<p>Attention! Station alert level has been set to white!</p>
<p>The station is suffering dangerously high levels of glimmer, there are several active psionic threats, or there is another significant epistemic emergency. Turn off all glimmer probers. Seek psionic insulation. Psychics should report to the Mantes for mindbreaking.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Abby clutched at the armrests of her seat as the evac shuttle, still docked to the station, jolted with an explosion. Crates slammed against the wall. Lockers in the med bay, not yet bolted securely, wobbled and rattled in place, threatening to tip over. Everyone jounced in their seats, glasses and hats — many of them the insulated headgear the Mantes had passed out — clattered to the floor. She shrieked, though so did several others aboard.</p>
<p>The captain, still standing outside the airlocks, was shouting down the hall, voice weirdly distorted by the very strangeness of the air. It <em>sounded</em> sparkly. It <em>looked</em> too loud. Something about everything was just slightly off, as though two universes slipped and juddered against each other, sending flares of one reality through the other.</p>
<p>“715!” the captain hollered from the hall. “No, don’t treat them here, treat them in the shuttle med bay!”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Attention! Station alert level has been set to white!</p>
<p>The station is suffering dangerously high levels of glimmer, there are several active psionic threats, or there is another significant epistemic emergency. Turn off all glimmer probers. Seek psionic insulation. Psychics should report to the Mantes for mindbreaking.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Mama, what’s–”</p>
<p>“Hush, baby,” her mother said, tucking Abby as close as she could across the safe distance between the flight chairs. It was at least enough for her mother to hug around her head, damping out the sound with one of her paws. “Hush. It just means things are going to feel really weird for a bit.”</p>
<p>From across the aisle, her father’s face, always so calm, crinkled into a smile. “It’s alright, little Soot. The boom was just the prober going, which means that things will level out.”</p>
<p>She nodded, watching as the captain chased the last of the paramedics aboard and dashed up to the cockpit. Her father’s explanation soothed her in a way her mother’s reassurances didn’t. They worked together to settle her nerves, each coming from two different angles.</p>
<p>“We’re still leaving, though?”</p>
<p>He nodded. “They’ll have the advanced crew come through and get everything all straightened up, not us everyday ordinary chumps,” he said, a chuckle rumbling beneath his words. “We couldn’t get drainers done in time. Safest to just head out.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” she said, doing her best to embody that confidence. Settling back in her seat and tugging away from her mother’s awkward embrace, Abby ran a paw through the unruly mop of white headfur — the only break in the otherwise all black coat she’d had since birth — to try and straighten it.</p>
<p>“Abigail?! Where’s your hat? Where’s the–”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Attention! Station alert level has been set to—</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There was no discontinuity.</p>
<p>That was the worst part, they would often think when they woke from yet another nightmare of that day a decade and a half ago. There was no discontinuity. There should have been some break in their — or her, as they thought of themselves back then — perception of time, some blacking out, some fading to white that presaged the shift.</p>
<p>There had not even been a perceivable decrease in the unnerving tang of glimmer in the air.</p>
<p>She had been there, sitting in her flight chair, running her paw through her headfur, just this twelve-year-old mouse her dad always called ‘little Soot’, and then she was at the cockpit in a wildly different body, sitting in front of unfamiliar controls.</p>
<p>She/he/this body cried out in shock and agony, for the captain, whose body she now inhabited, had been well and truly singed by the explosion of the prober, to the point where the CMO, the ever-kindly Dr. R, was caught in the act of slathering ointment on the side of her/his/this body’s face. They both — these two bodies no longer inhabited by the correct minds — stared at each other in shock and horror.</p>
<p>“No no no–” Dr. R/not Dr. R was saying.</p>
<p>Abby/the captain/this body wailed and clutched at the console, mashing buttons in a panicked attempt to find something, <em>anything</em> solid and known, something to anchor herself/himself/this body. The shuttle slewed sideways.</p>
<p>None of the rest of that otherwise prosaic afternoon made it into their dream. It always ended in silence, a warm rush of air to the face that blended seamlessly into the move into wakefulness.</p>
<p>The dream clung to Soot like the whispers of spiderwebs caught in fur, little streaks of memory that would tickle a whisker here, the rounded rim of an ear there. Days like these, more than most, the long-healed scar of their reconstructed muzzle would itch and the lisp that came with it, one they bore proudly, would be all the more pronounced.</p>
<p>They would make their way through the day with all the same practiced ease as ever, and yet just below the surface, simmering uncomfortably, would be the dream. There, just beneath their skin, would be–</p>
<p>“Captain on deck,” the automated system announced as soon as their ID was recognized. The faint chime that followed, a thing doubtless engineered to sound soothing and reassuring, always sounded inquisitive, as though the station was curious to hear their thoughts on the matter.</p>
<p>“Yeth, yeth,” they muttered under their breath, completing the ritual. “I’m here now.”</p>
