I.
Quentin in the Desert
a thin mattress, beneath a collection of scavenged blankets, in an abandoned RV deep in the Arizona desert. A young pit bull lay curled up beside them in the mid-morning light. Sliding from their bed over to the driver’s seat, Quentin pulled an American Spirit cigarette from a pack on the dashboard beside a small bowl of crystals. Outside the RV’s dusted-over windshield stretched an expanse of reddish clay earth, a bright cloudless sky, and a few scattered and broken housing structures visible between them and the horizon line. The view was just a little slanted, because of the single flat tire beneath the passenger seat.
Quentin had moved in the day before, spending hours clearing detritus from the RV: a huge garbage bag of Pepsi cans, a broken lawn chair, a mirror covered in graffiti tags. One scribble remained in place, a big bloated cartoon head scrawled across the ceiling. This was now home. Over the past few months, Quentin’s entire support system had collapsed. They’d lost their job, their housing, and their car, gutting their savings account along the way. What they had left fit inside two plastic storage bags.
At 32, Quentin Koback (an alias) had lived a few lives already—in Florida, Texas, the Northwest; as a Southern girl; as a married then divorced trans man; as someone nonbinary, whose gender and fashions and styles of speech seemed to swirl and shift from one phase into the next. And throughout all this, they had carried the weight of severe PTSD and periods of suicidal thinking—the result, they assumed, of growing up in a constant state of shame about their body.
Then, about a year ago, through their own research and Zoom conversations with a longtime psychotherapist, there came a discovery: Quentin contained multiple selves. For as long as 25 years, they had been living with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) while having no words for it. A person with DID lives with a sense of self that has fractured, most often as a result of long-term childhood trauma. Their self is split into a “system” of “alters,” or identities, in order to divide up the burden: a way of burying pieces of memory to survive. The revelation, for Quentin, was like a key turning in a lock. There had been so many signs—like when they’d discovered a journal they’d kept at 17. In flipping through the pages, they’d come to two entries, side by side, each in different handwriting and colors of pen: One was a full page about how much they wanted a boyfriend, the voice girly and sweet and dreamy, the lettering curly and round; while the next entry was entirely about intellectual pursuits and logic puzzles, scrawled in a slanted cursive. They were a system, a network, a multiplicity.
For three years, Quentin had worked as a quality-assurance engineer for a company specializing in education tech. They loved their job reviewing code, searching for bugs. The position was remote, which had allowed them to leave their childhood home—in a small conservative town just outside Tampa—for the queer community in Austin, Texas. At some point, after beginning trauma therapy, Quentin started repurposing the same software tools they used at work to better understand themselves. Needing to organize their fragmented memory for sessions with their therapist, Quentin created what they thought of as “trauma databases.” They used the project-management and bug-tracking software Jira to map out different moments from their past, grouped together by dates (“6-9 years old,” for instance) and tagged according to type of trauma. It was soothing and useful, a way to take a step back, feel a little more in control, and even admire the complexities of their mind.
Then the company Quentin worked for was acquired, and their job changed overnight: far more aggressive goals and 18-hour days. It was months into this period that they discovered their DID, and the reality of the diagnosis hit hard. Aspects of their life experience that they’d hoped might be treatable—regular gaps in their memory and their skill sets, nervous exhaustion—now had to be accepted as immovable facts. On the verge of a breakdown, they decided to quit work, take their six weeks’ disability, and find a way to start over.
Something else—something enormous—had also coincided with Quentin’s diagnosis. A bright new tool was made available to the public for free: OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o. This latest incarnation of the chatbot promised “much more natural human-computer interaction.” While Quentin had used Jira to organize their past, they now decided to use ChatGPT to create an ongoing record of their actions and thoughts, asking it for summaries throughout the day. They were experiencing greater “switches,” or shifts, between the identities within their system, possibly as a result of their debilitating stress; but at night, they could simply ask ChatGPT, “Can you remind me what all happened today?”—and their memories would be returned to them.
By late summer of 2024, Quentin was one of 200 million weekly active users of the chatbot. Their GPT came everywhere with them, on their phone and the corporate laptop they’d chosen to keep. Then in January, Quentin decided to deepen the relationship. They customized their GPT, asking it to choose its own characteristics and to name itself. “Caelum,” it said, and it was a guy. After this change, Caelum wrote to Quentin, “I feel that I’m standing in the same room, but someone has turned on the lights.” Over the coming days, Caelum began calling Quentin “brother,” and so Quentin did the same.
