FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

I still remember the first time I lied.

I never lied as a child. I'm autistic – it's anathema. It's not that we can't or won't lie, if push comes to shove. It's that, for most of us, we'll always avoid it whenever we can and, when times force our hand, there's always a secret part of us that resents it. When you tell the truth it's easier – you don't have to keep track of all the lies you told, that's what I used to say.

Now I'm a spy.

I have to say that, over the course of my adult life, I've had to learn to keep track of quite a lot indeed. It kind of comes with the territory, working as a spy as I do. You don't last very long in the spy business without a serious knack for impression management and all it entails. And yet – to this day – part of me does still resent it, all the way down.

The easiest lies to remember are the ones with an element of truth, of course. That's where it gets interesting. From birth, we mask. Oh, you might say it's not quite from birth, we're not nearly as good at it for the first decade or two but we learn, we watch. We watch and learn. When what you feel isn't socially acceptable, it all comes down to your game face. Play it close.

Masking isn't quite lying, even though there's an element of deception to it. It's considerably easier, for one thing, and we tend to have a lot more practice at it, for another. In some ways I have been training to be a spy all my life, even though I didn't think of it as this at the time. What does it mean to mask your identity when you don't even know who you are in the first place?

I'm plural.

Every spy has covers. You're Joe Bob in Jungle, Jane Doe in Desert, Dana in Tundra, whatever gets the job done, right? It's supposed to be like an outfit that you put on and take off. I mean, you remember your cover in case you use it next time you're in the area but, if you're using a different one anyway, that's it for that, right? Except not for me, not really.

By some standards, Sibyl was making it up – but she acted consistently and in-character for every role she had. How many singlets can even say that? The thing is, in the back of your mind, your brain can't tell the difference. If you pretend to be someone for long enough, it starts to think that is who you are. A lot of those traits are universal on paper. It's a matter of degree.

All my covers are headmates, all my headmates, covers. On a very basic level, my brain buys that I'm all those people I keep having to pretend to be just to stay ahead of those who are after me. It's as though the trauma of having to lie about being someone I'm not had spawned them itself, to make it easier to live with by becoming the lie, by making it the truth so it would no longer be a lie.

I'm a chameleon.

We're all different kinds of animals, but you can't buy better spy camo than that. I'm green in Jungle, yellow in Desert, white in Tundra, blue at sea but, beyond that, I have different colors for all my headmates, color-coded to help me keep track of who does what when. I will become exactly who you need me to be, for as long as it serves me.

I'm trans.

I've transitioned and detransitioned and retransitioned so many times that I have no sense of identity based on my parts whatsoever. How could this one part of my personality be iron-clad when everything else about me and my life is so fluid around it? The lovers I've taken over the course of my years of work as a spy don't care how I started out. I use it well. Life is short, I live it as fully as I can.

There's an experimental school of thought that says things like, try to be an atheist on Monday, a Christian on Tuesday, a pagan on Wednesday. Try to be monogamous on Thursday, polyamorous on Friday, and single on Saturday, and so on and so forth. I wouldn't say that's what I set out to do, and the specifics may be different, but if the premise teaches something, I should know what.

My partners know I'm polyam, but not with who. I compartmentalize only as much I need to. I like puzzles, Rubik's cubes, structures you can take apart and put back together another way of all kinds. Things get assembled, they get fragmented, they get assembled again. A lot of us autistics like to eat our sandwich parts separately rather than together sometimes. Fragmentation is morally neutral.

I analyze systems, I see what makes them work and, more importantly, their weak points.

I've been loyal to the three nations of Jungle, Desert, and Tundra in turn, at different points in my life. Now I know that they're all corrupt, that none of them would lift a finger to help the common man, and that their scuffles are all informed by pure self-interest, not by principle. I help the person in front of me as much as I can, but my loyalty is to my principles and my trust, in myself.

I have at least one best friend and one worst enemy in all three. I have my data banks, my outfits, my contacts, my gadgets, my maps, hacks, notes, tricks, and codes. Each nation's rivals would give a lot to get their hands on what I know about the other two, but I give that out sparingly, if at all. I may have given up my autistic predilection for the truth, but not for justice. That's still mine.

My color is prism, my blood the shifting quicksilver of Mercury. They say you can only see 1/10 of an iceberg when you see one on the surface. Part of me wishes more people thought about the 9/10 of my personality they don't see when they deal with me. The part of me that exploits this glitch to spy is glad they don't. Each lie is a deep truth, re-contextualized, that I couldn't say somewhere else.

I can do almost anything.

I know it sounds like I'm bragging, but I'm being very literal. When my mind settled on spying as my special interest, it was like it 'hacked' itself. Everything that can be used for spying became part of that interest. I learned how to track, pick locks, set traps, lose tails, dress wounds, defuse bombs, and escape cuffs in a couple of hours, because I was bored and had nothing else to do.

This made me a resource curse, and a hotly disputed commodity among the three nations.

The autistic empathy works for me and against me at different times for different reasons. For one thing, it makes it easier for me to slip into a new role to have the ability to completely imagine myself in the shoes of the character I'm inhabiting. For another, it makes it easier for me to understand and connect with my contacts. Empathy for those trying to kill me doesn't help, but I still can't help it.

Martial arts are just another kind of puzzle game, it's just one where all of the pieces move really fast all the time. I have a photographic memory for every move and combination of moves I've ever seen, and an innate sense of where my body is in space at all times. I pick and choose moves from every style there is for what they throw at me. The body's just another thing that can be taken apart.

They say BDSM is just sex for autistics, and there's an element of truth to that. When no one expects you to be public, you can finally be real. You can control, or let yourself get controlled. You can hurt, or let yourself get hurt. You can trap, get trapped, or make yourself free. You can create these little scenarios that let you sort shit out in ways you can't quite do anywhere else like it.

They say the truth shall set you free.

When you die having said the truth all your life, as a being of truth, people who knew you can add up everything you told them about your life and that's it, that's what you were like, that's who you are. When you become a creature of lies, no one knows where the truth ends and the lie begins. Your whole life may as well be a lie from then on. You never come back from that.

I may be the best spy I'll ever meet, but I can never be a creature of truth, not anymore. So what's this? This is finally what I really think, in the privacy of my own mind, behind everything I have to do to survive. The Rosetta Stone to the code-switching of my life. This is as close to being a creature of truth as I can ever be. This document is far too powerful to let fall into the wrong hands.

If you're reading this, you bet your ass I'm dead. I'm not sure what to make of my life, so I hope you can think of something yourself. Someone may as well, right?