile research?”

Ibrahim had given us a tour of his research library during our mind-link soul-therapy practice session. It was the size of a decent bedroom, and was covered wall-to-wall in bookshelves, and every shelf was filled to the brim. The library also doubled as Dr. Rathpalla’s mind-office, which he’d used for a straightforward one-on-one therapy session with his chosen ghost, an old woman by the name of Stephanie.

Even so, I was still somewhat chary to believe that Ibrahim had read all those books in the short span of time it had taken me to lecture the SHG about Andalon. Yes, the passage of time inside a mind-world wasn’t one-to-one with the passage of time out in the real world, but it wasn’t so extreme that you could use it to read years’ worth of text in a few minutes of real time.

Dr. Rathpalla shot me a bemused look. “You’re telling me you figured out how to recenter your consciousness all by yourself, but you didn’t figure out slo-mo?”

Tilting my head, I pursed my lips. “What?”

Apparently, Nurse Costran had been watching us, because she slithered up to our position and gave me a concerned, matronly look that she usually reserved for her patients in the Quiet Ward.

“You don’t know about slo-mo?” she asked. “Surely, you’ve had to have experienced it by now.”

I clenched my claws. “I feel like I’m out of the loop here,” I said.

“Have you been eating enough, Dr. Howle?” Yuth asked.

“What?”

Yuth scrutinized as much of me as my hazmat suit allowed. “From what you’ve said, you’ve been a Type Two for almost a whole week. That puts you ahead of me by maybe only a day or two, at most.” She glanced down at the thick trunk of tail that had displaced her legs—both in form and function—and then tilted her head to the side. “Still, you’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do.” She added, along with a warm smile.

“What is slo-mo?” I asked.

“Ever since you started to change,” Ibrahim said, “you have to have had moments where time seemed to… slow down. Maybe even stop.”

Oh, I thought.

Of course. That had happened all the time.

“That’s slo-mo?” I said, surprised. “I thought it was just stress.”

“It isn’t,” Ibrahim said. “It’s your thoughts speeding up. It’s like changing the playback speed on a video, only the video is your experience of reality.”

“Oooh,” Yuth said, “that’s a good analogy. I like it.” She smiled. “I hope you don’t mind if I steal it?”

“Not at all,” Dr. Rathpalla replied.

“What’s the point of this?” I asked. “When I experienced the slow-downs before, such as in my fight with the specter in the restroom, I couldn’t do anything other than think.”

“Specter in the restroom?” Yuth asked.

I shook my head. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, sure,” Ibrahim explained, “you can’t do anything with your body in slo-mo, but you’re free to do whatever you want inside your head.”

“Such as reading a library’s worth of literature?” I asked.

Dr. Rathpalla nodded. “Exactly.”

“So,” I said, “how does this work?”

“Like pretty much all the other wyrm powers,” Yuth said, “by thinking about it. Once you’ve quickened your thoughts—and I know this sounds silly, but it’s what’s worked—you can bring everything back to normal by slowing your mental ‘voice’. Strehhhhhtch yoooooouuuuuuuur thooooooooooughts oouuuuuuuut. That’s how you get out of slo-mo.”

I almost felt bad Andalon had pooped herself out. She’d have gotten a kick out of this.

“You won’t need to do that once you get a hang of it,” Yuth added, “but it’s a great way to get a hang of it.”

“Why are you telling me how to get out of slo-mo?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you tell me how to get into it, first?”

Shaking his head, Dr. Rathpalla reached out and put a clawed hand on my shoulder. “Because when Greg first told me about it,” he said, “he told me how to get into it before he told me how to get out of it.” He grimaced. “I, of course, was stupid enough to try doing it the instant he told me about it, and by the time my slowed-down mind finally registered the incoming sounds of his explanation of how to get out of it, I’d been stuck in slo-mo for two whole days!”

“I remember that,” Nurse Costran said. “From the outside, we saw Dr. Rathpalla get real quiet for two or three seconds and then he suddenly started whooping and hollering, weeping with joy.”

“Angel’s breath…” I muttered.

“Exactly.” Yuth nodded. “Now that you know how to get unstuck, it’s safe to tell you that you can enter slo-mo by speeding up your thoughts. As your thoughts accelerate, the world around you will seem to slow down.”

“Mmm… let me guess,” I said, “I can do so by imagining my inner monologue whizzing by at a terrific speed? A high-pitched squeaky voice?”

“Yep,” Dr. Rathpalla said, “that’s exactly what Greg told me to do.”

“So…” Yuth said, leaning back, “even though I know we’re not supposed to pressure other transformees to eat just to speed their TFs along, I can’t help but feel that you might just be the exemplary exception, Dr. Howle.”

She turned to the side. “Here.” A whip of yellows and blues lashed out like a grappling hook from Yuth’s outstretched claws. A second later, it sprang back to her, carrying a bag of potato chips along with it. She opened the plastic packaging with a flick of a talon. With my wyrmsight, I saw the threads of Yuth’s power emanating from her hand detach into a bundle of free-floating strings which then curled into a circle—a ring—fusing end to end, much like the spherical weave Letty had cooked up to make herself levitate.

“Nice trick,” I muttered. I shook my head. “I wish it had gone as easily for me,” I added.

Yuth narrowed her eyes at me. “You just slice the bag open with your claws,” she said.

I shook my head again. “No, not that,” I said. “The levitation, I mean.”

Yet again, both Dr. Rathpalla and Nurse Costran stared at me.

“Genneth, this is easy-peasy stuff,” Ibrahim said. “You really haven’t been handling this well on your own, have you?”

“You’d have figured it out with the rest of us if you hadn’t skipped out on the psychokinesis workshop,” Yuth added.

That’s right, I thought. Last time I was here, Yuth had mentioned they were doing group power-training sessions.

“It’s not my fault I was busy,” I said, grinning, only to sigh. “Well, I suppose it actually was my fault. I—”

“—Just zip it and eat your potato chips,” Yuth said. Pushing her clawed hand forward, the plexus ring and the bag of chips floating above it came right up to my face.

“No.” I raised my hands in a defensive posture. “I couldn’t possibly use up your—”

“—Genneth,” Nurse Costran said, with a click of what I hoped was her tongue, “we gathered a decent hoard of vendables a couple days ago, for exactly this reason: so that everyone would have enough to eat. Trust me, you’re not imposing on us. Please, eat,” she added. “I insist.”

Delicately, I plucked two and a half large, crunchy, corrugated potato chips and chewed them to bits.

“Just enough to keep the munchies at bay,” I said.

“Are you on a diet, or something?” Yuth said, facetiously. “C’mon.” She furrowed her brow. “Stop kidding around.”

“Actually,” I nodded, “yes, I am on a diet.” I smiled.

Yuth and Ibrahim weren’t the only ones who heard me say that. Faces and snouts—eyes human and not—turned to me and stared.

I sighed. “I meant what I said.” I passed my eyes over the confused onlookers. “I’m trying to drag out my changes as much as I can, for as long as I can.”

Dr. Rathpalla let out a loud groan. “Queen’s writ, Howle…” He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “This is all about that neurosis of yours, isn’t it?”

“Which one?” I said. “I have several.”

He rolled his eyes at me, and I guess I deserved that.

“You still haven’t truly accepted what’s happening to you, have you?” he said. “You just can’t leave well enough alone.” He chuckled sadly. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought you’d become a ‘Demptist.”

“Never!” I said, with half-mock indignation.

Dr. Rathpalla sighed. “Genneth, our time as doctors is over. Now that you’ve told us about Andalon, I can stop worrying about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. There’s no doubt in my mind. This is war. It’s a war over the souls of the dead, and you’ve shown us how we can fight.” He glanced over at the center of the Ward’s reception area. “Once we finish changing, I figure we can join the soldiers out there. We’ll take the fight directly to the fungus. It might have fired the first shot, but with Andalon’s power, we can fight back.”

“It’ll be a war on two fronts,” Yuth said, “inside and out. Thick World and Thin.”

“Thick World?” someone asked.

Suddenly, Greg stirred. “I call meat-space the Thick World. Mind-worlds are the Thin World, ‘cuz they’re not as thick and fleshy, you know?” And then he closed his golden eyes and was silent once more.

“We’re going to need all the transformees we can get,” Yuth said, turning away from Greg to face me again. “I’m pretty sure the fungus isn’t going to be happy about Andalon throwing a wrench in its plans, whatever those plans might be.” She pressed the bag of chips against my face, and I had to stagger back to avoid them. “Please,” she said, “eat, embrace the next steps of the change. You’re the only one who can talk to Andalon. We need you, Genneth.”

“I’m sorry, Yuth,” I turned, “Ibrahim… everyone… I’m a doctor, not a fighter. I can do the soul-therapy—I can fight the demons on that front. But…” I lowered my head in shame. “I’m not like Dr. Marteneiss; I’m not cut out for combat—not outside of RPGs, anyhow.”

“So, you’re just going to starve yourself, is that it?” someone said. “Because you’re a pussy?”

I responded to my heckler with contemptuous snort.

Dr. Rathpalla craned his head to the side. “Tira, you’re needed,” he said. “We’re gonna show Genneth what he can do.”

“What?” I said.

“You only think you’re bad at combat,” Dr. Rathpalla said. “Once you understand your powers, you’ll see what I mean. Now, get Andalon out here,” he added. “You’ll need her to translate.”