Disaggregation, part two

this is a book article but it is also part of a ritual and an exploration; you can join here, but you may prefer to join at the beginning for proper context.

1. book 1: Persona
   1. wot happens in the book
   2. the ‘default persona’ and the muck
   3. a memory of a demonstration
2. book 2: A/S/L
   1. wot happens in the book
3. space for a sorceress
4. betrayal

book 1: Persona

• OK, let’s get into this one. Because foooooof.
• yeah fooooooof. aoife was wielding some real sorcerous powers when she wrote this book. it wrapped us up in its whorls and truths.

• Let’s describe the book, in case our readers haven’t read it, and also to make sure it is fresh in our mental shared context.

  Persona is a horror novel by Aoife Josie Clements. We became aware of Aoife thanks to her role in Castration Movie; we are in a discord server with her as a result of that. It can be positioned in relation to the current wave of trans guro horror seen in authors like Alison Rumfitt and Gretchen Felker-Martin (whose endorsement is listed on the cover), but it is thankfully less of a direct political polemic or self-conscious of how transgressive~ it is, even if it is very very directly concerned with the abjection we face.

• it’s a book about dissociating to shit. of being an interchangeable thing. of breaking under the gaze of the world. of negation.
• So we can begin the plot summary-y section.

wot happens in the book

• The book opens with the story of a trans girl called Annie, though the FPPOV makes it take a while until we get her name. A persistent sleepwalker as a child, Annie briefly eked out a living working in a kitchen, but increasingly became overcome by what we might describe as severe agoraphobia; she is overwhelmed by the gaze of the world.

  As we hit the end of her sole relationship, a rather desperate affair with a server at the kitchen, Annie lives in a garbage-filled apartment, scraping by just enough from a job filling out meaningless online surveys to pay for food deliveries and hormones. Her attitude towards the bugs and filth is unusually positive; she seems to regard them with a kind of adoration. As the story begins, she attempts suicide.

  As the first arc progresses, Annie’s perception takes on increasingly strange shapes, narrated in claustrophobic present tense; it is harder to tell what is ‘real’ as we slip in and out of flashback. But it’s not that she doesn’t have reason to be paranoid. The survey company somehow performs a surreal ‘full body scan’ that her computer should not be able to perform. At one point she wakes up from a failed suicide attempt on a subway line; she bites the conductor and runs through the city, an event that will have repurcussions.

  But the thing that hits her hardest is that, bizarrely, in a throwaway online porn video, she sees the face of a performer who looks exactly identical to her.

  (Do you wanna do the next bit?)

• ok. absolutely. so the narration is very roundabout-loopwise-circumspect about what is happening, right? this is why we hesitate to spell it out all at once. because the buildup is such a big part of it. you must inhabit annie’s world for the shape of the ending to work.

  you have theories, of course. you think perhaps this might be a DID story, like that one episode of paranoia agent. or that she has a twin. annie’s dealing with the same, she becomes more and more obsessive, trying to find another glimpse of this performer, figure out what it means.

  it’s not just that she has an identical face; even her room is like a clean mirror of annie’s. she behaves in increasingly erratic ways to herself, dreaming of being trapped underground, waking to find she’s dug herself a hole; then she somehow witnesses her doppelganger in the identical apartment block across the street, fucking her ex, and their bodies merge into a kinda flesh scorpion.

  is that where the novel is going? is this a supernatural horror novel? but it is time to be the other girl. because it turns out there is another girl.

  and at first it seems that the other girl, amy, has more of her shit together, that she is the more normie to annie’s hikikomori. she is a cam worker, her clients are shit in the way clients tend to be, harassing her, wasting her time. she has friends, though she is clearly at some remove from them. she fills her mind with youtube ghost hunting videos and yoga and true crime, descriptions of the video interweaving into the narration as stream of consciousness wavers and wiggles

• It’s a really nice writing trick. Captures perfectly the furious context-switching of living as an online being.
• yeah fr. and like, she does not have her shit together much more than annie right? she’s barely holding on. she constantly has nightmares of a grasping arm, which can only be defeated by tracing lines to prove that it’s just a trick of the light. when she’s not doing cam work she is in some nebulous hr position for the same company as does annie’s surveys. she can’t help someone with his problems so she provokes him into getting fired. perhaps it’s not as strange as the ‘body scan’ in annie’s arc but this company is increasingly hard to explain.
• Doing these online surveys probably is as fucked up and self-displacing as it is in the book though. Even if it’s not a front for, you know.

• one of amy’s nebulous friends is an artist; she goes to her show, and her art is confrontational, and amy’s friend is having a bad time, but she hooks up with the guy who’s hosting the show and then it turns into a party where everyone does a ton of coke and they go to annie’s place and a guy has a psychotic episode trying to exorcise her and attempts suicide…

  and we finally get the context for the video annie saw, which is basically straight up a rape given all the substances and power dynamics and all that. but in the aftermath, amy’s friends abandon her for being associated with the whole situation, for dissociating out herself and failing to help.

  we see the same timeframe, some of the same events from amy’s side; amy becomes aware of annie thanks to one of those ghost-hunting videos, which misgenders and condescends about annie even as it chastises the viewers for voyeuristically treating a homeless person as a supernatural manifestation.

  and like, this is going to shade into the stuff we’ll be talking to with a/s/l, this figure of the total tranny schizo exile, social alien, homo sacer and all that shit: this possibility corner that haunts all of the discourses that shape our lives. but we know annie by this point. we have seen inside her world. without love it cannot be seen, of course.

  anyway by weird coincidence amy finds annie’s ex and hooks up with him (so that’s real) in an effort to get to annie. and it kinda… works? she sees annie, finds out where she lives, does not turn into a weird flesh scorpion. the two girls make contact and a kind of mania erupts. they feel a strangely fervent connection; they agree to skip town, to tear down all the layers of rubbish in annie’s apartment and go away together in amy’s car, the proposals of where to land kind of vague. they both lie to each other and yet both of them seem to actually understand the other in a way nobody else does. neither of them can afford to let go of this.

  and you want this for them. you want them at last to live. of course you do. how can you read this book and not love these girls by this point?

  but first they try to visit annie’s dad. and he doesn’t exist, her house isn’t real, her memories are entirely false, there was never anything there. so they get over their reluctance, they go to the company, because now they have to know.

• Some of the reviewers on Goodreads found the ending unsatisfying but for us, it really, dramatically hit. It makes it all come together.

• annie and amy descend into the strangely enormous shaft beneath the company, a huge stone staircase labelled ‘the abattoir’ in weird greasepaint layers. they separate at the bottom. amy cannot resist going on; annie goes into the weird underground management suite.

  annie discovers a man busily conversing about ‘the product’. sort of a scientist discussing how these products don’t really have consciousness, of how to spin this to the public, contradicting himself repeatedly. they do not have consciousness, but perhaps they represent the next step in human potential; that some of them transition and pursue sex work and suchlike things is a success of the program, or a defect, or an expression of something. by this point aoife has us by the neck.

  amy goes to the abattoir.

  on the way down she falls and breaks her legs. delerious, she witnesses this huge bioreactor column, an industrial process of making these clone-like bodies; fragmentary bodies are emerging from the muck, climbing over each other, rubbing and fucking and grasping. randomly, some are dragged up to the light by these silver surgical arms. they graft on faces for release, or else methodically take them apart and cast them back into the muck.

  the bodies are all the same stuff. nutrients, raw life, body soup (with penises, the narration makes note of their penises, some of them have boobs too). the book frames it as a kind of thing that pre-exists the company, something they are exploiting. there is suggestion of an origin, of whom all these bodies are clone; perhaps a defective origin, which gives them their transness “defect” or expressive potential.

  there are two epilogues. we find out what becomes of annie. she lurks in the cracks of another city, informal sex work, couchsurfing, something tenuous on the edge of the peopleworld. and we get a second-person epilogue, in which someone witnesses these new clone people being put out on the TV, and retreats from the world to a closed fortress; the narration imputes you with a disgust at your ‘children’, who “are able to conceptualise even less about the outside world than you can, but are now tasked with inventing entirely new ways of being in order to fill the vacuums of power and meaning left by the failed world you created.”

  and on this note it ends.

the ‘default persona’ and the muck

• The title of the book is ‘Persona’, and from the outset, Annie thinks of the personas she inhabits; notably the ‘Default Persona’ of online, an incurious and hostile man’s role, a creature which seeks isolation and resents the intrusion of figures like ‘The Girl’, who intrudes into the fantasy of non-existence, of negation. While this is framed as a chat room role it seems that the model is equally if not more the world of imageboards.

A quote, in which Annie considers, before her descending spiral really kicks in, the shape of Online in the form of an anon chat room:

You might expect, as many people once expected, that fungible anonymity would allow for more fluid and sincere personal expression than the limitations of a single identity. In reality, though, in the chat room, anonymity instead boils down the chaos of a conversation with multiple participants into a single voice, shouting itself into eternity in a beautiful, worthless mass expenditure of energy. It strips away our individual features so that we all emerge as, talk as, the Default Persona. The Default Persona within this space is a white male, approximately 18 to 30 years old, who has been gifted with historically miraculous comforts but whose shamefully masculine pride bristles against him. This is an easy thing to be, a safe thing to be. As long as you follow the code of anonymity, as long as you talk in this voice too, you can slide by, an unnoticed witness.

But, she goes on to note, there are other personas you can inhabit. Of particular note is The Girl, whose presence and existence is a fundamental challenge to the Default Persona. Her presence ‘In Here’ represents a failure far greater, and also a threat. A series of statements are elaborated.

She does not belong here … She is far worse than us for being here … She just needs to learn the rules of the game … She represents creativity and the world, and the Default Persona demands eternal negation.

And Annie continues to inhabit the default persona, here, not The Girl:

I’ve grown comfortable in his contradictions. While the Default Persona says he believes in things, the things he believes rarely seem to line up. Instead, any conversation with him, as him, is a game of invention, and reinvention, the constant creation and destruction of identity for rhetorical advantage, scoring cheap points off the naive enjoyment of anything. To come into this world attempting unguarded connection is to invite total evisceration, consumption and excretion by the hall of mirrors

She writes of dissociating through her childhood, of burying herself in the “spectacular underground” of extreme pirated media:

It felt good learning forbidden things: I was being taken seriously as an adult, even if I was constantly being torn down as a human being, let alone as a Girl.

And before long she had internalised the Default Persona. Ominously, Annie remarks:

Me and him are one and the same now, and in my head I carry his voice, his opinions, an awareness of what he would say in any given situation, the desire to say it, and the knowledge that silence is always better.

• so we have this sharp, atomic breakdown of the world of anon, the imageboard mask; and we have this lurid, feverish image of the bodies being made and unmade like the tank of Rei clones, and rereading the former throws the latter into resonance. this muck is what we creatures of the Wired emerged from. we were chosen, randomly, to have the seed of becoming something else planted in us. were chosen by the arm; selected to become the Product instead of biomass.

  why? no reason at all. we are made of the same stuff. our brain is a shapable plastic learning engine, ready to be filled with stories, same as the rest. but we switched contexts, again and again, didn’t we? we planted image after image into the clay. innumerable subcultures and discourses. we would read about the struggles that came and went and here and there we would get caught up in the fury.

  we are called things, sometimes. we were called a caring nerd, and that made us feel good. one friend said we were a polymath. another, an aesthete. we greedily reach for any external description of what we are, or what we have seemed to be, even mockery, perhaps especially gentle mockery that carries the form of recognition. because from ‘in here’ it is so hard to discern.

  ironically if we are anything now it is this being of questioning. we probe and probe and talk about weird philosophical cybergothic things like the character in yvette’s first book. we are the only person who says things like “I need to act like a stereotype of myself so you remember who I am.” but really it is us who are trying to remember who we are.

• We can give you autobiographical information of course. We don’t tend to forget where we live, and so far nobody has wanted a name besides ‘Bryn’ or ‘canmom’. Enough processes are active as to hold onto this information.
• ‘bryn’ is a kind of anchor. ‘canmom’ is something we have ended up with.
• Our body-interface, as you would put it, has a shape as well. We’ve worked to make it softer.
• estroglyphs and spiroglyphs… or decapetylglyphs… surgeryglyphs

a memory of a demonstration

The fascist woman in the spy x family t-shirt had come out to the demonstration too, from god knows where. Antifascists had come out to confront her group. That day’s Bryn had heard on the web that more bodies were needed, so she cycled down to the demonstration, like she used to do in the old days.

By the time she arrived, the balance of power was already with the antifascists. Most of the fash had left, a tiny core remaining, crowded against a shop front, separated from Our Side by a thin police line. The usual chants and shouts were going across it, but no projectiles. Someone had found a sound system and a mic. The shoppers wandered by with mild curiosity, sometimes approached and even joined the demonstration.

This Bryn could not help but replay the scene from their eyes. She had emerged from the crowd, laughed at them, and tried to photograph them for obviously hostile reasons. She was in the role of The Antifa Tranny, and there was no possible bridge across to touch their world where ‘scroungers’ existed. But she was playing the part badly, going out recklessly into a dangerous place in front of people who despised everything she represents.

Her friends checked, was she all right, had she been hurt? Wounded pride more than anything, she said. It was true.

But it seemed, she felt, that she was lost in the sea of symbols. The Antifa and the Fash would face each other, over and over again, and each of us would step into our designated roles, to play this game. What could anyone say that wouldn’t be cast against that matrix?

And shouldn’t she know better? If she probed for facts about Bryn, experienced at political demonstrations was supposed to be one. She had run around with black blocs, dropping smoke and sprinting, pushed through police lines, watched the nazis get their heads kicked in during the big BLM demos of the pandemic summer. She’d treated injuries, though never worse than a sprained ankle. Here she was doing rookie mistakes, going out without a buddy, approaching the enemy without being ready to fight. What had possessed her?

Moreover… what had led these two entities here? Something had made this woman in the spy x family t-shirt, just as something had made this Bryn. Bryn could try to trace a history that had led her here. A point of divergence somewhere had put her on Our Side and not Their Side. Some other process had made the woman in the spy x family t-shirt.

In theory it was about the right of disabled people to exist, or migrants: whatever The Fascists were trying to accomplish needed to be stopped; but it was unlikely that this battle would do very much either way for the situations of either group. But in confronting each other on the street like this, by facing someone who would spit and call her a tranny, she could know she really was in fact A Tranny. And no doubt this woman could go home affirming that she was something else as well, whatever that was in her personal world of symbols.

• What are we doing here? Why are we writing this kind of pseudo-autofiction thing? Is this inspired by Aoife? We’re breaking the stylistic conventions we’ve established.
• it felt right to. we have a word-frame for this memory. the technique of declaring a Thing, with Capital Letters.
• You quoted quite a few passages of Aoife above. Do these resonate in particular? Why these paragraphs?
• structure, mirroring. the sense of being something that emerges from a mass. we are contemplating our time in the message boards and chat rooms.
• That image at the end of the novel… Polymorphous perversity, giving way to distinction. The AT Field.
• yes. we are just cells. we are just life. we are just the growth process. thoughts are growths too, in an abstract space. distinctions grow out of distinctions. pheromone trails. we are thrown into the world. we hold onto these images. it was the first time we found someone express what we were trying to express through Incubator.

• For some context to the reader, we were never particularly active on imageboards, but we had our early exposures to the culture. But in our teens, our friends were all imageboard guys, and we encountered the material of /b/ through them. While Jackie was running her runescape teen brothel, somewhere else in the servers, headcrab2002 was picking flax, and our friends would sometimes take control to go around annoying strangers about cybersex.

  We pulled in fragmentary bits of culture from magazines and forums… we immersed ourselves in roleplaying forums, learned to speak forum before we learned to speak to schoolmates. We knew we were so often the butt of the joke but at least we had a place as that. A friend would come over and we would watch him play Half Life. We feared downloading films, and then we learned to do it, and then we learned to follow the esoteric arguments of fansubbers, and to construct a persona which had strong opinions about video encoding.

• why were we so afraid of touch?

• We imitated animations, we imitated writing, the patterns as we understood them. Stick figures. Warhammer spaceships. We followed online arguments and learned to express the consensus thought of a niche subculture which fit our conception of the people who knew best. Impulse: find out what it means to do it as well as possible and do that. Impulse: know all the rules. We pushed together symbols we didn’t understand, read about social movements, built up the context to understand them. Sometimes other contexts hit us like a bomb, like the LiveJournal ‘social justice’ milieu of 2009, or the ‘rationalists’.

  We disavowed. We performed the appropriate shames, what we thought were the appropriate shames, for our sordid past of having slightly bad opinions in a kinda normie way. We learned the rituals of apologising. We constructed a persona who was very concerned about representations of fictional members of various social groups in American cartoons. We constructed personas who knew what to say about Bayes’s theorem or Maoism or Sylvia Federici.

  It was helpful that there were explicit rules to be followed. We didn’t understand that the rules were just things people made up, and that the real rules were not the rules people laid out openly, until the tumblr tranny subculture splintered with accusations and it became impossible to ignore.

  For a large part of that long period, sexuality was something that could not be addressed openly. In the dark and the quiet, the child-Bryn fantasised about having a smooth hole through her finger and pushing her other finger through it. She fantasised about a line of people all fucking each other in the ass. But she kept all this secret. She didn’t even dare express something resembling desire to anyone under any circumstances. To unlock the door she had to take a roundabout and awkward route through another online 2D imageboard-derived subculture.

  We learned how to be into ponies and encountered sexuality through that interface. It seemed permissible, for a while, for a “man” to engage with this thing, because someone on the internet said it was a good and feminist thing. Eventually that consensus changed and we disavowed that too, in favour of progressive science fiction novels. ‘Bryn who disavows’ became a routinely operated stance.

  But it let us loop closer to not modelling ourselves through this category of ‘man’ anymore, to get involved with other LGBT students. They were going on political demonstrations and having arguments on Twitter, so we got Twitter and followed their arguments. We barely knew how to function in this milieu and we were certainly not functioning in university milieu. We were diagnosed with depression and anxiety and put on SSRIs but it didn’t seem to make us work again. We tried to form relationships with people we met at science fiction conventions. We didn’t know how to be a girlfriend yet so it went quite poorly. We felt most at home in things like word games and board game nights, where it was clear who to be.

• would our friends of that time understand what we became?

• Maybe they would. Perhaps even another one of them could have transitioned by now, for all we know. Perhaps something could have exploded their worldview. Perhaps they too could have disaggregated.

  They were in the Wired too. The great persona-blender would have cut them apart as it did us. But perhaps they were not so immersed in the Wired. Perhaps they had anchoring contexts.

book 2: A/S/L

• So let’s talk about A/S/L, so it can inform the rest of the discussion.
• goddamn this one is like. shaped charge pointed right at us?? like it’s literally about trans girls making games together in service of occult workings, it’s about the memory of internet chat rooms lingering on your brain, it’s about things failing to pan out how you imagined…
• If Persona is more on the horror end of the distribution this is more on the literary end although these categories really blend together. We should read more literary fiction though.
• if it’s gay and such, sure

• Obviously if it’s gay and such. But yeah like… we were on the Topside thing back in the day, we read like Casey Plett, Imogen Binnie, Sybil Lamb, Torrey Peters before she was like super popular or whatever. We know the fingerprints. The no quotation marks thing being an obvious one.

  It’s kind of fascinating, looking back, how much we used those books to construct the idea of what Being A Trans Woman would be. Considering like… I know people get really weird about Nevada as the egg cracking book or whatever when it’s sorta not that, that’s a horrendous and reductive reading of it, but like more than that, those literary realist trans books never really made being trans seem like a good time for anyone. But they do make it seem like an interesting time. All these girls taking various drugs and having various configurations of sex and sex work and experiencing nightmare personal crises and so on. You feel like you’re touching the Truth.

• it can be a terribly dangerous thing to feel like we have found the Truth. and we keep doing it.

• In those early transition days we were very caught up in the ideal of being a trans woman, to the neglect of actually responding properly to the people around us. This whole mental break thing was prompted in part by running into someone from that past. We won’t name her, but I think a big problem she had was that we were always absorbed in some online Thing. We have some other memories from that time that are still available… they are about failing to pay attention, saying things which came off the wrong way, that kinda stuff.

  Well, her autism direction skewed more science fictional; her worlds were spec bio and such. Back then we had built the first Trans Persona, of someone with her heart caught on the idea of these trans communist chicks on tumblr and their complicated dazzling ideologies and inscrutable ways to interact on the internet. We had stumbled into this persona of someone new to touch and affection, as enthusiastic about sexuality as she had once been distant from it, enthralled by the idea of being in a big polycule and such.

• we were not wrong to desire touch. we had to find the people who wanted to play the game the way we wanted to play it.
• We have this Topside zine called Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads, and it contains many different flavours of trans fiction from that period. I have a memory of sharing this with the aforementioned ex; that she responded most to this kind of near-future clifi story about an apocalyptic new york, whereas the Bryn of that time was vibing more with a sorta more grounded story of like a trans girl hooking up or something, all done in like lowercase stream of consciousness. And later we actually felt guilty about that, like we weren’t being true to the Spirit of Autism or something; that she was more in tune with a different ideal. Anyway, we just dug out the zine and it turns out that story that the Bryn of back then liked was by Merritt Kopas, which is probably another reason we activated the Disavow Function.
• oh god oof
• Yeah like. Should we get into that in here?
• kinda have to at least touch on it, what with the anna anthropy cite in the endnotes of a/s/l
• But what do we have to say exactly? Relitigate the events behind Hot Allostatic Load? Try and figure out how far the web of negative association should extend? What is our duty here? But to make a long story short, Anna and Merritt treated our friend unconscionably and destroyed their life over basically nothing. Just about everyone even tangentially attached to the ‘queer games’ scene of that era enabled them to do it.
• A different persona intruding here, I think? We have to acknowledge this, but the purpose of this article is not to resolve events that happened a decade ago between people we have largely never met. Let’s focus on jeanne, and a/s/l.
• It turns out Jeanne Thornton also has a story in this zine, actually. It’s a pretty clear roman à clef, about a vampire returning from a book tour. The three vampires named in the story are presumably fictionalised versions of the actual people on the tour. Jeanne is here as ‘the new one’, still struggling to come to terms with being a vampire, concerned about ‘appropriating’ and such like things, rather awed by her companions. She briefly comments on how the trans lit (sorry, vampire lit) had largely been ‘conversion’ narratives, and not the problems an out vampire faces, among them ‘everyone hanging around the castle complaining about how some other vampire lady is actually a jerk and how to process that’.
• trannies love our vampire metaphors huh
• Jeanne’s literary voice is not yet established in this story; A/S/L is a much sharper, more richly characterised work. But I do find it interesting to observe this past context.
• context may be important, but this is kinda a rough start to talking about a book that really hit us very hard, that we loved. so let’s get into the part where we talk about what happens in it!
• Absolutely. Once again, then: the events of the book, to keep them fresh in mind, and perhaps explain what we’re on about for anyone who doesn’t go and read the book (which they most urgently should.)

wot happens in the book

A/S/L is a story about (it turns out) three trans women, Abraxa, Sash and Lilith, who as teenagers worked together on a game called Saga of the Sorceress. Jeanne’s rendition of a teenage IRC channel, of the grandiosity of that sort of bubble is shockingly spot on; we are reminded of thecatamites’s writing on RPG forums for Em Reed’s ‘lost history jam’.

The trio live on a channel called #teengoetia; at this time, only Sash is out to herself, and she is cooking up a complicated vision of the significance of RPGs made in a clunky ASCII engine called CraftQ, a fictionalised version of the ZZT engine and the community around it. They have formed a ‘company’ together, who share a grand plan to build the greatest CraftQ game ever, taking after the masters of the RPG form, a series called ‘Mystic Knights’ which all, but especially Sash, revere.

Sash, believed by all to be the CraftQ community’s only cis girl, is the mastermind of the project and writer; then there is Abraxa, who makes her entrance first with a ritual and a dream, and then drops into IRC talking about trans porn and gender transformation rings, working at once as the game’s artist, musician and programmer. And then there is Lilith, who doesn’t understand why she has been made the level designer but earnestly wants to impress Sash.

And Sash, for her part, has built a whole mythology around the developers of the fictional Mystic Knights games, following the occultic contours that are usually attributed to people like Grant Morrison. Mystic Knights is a melange of JRPGs most closely taking after Final Fantasy, something most evident when we hear of later iterations of the series, like an MMO supposedly mostly played by trans women.

Lilith disappears; we soon find out why, a moment of personal resolution that occurs on a Boy Scout trip and convinces her she must decide to betray Sash to gain the tenuous acceptance of the group; later we find out that shortly before the trip, Sash, who was infatuated with her, had a sexually charged interaction where she tried to get Lilith to come out as trans and Lilith ghosted her. Absent Lilith, the game project dies. And the novel jumps forward in time; now we join Abraxa, who has lived a drifting life, washing up in the house of her friend Marcie. She tries to find jobs; Jeanne writes these darkly funny scenes of the aftermath of her job interviews where she came off far too obviously crazy.

Abraxa’s POV is one of the true beautiful triumphs of this novel. It winds in the way one of Sash’s ideal, ‘involuted’ CraftQ dungeons creates a winding path back to its origin. We understand the dislocation that Abraxa feels from the world, the roundabout ways she processes things. Abraxa has moved on, time and again, from different contexts; she does this of her own accord or she is kicked out, one way or another. Shortly before we rejoin her, she nearly drowned. She does mushrooms with her host and a visiting friend in the basement of a burned church, and has a vision of being embraced by the Sorceress of Mystic Knights and CraftQ; this inspires her to move into the church to perform a magical working.

Meanwhile, we are reintroduced to Lilith, who has found her way into a relatively secure position as a bank loan underwriter, and of course still carries the anxiety of any trans woman who has found some tenuous foothold in society. She has, more than the others, buried the memories of working on the game, but not completely; we see through Lilith’s eyes her connections with other trans women of New York with whom she shares some awkward friendships; we have a temporal location now, around the time of the first Trump election.

Sash is the last to be reintroduced, and she has largely buried herself—not quite, perhaps, to the same degree as Annie in Persona, but she lives with her parents, discretely working as a webcam dominatrix with only one client, a strangely endearing character referred to as only Droneslut who does the CBT and ruined orgasms and findom as ordered by Sash.

I find the character of Sash particularly interesting as well. She is someone who thinks in lists and procedures; she is the main trio’s only black character; she finds herself at a remove even at queer/trans events, like a book reading where she meets a journalist covering a San Franciscan game-making cult which echoes what Sash and her friends were trying to do. At the same time, Sash sees a cryptic blog post from Abraxa which reveals that she is still alive and perhaps in distress, naming a location; Sash commands Droneslut to track down the location.

There are two parallel threads here, now. Lilith is approached by a cis woman who wants a loan to build a kind of LGBT healing centre; she tells Lilith of a cloying vision of rescuing some traumatised babyqueer like a wild animal, but Lilith sees the project as a chance to use her position to do something actually good, and goes behind her boss’s back to work on the loan.

Of course, the building she wants to use is the exact one that Abraxa now occupies; Abraxa has been transforming it gradually into a garden/ritual space, convinced she must pursue some numinous purpose bestowed on her by the Sorceress. To shield herself from ‘System D’, she isolates herself from the internet, from spaces outside the church basement; she rejects offers of help even from the friend Marcie she most recently left, lives only on bagels and canned food, occasionally visits queer coops to take stuff. She reads library books about historical mystics and anchorites and spends the time transforming the church. When asked what her goal is, she speaks of making a kind of community space.

Through Droneslut, Sash manages to make contact with Abraxa. Lilith stumbles in by chance, or perhaps we should read it that she is drawn in by the magical working; she visits to find out what’s the situation with the apparent squatter in the church and gradually realises that it must be Abraxa. For her this is a distant memory, but she feels an inexplicable loyalty to her old friend. She tries to convince her cis client not to call the cops to remove Abraxa.

The cis client is, it turns out, willing to sic the law on a homeless trans woman to create her personal vision of a queer healing centre thing. Abraxa sends cryptic invites to Lilith and Sash; before she goes, Lilith goes to the bank to end the loan application, and gets herself fired for her shenanigans. It seems that at last the three may finally meet, in person; that their vision of Invocation LLC might be rekindled by Abraxa’s magical working.

By this point in the novel, you will want this to happen more than anything. But the novel has told you what’s going to happen, like Baru Cormorant did; by the time Sash arrives, Abraxa has already left, once again. We see her travelling by foot, drinking oily water; her health had been declining across the novel and it seems hard to think that she will survive this time.

Sash meets Lilith, and they revisit their game together; Lilith offers for Sash to move in… but entropy wins here too, Sash shuts herself down, runs away. The whole thing falls apart a second time.

We end with a letter written to Sash, from Lilith, in which she gives her meaning of the encounter they had as teens, the door that was opened.

• i feel on the verge of tears again.

• We are, yes, but I am thinking about the meaning of the choice to end that way. Both novels end with the connection at the centre dashed. We spend the novel waiting for the moment where the two, or the three, unite to support each other against this awful world; and like Droneslut’s ruined orgasms, these hopes are torn apart again after only a very brief encounter.

  There is so much to get into here. There is the significance of the Sorceress, of “System D”—no connection with Linux so far as I can tell, it is instead a kind of Instrumentality-like project to link the minds of everyone except certain outcasts too alien to be brought in to the fold. There are the sorts of tranny lives represented by our three protagonists. There is the making of worlds to inhabit through games and the communities that surround them.

  I heard about this book on a blog called ‘The Transfeminine Review’, and noticed that the premise seemed kind of similar to a story that we are writing, and thus seemed powerfully relevant to the sorts of things that we’re all about here in canmom. So we wanted to read it, to see if what were doing was too similar to something that had already been done very well, and also to experience a reportedly great book on subjects that matter to us.

• the story we are writing is not this story. how could it be? this story is from jeanne.

• But a great book is what we got.

  In the early 2010s our head was blasted open by the incursion of the Twine scene. We encountered it through Xrafstar/Charity (then best known as Porpentine), who ran a weekly column on Rock Paper Shotgun, where they reviewed all the weird and interesting queer indie games that would be the precursor to today’s itch.io. It had a strong adjacency with certain movements in indie roleplaying games; the two subcultures rode some strange cultural wave.

  With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to say that Xraf was miles ahead; their works of that time were more striking in their imagery, far more emotionally sharp, far less caught up in the forms and conventions than their contemporaries in that scene. Of course, I view them with a certain lens. They won’t mean to me what they mean for you. But all of it was equally new to us. In any case, as we were sort of dissociating along writing long blog posts about physics or whatever the hell it was we were doing back then, this force, this strange sorcery from the most cultic parts of america, came to visit us. It was perhaps exactly what we were looking for. We constructed these new spaces into our mind, we became a convert.

  I relate this largely because this is what happened to Lilith in the dark halls of #teengoetia. Lilith writes:

When I met you, long ago now, I was stuck. I didn’t even realise then how stuck I was: I was alone, asleep, buried. Back then, all that stuff—CraftQ and #teengoetia and online and all the weirdos we knew—it was a way for me to be alive. You, and Abraxa, and everyone else we knew online, so dramatic and committed and creative and shining and fun. A whole secret world in my heart, no matter where my body was: in Texas, in the Boy Scouts, in the world where I was going to grow up to be a man. Bodies didn’t matter there. It was the start of everything, for me, and so much of it flowed from you.

• I won’t quote the whole letter; Lilith’s anger towards Sash, that she would apologise for any of what happened, her descriptions of the seriousness that they all held in that world, is too contextual, it won’t work without the frame in the book. What I will quote is another line:

That’s how I think you might see it. Do you want me to tell you what I see? Long ago, you opened a door in me, and I walked through it, and my life became my life at last.

This is a pheromone trail. We will elaborate on that in the next part.

space for a sorceress

In the worldview that Abraxa builds for herself, the goddess who stands as an enemy of ‘System D’ is the Sorceress.

An intriguing party member in the Mystic Knight games, Sash selected the Sorceress as the POV character whose inner world they would expand on in their work. We get glimpses of the sorts of stories that Sash wanted to tell with her, and they are ambitious, literary or pretentious but either way a great deal of meaning was invested into this figure.

The Sorceress is described as basically a kind of goth elf girl, an inevitable erotic fixation of Mystic Knights players. Abraxa hopes to discover what she represents; a beautiful passage describes Abraxa’s dream, when Lilith finally asks. It begins:

In this game, you are a trans woman who is trying to perform a magical ritual. You do this by occupying a space, ritually consecrating it, performing certain actions within it to summon the presence of the entities you desire to be there. For example, if you summon the sorceress, your space will be attuned to her energy, which is the energy of fire: the energy of transformation in accordance with purpose.

As the ritual develops, others will be drawn in. A place for trans people to stay, where people can learn about Mystic Knights, and ‘develop an ethic of reciprocal altruism, separate from ownership.’, reflecting the mission of the Sorceress in her source material.

Some trans girls want to build temples. Sometimes they say they they wanna build a cult. And, as the book makes very clear, building a game is not so very different. Source code maps to religious texts.

Sometimes the girls actually do go and build the cult. There was a section here where we considered engaging with a mystic-type author associated with the so-called ‘Zizians’ whose writing about plural stuff was sent our way; in the end I think we have decided it would be wiser to excise that because the situation seems far too ugly and complicated to really work into this project in a way that wouldn’t be horrible. These pathways will be quiet for now.

Instead, we landed on the discussion of pheromone trails.

betrayal

Early in the novel, Lilith rationalises her ghosting of Sash by coming to a belief that “the main ethical choice in life is who to betray.” This theme of deception and betrayal comes back soon after we rejoin her after the timeskip, as she contemplates how she must be seen by the bank where she works:

It was like the part in Mystic Knights 2 when the sorceress first joins the party and the other heroes don’t trust her yet. She’s evil, she’s a witch, she used to be our enemy. How do we know she won’t betray us?

Lilith tried to see the situation through Ronin’s eyes. The first thing she saw: she was a transsexual. This was never the first fact she noticed about herself anymore, when she chose to look, but it must always be the first thing Ronin saw, even the object of his fantasies of her. And what were those fantasies? Fantasies of blur, fantasies of instability. A transsexual is inherently unstable: she is someone who yanks herself out of her context and plants herself in altogether different soil. No transsexual’s roots can ever be as strong as a cis person’s. We are built to betray. This is how Ronin must see it.

She shakes off this fantasy; but the course of the novel does see her betray the bank for Abraxa’s sake. In the eyes of the Default Persona: quitting a decent job Out There for the sake of weird online tranny shit that nobody can understand. Yet, for the likely trans reader, this is no doubt Lilith’s redeeming act; the point where she brings her loyalties back to the sacred work of making a videogame with some other trannies.

• but the instability is universal. the possibility of the break is universal. we trannies certainly don’t have a monopoly on weird incomprehensible online shit, but we do live beside and within it. the abyss the cis see through us is the possibility that having a stable job at a bank wouldn’t be the most important thing for someone, right? they glimpse a world they do not understand and have to face up to the fact that their world is hollow.
• Hold on now. We can’t just go on like that. As if ‘the cis’ is a coherent category and they all want to work in a bank. We can do a lot better than this.
• well not ‘the cis’. but like. people for whom the system works, to some degree. i mean you can kinda see it with Lilith’s friend, the one who calls herself a communist but thinks it’s lame to support Abraxa’s efforts. she’s trans but she’s still doing the thing. a small world is seen as a corruption by the big one.
• Hmm. Is Annie’s rotten apartment equally as sacred as making a videogame?

• it is to her. the bugs have meaning for her and we get to inhabit that world with her. until amy gives her a route towards a different expression of what they both are.

  what is scary about being in a cult? is it that your microworld would lose its interface with the other worlds? that you would do harm, or be harmed in ways you are unable to perceive, because you cannot see the other worlds layered over yours?

• It’s being controlled. Not making your own meaning but having it forced onto you by violence.
• which we do every day. like that’s the whole theme of all of this.
• When it’s diffuse, from everywhere, it’s… you can redirect it, let it flow past, find points of shelter. When you have someone’s personal attention…
• serious weakness would say it’s the opposite, perhaps…
• I still don’t think we’re ready to write about seriweak.
• not right now. not here. but we should try.

(The discussion continues in part 3)