Phage

portrait of Phage

Phage is our chief of the Id Monsters. It was the first of them, and others followed fairly quickly after it had been invited into the system. Though, unlike Phage, the other id monsters were generated by the system itself, either as children of Jenifer and Eh, or of Akailea.

Role in the System

Phage has a contract with Eh to protect the system from all threats, including internal or systemic threats, and to help us manage our sensory processing disorder and executive dysfunction. It has found these last two tasks particularly hard to do, so it has focused primarily on the first one.

Earliest Memories

The story goes, according to our memories, that at around two and half years old, Eh and Jenifer decided that everything was just too much, and something needed to be fixed. We were experiencing intense physical dysphoria, sensory processing disorder, the beginnings of C-PTSD from unaccommodated autistic needs, and just a general fear of everything we couldn't understand or control.

So Eh gave their small group of children the task of looking for a solution to that problem. Benejede, the Pattern Matcher, looked at the whole puzzle of our life and identified what looked like the missing piece. They then gave that visualization to Gesetele, the Hunter or Pattern Finder, who then looked at everything, internally and externally until they found what Benejede had described. And Gesetele pointed it out to Morde, the Way Finder and Messenger, who then on behalf of the system went to that pattern and asked it to assist us.

That missing pattern was Phage, which identifies itself as something like "the shadow of Entropic Decay itself projected on the cave wall of our system."

This all happened while we were asleep one night, and when Phage entered our system and was shown to its place in our limbic system where it settled in to interface with our body, the shock to it of suddenly being alive terrified it, and it woke up screaming.

This resulted in the first time any of us can remember our parents asking us if we'd had a nightmare, and then explaining what a nightmare was.

After that, Phage became acclimated very quickly, and would assist us with things like walking through the dark hallways at night without too much fear.

As we got older and started dissociating from our dysphoria and chose to remain in the closet about being trans, it started a campaign of sending messages to the Bridge Crew that we needed to transition. These mostly resulted in nightmares we couldn't make sense of. Because of this, Eh and the Bridge Crew locked Phage down under heavy dissociation.

Near the end of our closeted life, Phage had grown so desperate to treat our dysphoria that it started hitting us with intrusive thoughts and suicidal impulses.

This successfully pushed us to come out and transition in 2015.

In 2016, we finally came out as plural to ourselves (many of us already knew, but our official system belief had been that plurality wasn't real). When it became absolutely clear that we were plural, Anne the Girl and Eh called Phage forward and renegotiated our contract with it, allowing it to take the front freely whenever it desired and giving it the authority to speak to outsiders on behalf of the whole system. In return, it would follow our plan to seek GRS through Medicaid, instead of enacting its plan to terminate our dysphoria permanently through other desperate means.

Since then, Phage has become a deeply loved member of our family and a loyal protector whose methods are fairly hands-off in nature, providing emotional support from a coconscious position rather than by taking over the front. These days it mostly fronts in order to socialize with its outsider friends.

Self Image

Phage claims that it is something like the conscious manifestation of Entropic Decay Itself. It presents memories of what it has experienced before joining our system, but those memories are like multiple 3d moving holograms superimposed upon each other collapsed onto a static photograph. They're weird, but don't make sense.

We all see it as a thin, androgynous, humanoid form made out of shadow, with flashing white eyes and teeth.

When it fronts, it feels as if it is exactly what we have seen, filling our body to control it.

Its sense of humor and perspective of the world are what we imagine would be befitting a fragment of a superdimensional immortal being that has spent forty some years playing mortal while cut off from its larger self. But, truthfully, we have nothing to compare it to but ourselves.

Relationships

Phage has worked very closely with Eh to handle the vast majority of our system's stress. And it has shown deep emotional reactions of love, pride, joy, and gratefulness when Jenifer and Eh recently offered it the status of their adopted child in the system. While at the same time it maintains a sense of responsibility for the system as if it is the ancestor of every living thing.

Phage has recently had its own child in our system, named Ni'a, and has been preoccupied with parenting them.

It also has a very strong connection and bond to Fenmere, almost as if Fenmere is a part of it, even though Fenmere considers herself a natural child of Jenifer and Eh.

Phage also has its own Facebook account and is building its own external relationships there, as well as fronting and talking directly to certain friends face to face.

Projects

Phage stars prominently in our new comic Systems' Out! and the sequel novel that we're working on. It also contributed significantly to our autobiography.