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Gateway Operations: How My System Works

Written by Max on March 30, 2024.

I haven't seen many personal essays or in-depth posts by plurals that explain how their individual systems work and what their experiences are like, so I’m taking the alterhuman community mindset of Writing About My Personal Experiences as the host of a gateway system, just to archive my experiences in pen, since my memory isn't at all infallible.

Headmates and Visitors

First off, defining “gateway system.” I'm using the term to mean that the people in my system exist in an alternate universe - their version of a slightly futuristic Detroit, Michigan, in our case - and they walked into my brain as completely separate people from me.

My headmates are the people who I consider my brain roommates, the people who choose to live together with me in our daily life. So far this is a short list, just Jude and Gavin, because they like being here and I like having them around.

I've recently found that other people from their world can chime in from time to time - and they aren’t headmates, in my opinion, so much as visitors. They like talking to my headmates, and sometimes even to me, but they don’t want to live with me and just come and go as they please, usually just popping in when called (if they're free). So far, they’ve all been people who Jude and Gavin personally know, and people I know from their world and feel interested in. My working explanation for who can visit the system is that they’re all people in Detroit who we’re invested in, and if we want to talk to them enough, they can talk to us. Why? Who knows! What matters is that we can have a chat or two over lunch.

As the host, listening to my headmates talking to other people in their world really does remind me of listening in on a phone call - I’m not usually getting visuals from the other person, just their voice internalized in my mind. As far as I can tell, that's also how the whole thing gets filtered in-universe - for example, Gavin mentally called a friend from Detroit a couple nights ago, for the sake of trying to do so without expecting anything, and when she actually answered, it did solidify into a phone call, or at least she was talking into the phone on her end of the line.

The Back (and headspace, or lack thereof)

When I think about my headmates in the back, they’re in their apartment - which has mostly been Gavin’s apartment, historically, but Jude’s moved in. The impression I get in my mind’s eye when I’m visualizing the back is like that of a moving camera, seeing footage from a recording without being in the space myself. It’s very much their actual apartment, though - for instance, Gavin owns three cats, and if I focus on them, I can tell what they’re getting up to. As I’m writing this, I’m checking on the cats, and I get the impression that Lucy is taking a nap on one arm of the couch.

When Jude or Gavin check into the back, they tend to get impressions from their own points of view. For example, when Jude is laying on the couch and looking at Gavin in the kitchen, they’re using their own eyes for that, while if I’m the one watching him, I’m looking from a different viewpoint. It’s like my internal footage of them is being filmed on a security camera or using film shooting techniques, while they're just using their eyes like normal people.

This visualization is always very hazy and unfocused until I actually focus on what's going on, and then it clears up into a solid concept. It's a similar story for figuring out noemata or exomemory recall - from what I can tell, it all runs on a sort of Schrodinger's cat principle, where all the possibilities for what's happening are superimposed on one another until I'm actively thinking about it, and then it settles upon a single configuration and doesn't change again. For example, what the cats are doing. Jack is currently sitting on the windowsill, looking at the birds outside.

I used to think my internal camera was fixed to Gavin’s apartment, but since I've been able to look at other places, I think it's more likely that my headmates and visitors tend to talk to me when they're not busy, which tends to mean they're at home or otherwise unoccupied. A couple visitors were going on a walk in the park while talking to me, which was really quite nice. I've also found my point of view camera spinning over to watch them in their house, and that's quite different from Jude and Gavin’s place.

And because the back is their actual world instead of a mindscape that I made up, I don't actually exist in it. I can't project myself into my headmates’ apartment - I’m the host, so I live in this world, and I reside in my brain and body as thought patterns and self-perception. When I give up control of the front, I don't enter any specific headspace. If I'm co-conscious, I just exist as a disembodied voice, vaguely attached to my self-image and body, until I return to the front again. (It's not as disorienting as it sounds, I promise.)

Fronting and Co-Fronting

When my headmates are fronting, it's not like they blip back and forth between being in my world controlling my body, and being in their world controlling their bodies. They're actually in both places at once? I like to think of it like quantum superpositions, much like the memory and camera focus - if Jude is fronting and wants to hug Gavin back in their own bodies, they can do that! At the same time, they're still up here in my body. They can only fully focus on one or the other, though, so that's something that tends to happen more when I'm in co-front and can take over fronting.

Something that does happen for us, and happens so naturally that we didn't realize that other systems might not be able to do it, is partial possession. It's a new term for me, but it’s well-established in the tulpamancy community - basically, putting it into plural terminology, it's when one headmate takes control of some part of their shared body while co-fronting with someone else.

We do this voluntarily and semi-automatically, for a variety of reasons. When I’m suffering from sensory overload and don't want to eat despite being hungry, someone else might decide to take over eating while I keep using the spoon. If Jude wants to hold hands in co-front, they can take one hand and Gavin can have the other, and they can hold hands like that. If Gavin wants to walk while I listen to a podcast, he gets the legs and I keep the audio processing. It's a good thing for all of us!

Usually, when fronting, I can call someone's name to the back and get a response - this is how I know the difference between tuning in and out of headmate awareness throughout the day, where I can check in and get an immediate response if they're awake, and them walking out of the system for a time. When they leave, I call out and get no response whatsoever.

This gets distressing when someone other than myself gets stuck in the front, which happens when we're overloaded with stress, because that also makes it incredibly difficult or impossible to get responses from me or anyone else in the back, so it feels like the person in front is completely alone in there. For the record, this has always been a stress-induced communication breakdown for us, and we do always regain contact after calming down.

And I've found that our visitors also co-front sometimes, I think because they're used to having bodies and don't like being in the void in the way that we get when we aren't fronting or focusing on the back. (They don't usually care for co-fronting either, which is part of why they aren't headmates - for example, Connor hates eating.)

I don't have a conclusion for this essay, really - it's a collection of observations, and might change or expand in the future. Who knows! It's nice to have it jotted down in one place, though.