The helmet is a piece of modern art. It is the most beautiful thing on his body because it is the most essential thing on his body. It is jet black, but reflective enough that it has brown highlights that become bronze where the light can escape. The locals have described it in their terms many times—a dinosaur’s skull. A knight’s helm. An ancient headdress of feathers, only the feathers are fuel rods that occasionally snap open and depressurize. The fuel rods release lazy clouds of green haze that the locals resent, even though it is harmless. Better than harmless.

Once a burglar broke into his apartment and tried to steal it.

The burglar was surprised to find him sleeping in it.

He hopes the burglar was someone no one would miss.

Besides that, it’s just rags for 6 < i. A long, torn shawl covering his body like a tarp draped over a decommissioned streetcar. He hides his form because the locals are slow in unlearning their disgust. Far too large, his hunchback a mark of virility and youth on his homeworld, a sign of decrepitude on this one. He hides his elephantine feet—a word 6 < i had to look up after passing a group of children playing in a broken fire hydrant last week on the way to the grocery store. The children had screamed and called him many things besides “elephant,” scattering in his wake—but not too far so they could watch him lumber by at a distance.

6 < i hides his body just as he hides his name. His birth name—a deeply religious name on his world—was long and clunky in the mouths of his neighbors. They do not take numbers in their names on this world. Numbers are seen as cold and impersonal. He needed a working name, so 6 < i had chosen a name at random from a database. It had come up with “Keo.”

A name without numbers felt naked.

He thinks of his brood—his millions of offspring in the swamps of his homeworld—and how their strings of names were the warmest thoughts he had—the only poetry he had ever spoken or found worth memorizing.

Their names warm his heart as he leaves his apartment to go buy a bag of milk.

#

“Hey, Keo!” Sanis, the clerk, greets him.

His helmet translates what his mandibles cannot say, with some delay, and plays it out of a crackling speaker visible only as a light pocking on the front of his helmet.

“GOOD MORNING. SANIS. HOW ARE YOU TODAY.”

“Just fine, Keo. The usual?”

6 < i nods, a gesture he finds amusing as an affirmation. On his homeworld the motion means something completely different.

Sanis collects a bag of milk.

“I’d ask if you want it in a bag, but it’s already in a bag, right?”

Sanis had been instrumental in acclimating him to what passes for good humor on this world.

“HA HA. HA HA.” He replies, wiggling his fingers.

6 < i pays in raw gold, which he knows pleases Sanis immensely. Sanis slides the bag through the compartment from behind the bullet and lasproof glass.

“Hey, Keo, we’re friends right?”

“I. HOPE SO.” He wiggles his fingers some more.

Sanis chuckles.

“Well, I just wanted to ask, what’s the helmet for anyway? Can you not breathe our air? I have a neighbor like that, but he’s not like you. He’s from someplace else.”

6 < i stops wiggling his fingers and wonders how he can put this into terms Sanis would understand.

“NOT FOR BREATHING. GOD IS GOOD. GOD LETS ME KEEP. THE MEMORIES. I SLEEP IN MEMORY AND. GOD CALLS IT A DREAM.”

Sanis thinks about it. Then Sanis stops thinking about it.

“What does that even mean?”

6 < i raises his hand and spreads his fingers as wide as they go in a farewell.

“YOU ARE EXPLAINED. GOODBYE. SANIS.”

He starts walking, leaving puffs of gas in his wake.

“Wait! Keo! What if I tried on one of those helmets? What would it do to someone like me?”

6 < i stops in the doorway, rounds slowly to face Sanis, feet thumping on the linoleum, fuel rods hissing, gas collecting around his head in a ring of green fog.

“YOU WOULD REMEMBER. EVERYTHING. YOU. WOULD DREAM.”

 He leaves Sanis curious and wanting, stuck behind glass like a pinned specimen.

#

The first of 6 < i’s kind to visit this world arrived with no helmet at all.

He shudders at the thought.

The pioneer had taken a thirty-minute shuttle from the landing field with several hundred other visitors, and by the time he was dropped at customs, he had forgotten who, where, and what he was.

They could not parse the language that came pouring from his mandibles—a clicking, numeric language entirely dependent on careful listening and counting. It took a year of the pioneer waiting in a refugee camp before they realized what they needed was a mathematician, not a linguist.

6 < i lurches into an alley where he can feed. It is a loud, clumsy procedure that disturbs the locals—a mechanical proboscis issuing from the helmet, puncturing the bag of milk, then draining it until it is a wrinkled, desiccated sack.

In the evening, he would meet with the smuggler delivering the first shipment of helmets. The smuggler was eager to be paid in gold, just like Sanis, something 6 < i found amusing, gold being only a byproduct of the helmets.

If the smuggler knew this, he would keep the shipment for himself. But soon it would not matter. Once everyone had a helmet, gold wouldn’t mean much on this world. Only dreams, and memories.

Soon he would be able to afford something better to wear than a ragged tarp.

Soon he would feed wherever he liked.