Tobble

Being taken for somebody's animal is tradecraft only when you chose it, and Tobble never did.

Tobble is a member of Tissadelle Shepherd's plural system: a distinct person sharing the system's one body, on the terms Concord personhood standards have recognised for well over a century. He is a ginger cat and uses he/him. That is not a costume, a coping image, or a figure Shepherd invented to make something easier: he is a nonhuman member, a person whose own identity is simply not the species of the body he shares. Shepherd's page carries the system as a whole. This page carries what the record holds of him, all of it on the system's own account, which is the only authority there has ever been on the subject.

On the record

For most of Shepherd's service Tobble was in no file the Corps held. The plural registration she filed after the Starwarden posting of 2829 UCSD names him (Not Asked (S05E00C01)), and says that the system has more members than the form has boxes for, and nothing further. Because that is what I am is on the record as his answer to why a cat.

The mistake made about him is institutional. The Smart Pet programme has trained a whole service to hear cat and think animal, and the assumption holds until it is applied to a person. Shepherd corrects it once and does not raise it again, and she does not let it pass in front of him.

At the front

He fronts when the work is with cats and comparable animals, because he is better at it, and the system uses whoever is better at the thing in front of it. At work he can be professionally quiet for a whole day and then say what he made of it. He has opinions, and usually shares them with her; about Karla Wender, at least once, he kept them to himself.

The deeper layer

The inner world the system shares is structured like a high-fantasy role-playing game. Tobble's own part of it sits deeper than the questing layer and runs on a different discipline: kept records, checked procedure, arithmetic done twice because once is an opinion. Deeper describes structure, not standing. There is no hierarchy in it, and neither architecture is the truer one.

He and Shepherd speak inward, privately, and no one else in the room hears it. It was not a thing she did on duty. At Dock Seven she did.

Dock Seven

At Dock Seven, in Mid-Autumn 2831 UCSD, Shepherd was fronting and carrying everything, and Tobble was carrying nothing. When the load came apart he was what was left with structure to spend, and he spent it, with the lost ship's own records for a scaffold (What Came Off the Ship (S05E02C03)). What went in was some of her and not her, on his account, and he has never once called it a rescue. What followed is told from Season 6 on (First Light, Off the Record (S06E01C01)).

The Fellowship of Light's house on the Boyne reads it as a crew of two in one vessel (Two in the One Currach). That reading belongs to the house, and the record files it as theirs.

What the record does not hold

The record holds no account of when he came, and has not been asked for one. It holds no photograph of him, and never will: a member of a system has no body of his own for a camera to take. An impression has been painted from the system's description, as one was for Asteria, and the record files it as an impression and not a likeness, which is the only kind of picture he can have.

See also: Tissadelle Shepherd · Plural Minds · Sen