History of our Census

Getting an idea of our population has always involved a significant amount of interpreting messages from our subconscious. Today, we use a combination of direct communication with subconscious members and neurological structures with external world observations and calculations to maintain a fairly accurate estimate.

With a population number as high as ours, and the mechanisms by which we know it grows, one does feel compelled to ask, "What exactly is a headmate?" and "Where should we draw the line for who is counted as one and who is not?"

Aside from the ethical pitfalls of drawing such a line in a population of individuals who are constantly growing and developing, we just don't have the practical means to draw such a distinction and get a restricted propulation count.

For this reason, we count each distinct self-schema as a full fledged system member, regardless of current complexity or apparent autonomy.

To date, the only entity in our system that we have solidly confirmed as a "part" is the Auditor, which may not have a self-schema.

Pre-Out Numbers

Before we consciously accepted our plurality, a number of us knew that we were in a system and urged our Bridge Crew to write stories and mythologies that included aspects of our collective identities. One such story was the myth of the Dragon People (the Ktletaccete). And when we got to the part of trying to describe just how many Dragon People there were, by saying "the Great One had many children," we chose a large number that was meant to be a mythological feeling arbitrary place holder for "countless". We chose 900,000.

This was when we were 19 years old. If we were to assume our average rate of growth could be applied consistently and evenly throughout our life, we should have been between 1.2 million and 1.5 million headmates in size at that time. However, we're pretty sure our growth rates have been bigger later in life due to college life and working in customer service, meaning earlier rates must have been lower, so 900,000 probably falls within a reasonable margine of error.

Still, it was a round number that we just thought of. Clearly an estimate at best, and more of an artistic choice at least.

Raw Observation

When we came out as plural to ourselves in 2016, we immediately started keeping count of who came forward and identified themselves.

We started with the awareness of Eh and Anne the Girl, and the surmised presence of an angry, desperate headmate who turned out to be Phage. Then, the same day we met Phage, we realized that Fenmere had to be a system member because she'd had name confusion and amnesia in our 20s, along with notable changes in emotions and reactions to things when her name felt right (i.e. when she was fronting). In fact, we had made conscious note of that in our 20s, suspecting plurality but not knowing that plurality was real and therefore we didn't come out as plural at that time.

After bringing Fenmere forward and talking to her, the floodgates were open and other headmates started surfacing at a high rate.

In a matter of a few months, we breached 40 known headmates. And we stopped keeping a tally somewhere around 60. Our Facebook archives have a record of these efforts.

Recently, while making this wiki, we have had the opportunity to count system members who have fronted or shown themselves on the Bridge, and we are at over 87 such encounters in the years between 2016 and 2020. But we are aware of only about 40 members who regularly take turns on the Bridge Crew.

Evidence of Massive Growth

In the first year after we came out to ourselves as plural (2016-2017), our increased awareness of ourselves combined with a spreading eagerness amongst our population to be seen by the others resulted in a rapidly growing headcount, as noted above. It also meant that we were paying attention when new system members were generated and took the front.

We have records now (in our Facebook archives) of several instances where a new system member was created and given full autonomy within a matter of seconds. And the stimuli that triggered such a generation has proven to be wide and varied, and extremely common.

We found that we generated new system members to represent people or fictional characters we met, role playing characters we created, or new aspects of our own selves that we needed to express. Eh split twice, while fronting, on to separate occasions, to create Little Eh and Elle, for instance. Most of our role playing characters have turned out to be expressions of old headmates who hadn't been named yet, but Magic Princess Mobile Catgirl appears to be totally new and a result of character creation. And every new TV show or book we've read has resulted in fresh new Liaisons for the characters in them, the hero usually fronting strongly by the end of the story.

Also, so many liaisons of past encounters with people and characters began surfacing, some generated from very brief exposures, that together with the above experiences we had to logically conclude that we likely had a liaison for every single person we've known and every single fictional character we've related to.

So, we started estimating our likely numbers, based on our Facebook friends list, school annuals, and list of books we've read.

Reluctantly, we started to accept our population might be somewhere between 900 and 3,200. And we began joking that we were the size of a Galaxy class starship from Star Trek.

However, these estimates were very fuzzy and drawn from external numbers. We didn't know exactly how sensitive our generational mechanism was, nor what a system member's average lifespan is (apparently, we don't seem to die until our body does, or until brain damage or dementia occurs, but we didn't know that). So we weren't sure what our actual number was and we wanted to figure out a way to find out.