“Kristoff?” Lucas’s tentative voice is muffled by the door. There are others, but I don’t make out what they’re saying. I don’t want to make it out. I know what it is, and it just makes this worse.
The voices get soft enough I barely make them out, then there’s a scuffle and when he speaks again, I have the impression Lucas is alone. “Kristoff, I’m coming in.” I get more of an impression the door opens than anything else. Then he approaches.
I keep my head resting on my arms, over my raised knees. I don’t want to look at him. This perfect father. I don’t even want to think of him like that.
“Kristoff, what’s wrong?” His voice lowers as he speaks, then it’s almost level with me.
I shake my head.
Just end this already. Stop torturing me with what I’m going to lose and wake me up!
“Kristoff, talk to me, please. I want to help, but I don’t know—”
“You can’t help! You can’t fucking do anything but make this worse!”
“Kristoff, I’m not going to do anything like that. I love you and—”
“Stop!” my ears are folded back, my hands over them, trying to block out his words.
“Kristoff.” The imploring tone nearly makes me break. “I can’t help if you don’t tell me—”
“You can’t help!” His face is a blur through my tears. “You’re just making it worse! Don’t you get how much it hurts to know I’m going to lose all of this?” I bury my face back in my arms.
“You’re not going to lose us. I promise. I will never let anything happen to you again, ever.”
“I just want to wake up.” My sobs cause the words to hitch. “Stop torturing me with this.”
“Well,” a new voice says, “that explains a few things.”
I have to wipe my eyes a few times to make him out enough to recognize him, and as soon as I stop, Uncle’s just another blurry figure next to Lucas. Unlike him, he’s dressed.
“What are you talking about?” Lucas asks, borderline angry.
“He’s been taking all of this in surprisingly well, considering how different it all is.”
“Because he’s always known who he was,” Lucas replies. “You’ve seen what he was interested in.”
“Yes, and without more information, that worked as an explanation. But Eric’s been monitoring his emotional stated, and other than the occasional spike of anxiety, he’s been unexpectedly stable. The facts he doesn’t believe any of this is real works much better as an explanation than him having subconsciously prepared himself.”
“How can he think any of this is a dream?”
“You’d be in a better position to answer that. I’ve accessed all the research about it, but I don’t have firsthand experience with dreaming.”
“Haven’t you asked David?”
“We’ve agreed that his experience with dreams doesn’t match the norm. Possibly the result of how he came to be.”
Listening to them is distracting enough I’ve stopped crying.
“What am I supposed to do, then?” Lucas asks, sounding lost.
“I think you need to tell him everything.”
“He isn’t ready, Uncle. We all agreed that he had to learn how to use his—”
“And we were wrong. We reached that conclusion under a false set of data. I think that until he understands, it would only make the situation worse.”
Lucas looks at me. “Kristoff, can you come with me? It’ll be better if we’re seated comfortably for this.”
I want to tell him that isn’t my name, but the hope in his eyes… makes me want this to be true so fucking badly I can’t. I nod and get to my feet.
“I let the others know you can Kristoff need to talk about the situation,” Uncle says. “You have the center to yourself. I’m adjusting the access, so you’ll also be able to move on to the next part here, if you think he’s ready.”
“The plan was to do that within a fully shielded room inside Corporate.”
Uncle chuckles. “And how many of the plans survived encounter with your son?”
Lucas smiles, and I can’t get myself to tell him that isn’t me. I can’t work up the energy to care anymore. Somewhere, there’s a timer to the end of all this, and I just want it to reach zero.
I follow him, although he looks over his shoulder a few times as if he’s afraid I’ll bolt. Or that Uncle, behind me, isn’t going to grab me if I do. The room is one door over, office sized with a table and a chair on each side. On it are two cups of steaming coffee. Lucas sits on one side, I take the other. Uncle sits next to him, and for a moment I don’t understand how I missed that there was a second chair. Then I shake my head. 
There wasn’t. It’s a dream. 
Lucas places both hands around his cups, but doesn’t drink. I don’t bother acknowledging mine.
“Alright.” He lets out a breath. “This is going to sound impossible.”
I snort. Sure, more impossible.
“When you and your brothers were born, it was the most wonderful day of my life. Then, six months later, I experienced the most terrifying one, when you, Kirk, and Kurtis were stolen from me.”
I stare, surprised at how in depth this is. I have to actively remind myself it isn’t real. It’s just a story within a story my mind is telling me for some sick reason.
“We responded immediately, but they were surprisingly organized. We caught the people who had Kirk and Kurtis. Tuck stopped one of them without prejudice. But dealing with those two, let the last one, the one carrying you, get further into the complex. The unit reached his location in time to watch him throw himself into…something and you both vanish.”
“Who did it?” I ask before I can remind myself none of this is real.
“The people who kidnapped you and your brothers,” Uncle says, “were affiliated with an Independent terrorist group that’s been causing us problems for decades. But the technology within the complex, and the fact the man who had you knew how to operate it, implies they were backed by someone else.”
“Who?” I curse the dream for making this so interesting. Maybe the best way to get through it is to accept it as some sort of VR movie. The ultimate in visual novels.
“That’s complicated,” Lucas says, while Uncle frowns. “But we took everything there to figure out what happened.”
“Your father was irrationally certain you weren’t dead.”
“I was right,” Lucas states. “And I wasn’t going to let anyone who thought otherwise slack off. It took a year to get some of the machine working.”
“The tech is beyond what even our theories expected to be possible,” Uncle adds. “Certainly beyond what should actually exist. It’s part of what truly complicates who might be involved.”
“Once it was working, it showed something I couldn’t understand. This furless thing in the process of having his diapers changed. All it let me do was watch. And little I saw made sense. No one had any fur to speak of. And, for some reason, the image only ever centered on that baby. It would be months before they workout how to zoom out, change the orientation, but they never managed to get it to move from…you. Although it would be two more years before the scientist understood enough of the technology to work that out.”
“An alternate dimension?” I venture. Uncle is surprised. Lucas smiles proudly. “Are you saying that in going there, it made me human, and I returned to this when I was brought back?” How many furry writers used that idea?
“No,” Uncle says.
“It’s much more complicated, and that played a part in why it took so long to bring you home. The theory that has the most weight based on what we know is that the reason you survived the transition is that you were young enough for your genetic code to be malleable. It probably wasn’t instantaneous, but you shed your fur, your muzzle went away.”
“Your abductor would have died from the same process,” Uncle says. “The dimensional window doesn’t let us move around in time, so we can’t know for certain, but I’m confident that if he had survived, the window wouldn’t have been locked in you alone. There would be a way to shift between both of you, or the lack of a singular center might have untethered it entirely and let us view whatever we wanted.”
“What matters was that I could watch you. I agonized over not being able to reach you, to take you away from the suffering you endured because of what you are.”
“Because I’m gay?” that’s definitely been a thing. I was looked at like I was strange by some of the foster parents well before I knew that.
Lucas shakes his head. “In time, we were about to zoom out far enough until we could see the entire city, and while we couldn’t get the window to zoom on another location, with the technology we have, we were able to do that. Because we can’t move it in time, I was never able to confirm it, but I picked up plenty of stories about you not being entirely human. About you being a changeling. Probably from the process of you adapting to that world.”
“What happened then?”
They exchange a worried look.
“Then I agonized as I watched the way those people treated you.” He reaches across the table, and I pull my hand away before I can think better if it. I think I about it, and I don’t put it back. It’s going to hurt enough already.
“Then we workout how to turn the window into a door,” Uncle says.
“I wanted to reach in and get you immediately.”
“He nearly did, too.”
“What did you expect me to do?” Lucas snapped. “He was right there, suffering, and the lot of you wouldn’t get out of the way.”
“How about we spare him a repeat of that argument, Lucas? Eventually, we worked out enough of the details to get you here safely. And you woke up yesterday morning.”
I look from Lucas to Uncle. “I want to believe you.”
“It’s real, Kristoff. I’m real,” Lucas insists.
“You think you’re real, because you’re just a character in the dream. You can’t know any different.”
“And can you?” Uncle asks, and I frown at him. “Know that you’re in a dream?”
“It’s never happened before, but I know it’s a thing. I’ve read about it online. It’s called lucid dreaming.”
Uncle stares at me for a few seconds. “Can’t they control the dream? Isn’t that one of the traits that define lucid dreaming? Have you been able to?”
I shake my head. “But it doesn’t mean anything. My subconscious is just stubborn.”
“Kristoff,” Lucas says. “You’re justifying. If it works one way it—”
“Lucas, please let me handle this.”
He isn’t happy about it, but Lucas nods.
“Kristoff. What are the ways by which a dreamer can tell they are dreaming?”
I frown. How does he expect me to—the memory of the video is surprisingly clear. “Clocks might run backwards. Text is going to be mangled. The way the youtuber described it was that it was like reality had been built by an AI.”
“You have—”
Uncle silences Lucas with a hand. “So, had there been any of that?”
I smirk. “You don’t seem to have clocks, or written text that I saw.”
“That leaves misshapen visuals.” He raises his hand. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three.”
“And are they misshapen in any way?” he gives me a toothy smile. “How about my teeth? I believe generative artificial image generation couldn’t manage to properly make hands and teeth. So your dream should be like that, right? How disjointed has it been?”
“Stop.” I rub my temple. “You’re just saying what the dream—”
“No, Kristoff. This is me, the real me. I’m not a dream. I understand that this is scary and that—”
“It isn’t.” I look at Uncle. “You don’t get it. This is perfect. It’s exactly what I’ve wanted my entire life. A father who loves me so much he reached across dimension to save me. A family who has no problem being sexual with me and themselves. This is a dream come true. So there’s no way it can be real.” I look away, and when I speak again, my voice is barely above a whisper. “I’m not that lucky.”
“Ow!” I glare at Lucas as he pulls his hand away from pinching my arm hard. “What was that for?”
“You don’t feel pain in dreams,” Uncle says.
“I don’t know, okay. Maybe I do in mine and just don’t remember when I wake up.”
Uncle runs a hand over his face and his muzzle. It looks odd and so natural at the same time. “Okay. I get that the idea of losing all this is scary.” I snort. There’s an understatement. “But what are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re here. I know you are here for a very long time, but there is literally no way I can convince you of that. And there are things you’re going to see and be able to do that’s going to reinforce your belief this is a dream.”
“You mean like flying?”
“With the air of technology, yes. It is what Gravity and other attractions like it are about. Giving people a chance to experience something we aren’t designed to be able to do. And that was a very crude application of the technology. We are centuries ahead of where you grew up, Kristoff. We have populated the solar system. As we speak, here are six generational ships in transit for different stars, where they will build their own civilization once they get there, and one day, once we crack how to side step relativity, we will go visit them and see what they made of it. It might happen within your lifetime. I understand how unreal all of that sounds, but it is real.”
“But you can’t convince me of that,” I say, running through the implications. I see the pain on Lucas—my Dad’s face. How badly he wants me to be in his family; how scared he is I’ll reject all of this. Reject him. “I have to decide to accept it.”
“You don’t have to,” Uncle says in a tone that unnerves me. “If we were those kinds of people, we have the technology to force you to accept it. We can retype your personality.”
“Then why didn’t you? Wouldn’t it have made all this easier?”
“We’re not those kinds of people, Kristoff,” He answers in a serious tone. “Even as a penalty for crimes, it’s the last resort. It’s too easy to abuse. Even Vanguard finally saw the wisdom of adding so many safeguards before it was allowed, eventually. Doing that means you wouldn’t be you. And you are who we want. And yes, that means the you who is having trouble accepting all this.”
“I wouldn’t want whoever that person turned out to be, Kristoff,” my Dad says. “He wouldn’t be my son.” He places a hand on mine, and I don’t even think of pulling it away. “You are my son. You’re the only one I want, even if that means you’ll never accept I’m real.”
“Okay.” I put my other hand on top of his and let out a shaking breath. “This is real. And if, one day, I wake up from it, I’ll cherish everything that happened with all my heart.”