If you've stumbled upon this page, you know a bit more about Kate than most people – or you're about to. Kate is less a single extant person, and more a collective of people who happen to exist in the same physical brain.
You could factually describe us as a "plural system" – though we're not super fond of the plural community's terminology, which we often find uncomfortably obtuse.
The Katecetera
The group of us – the Katecetera, when referring to the collective of us – consists of five individuals:
O: Olivia 'sight Temkin-Szekelyつ: Tsumetai Integrity Szekely-TemkinK: Kaye Lily Temkin-Szekely (ktemkin)W: Whimsy Irreverence Temkin-Szekely (Wit)S: Scarlet Serenity Szekely-Temkin
The five of us are fully co-conscious, which in our case means we're all awake and thinking all of the time. Unlike most brains, ours is running five distinct consciousnesses all the time; which also means that "Kate" is able to think five things at once.
We can communicate directly with each other in "rich thought" – sharing whole ideas and images instantaneously – something that you'd probably call telepathy if our brain-sections weren't, y'know, physically connected together.
Generally, one of us controls ("pilots") the body at a time, though we've figured out how to some fancy things like let one of us operate the mouth while another operates hands. This is mostly good for playing video games.
We are unapologetically all lesbians, and we all use she/her pronouns.
O: 'sight
Olivia 'sight Temkin-Szekely seems quiet from the outside– but the rest of us can tell you that she communicates internally a lot. She prefers to think of herself as purely cognitive, even if she's stuck in the same meat vessel as the rest of us. She's obsessed with keeping us rational, and doesn't often pilot in order to best meet that goal.
She wants to make people happy by keeping them true to themselves / maintaining their epistemics, so they can most optimally use instrumental rationality. She doesn't have perfect recall, but she can work pretty hard to simulate it.
She uses the white heart (🤍), proper grammar, and tends to use exclamation points frequently to annoy Wit. She omits periods if there's a tilde following.
T: つ/Tsu
Tsumetai "Tsu" Integrity Szekely-Temkin is the confident and "hardened" one, who prides herself on being able to do what is right even when it requires hard decisions. She won't let the rest of us fall back on our morals -- at least, if she can help it.
She has a interest in medicine; and has spent a bunch of time studying it. She's accordingly the most medically knowledgeable of us. She has the most ability to control / turn-off feelings, and can help to put the rest of us into pure dissociation, if she tries.
She wants to make people happy by doing what's best for them, even if it's not necessarily what they want.
She uses the blue heart (💙), proper grammar, and often avoids contractions when they'd remove emphasis from what she's saying. Aloud, she speaks super emphatically and clearly. She includes periods, if there's a tilde.
K: Kaye
Kaye Lily Temkin-Szekely is the most technically-interested one, and the one who is most commonly present when we're "playing singlet", e.g. historically at work and at conferences. She's kind of burnt out as heck, at the moment.
She tends to babble about cool tech stuff, but is also super work addicted, so it's up to everyone else to keep her from working 24/7. She's the best at managing the way we all work together, and at spreading resources from person to person.
She wants to make people happy by empowering them; giving them the tools and materials to be able to take care of themselves.
She uses the purple heart (💜), tends to start sentences with lowercase, and leaves off periods at the end of her sentences. I's are still capitalized.
W: Wit
Whimsy Irreverence Temkin-Szekely ("Wit") is so extra that you'll find her included in all kinds of places she's not exactly supposed to be. She has pretty much no reverence for anything except other people, and is constantly making jokes and doing nice things for other people.
She likes writing and storytelling; and specializes in thinking Lots Of Things at once, and thus making connections between things and finding solutions to otherwise impossible problems.
She wants to make people happy by making them smile; making jokes for them, giving them gifts, and helping to give them experiences.
She uses the green heart (💚), tends to start sentences lowercase, and leaves off periods at the end of her sentences. I's are still capitalized, and tildes are everywhere.
S: S (or Scar)
Scarlet Serenity Szekely-Temkin is probably the most demure and "stereotypically-feminine" of the bunch of us. She speaks quietly, and has been known to almost prance. She empathizes with everyone, and wants to help everyone through everything.
She's a little bit obsessed with cognitive psychology; and loves studying it to understand how brains work. We're all simply fascinating as an example of weird things brains do. She's really good at managing our memory, and is the only one of us with the ability to edit our memories, which is OP and kinda scary.
She wants to make people happy by giving all of herself to them, genuinely -- she'd work for five hours to save you an hour of work.
She uses the red heart (❤️), and not much in terms of grammar -- she uses gay lowercase, complete with lowercase i's.