"Star Fading" part 2

[butterflydreaming]

She ordered a hobo skillet, soysage instead of the ham, which was vat meat but still animal enough that Zoe wouldn't eat it, even though she knew of vegans who considered massively grown muscle tissue to be acceptable. As she had not been able to make her own eating choices until she left home, she knew the taste of real animal meat as well as vat meat, and found the vat meat somehow worse. Instead of tasting like misery and death, it had tasted like nothing, a thing without a soul at all. So Zoe stuck to vegetables and things made out of vegetables. They had a zen-like peace to them.

After breakfast, she had errands to run, but they didn't take much time. There was little else to do with the time before heading in to the center. Three-dees and other immersion entertainment were on the discouraged list, things she shouldn't do before a dream session. She went to a park instead. The day was sunny, and there was a short line to get through at the entrance before she could wave her credit card for the entrance fee. She picked an available space on a low knoll and settled down on the sweet ground cover to watch the sky. It was a good day for cloud shapes. Many other citizens were taking in the view; Zoe joined them, quietly by herself, until her belt tweeted that her two hours were nearly up. She gave her space to a little girl and her mother. The mother directed her child to "say thank you to the nice man," but the child hid shyly behind the tails of her mother's long UV coat.

After almost ten years of awareness that her outside didn't match her inside, it still stung to be seen as male. Zoe had been raised as a boy. There were small differences in the rearing of boys or girls, but when Zoe was herself small, they felt enormous. She knew something was wrong, as a child, but she didn't know what the wrong thing was. In adolescence she rebelled against the conventions perpetuated by her parents and joined the AyEm, the androgyne movement, long enough to realize that she didn't fit in there, either. Still, they helped her. She met people who understood that sex and gender were not the same thing. For Zoe, the nameless wrong thing had always been that hers were mismatched.

She trotted up the pathway to the dream collection center, an adobe colored edifice with no sign to indicate its use. The irregular angles of its shape lifted her spirit; the building brought to mind a crudely hewn arrow, pointing into the hidden night where the dream recipients sped through space.