Here are the 2017 framing sections of the far-future Border Crosser story. The first appears at the beginning, the second in the late middle, and the third at the end:

1.

Now I am not early in the twenty-first century.

Now I am not early.

Now I am not.

Now I am.

Now is Monday morning, ship time, so I am against the Empire.

2.

INTERLUDE: EARLY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

I am early in the twenty-first century, and it is not accomplished. The whole world has gone to shit. I’m aware of my diagnoses, but writing about how I project my dark microcosm onto the macrocosm doesn’t make me feel better. I’m profoundly decentered, and I know it. The Hollywood narratives about people like me which imagine some fixed central point of rational self that some nice person can change are fairytales designed for sale to those nice people, because they don’t help me in the least. No, that’s not quite true—those narratives help me manipulate, gaslight, and obsess the helpful others this way and that, and we all fall down.

Why do I always do this to myself?

I’ve tried writing the world better, and it just won’t give. My future powerful Eris-self has taken my revenge on the universe and the assholes who run my world, and I don’t feel any better, because the assholes are still here in the real, and even if they go someday, I can’t wait that long.

Even without talking to the shrinks, I know what they’ll say about where this has to go next. I hate them because they’re right. I’ve gone out to the stars; now, I have to go into my bowels and dig out some old stupid pain to show them. It doesn’t help create anything; it just hurts. But I’m going to do it to keep my hands and mind busy, because the other things I might do still scare me.

I have to go back to the place from which no one rescues me.

3.

In the year 2017, a human being puts down a razor blade or pills or a gun or some other conventional instrument of self-harm and instead picks up a pen. The person hesitates, because this is part of their therapy, and they’d much rather hurt themself than do what the shrinks told them. Most of all, they don’t want to be here and now. So they write, “I am not early in the twenty-first century.”

They write while the world spirals downward, and everyone they know plummets with it. But even a constellation of profoundly decentered selves can, in words, make rooms of their own for the fractured bits, build many mansions in heaven, hell, and earth.

By the end, they decide that this story may hurt just enough to do the trick.