Emily Aurelius let out a long breath as she set foot on Dromia VI for the first time.

She was a golden jackal of fairly average height, with a slender build, dark hazel eyes, golden-brown fur ticked with darker brown along her back and brushy tail, and large, mobile ears that swiveled about, taking everything around her in. Shoulder-length dark brown hair fell in loose waves around her narrow-muzzled face, pinned back on one side with a hand-decorated barrette, and a simple, practical coverall in plain dark blue was her only article of clothing, belted at her waist, which nicely emphasized broad hips and modestly-sized breasts.

Holding her breath as she stepped over the threshold had been completely absurd, but Emily hadn’t been able to help feeling as though somehow something would stop her, somebody would turn up and tell her that she couldn’t be here, she had to go back to Mars, back to the Terran Federation, back to her real home. Surely there was no way she could be allowed to actually escape. Yet here she was, just outside the long tunnel of the disembarking tube from the shuttle that had brought her here, and a tension she hadn’t fully realized she’d been carrying went out of her.

She stepped aside from the flow of people of assorted species, towing her massive suitcase behind her, and paused to just soak in the sudden sense of relief that washed over her. What was beneath her bare paws—bare because bare feet were acceptable among morphs, and every penny not spent on shoes could go towards her escape—was only worn shuttleport carpet in a rather unattractive pattern, but it still felt amazing. She could feel the way the gravity was a little bit stronger than back home, and the smell of the air was different too, even here inside where everything was no doubt filtered and air-conditioned. She really was on an alien world, an Alliance world, a world where humanity didn’t rule.

The shuttle had smelled different too, of course, and the big interstellar liner that had carried her from the Sol system to the Dromia system, yet this air still seemed amazing, the scent of somewhere truly other. Suddenly eager to get outside, Emily grabbed her suitcase and hurried down the shuttleport hall.

Other passengers moved around her, mostly morphs, the sentient and largely humanoid animal people that made up much of the Alliance of Sentients. There were humans too, though, and she even saw one Threoa, a vaguely feline alien from far outside of the sphere of human influence. It was strolling beside a feral wolf morph, the two quadrupeds in easy companionship, but a human walked on the alien’s other side, and was obviously part of their conversation as well, which made Emily blink in surprise. Back on Mars humans, morphs and aliens tended to keep to themselves. Seeing that trio felt strange, almost uncomfortable.

Emily frowned at that feeling. She’d come here in part to escape the oppressive sense of propriety that suffused Federation culture, especially Solarian culture. Why should seeing exactly what she’d hoped to find here feel wrong? She found herself glancing around, to see if anybody else was staring, and it was even stranger to find nobody was. Nobody was going to jump in and tell the three to keep to themselves. Of course probably nobody back home would have either, people would have just stared, and gossiped later.

Realizing that she herself was staring, Emily looked away from the trio and walked a little faster. Ahead a pair of doors stood open, the passengers from the shuttle streaming through them, into the alien day beyond.

Outside she paused again, looking around at her new world. It was very green, that was the first thing she noticed. The plants here used chlorophyll just like on Earth, and like the largely Earth-native plants of Mars, so they were green in the same way, though there were reds and purples mixed in too that were less common back home.

No, that was no longer home. Time to stop thinking of it that way. This was home now.

But though the green itself wasn’t really different, the amount of it was. The shuttleport she’d left from had been a thing of concrete and metal, all spare practicality, humming with ground cars and aircars and paved almost everywhere. A paved road swooped in front of the shuttleport here, swarmed with vehicles, both ground and air, picking up and dropping off, but it threaded through a sea of green. The whole front of the shuttleport seemed to be a garden, crammed with plants. Where was the parking lot? Surely there must be one! Yet there was no sign of the broad expanses of pavement and vehicles she’d expected, there was just green and green and green. That was at least half of the alien scent that filled her nostrils as she inhaled again, the scent of green and growing things.

"Emily?"

Emily turned and saw a familiar person striding towards her, and she broke into a grin. "Yin!"

Yin was a wolf morph, a good head taller than Emily and at least half again as broad. She was built like a weight lifter, dressed in nothing more than a tank top and torn jean shorts, with heavy black boots covering her feet. Her fur was gray, streaked with darker markings and touched with white at her muzzle and along her belly, while her hair was jet black, with a few threads of silver through it.

As she approached she opened her arms, and Emily couldn’t keep from flinging herself into that embrace. They’d only met in person once, but they talked for hours and hours whenever Yin was in the Sol system, so Yin seemed familiar all the same, especially in a place where Emily didn’t know a single other soul.

Yin gave her a tight hug, nearly lifting her off her feet, then stepped back. "It’s good to see you again, finally. Got any more luggage?"

Emily shook her head. "Just this."

"I’ve got an aircar. The place I found for you is out in the country, so I thought we’d make a quick hop of it. I can take you around by ground car or on foot to play tourist once you’ve settled in and gotten some rest."

"That sounds good." Emily had been several weeks on the ship over, living in a cramped shared bunkroom, so rest in an actual groundside apartment was definitely appealing.

"Come on, then." Yin set off along the sidewalk and Emily trotted after, feeling the warm pavement under her paws. They walked along a path that wound amid trees and shrubs and flowers until it came to a tiny little building. Emily recognized it and smiled, realizing where the vehicles must be. It was an elevator. Sure enough, once they’d descended they came out into a parking garage, smelling faintly of machine oil and ozone, and crowded with groundcars and aircars alike.

Yin took Emily’s suitcase and loaded it into the back of a bright red aircar with absurdly tiny little wings. It "flew" with countergrav, of course, the wings were actually for steering, not lift.

Emily climbed into the passenger seat, looking around for the seatbelt. Yin, climbing into the driver’s seat beside her, said, "It’s got a safe field. No belt."

"Oh. But what if that fails?"

"It’s triple redundant and independently powered. It won’t! Also I’m a licensed military pilot, I know what I’m doing in the air. I could fly the shuttle you came in on, I can certainly fly this little thing. We won’t crash."

"Oh." Not entirely sure she felt reassured, Emily sat back in the seat as Yin expertly maneuvered the little vehicle through the parking garage and out into the air beyond. It sailed along sedately, gradually rising above the sea of green. As Emily got a better view, she saw the shuttleport itself, with its big, paved landing pads covered in obscure markings, the whole thing surrounded by greenery. It seemed to go on forever, as if the shuttleport were in the middle of a forest, but slowly Emily started to notice the buildings peeking up amid the green. As the aircar curved around she saw that in one direction the buildings grew thicker and thicker until there was actually a city and not a forest. In every other direction, though, everything was green.

"Is the whole planet a garden?" she said, taking in the view.

Yin laughed. "No! But it’s something of a tradition here to plant trees whenever anything new gets built, and to build underground as much as is practical. In fact I’m pretty sure it’s a zoning law that outside of urban areas there are strict limits on how much you can put above ground. So everything just ends up looking like gardens. We’re headed away from the city, so we’ll go over some agricultural land, and some of the native forest shortly, once I get out of restricted airspace and can open this little thing up." Yin patted the steering yoke fondly.

That sounded ominous to Emily. She gripped the door’s handle just a bit harder, then yelped as Yin suddenly sent the aircar rocketing forward at what felt like a ridiculous speed. "There we go!" said Yin, grinning, her ears pricked forward, hands confidently gripping the steering yoke. The green was now a blur whipping by beneath them, though they were still climbing, and as they got higher and higher it became both less alarming, and easier to see the countryside below.

It was countryside now, with broad green fields intermixed with patches of wilder green, and very occasionally dotted with buildings. This all had been settled for hundreds of years, of course, but it was newly settled still compared to anywhere on Earth or even on Mars, where humanity had been living since the days when humanity had thought themselves alone in the universe.

"So I’ve ironed out my schedule since we last spoke," said Yin, glancing over at Emily, "And I’ve got just over six months to hang around and help you get settled in before TEA and I jet off again." Emily nodded. Yin wasn’t a native of Dromia VI, she was from one of the other Alliance planets, and did a lot of traveling. Which was how they’d become friends, since Emily had never left Mars before this trip. They’d chatted in real time frequently whenever Yin had been in the Sol system, and they’d also sent letters in between. They were close friends, though Emily sometimes had a hard time imagining why. Yin was older, more outgoing, braver, and seemed utterly comfortable in her own skin, something Emily had never managed.

Yin had been in the military in her youth, which Emily couldn’t even imagine doing, and she seemed to travel around space as she pleased now, with her parter, an AI housed in a spaceship called The Easily Amused, or TEA. Emily had talked to TEA a lot too, but hadn’t clicked with the AI the way she had with her fellow morph. Exactly what Yin did was a little nebulous to Emily. She knew Yin sometimes hauled small cargo or did courier work, but Emily was half afraid to ask the details, she had a feeling that some of what Yin did was very illegal, at least by the Federation’s laws. She was less familiar with the Alliance, something that probably should change soon, since she lived here now.

"Thank you," she said as the little aircraft began to slow and descend again. "I’m not sure I’d have been brave enough to move here without knowing there’d be somebody I know waiting."

"I’m always happy to help a friend," said Yin. "Part of why I like the traveling life. I can hop around wherever I’m needed. I’m also always happy to help somebody escape that cesspit over in the Federation." There was a low growl in Yin’s voice as she began to circle their destination, a small town that spread out along a riverbank amid a native forest.

Emily shifted slightly, feeling uncomfortable at both what Yin had said and the tone she’d said it in. "It’s not all bad there. Things are improving. There are five non-human senators on Mars now, you know."

Yin snorted. "Oh boy, five whole morphs. Out of how many?"

Emily felt her ears flush, and she laid them back in embarrassment. Yin touched the aircar down on a small landing pad beside a modest three-story building. Then she reached out and patted Emily’s shoulder. "Hey, it’s not your fault that the Federation is backwards. Though now that you’re here in the Alliance, you’ll need to watch that kind of language."

Emily blinked at Yin. "Language?"

"’Non-human.’ It’s considered a bit of a slur here, especially when applied to morphs. You and I, my friend, are human. Every bit as much as any furless ape you’ve ever met."

Emily’s ears flicked in confusion. "But... You’re a wolf Yadi morph. I’m a jackal morph. We’re not human."

"Why not?" Yin grinned cheerfully at Emily. "Human isn’t the kind of skin you have or even the shape of your body. Human is a way of thinking. You have a human mind, so you’re human. Both legally and culturally speaking, here. Even and AIs are mostly human here. Everyone but actual aliens like the Dansk or Threoa are human in the Alliance. And there’s some talk of expanding the legal definition to include aliens who have demonstrably human ways of thinking like them too."

Emily found herself blinking again at the thought of declaring a Dansk, a half-ton amphibious arthropod like some bizarre cross between a lobster and a centaur, to be a human being. "That’s weird."

"Is it?" Yin tilted her head, looking over at Emily intently. "Is it really? Most morphs were made with human DNA, you know. Animal bodies with human brains. For a basic humanoid type like yourself the differences are nearly entirely cosmetic. A few of us can even interbreed with humans. That’s part of the definition of a species, is ability to interbreed. Hell, Yadis are a lot further off from baseline humanity, so it’s very likely that you’re more closely related to what the Federation calls humans than you are to me. So why should the fur—or the chitin for that matter—make any difference?"

"I... I don’t know." Emily looked over at Yin, suddenly aware of how strange Yin really was. Yadis were a very unique species. They were fully hermaphroditic, for one thing. They tended to read as—and live as—females, since the hips needed to bear children and the breasts needed to nurse them were both more immediately obvious than the masculine elements of their anatomy. But that actually quite drastic difference meant they weren’t genetically compatible with any other morph species. If Emily wanted to have children, she could find any number of morphs from similar design backgrounds who might be compatible with her. Yin could—and had, Emily knew—interbreed only with another Yadi. Emily had to admit that this probably made her a different species than Emily was, and yet of course Emily thought of them both as morphs, as essentially the same.

"Think about it," said Yin, and then she opened the aircar door and stepped out. Emily opened her own door, feeling her mind spinning as she did. She’d known things would be different here, but she hadn’t known they’d be this different. Admitting she and Yin were different things might make sense. But calling herself human? That seemed utterly impossible.

Somehow, as she got her things into her apartment, said her goodbyes to Yin, and began to do a little unpacking, that thought drove home more than anything else had—even the alien scent of the air—that she was no longer in the Federation, that she really was on an alien world, where things were different.

What else might be different here? She’d known that her economic circumstances would be different, that was the ostensible reason why she’d saved up the funds to move. Morphs had a hard time getting anything but the most menial of jobs on Mars, and she knew it was the same elsewhere in the Federation. Here morphs were a majority of the population, and as she’d already seen, species prejudice was much less common. And while both star nations had social safety nets that meant she wouldn’t be homeless, the Federation’s welfare program was considerably less generous; if she lost her job and had to fall back on it she’d probably be reduced to living in a group home of some kind, with only the barest of amenities. Here, well... She looked around the little apartment and smiled. This was a basic living home, a place provided for free to anybody—even a non-citizen like her—who registered as being in danger of homelessness.

She wanted to find a good job and get a place that was truly her own eventually, but for now this was at least as nice as anywhere she’d ever paid to live on Mars. It had two rooms, a living-dining room with an attached kitchenette, and a single modest bedroom with a small but nicely appointed bathroom. It even had a built-in computer terminal that looked fairly decent.

Seeing that yanked Emily’s thoughts to a different track entirely, and she went to her suitcase, digging through it until she found a small box that she’d carefully wrapped up in several of her shirts. Most of her luggage was clothing, she’d sold all her larger possessions to add to her moving fund, but a few other things had come along as well. This was the one thing she’d have brought even if she had to leave everything else behind.

Inside the box, further wrapped in foam padding, was an induction headset and a tiny data card. Emily extracted the card, then turned on the computer terminal and examined its input ports. The ports were familiar, much to her relief. These things were standardized in the Federation, and it seemed the same standard was used here. One point in common between the two nations, at least.

The computer could apparently handle the same file types as well, for when Emily slotted the card into place her files popped up on the screen.

There they were: years and years worth of work designing and sculpting and building; all the places and people she’d made in her private virtual world, starting from crude things, mostly modified from free templates, that she’d built as a little girl and ending with some recent work she was very proud of.

Emily picked up the headset and settled it over her ears, carefully positioning the temple pieces that would send signals directly into her brain. A brain jack would give better fidelity, but she’d never been able to afford the surgery to get one. The headset was cheaper. Before plugging in the cord that ran from it, though, she rummaged in the suitcase and found something else. A vest of heavy, stretchy fabric, with a fastener running up the side. She unfastened her coverall and pulled it down to her waist, then wiggled into the tight vest and fastened it up. A little more wiggling got everything properly in place, and now her chest was flat.

The chest binder was sold for transgender men who hadn’t had surgery for whatever reason. Emily wasn’t transgender, of course. But for most of her life her virtual character had been male, and something about bringing her real body slightly in line with that felt good, comfortable, and certainly better than having the occasional jarring bit of inaccurate feedback when she touched herself and real nerves overrode the headset’s signals.

She did her coverall up again, then plugged into the computer, and opened the virtual reality world she’d spent so much time constructing. With a long sigh she sat down on the bed and closed her eyes, letting go of the real world and stepping into her fantasy creation.

Emily was still a jackal morph in this world, but she’d created a black-backed jackal, with bolder, more dramatic markings than her natural form. Something close enough to her to feel like there was a connection, but different enough to be fun and interesting. The real difference, though, was that the body she wore here, in the fantasy castle where she now opened her eyes, was male.

She’d invented this character as a child, and called him Eli. By now she’d designed and redesigned him dozens of times. She’d written stories about him, acted out VR "plays" as him, and put together an elaborate supporting cast of other characters he had relationships with, but mostly she’d just done what she was doing now; spent time being Eli instead of Emily, being the slightly dashing, confident, interesting young man rather than her shy, anxious, boring real self.

"Eli" even went out and hung around with other people in public virtual spaces sometimes. Eventually Emily would have to get hooked up to the planetary net and find out where such spaces were here, see if she could meet more people and make relatively local friends that way. Socializing as Eli was always easier, more comfortable, than doing so as Emily. Everything about being Eli felt comfortable, and so now she relaxed into her private world, her private self, and let all the stress of her long journey and all her fears about this new phase of her life slip away.

---

A soft chime in Eli’s ear was a reminder that it was time to log out and become Emily again. He—she rather—had arranged to meet Yin at a coffee shop and spend the afternoon playing tourist around the city. He’d been on Dromia VI for just over two months now, and felt he’d settled in quite well. He had a group of friends in a virtual chat room, a part time job with opportunities for further advancement, and even a few friends he met in person now and again, though of course those friends knew him as Emily, not Eli. Speaking of which...

He said his goodbyes and logged out, then removed the headset, blinking himself back into his little apartment and back into the real world, into Emily’s world. He—she again—shook herself, shaking off the always slightly bizarre feeling of switching from the headset’s transmissions to her own actual neurons. Almost as bizarre was settling back into her own feminine body. It wasn’t all that different, but it was still strange, and she sometimes wondered how people with more wildly divergent virtual selves managed.

He—no she, for heaven’s sake, why was it so hard to settle back into being Emily today?—glanced at the time display on her computer. She didn’t have much time to get herself together. Well, the coverall she was wearing now would do for going out, it wasn’t as though she owned any fancy outfits, or as if Yin cared about that kind of thing.

She was nearly out the door when she realized she was still wearing the binder instead of her bra. It didn’t really make her look male so much as it made her look like a very flat girl, but still, maybe that was strange? She paused in the doorway, then shrugged. Stopping to change back into a bra would make her late, and it wasn’t like it really mattered.

So with a little shrug and an odd feeling of mixed nervousness and pleasure—why should going out "as" Eli seem nice?—Emily darted out the door and down the stairs to the sidewalk outside.

The coffee shop where she’d agreed to meet Yin was in the city, so Emily made her way to a public tube station and down into the underground transit system. It felt strange, to have the faint constriction of the chest binder constantly with her, here in the real world. She kept looking at her fellow passengers, wondering if any of them noticed anything different, if any of them would care if they did. The thought came to her that probably they wouldn’t. In a place where "human" had to do with what was in your mind, and not your body, why would male or female be any different? If she decided she was Eli here, that would certainly be allowed, probably even encouraged.

That was a nice thought. No more strict societal roles, no more judgment, no more oppressive expectations. There was a lightness, a sense of possibility to it. She could be anything at all, here! Maybe she could even be transgender, if she decided she wanted to be.

Emily frowned faintly as she sat in her seat, and tried to work her way through why she’d suddenly used that particular word. Why should she think she was allowed to be transgender here, specifically? Changing one’s legal gender was possible on Mars, after all. Trans rights were protected by law, as were morph rights and all sorts of other minority rights.

She sighed and tipped her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. The law allowed it, yes, but there were more subtle things than laws at work in the Federation. Humans were humans, morphs were morphs, men were men, women were women. You stayed in your lane, did your part, played your role, and that was the way the universe worked. Everyone was in theory equal, everyone was in theory free. The slavery-by-another name that was morph ownership and the genetic engineering of new morphs had both ended more than a hundred years ago. That was a part of the past, not the present.

Morphs were treated differently, though. They were other than human, and sometimes that meant sub-human. People could be gay, or transgender, or anything else they wanted to be if they were human, especially if they were wealthy, and powerful. The poor though, and morphs were very often poor, lived more tightly constrained, more harshly judged lives. Not by any law, laws that treated morphs differently had mostly been removed from the books, but just by the ways in which other people acted around them.

Hell, the virtual spaces where she’d been Eli for so many years growing up had all been morph-only spaces, because they had to be, because the Martian net was de-facto segregated, and places that allowed humans tended to become taken over by humans, with morphs driven out and banned in practice even if not on paper.

She hadn’t even really thought about that while she’d lived there. Morphs had morph things and humans had human things, and being transgender was mostly a human thing. But then here in Alliance space, Emily was considered human...

Why am I thinking about being transgender just because I’m finding it a bit hard to shake off being Eli today? I’m not transgender. I don’t feel awful about being female. Emily flicked her ears, shifting, tipping her head down and looking down into her lap. Eli wasn’t her real self. Eli was just...comfortable, that was all. But Eli belonged to virtual reality, not here in the world.

But I’m out in his binder today, here in the real world. I could be him, if I really wanted to, she answered herself.

Emily laid her ears back. That thought was absolute nonsense and she had no business thinking it. She was content enough with the way things were, with Eli and his comfortable virtual space, with herself as Emily and her satisfactory life. There was no point in changing any of that. Eli could never be fully real, so why even think about trying some half-baked attempt to be him?

The tube car arrived and she rose, following the the crowd of humans and morphs—humans all, she mentally corrected herself—out into the station and up to the street above. A few blocks’ worth of brisk walking brought her to the coffee shop. She looked around, but didn’t see Yin yet, so she went to the counter to get something to drink while she waited.

"What name shall I shout?" asked the fox behind the counter with a toothy grin, and acting on a sudden, strange impulse, Emily said "Eli." She felt absurd almost before she’d finished speaking the two short syllables. The card she handed over to pay for the drink didn’t say Eli on it, it said Emily. And despite her flat chest, her wide hips, short stature and high voice meant there was no way anyone could think a male name like Eli belonged to her. But the fox just nodded, still smiling, and took her card.

Emily sat down to wait for her drink, and for Yin. The latter arrived before the former. With a cheerful wave, Yin dropped down to sit next to Emily. "Hey there!"

It seemed oddly nice that Yin hadn’t greeted him—her? Things were being so strangely confusing today—by name, since that meant that there was no reason for him to stop feeling like Eli for a moment, at least. Though despite the lack of the wrong—right?—name things really wouldn’t settle in her—or his?—mind at all now. Eli belonged in a virtual space with his virtual friends, not here, talking to Yin. Yin was part of the real world. Maybe Eli should make more of an effort to find a way back into Emily’s mindset. She was the one who was real, after all, and the one who was friends with Yin.

He didn’t want to stop being himself just now, though. He remembered the feeling he’d felt earlier as he walked to the tube among the crowd of humans of all sorts; the free, almost weightless feeling that anything might be possible.

Maybe a little space for Eli in the real world could be possible too?

"Large mocha for Eli!"

Eli’s ears swiveled towards the sound, and he felt a weird thrill at hearing the name. He was very used to answering to it, of course, given the amount of role-playing he did with it, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard it with his real-world ears before. It felt nice. It felt beyond nice, really, and that was so strange. Everything seemed strange today. Everything was off-balance, and it should have been uncomfortable, yet somehow it didn’t feel like he was falling off his feet. More like he was in free-fall, tumbling, yet with all the world, all of the galaxy itself spread out before him.

Eli got up, giving up on fighting the odd mood for now, and picked up the cup of rich, steaming beverage. He sat down across from Yin at the little table again. Yin gave him a curious look. "Eli, huh?"

He felt his ears flick back against his head and he took a sip of the mocha, buying himself time to decide how to explain. "Have I mentioned Eli to you before?"

"He’s a character you play on the net, right?"

Eli nodded. "He’s... I can get very into the mindset of being him. When I’m in the virtual world I feel very much that I am him, that I’m this other person entirely. I mean. Not entirely, I guess." Eli flicked his ears again, feeling awkward. "He’s still me. I’m him. He’s a male version of me, mostly? He’s maybe a little more...confident, I guess than Emily is. Maybe I’m not being him very well right now." He felt his ears flushing hotly.

Yin chuckled. "I think I understand."

"I just felt like him today. So I gave them that name. I guess that’s who I am right now? I never really thought being Eli in the real world was possible. But...maybe it is, a little bit?"

"Of course it is," said Yin, smiling. "Hell, if you wanted to be Eli full time, complete with fully male body, you could. Sex reassignment procedures these days are very good, it’s pretty much indistinguishable from having been born with an XY set of chromosomes. I have a friend who was considering it a few years back, I helped him do some research."

Eli put a fake-feeling smile on, tried to laugh. "That’s silly. I don’t have the money for that kind of thing. I doubt I ever will unless something pretty wild happens. And anyway, I’m not transgender. Eli is just...comfortable."

Yin tilted her head, looking at him for a while. "Comfortable, huh? Does that mean Emily is uncomfortable?"

"I..." Eli blinked. "I... I don’t... I mean... Of course not."

"No?"

"Well, maybe a little, sometimes. People treat women differently. But that’s just... I don’t know, sexism, or whatever. If I don’t like getting hit on by random men, it doesn’t make me male. I’d say that makes me stereotypically female, if anything! And nobody is telling me that I can’t like camping or have to paint my claws just because I’m female anymore." He made a face at the memories of old stupidity.

"That’s true enough." Yin’s calmly curious expression turned to a sudden grin. "But is avoiding cat calls really the only reason why you’re currently as flat as a twelve year old boy?"

"Uh..." Eli’s ears went flat.

"Is that comfortable too, whatever it is you’re wearing?"

"Heh." Eli’s ears flicked, and he managed a smile. "It itches like hell, actually. But yes. Very much so."

"What if you could afford the whole package, physical change and all? What if it was free?"

"I... I don’t know." Eli felt his ears flattening back down. Why would Yin dangle something like that in front of him?

"Because it is, you know." Yin’s smile was almost smug, and her tail was waving back and forth only slightly too slowly to be called a wag.

Eli blinked at her. "What?"

"Sex reassignment procedures are covered by the state."

Eli blinked some more. "But... I’m an immigrant. I know I have a basic healthcare plan as a resident..."

"Yep. Which includes this sort of thing."

"Really? But a sex change is so involved. I looked into costs a little back in the Federation. It costs more than I could ever save up. How can that just be free? Wouldn’t it bankrupt the government? I mean, I’m not even a citizen!"

Yin chuckled. "Citizenship is a bit more casual a thing here. There’s no such thing as an Alliance of Sentients native, you know. We all came here from somewhere else at some point. The alliance has barely existed for a hundred years, and none of the planets in it have native sentients, they’re all colonies from Earth. So you have as much inherent right to citizenship here as anybody does. If you want to apply, I’m sure you could be accepted, in fact. As for the cost, transgender people are less than one percent of the population. It’s not as big of an expense as you might think, compared to life-saving medicine. And..." Yin reached out and touched Eli’s hand gently, "I know it can be life-saving for some people."

Eli shook his head instantly. "I’m not going to hurt myself because I can’t be male."

"Maybe not physically, but what about mentally?"

"I... It’s not like that. Emily is fine, really. Being her isn’t hurting me."

"Would Eli be more fine, though?"

"I...don’t know." He thought about how good it had felt just now, to hear some random fox call his name out here in the real world. Maybe Eli would be more fine. His ears splayed out flat, then pricked up again, then went down. Being Eli was comfortable in one sense, but terrifying in another. Could he really live life as a male? What might he be giving up? But what might he be gaining? He remembered, suddenly, the thought he’d once had, that he envied how comfortable Yin was in her own skin. If he really could be Eli all the time, maybe he could someday feel comfortable in his own skin like that. It still seemed ridiculous, though. Eli was a fictional character, Emily was who he really was. How could he be Eli? He might as well be Bilbo Baggins or Leto Atreides if he wanted to be male. It was absurd.

"It looks like you’re having some thoughts on the subject," said Yin, her tail still wagging in amusement.

"You could say that," said Eli, his ears finally coming back up again, a small smile quirking the corner of his mouth.

"Think about it, then. Look into all your options, maybe. Gender and sex aren’t binary, I know that pretty well myself." Yin grinned even more broadly, and Eli laughed and smiled back. "There are things you could do besides just ’be male’ or ’be female.’ But if Eli is comfortable, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be Eli."

"Maybe I’ll try it out for a while," said Eli.

"Well, I’m going to try out ordering a cup of coffee. Be back in a moment."

As Eli sat and watched Yin head to the counter, he felt another rush of that strange, light, free feeling. It felt good. He could be Eli if he wanted to be, there was literally nothing at all stopping him.

---

"Wait, so you’ve been spending all this time in here, looking like that, and you didn’t think of yourself as a guy?" The person asking the question appeared to be a baseline human woman, who sat sprawled on a picnic blanket in the virtual park. She was wearing an elaborate Elizabethan gown, complete with ridiculous neck ruff. Eli sat next to her, dressed in an eighteenth century suit coat in chocolate brown, trimmed heavily with gold embroidery and topped with a matching tricorn hat. He’d "sculpted" it himself, based on several historical suits, and he was quite proud of the way the fabric draped and the sheen of the gold thread. The play-picnicking group was a historical writer’s society, but though he mostly wrote fantasy, and had only just begun to dabble in modeling historical clothing, they’d been delighted to welcome Eli when he’d joined two months ago.

"Now, now, now, that’s not all that absurd, Susanna," chimed in a second speaker. He was a dragon, which as far as Eli knew was something that didn’t exist in reality, though some people called Ssifith "star dragons". But Telixith didn’t look at all like a Ssifith, he looked like something out of an illustration for a particularly odd children’s book, for he was wearing a late Victorian dress, complete with bonnet and parasol. He was also sitting on a cloud that he’d floated just above the picnic blanket.

Many of the inhabitants of virtual reality chose to abide by the usual laws of physics, but Telixith seemed to like flouting them as much as he liked flouting the usual laws of fashion. "We all know I’m male out in the real world, and here too as far as that goes. I only do the dresses because men’s fashion in my favorite writing era is comparatively boring. Well, that and I have fun with the absurdity of a dragon in a dress, whatever the gender." He grinned. "Also, we all know that you’re not actually a baseline, Susana."

Susanna rolled her eyes. "I assume you’ve heard of a little thing called historical accuracy? There weren’t any morphs in the fifteen hundreds. It just seems odd to me, that somebody could spend as much time as possible being a man and never even consider the possibility that they might be transgender."

"It probably is odd," said Eli with a little shrug and a smile. "But I thought of Eli as fictional, as just a character I could play. He was somebody I wrote that I connected with, sure, but he couldn’t possibly be real." Eli sighed. "To be honest, when I lived back on Mars the idea of being Eli was almost literally unthinkable. So I didn’t think it. Morphs weren’t trans, surgery was a fairy tale dream I’d never be able to afford, nothing about being Eli was realistic or possible, so it was just...safer, I guess, to regard him as fictional, as not really me. The really funny thing is that I read a lot about trans things, I did research into what was possible and everything. I just kept it all at a safe mental distance. It was all hypothetical, just satisfying my curiosity." He paused then laughed as he realized. "Just satisfying my curiosity, but I hardly looked into male-to-female surgery when I was doing it, just female-to-male!"

There was a cascade of laughter from the others, and Telixith reached out and patted Eli’s shoulder. "It’s safe to be whoever you really are here, though."

"Indeed!" Eli’s smiled broadened. "It was being here, and seeing that it’s really true that people in the Alliance are defined by how they think, not how they look, that eventually opened me up to the truth. It didn’t take very long, really. I’ve only been here two months! I guess it was a pretty obvious truth."

"So, sorry if we’re all asking personal questions here, but you’re going to get surgery and all that, then?" That question came from Roberto, a tiger sitting with his tail neatly wrapped around him. He was the other person present in male dress, but "male dress" in his case meant a Scottish kilt, complete with sporran.

Eli shrugged. "I still haven’t decided for certain. There are things about being Emily I kinda like, even if they seem few and far between now. I don’t know if I want to give her up entirely. But I certainly want to at least take some steps in that direction. I’m going by Eli when I go out a lot of the time, at least. Nobody has bothered me about it so far."

"That’s just great," said Susana, and there was a murmur of agreement from everyone else.

"It is pretty great, yeah," said Eli, and he found that somewhat to his astonishment, there were tears gathering in his eyes. They were good tears, though, welling up from the immense sense of lightness, freedom, even relief at the realization that he could be himself, he could exist, he had a place out in the real world and not just here in the virtual. That he was Eli, and maybe Emily too, but that Eli wasn’t any less a person, and maybe was even more of one, that maybe it was Emily who had never been real. It was still all a jumble in his mind, and he wasn’t sure how things would fall out in the end, but he said, "I never thought anything like this could be possible. It’s beyond great, it’s amazing that I have the choice to actually be myself, whoever that self may turn out to be."