Year Zero - 4. Many Worlds

Alter: Olivia

Local Network World: 0103/0008/0098

Dates: 15/06/2025 - 18/06/2025

A Piece of a Place

Olivia winced as Kira inspected the gashes on her abdomen. She felt incredibly exposed…wearing just a sports bra, with her jeans undone and shimmied down slightly to give Kira room to work, trying to lie still on the unforgiving rigidity of the kitchen bench. She writhed her shoulders uncomfortably, attempting to ward off a cramp, before raising an arm to cover her breasts a little better.

“It’s not like they’re anything I haven’t seen in the mirror a thousand times,” Kira reminded her absently as they swabbed away a little more blood.

“Fuck off.” Olivia grunted. “Are you almost done? How bad is it?”

“It’s fine. Glorified scratches. The blood made it look much worse than it was. We’ll get some antiseptic on you and that should be basically that.”

“Still. Pretty much ruined my tank top.”

“Like you don’t have another bunch just like it.”

“Fuck you, Kira. I have range.”

“Sure you do.”

“I really need a drink.” Olivia sighed.

“You always need a drink. I feel like you should probably unpack that a little, no? Kinda sounds like it’s becoming a problem.”

“Hard pass. My life is the problem. Alcohol is just…medicine.”

“Liv, that’s actually really fucked up,” Kira observed.

“Yeah? Ask yourself this: do I act different when I’m drunk?”

“Not really. None of us really seem to. Probably something to do with the neurodivergence? I dunno. And look, I get what you’re saying, but it’s like pain meds and chronic pain, right? Being addicted to painkillers doesn’t mean the pain isn’t real or that the pills aren’t effective, but it does mean you’ve managed to turn one problem into two problems.”

“I’m not addicted, Kira.”

“Agree to disagree, I guess.” Kira shrugged, rolling their eyes pointedly - making sure Olivia saw them do it - before moving on: “What happened, anyway?”

“I’ve no idea. We were in some other place. It took me awhile to notice, but it seemed…I dunno, incomplete? There were people, they tried to attack us, I got her out of there but…” Olivia nodded downward towards her stomach: “One of them had a broken bottle, I think? I have no idea what any of that was about.” Kira frowned. They looked confused, but didn’t ask any follow up questions. “Did you feel anything about it? The place we went?”

“Yeah, I did. I know what you mean about it being ‘incomplete’. It felt small. Temporary somehow.”

“Yeah, that’s what I felt. Like a piece of a place, and once I was gone I couldn’t feel it anymore.”

“I think she might have made it. Kind of like a pocket dimension? It felt very small and very accessible, like one big weak point. Might explain why it looked so different from where you went in or where you came back out.”

“All this fuss for some hopeless rando with a weird, useless power.” Olivia shook her head.

“I mean, I don’t know if it’s useless. It’s definitely new. But tracking down Alters…that’s the job, Liv. I told you.”

“Whatever. We’ve been doing this for months, and it’s been totally pointless. Exodus haven’t found any Alters who aren’t just…random girls running around with no idea what they can do. You and me - we haven’t got anywhere on our end, either. And Maya’s being flaky as fuck so we haven’t made any progress with seeing what she can do with her powers. So far as I can see, we’ve already lost. We’re all just…ghosts, at this point.”

“That’s gloomy.”

“You have a counterpoint? You’ve been in this as long as I have - longer, actually - so if you have some optimism to share, please do.”

“Many Worlds, y’know? Infinite variation. We lost, but somewhere out there we didn’t. In fact, we didn’t infinite times.”

“Which also means we did infinite times.”

“True. I guess I got nothing, then. Everything’s pre-determined across the infinite multiverse. Sounds like a good reason to sit on your ass and be a little bitch about it, yeah?”

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah, exactly. Look, the reason I bring it up isn’t because I’m suggesting there’s some kind of…cosmic score card being filled out with wins versus losses, it’s because infinite variation means that our probability of success is never zero. It has to happen somewhere in the Multiverse, so why not here? Why not for us? Also, I dunno if this has factored into your calculus, but on Anna’s world, we weren’t fighting because we actually thought the fight was winnable, we were fighting because, first, not fighting was worse than losing. And second, because if you don’t fight you do have zero chance of winning. Both observations also apply to our current situation, in case you hadn’t pieced that part together yet. So shut up and do your job. Cause what the fuck else are you gonna do?”

“But her? Barely seems worth our time. She’s just so clueless.”

“Well, she also happens to be the first Alter we’ve found since we had that All-Hands who already has some kind of connection to weak points. I tend to agree with Ari about not dragging girls into this fight if they aren’t already exposed to any of it, which makes Kade the best option - the only option, so far - for…”

“For what, Kira? Getting our numbers up? Recruiting?”

“For figuring out a path forward.” Kira finished diplomatically. “And it’s not like we weren’t all clueless, once upon a time.”

“I was never that clueless. I managed to get a read on her. Our timelines diverged around the time I transitioned. So we were pretty similar until twenty-two, and then she took another two entire fucking decades to get her shit together. Y’know what I call that?”

“I dunno…justifiable and understandable fear and confusion?”

“She’s a coward and an idiot.” Olivia clarified her position.

“Most of the Alters we know of didn’t medically transition when you did. I certainly didn’t. And Maya transitioned well before you did. You can’t…extrapolate difficult personal choices into indications of worth.” Kira reminded Olivia, beginning to dab at her wounds with antiseptic-soaked cotton-wool. Olivia forced a sharp intake of breath through gritted teeth as she flinched. Hard.

“You’re a cunt.” She stated.

“Well sure. I’m you, so…” Kira smirked.

“What’s important about her, anyway?” Olivia pressed. Kira shrugged.

“I dunno. Nothing before, other than that we know she has powers already. But now? Well, you’d have to ask Seven about that.”

“What?”

“Seven’s on Kade’s World. Or at least she was for a little while.”

“You’re tracking Seven, now?”

“I was tracking Kade.” Kira explained patiently. “You know how my power works. I picked up on her when she went to…wherever she went. It seemed strange. I sent you to look into it. You got her home, and Seven was there, in her world. I felt it. And then she wasn’t. My guess would be that she felt the same thing I did. Someone new, and close, and strong doing something we haven’t seen before. I think she’s probably monitoring us. I think she’s definitely monitoring Kade.”

“Fuck, what about the weak points - " Olivia pulled herself up onto her elbows, eyes wide:

“ - They’re fine. It’s fine. It’s not happening again.” Kira assured her. Olivia sighed, lowering herself back down.

“Fuck.”

“I know. Believe me, I know.”

“I just…”

“I’m right there with you, Liv. It’s okay.” Kira raised a hand to Olivia’s forehead, gently palming back her curls. Olivia exhaled shakily, feeling her face set back into its typical format.

“Obviously you’re telling me I need to bring Kade into this. Properly.”

“Mmhmm.” Kira confirmed.

“Jesus, Kira. You’re just dying to make this a full time job for me, aren’t you? You remember that I already have one of those?”

“You remember that you have options?”

“Oh what, like I’m gonna run off and have multiverse adventures like Sage and the Hot Topic twins? Please. I feel like you all forget that we’re actually kinda old. ‘Queer time’ might explain the whole…none of us being ‘proper’ adults thing, but it’s sure as fuck not gonna pay my bills or stave off…I dunno, whatever medical conditions my old ass is gonna inevitably have to deal with in the rapidly approaching future.”

“Whatever. You do you.”

Divergence

Olivia sat on a bench off to the side of the boulevard. She slowly, distractedly ate a soft serve, making direct eye contact with the Helios Foundation building on the other side of the river. She’d never understood how completely the lie had been accepted that it had existed prior to The Incident. In every world she travelled to, that uncanny eyesore towered over the city of Brisbane, and in every world, people were just like: ‘Well, I guess that building I feel weird in my stomach about whenever I’m within a city block of is normal and fine’. Olivia rolled her eyes.

In this world, apparently, Brisbane was called ‘Edenglassie’. Which explained why Kade had seemed so confused when she’d mentioned ‘Brisbane City’. It was…novel. On most of the Alters’ worlds, it was just called ‘Brisbane’. Sometimes Meanjin - like on Anna’s world - and sometimes both interchangeably. But for Olivia, Edenglassie was a new one. She had a vague recollection that, in her world, Brisbane had been called that at some point prior to it being renamed after a governor. Or something.

“Olivia?”

“Fuck. Rule three strikes again.” Olivia muttered, glancing over at Kade. She’d been planning to role-play how this conversation would go before actually making contact; the first time went so poorly that she felt as though she really needed to do some prep-work for it. But there Kade was. Predictably, she was stuck in place, the colour draining from her face as Olivia watched. It already felt mildly like watching a train-wreck in slow motion. Olivia sighed. “How are you?”

“How am I?” Kade repeated the words back slowly.

“Yes, Kade. How are you? Did you want to sit down?” Olivia patted the bench beside her. “I was gonna come find you later but you’re here now, so…”

“The last time I saw you was an excessively bad day for me. Like…’maybe I should explore a schizophrenia diagnosis’ bad.”

“Kade…” Olivia sighed. “I’m sorry about last time. It was a very jarring situation and I reacted poorly. Can you just sit the fuck down, please?” With a defiant eye-roll, Kade complied. “Look…” Olivia began, folding one leg over the other and angling herself towards Kade: “I’m not good at this. You’re gonna have to work with me, here.” Kade gave her a shallow nod. “Let’s start with: Hi. You can call me ‘Liv’. And I’m you from a parallel world.”

“Which is an extremely normal and not-at-all-insane thing to say.”

“Yeah,” Olivia frowned. “I know.”

“Look. I - " Kade started, but Olivia held up her hand.

“ - Stop. I get that you’re trying to systematically run through every other possible explanation for why there could be this random girl with the same face as you sitting here with a…really, exceptionally fucking bland ice cream, if I’m gonna be honest about it. Like how do you screw up soft serve?” Olivia glared briefly at the soft serve before continuing: “And I get that most of what you’re coming up with is ‘I’m crazy’. So here’s my pitch: I’ll prove it, and then you can ask all the questions you like about it. Okay?” Kade nodded reluctantly. Olivia got up from the bench, gesturing for Kade to do the same, before tossing the last of her ice cream in the bin beside the bench.

The two of them walked slowly along the boulevard. Olivia, looking around for a weak point, kept catching Kade side-eyeing her, as if she was concerned that Olivia would simply disappear if not being continuously observed. Olivia was sympathetic to how difficult this most likely was for Kade to take in, but at the same time she couldn’t help but judge her a little. When it came to the Multiverse, Olivia had worked most of it out herself without having it explained or her hand held through the initial stages. She still remembered the first time she’d found a weak point and pushed her way through. She remembered wandering around Anna’s world, feeling her presence like a lighthouse in the dark, following that feeling and finding Anna for the first time…this very familiar, very cisgender girl with her same face but not quite. She remembered how Anna had smiled at her with this big, welcoming smile, like they’d known each other their entire lives and she was just so excited to see her. No one had to come and find her. No one had to convince her it was real. She had felt it in her bones and acted accordingly.

“Do you feel that?” Olivia queried, slowing her pace as they approached a ferry terminal. The area was quiet; not many people around. Olivia knew that in her world, most of the ferry terminals along the South Bank boulevard were still in the process of being repaired after some flooding, so it’d be fairly empty there, as well. Not that it mattered. As Kira had noted: no one ever seemed to notice them doing this. Olivia’s guess was that the human brain reacted to the sudden appearance or disappearance of some random girl in some random location in much the same way as it reacted to a misspelled word in a long sentence: it just glossed over it and moved on with its’ day.

“Feel what…?” Kade asked. Olivia reached out her hand to brush against…nothing.

“This is a weak point. A Rift. You can’t see it, but if you move towards it, you’ll feel this kind of uh…resistance. What I want you to do is close your eyes and think about my face, then move towards that resistance. See? Simple. And if I’m lying, or a figment of your imagination or whatever, literally nothing happens.” Kade nodded slowly.

“Okay.” She squeezed her eyes shut, before cocking her head to the side in momentary surprise. “Oh. I think I feel something.”

“Like pushing two magnets of the same polarity together, right?” Kade nodded. “That’s good. Now just move towards it. Let that feeling show you where to go.” Kade did so. Olivia watched her disappear into thin air before following on behind her. On the other side, everything looked largely the same. Scaffolding was up around the front-most part of the terminal where it hadn’t been a moment ago. “Okay. Done. Welcome to Brisbane. Let’s go find you some proof, shall we?”

The two of them walked towards the Cultural Centre: the hub of brutalist architecture astride the South Bank Parklands, directly across the river from the city centre. Olivia kept chuckling quietly to herself, watching Kade’s bemused expression and creased-in eyebrows jumping manically from unfamiliar-thing to uncanny-thing. She kept moving around the pathway, as if each point of difference had a gravitational pull that dragged her a little ways towards it. Olivia specifically led her through the part of South Bank where the Nepalese Peace Pagoda was - an intricate, multi-storey wood-and-glass structure surrounded by stone carvings and small fountains - making a point of showing her the inscription regarding the ‘Brisbane World Expo of 1988’. From there, she led her out and into the wide plaza behind which the Performing Arts Centre and Museum were…the harsh angles of their concrete veneers softened by planters overflowing with evergreen foliage and small purple flowers. As they approached the far side of the plaza, Kade seemed particularly bemused.

“Unity Bridge. It looks so different…” She murmured.

“Really?” Olivia frowned. “I hadn’t noticed. They call it the Victoria Bridge in my world.” There was a certain point, travelling between worlds, where Olivia had become aware that she’d lost some degree of sensitivity to differences. It all sort of blended together. It was why she particularly enjoyed differences in public transport: she always noticed monorails, or trams, or airships; things decidedly not native to her iteration of Brisbane. Other things - architecture, roads, suburb names - less so. She remembered a friend telling her once that a lot of people who lived in Berlin eventually stopped ‘seeing’ graffiti. It was so commonplace that, after awhile, their minds started editing it out as a sort of visual background noise. She didn’t know whether that was true, but, in her estimation, it was very much like that.

“Liv…” Kade turned to her. Her eyes were sparkling; her bemused frown was tilting upwards at the edges. “This is so fucking cool.” Olivia smiled back.

“It really is.”

“If I am crazy…honestly, I’m kinda down. This rules, actually.”

“Oh, this is nothing. There are little differences between my world and yours, here and there…but I haven’t noticed anything really big yet. We have this Alter, Maya - "

“ - Alter?”

“Oh, right. Alternate versions of you, from different universes? Like what you and I are?”

“Oh, right. Of course. Naturally.” Kade rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to. But Maya’s version of Brisbane has a couple of suburbs that are kind of…permanently partially flooded. There’s this whole Venetian vibe with little boats and canals, that sort of thing. It’s actually very cool. Doesn’t smell great, though, it’s pretty polluted.”

“Can we go there?” Kade’s eyes widened with what looked like an involuntary little gasp.

“Yeah, of course. I mean, that’s how it works: you can go anywhere. You just find a weak point and go through to the same place in a whole other world.”

“So this is like…a Multiverse thing.”

“Mmhmm.”

“With infinite worlds, and infinite other versions of me?”

“Well…yes. Asterisk.”

“What?”

“Asterisk. Like…an addendum? Between me and the other Alters I know, none of us have ever managed to go somewhere where there isn’t one of us, and where that fucking eyesore,” Olivia pointed back towards the Helios Foundation building “didn’t magically appear ten years ago out of nowhere: coincidentally around the time we all started realising we could do what we can do. We assume that the Multiverse is bigger than that cause…well, Many Worlds theory, but like I said: none of us have ever managed to go anywhere ‘else’. So we call this ‘The Local Network’.” Olivia spread her arms wide and took a quick, theatrical spin around. She started to walk off again, moving towards the Victoria Bridge. Kade followed:

“What does the Helios Foundation building have to do with any of it?”

“No idea. Probably something though, right?”

“The last time I saw you, you said it was like the Chernobyl Sarcophagus.”

“I mean…yeah, couldn’t you feel it? Like there was something fundamentally not right about it? Normal people avoid it like the plague, which is why it’s always deserted when you get close. But not us. Not Alters. It’s almost like we’re drawn to it, even despite how it makes us feel. We’ve all been there and had that experience…seeing a version of ourselves that the building wants to draw us into looking at, feeling this sense that there’s something very wrong…”

“It uh…my reflection didn’t copy what I was doing.” Kade admitted.

“Oh. Gross. I hate that. Fucking…nightmare fuel. But yeah, like I said: there’s something deeply wrong with that place, so I’m not exactly shocked, y’know?” Olivia paused, glancing at Kade: “Anyway, long story short, yes we can go visit Maya. As long as she lets us. Part of her power is that she can prevent other Alters from entering her world if she doesn’t feel like seeing us. Now…If I were a psychologist, I’d probably have some opinions about the likelihood of that being random chance, given her avoidant-ass attachment style, but hey.”

“Powers?” Kade grabbed Olivia’s arm, stopping her: “Do you have powers? Do I have powers?” Olivia laughed.

“Yeah, Kade. We all have something. If I had to guess, I’d say yours probably has to do with wherever you took us the other day. That in-between place? It’s not something I’ve seen before.”

“What about yours?”

“Mine? Uh…it’s a little hard to explain. The simplest way of putting it is that I can sort of…intuit things about other Alters. I can ‘read’ you, basically. I can tell where our timelines diverged - like the key points where we moved in completely, irreversibly different directions - how we’re different…that kind of thing.”

“So where did we diverge?”

“It would have been around the time I transitioned. I was twenty-two.” Kade cocked her head, considering that as Olivia waited for the inevitable follow-up question:

“So…if I’d transitioned back then, I’d be like you?”

“Maybe not. There are a million little differences relating to nature and nurture, but then there’s also the whole…butterfly effect thing of little differences cascading into huge differences over time. Most of the Alters share the key points of a single history up to a point, and then branch off pretty radically from there in one way or another.”

“At a certain point, I’m probably going to need some time to digest this. It’s a lot of information.” Olivia nodded.

“But you’re good? Feeling convinced?”

“I mean…yeah. It’s pretty convincing.”

“Good. Great. That should get Kira off my ass for at least a few days. Let’s take a break and go get some lunch.”

Gyoza

Olivia and Kade sat outside a quiet little sushi restaurant overlooking the river. It was just before midday and they had the place largely to themselves. Under an oversized umbrella that stuck up through the centre of their table, Olivia picked at a plate of Gyoza and Kade stared down at a couple of salmon-and-avocado sushi rolls. She looked deep in thought.

“You good?” Olivia asked.

“Yeah, just running back over it in my mind. It’s a lot to take in.”

“Anything in particular?” She prodded.

“So this Alter called ‘Seven’, she let some alien thing into that one world and it made everyone go crazy?”

“That’s the running theory, yeah.”

“From what you said, it sounds a bit like what happened in that film, The Signal.”

“I’m not familiar.”

“It’s this random horror film. Basically, someone broadcasts this weird signal that ramps up everyone’s paranoia, and aggression…and everyone thinks they’re acting logically and that it’s everyone else who’s crazy.”

“Uh…yeah. It was a bit like that, actually. But it was more like…have you ever heard the term ‘Othering’?” Kade nodded.

“The whole ‘us versus them’ thing?”

“Mmm. That. It was just seeing those small situations of like…people being shitty, treating difference like a disease, talking about ‘those people’, and watching all of that build and build until it stopped being words and started being actions. From there, it just escalated and escalated until…” Olivia trailed off. “The thing is, it was hard to tell what was happening because for awhile it was just indistinguishable from the kind of thing you see every day. As a trans person you get…not desensitised, as such, but…used to being under threat, I guess? At least, that’s been my experience of it. People like us are always trying to push back against it, but there’s not many of us, and the people who are trying to actually attack us as a group are often pretty powerful. So when you’re seeing the rhetoric intensifying and everyday people getting crueller and more confrontational, it feels almost tidal. Like sure, the water is rising, but it should start to fall back soon. And it’s not like you can fight the ocean so you just…wait it out. It’s all horrible, but you’ve seen it a thousand times, and you look back at history and you’re just like…’well, things were objectively worse x amount of time ago, so that’s a reason to have hope’. I feel like it’s broadly the same for all marginalised groups: there’s definitely a time when things were worse than they are now, even if people are actively attacking our rights - attacking us - in the present, so it’s comforting to get it into your head that the resistance you’re seeing is resistance to things getting better, as opposed to a symptom that they might be about to get a whole lot fucking worse.”

“And that started to happen?”

“Believe me when I say ‘fuck yes’.” Olivia stabbed a gyoza with a chopstick before sticking it, whole, into her mouth, chewing slowly and looking out towards the river. She hoped that was an effective enough way of physically demonstrating a ‘period’ to end the line of questioning there.

“So what’s your deal when you’re not doing the whole…multiverse thing?”

“Well, I have a job.” Olivia started before thinking better of it and taking a few moments to swallow her mouthful of dumpling. “That covers a lot of it. Just boring office stuff. I…watch a lot of TV. I also enjoy making lots of very, very poor life decisions and constantly torturing myself about them after they blow up in my face. How about you?”

“Pretty much the same, to be honest.” Kade shrugged. Olivia smirked.

“Yeah, I kinda figured. Most of us were in some version of the same place before we met up. Shocking, I know. Since then, a few of us have changed quite a lot. Others…less so. It’d be cool if this was an Orphan Black situation where some of us had actual…y’know…skills? But no. So it does open up certain options, but at the same time…personally, I like having some security and stability. Running off into the multiverse as just this random girl who’s moderately good with spreadsheets doesn’t particularly lend itself to either.” Olivia dipped a new gyoza into her little bowl of soy sauce and took a small bite before setting the rest back down on her plate. “Girlfriend?” Her eyes narrowed, and she pointed a chopstick questioningly in Kade’s direction: “…Boyfriend…?”

“No. I mean, technically I’m married but that’s…over.” Olivia held her pose, raising an eyebrow. Kade sighed and rolled her eyes. “Yes, to a woman.” Olivia nodded, setting the chopstick down.

“I swear to god, one day we’re gonna find a straight one. Statistically, we have to. There must be one out there.”

“You make it sound like Pokemon.”

“I mean, it’s not not like Pokemon. So far we’ve got one of us who went on hormone blockers and started transitioning at eighteen, we have enbies, a cis girl, a cis guy…” Olivia listed off. Kade looked very much like she had no idea how to respond to that. Olivia pivoted: “Anyway, what happened with all that?”

“My marriage?” Kade clarified. Olivia nodded. “Can’t you just…” She waved her hands around in the air: “magically know the details or whatever it is you do?”

“It takes effort, and I can only see bits and pieces. The further events are from the main point of divergence, the more effort it takes. It’s also…I don’t know, it feels a bit fucked up to just…’read’ Alters when you could talk to them. Intrusive. Like we’re all the same girl, right? I’d want to use my own words to describe my own experiences, so why would I take that away from you?” Olivia chose to leave out the part where, routinely, she would start seeing broader context and connections during those sorts of conversations without particularly meaning to. It was a little like visualising a story she was reading…except instead of visualising what was being described, the things she saw were events and situations branching off from it. There was no benefit to either of them in letting Kade know the extent of what she’d already seen of her life. Kade sighed:

“It’s a long story. I don’t really want to get into it. Sara and I had a really great relationship right up until almost the end. I thought she knew who I was and wanted me anyway. I was...incorrect. So she left me, I transitioned, and now she’s in a deeply heteronormative relationship with some aggressively cisgender guy who she posts Facebook pictures with from time to time.”

“I’m sorry, you still have her on Facebook why?”

“Why does everyone always ask me that? It’s Facebook and I’m not fourteen. Deleting people seems…overwrought. It’s not like having them there means anything.”

“Means you have to keep seeing their life updates.”

“Better than causing needless drama.”

“I suppose that’s one perspective. A bad one, sure, but…yeah, it’s a perspective.”

“He’s actually nice, irritatingly.”

“Who, your ex’s new guy?”

“Mmm.” Kade nodded. “It pisses me off that he’s nice: I’d love to hate him but I actually kind of like him, based on the few times we’ve met. Anyway, long story short: she and I tried to be friends, but…to me at least, it felt very much like she didn’t actually want that, so I took the hint. I may have been a bit of an asshole on the way out of that situation, but I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean or that I didn’t think she deserved to hear, so…here we are, now. Alone.”

“Well it’s good that you’re not bitter about it.” Olivia responded with the kind of sarcasm that she hoped translated as supportive. Kade chuckled.

“Yeah. It is what it is.”

“I mean…” Olivia started. Kade held up her hand and shook her head.

“Please don’t.”

“What?”

“The only reactions anyone ever has are variations on either ‘she clearly sucks’ or ‘it must be just as hard for her’. Neither are true and neither are helpful to hear.”

“Okay, that’s fair.” Olivia nodded. “Let’s do something different, then. Can I pose you some hypothetical questions?”

“Sure…?” Kade replied cautiously, taking a big bite of one of her salmon rolls.

“What if you like men?”

“Buh I downt,” Kade answered awkwardly, her mouth full of sushi.

“Yeah. I know. Neither me. But what if you do? Cause you don’t actually know yet. The data behind the way that sexual orientation can change when you start taking hormones is complex. It’s, at minimum, possible.”

“Okay, yeah. I mean I’m open to it in theory, I just think it’s extremely unlikely given my history. Especially with all those…formative experiences you get into where they think you’re one of them and say some fucked up shit they assume you’ll just…agree with. Like the things I’ve heard guys say about women they’re with, or who they want to be with? Jesus. Or the things I’ve heard them say about the girls they actively want to break up with? Too many shitty experiences. Too many guys I thought were safe until, suddenly, they weren’t. I feel like even if I did end up being somewhat attracted to guys, I’d probably just…try to ignore it? Anyway…what’s your point?”

“The point is…what would that have done to your relationship, if she’d stayed? If you were bi and wanted to explore that side of your sexuality? Or even if you didn’t feel the need to and she worried that she was standing in your way and that you’d end up resenting her? Like…this would be a brand new thing for you, a huge shift in how you viewed yourself in the world. What kind of partner wouldn’t feel some type of way about standing between you and exploring that?”

“I mean, it’d be a conversation.”

“Yeah, it would be. One that could potentially break your relationship. Or, what if - god forbid - you found out you were actually straight? It does happen, you realise?” Kade’s expression twisted, managing to convey equal parts skepticism and disgust: “I know, same, but what if? It’s something you can’t actually rule out. Kind of like your ex realising she didn’t want to be married to a woman.”

“Okay. Yeah. Point taken.”

“Good girl.” Olivia threw her a sardonic little half-smile. Kade just glared at her, maintaining eye contact as she silently took a slow bite of a sushi roll. “Next…are you familiar with poly?”

“I’m a gay trans girl: yes Liv, I know what polyamory is.” Kade sighed and slurred through a mouthful of sushi. Olivia nodded.

“So that’s actually exactly my point. A lot of trans girls are polyamorous, and your mind and body are going through a lot of changes. What if you ended up feeling constricted in your current relationship style? What if you wanted something different, and your partner didn’t? It’s entirely possible that your perspective might change, or that you might…I don’t know, have access to opportunities and experiences you didn’t expect and want to explore. Again…not something you can rule out. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Second time around, the point you’re making is about as a subtle as a brick to the head, so yeah. Yeah, I get where you’re going with it.”

“Mmhmm. There’re a lot of these questions you should probably start asking yourself, about…sexuality, relationship styles, what you want, what you’re interested in. Because you’re on the precipice of a lot of it being quite radically subject to change. And any changes in these areas would have been potential relationship breakers if Sara had stayed. I feel like there’s divided opinions in the trans community about whether transitioning like…changes your personality? My personal take is that I’m the exact same person I was, I just get to be comfortable in my own skin, now. But the way you experience romance? Sex? The kinds of people you want to experience them with? The contours of what you want those experiences to be? All that can change. Pretty drastically, in my experience.”

“So what, I should be grateful for getting dumped because it would’ve ended anyway, is what you’re saying?”

“No, not at all. I’m just saying that you might want to make sure you have the right perspective on the relationship ending. It’s worth remembering while you’re going through all of this early-days stuff that there’s far more to life than both transition, and to holding onto relationships that don’t fit your wants or needs. Between the two possibilities - partner stays or partner leaves - both actually have upsides and downsides. You know the downsides about them leaving: it fucking hurts - ”

“ - You might be understating it a little there - "

“ - Oh really? You’re still here, aren’t you?” Olivia asked, pointing a chopstick at Kade accusingly. Kade inhaled sharply, staying silent. Olivia lowered the chopstick as an image flashed across the surface of her minds’ eye of Kade crying into her pillow amidst dishevelled sheets; an empty bottle of vodka on the kitchen bench outside the bedroom door. Gritting her teeth, Olivia forced it to the side. “I’m sorry, that was a bit of a fucked up thing to say.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s true. It hurts. It was traumatic. But…it’s not the end of the world, I guess.” Kade just shrugged, avoiding eye contact. “Anyway. My scale for trauma is a little…skewed.”

“Mine too.” Olivia nodded. She made herself continue, not having anything productive or un-intrusive to add: “Anyway: the big upside, for you, is that you’re a free agent. You can do whatever you want. You don’t have to negotiate the parameters of your self-expression. You don’t have to litigate each step of your transition against someone else’s comfort; against their memories of - and affection for - a version of you that no longer exists. That…let’s face it, never actually did, as anything more than a poorly fitting disguise you’d been forced to wear…but who was still the person your partner thought they’d married. You aren’t in a position where you have to manipulate someone you love, and try to contort the relationship you have with them into a kind of ‘near-enough-is-good-enough’ shape, just so you can continue to live with it. Simply, you aren’t anchored to Kieran’s life in any way that prevents you from working out the full extent of what it means to be Kade. And for better or worse…you kinda do have Sara to thank for that.”

“I’m gonna be honest, from where I’m sitting? That’s a pretty bleak analysis.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve seen it play out more than once, with couples who tried to stay together and failed. Or ones who managed to stay together and one or both of them ended up hating the other. I mean…don’t get me wrong, Kade: I’m not saying that sort of thing can’t work. There’s this one couple on TikTok who seem just…disgustingly happy after one of them transitioned. I love them…they’re my favourite rom-com, even despite being pretty fucking certain that they’re triggering a lot of girls in your position on the daily. And yeah, I’m sure that version of things happens a lot, where wants and needs are still well aligned following transition. But where they’re not…I’m equally sure that, for a lot of trans girls, having to hammer their universe into a new shape that breaks the mould of a pre-existing agreement is uh…a process that requires putting their own self-interest dramatically ahead of their partners’ wants and needs. And in that scenario, even where they end up finding equilibrium in the end, it’s a pretty fucked up thing to do to someone who is, most likely, having their very own drawn out existential crisis about the way their entire life and perspective on their future has suddenly changed. It sort of says something about the value you place on them relative to yourself, not to mention the relationship as a whole, if you’re willing to try to change your partner to fit them into a different future than the one they signed up for. There’s something a bit toxic about it actually, and I can’t imagine it not ending in, at minimum, a lot of underlying resentment. y’know?”

“I guess I can see what you mean. Though it sort of feels as though you might have a bit of a bias, here?” Kade raised a pointed eyebrow at Olivia.

“Yeah. Yeah, I might do.” Olivia shrugged. “I went through a few things in early transition that made me pretty skeptical about…well, relationships in general, but - yeah, you’re right - ones where one partner has to sacrifice and change in order to maintain the connection more specifically.” Olivia shrugged, picking at a gyoza with her fingernails, tearing off the outer rim and dipping it in soy. She stared at the noodle of torn gyoza, propping an elbow on the table and resting her head against the palm of her hand. “There was this girl, at one point. Very early days, for me. It’s uh…hard to talk about, even after all this time. See, she was married to a girl who stayed. She and I…” Olivia trailed off, pursing her lips.

“Had a relationship?” Kade slowly attempted. Olivia shook her head vigorously.

“No. God no. And, in retrospect…thank fuck for that. For so very many reasons. But we liked each other. I don’t know how much of it was real for her - how much of what she said was true - but it was real for me. And then she hurt me. Very, very badly, in the end. But I suspect that she hurt her wife more. And I was complicit in her doing that. And why? Because more than transition, more than her relationship, certainly more than either of us, what she wanted for herself was the most important thing, and ultimately she didn’t care who she had to hurt, or how badly, to get it. And you’re not immune to that. None of us are. I don’t like to base my opinions on individual events, but it was something that opened my eyes.”

“Yeah? Opened your eyes to what, specifically?”

“To the fact that self-actualisation can be a form of violence when someone has you at the centre of their universe, but they’re not at the centre of yours. When what you want takes precedence over the promises you made, the words you swore were truth but no longer are, and the narratives you established together that no longer hold your interest. It’s easy - far too easy - in a situation without a point of reference or like…any kind of ‘script’, to really fucking hurt people. Particularly where your self-interest outweighs your concern for whether or not you’re going to. So…yeah, I’m biased. But bias doesn’t inherently make you wrong, Kade. It can just be the shadow of a hard lesson you learned from living through a worst case scenario. One that you suddenly have to live with knowing, moving forward, is never not a possibility.” She raised her hand to her lips and bit down harder than was really necessary on the separated noodle of dumpling for emphasis.

“You sure you don’t want to elaborate on the uh…situationship?” Kade asked, clearly curious.

“Yeah, there’s no way I’m getting into that. We’ve known each other for what…a cumulative few hours? The heavily edited version of my takeaways would be: I was pretty much where you are currently. I was going through a second puberty, finally shrugging off that whole…dissociative haze I’d been drifting through, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by this huge new emotional landscape I wasn’t familiar with. I was single. Other trans girls were often fascinating and routinely beautiful, and, from a dating perspective I’d…somehow gotten it into my head that maybe they wouldn’t hurt me like cis girls had. That maybe because we had these shared experiences, they’d understand me better? Like me more?”

“So you were pretty much exclusively interested in other trans girls at that point?” Kade asked, dipping the last of one of her sushi rolls into soy sauce.

“That might be overstating it. I mean, it’s still my preference, overall. Cause…y’know…if you have the option between two hypothetical, equally appealing human beings…one of whom is going to intuitively ‘get’ a lot of things about you that you don’t want to have to constantly explain, and one of whom won’t and uh…might misinterpret those things or take them personally…” Olivia trailed off, holding her hands out to the side to mime a set of scales.

“Makes sense.” Kade shrugged.

“Yeah. Cause that’s the thing: I wasn’t entirely wrong about it all - at least about the ‘understanding me better’ part - I just had some pretty intense rose-coloured glasses on at the time. So it put me in a position where I was both prone to making incredibly stupid mistakes, and to letting the wrong people get close enough to me to do some real, lasting damage. It was out of loneliness, and out of this desperate desire for someone to actually see and want the real me instead of that bullshit mask I used to wear, but like…you really need to be careful that you’re putting your energy in the right place. Working out what you want, now that you’re becoming an actual, whole-ass person. Not, for example, trying to hold onto ideas of what your life should be, or chasing other trans girls…trying to be like them, or be with them or whatever, just because you have no idea what to do with yourself. I guess, overall, my biggest realisation was that no one was coming to save me, or fix me, no matter how much I wished they would. And the people who made me think they might weren’t doing it because they meant it, they were doing it because they wanted something from me. So the simple version is…don’t…be…an idiot, I guess?”

“Not my long suit, historically.”

“Same, unsurprisingly. But try, y’know? Anyway, hope that was at least a little bit helpful.”

“It should help. As responses go, It’s way better than constantly being told my ex is a bitch, which just feels like historical revisionism to be honest; she was never that. Even at her worst, she was…maybe a little confused? Maybe a little selfish? Which…who the fuck isn’t from time to time? But…honestly Liv, right now, it just feels like nothing’s ever going to be good again.” Olivia rolled her eyes.

“‘Again’? Oh my god, when was anything ever actually good? We have basically the same history up until I transitioned - I know you were sleep-walking through your own life. You can’t fool me.”

“Okay, Jesus.”

“No, I’m sorry. Just…look: you and me…we like data. Until you have enough to quantify how good life can be now that you’re…y’know…you? Sure, you’re probably gonna want to die a little. Just give it time. Trust the process. And in the meantime, I’ll introduce you to some Alters we can make fun of together when they’re not around. I guarantee it’ll make you feel better.”