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The man who would become Quiet-Dream could not claim to have led a boring life. On paper, he was an accountant, a skillset that had yet to become remotely useful in his current situation. In actuality, though, his job mainly involved taking the very bleak numbers given to him by various non-profit organizations and presenting them to potential sponsors, philanthropists, government grant assessors, and foundation heads in order to secure funding. This, of course, required curating and massaging the numbers to fit the tastes of the target audience.
A sponsor may want visibility and confidence that the organization wouldn’t just evaporate overnight, while many philanthropists wanted to be “angel donors,” seeking out floundering and doomed charities to “rescue” and bolster their own ego. He would take the same set of data and present it differently to both, twisting the truth for each in order to maximize the chances of getting someone with too much money to part with a pittance to help people who needed it. He was more like a contracted marketing firm dressed up as an accountant than the actual thing.
It started out as just an interim job, a friend working for a local charity had offered it to him fresh out of college. But then he saw the reality of the world he was dealing with. A world of haves and have-nots, where cruel an incompetent people stepped on the less fortunate to secure undeserved power. A world where preexisting access to wealth could decide your entire trajectory in life. A world where the powerful could look you in the eye as you presented them with an easy way to make the world a better place and have the gall to ask what was in it for them.
He couldn’t become a proper accountant after that. He couldn’t work for those people and help them hoard even more wealth. But he couldn’t abandon that charity work, either, because he was the only qualified person willing to do it. This career choice meant that he wouldn’t be living comfortably, charities could rarely pay him a living wage, if they could even pay him at all, but the thought of giving up for his own sake made him sick.
“It is safe to assume, then, that your personality has remained consistent between lives.” Lead Scholar Delving-Thought interjected as Quiet-Dream described his work immediately prior to having ended up here.
“Why’s that?”
“You have a habit of taking on a lot of responsibility that you are not obligated to, despite being in crisis yourself.” The cockatoo quickly noticed Quiet-Dream’s glare at the insinuation and continued. “That is not a value judgement. Simply an observation for my notes.”
“If you say so.” The Apprentice took a worried glance at Black-Leap, who had been uncomfortably quiet since he’d begun telling his story. She was staring at the ground, lost in thought.
“However, I am curious how your identity has adapted.”
“In what way?” The squirrel braced himself. There were several different directions this question could go. None of them pleasant.
“The most obvious point is your species, of course.” The bird seemed to take note of the tension in the question, brushing down more notes as they stared at him. “Your physical reality is not in question, but that only has partial bearing on your self-perception. For example, it is not uncommon for young of one species raised exclusively in the care of another to identify strongly with the species of their social family rather than their biological parents.” They dipped their feather in their inkwell and clicked their beak expectantly, their gaze expressing nothing but an all-consuming curiosity. “What do you consider yourself to be, Apprentice?”
“Not a squirrel,” Quiet-Dream squeaked with absolute certainty. “But… not human, either. I don’t know what I am. It doesn’t matter, though. Whatever I am, I’m me.”
“Are you comfortable with that uncertainty?”
“No. But what choice do I have?”
The Scholar did not answer, letting the question hang as they took their time retrieving a new sheet of paper and a fresh quill from a bag, this one clearly not one of their own. Their own molts clearly did not cover the entirety of their prolific writing needs.
“There is a second, far more subtle point, however. One that I am actually more interested in.” They didn’t give him time to prepare himself this time, opting to dive right in. “Something that I observed in Pearl’s vocalizations was the use of symbolic shorthand used to represent the subject of a statement. ‘He.’ ‘She.’ ‘They.’ ‘It.’” Delving-Thought spoke the list of pronouns aloud, no more elegant than their earlier attempts at mimicking Maggie’s speech, but still perfectly intelligible. “Given the implications of those, along with what you have said about your previous life, am I correct in assuming that your former species used sex as a social category?”
“I’m not answering that,” Quiet-Dream hissed, standing up and assuming a defensive posture.
“You do not have to.” The rapid swishes of the feather-brush made it clear that his reflexive non-answer might as well have been an emphatic yes. “Your former species is far from the only one to establish sex-based social identities among your own kind; they are merely more obvious in settlements primarily composed of similar species. You are not likely to have encountered their use in Darksoil.”
“And now you want to know about mine.”
“No, I simply want to know if it has changed along with your body. The identity itself is much less important than that detail.”
The squirrel took a deep breath and sat back down, attempting to calm himself. A quick glance over to Black-Leap made his heart sink. The kit was clearly distressed by his outburst, looking away as soon as he met her gaze.
The fact that he had such a strong reaction to the question was reason enough to examine it. It was something that he had simply refused to think about at length, using the fact that there was so much else going on as a reason to put it off. But he’d have to confront it, because he’d dedicated himself to being a mom. And that was important to him.
Is gender even the same as animal social roles? he wondered. This question was central to his answer. What the Scholar was talking about seemed more… biological than human gender. Not prescriptive of a manner of presentation, but rather a matter of form and function when it comes to reproduction and child rearing. Like they said, outside of that kind of communal, single-species living arrangement, it simply didn’t matter. And knowing that, he knew exactly what his answer would be.
“It hasn’t changed. I am the mother of two kits, but that is separate from the identity you’re interested in.”
“Understood.” Delving-Thought paused, glancing between Quiet-Dream and his kit before setting down their brush for a moment. “I just have one more line of questioning for you, Apprentice, but this has clearly been a stressful experience for you both. Are you willing to continue?”The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Black-Leap?” The mother squirrel looked over at the kit. “How are you feeling?”
“I want to hear more,” she squeaked, meekly meeting Quiet-Dream’s gaze. “Ink-Talon promised to teach me about these things, but…”
“But he never got around to it, did he?”
“No.”
“Okay. We’ll continue.” The Apprentice sighed. One more thing he’d be dressing the crow down for when he got back. If he ever does.
“Thank you.” The Lead-Scholar nodded, picking up the feather-brush once again. “The world you have described, it is the one depicted in the Beacon’s Insight, correct?”
“As far as I can tell, yes.” The squirrel nodded, wary of just what the cockatoo’s angle was.
“And some of the events depicted were contemporary with your lifetime, despite the age of our records?”
“Also correct. You aren’t one of the people who think I’m some kind of spiritual prophet, are you?” Quiet-Dream spotted an opportunity and went for it. Even if Delving-Thought wasn’t involved in the politics surrounding them all right now, they might know someone who was.
“Is that a common belief?” This seemed to catch the bird off-guard, and it moved to grab a new fresh page on the spot.
“Common enough that I just happened to witness a Consensus of three of them placing absolute faith in my vague knowledge of human engineering, forcing me to advise as an ‘expert.’” He nearly spit to express the final word, the whole concept still made his stomach turn. He thought better before going through with it, thankfully. “Someone has made copies of select records from the library and is circulating them in the city. Ones pertaining to our origins and the Beacons. People are drawing rather… extreme conclusions from them.”
“I see…” Quiet-Dream could see Delving-Thought’s mind begin to race behind their eyes, but they shook their head before they got in too deep. Instead, they brushed down a series of quick strokes on the blank sheet of paper they had just grabbed before folding it up and setting it aside. “If it is any comfort, I do not share that level of spiritual fervor.”
“What do you think we are, then?” Quiet-Dream bristled, standing up and clenching his jaw in frustration. This was going nowhere “How am I supposed to convince people not to elevate me as someone better than them?
“Have you examined any more of the Beacon’s Insight beyond what you and Ink-Talon recorded?” Delving-Thought asked, countering his questions with one of their own.
“No. Archivist Sharp-Search said that the rest weren’t worth using.”
“The Archivist was correct in its assessment. There are more records, but they are… unpleasant.” The cockatoo shuffled awkwardly on their feet. “Records of those who either Attuned to the Beacon improperly, or lost themselves within its Insight. They have been regarded as a shameful failure of the early Scholars, a preventable loss of life, and are kept within the archives only as a reminder of that shame. As Lead Scholar, I took it upon myself to commit them to memory, dedicating myself to preventing such a mistake from happening again.”
“And one of them was… like us?” Quiet-Dream asked, sitting back down as he realized what they were implying.
“Only superficially. Its identity was replaced, like your own, but with something… malformed and incomplete.” Delving-Thought shuddered, and Black-Leap pressed into the Apprentice’s side, having moved over some time during the description. All Quiet-Dream could do was stroke the top of the kit’s head to comfort her. “Thanks to your discovery of the Insight’s nature, I now realize that the identity in question was that of a fictional character. Their only memories were of the events of the Insight, and they lacked the ability to reason outside of the Insight’s narrative. They did not survive for more than two days.”
That final statement seemed to suck the heat out of the room, prompting the squirrel to shiver. Whatever had happened to them all, it was clear that there were no shortage of ways it could go wrong. The fact that none of the humans in this group had died in the process was a miracle. Others out there might not have been so lucky.
“But we are Insight, aren’t we?” Quiet-Dream murmured, lowering his gaze to the ground. “That’s what our Ink-Talon theorized, after the failed ‘treatment.’” He growled the final part of the statement, both in disdain for the treatment itself, and for Ink-Talon’s resulting behavioral shift. “We’re just… stories of people who no longer exist. Sacred stories, according to some.”
“Not quite. I believe that you are Insight only insofar that your lives prior to waking up in that body are likely records stored within a Beacon. However!” The Scholar hopped and fluttered their wings, landing in front of the squirrels and giving them the first look of proper sympathy they had the entire interview. “If these interviews have convinced me of anything, it is that the records that made up your minds are complete. Your entire beings, from your habits to your personalities to your memories, have been recreated in such detail that even if there were errors, you would not be able to notice them. You are real.”
“Yeah!” Black-Leap squeaked, expressing her first hint of enthusiasm in quite a while. “If you were fake, I’d know!”
“I suppose you would.” Quiet-Dream took a deep breath, clenching and relaxing his paws in sequence.
“Regardless of their origins, the Beacons are not infallible. That has been proven. And as a real person, you are no more an agent of ‘divine guidance’ than I am.” Delving-Thought stepped back and gestured to several baskets of bound scrolls sitting on one corner of the room. “My Gift and the way I use it come from the Beacons. But these records do not constitute an absolute truth any more than your memories do. We are all fallible, and I am of the opinion that any god who makes mistakes is not one worth devoting your life to.”
“I… Thank you, for your honesty.” The squirrel did his best to quell his nervous trembling. He hadn’t noticed when it had started. All he could think to do was extend a forepaw to Delving-Thought to shake. “And for treating us with basic respect. It has been… difficult to live without that lately.”
“I would be abdicating my responsibilities as Lead Scholar if I did not act in accordance with the evidence I observe,” the cockatoo clicked as they grasped his forepaw and shook, Understanding the intended gesture with unsurprising ease. “And the behavior of the Guardians is something I intend on recommending against myself, since I have yet to uncover anything necessitating it. I would like to think my opinion holds at least some credibility.” After releasing his paw, they then gestured towards the door with their wing. “The Guardian outside will escort you back, however…” Their gaze to Black-Leap. “I wish to request permission to interview your kit one-on-one. Its perspective is unique and important.”
“You’re asking for permission?”
“I do not coerce people for information, Apprentice, and certainly not a child,” the Scholar squawked, clearly insulted. “Doing so would render anything I learned unreliable. Either of you may refuse, and I will send you both back.”
Quiet-Dream’s first instinct was to refuse, of course. But the Scholar did seem more well-intentioned than the Guardians, and it wasn’t just his opinion that mattered…
“What do you want to do, Black-Leap? Your choice.”
“I’m staying.” Black-Leap chirped bluntly, not elaborating further.
“If that’s what you want. Be a good girl while I’m gone, okay?” In his peripheral vision, he noticed the Lead Scholar tilt his head inquisitively. He had a pretty good idea what part of that sparked their curiosity, and was thankful that they refrained from asking about it. He wouldn’t have been able to give them a satisfying answer.
“I promise!”
“I’ll see you when you’re done, then.” Quiet-Dream nodded and turned around, calling to be let out and escorted back to his room. He didn’t feel good about much that went on in that interview, even the encouragement and kindness Delving-Thought displayed was in response to aspects of his nature that did not sit well with him. However, if her behavior during the interview was any indication, Black-Leap was even more troubled by things than he was. Given that it was about him in the first place, he was the worst person for her to talk to. If I’m lucky, she can work some of that out with the Lead Scholar. And if not, then… Then I’m going to need some help.
After a moment, the door swung open into a quiet hallway. It wasn’t until he was all the way out that Quiet-Dream realized that it was entirely deserted. And it wasn’t until the door was pushed shut that he saw the unconscious body of the coyote who had escorted him here in a heap behind it, with something much taller standing over their crumpled form. Unfortunately, he spotted the movement in his peripheral vision was far too late, and a damp, sweet-smelling bag was thrown over his head before he could make out either assailant or call for help.
The last thing he heard before the chemical concoction in the fabric finished putting him to sleep was a series of quiet taps on the ground, made with something metallic.
“Leave a signature. I want them to realize who they are dealing with.”
And then he was out cold.