Citizen Sleeper, Transitioning, and Leaving Your Home
Hunter: “Can you confirm your legal right to sentience?”
Sleeper: “I’m a person.”
Hunter: “Incorrect.”
I’ve been thinking of leaving my home country.
For years now, the UK has been becoming increasingly more and more transphobic. Leaving the country for my own safety is something that’s crossed my mind before, but with recent developments it feels like it’s gone from “something I might have to do”, a hypothetical that I’ve looked into and given some thought, to “something I will have to do” and that I need to start planning for as soon as possible. It feels like the only guarantee is that things will get worse. And, between my brother moving to a different country himself, uni graduation in a few months, and the subsequent scattering of my friends, I feel like my community is falling apart anyway. Now is probably the best time.
But I don’t even know if leaving for another country would be a good decision. Could I even afford it? Do the countries I’m looking at also have their own anti-trans movements gaining power, and will I have to repeat it all over again in a few years? How could I make sure that I still have access to HRT? How can I find a job and somewhere to live, how can I get all my stuff over from the UK? Is it cowardly of me to leave during a time when everyone is needed to fight back? And how can I start from scratch completely, especially if I end up somewhere where I don’t know anyone? These feelings, these questions, are a lot, and they led me back to Citizen Sleeper. A game about a marginalised person who left their unsafe home to start fresh somewhere new.
Sleeper: You start to trail off when you realise you can’t find the words to explain how the memories you do have feel like both yours and someone else’s at the same time, and how that always fills you with a certain sadness.
Sleeper: The sadness of remaining forever unknown, even to yourself.
Sleepers are people. In every way; the way they act, the way they think and feel, the way they’re treated by those around them. It’s not something that’s up for debate. Yet the legal system within the Core and Surrogate Systems is built upon denying their personhood. The only context in which sleepers can exist is as slaves for Essen-Arp, and beyond that context their existence is outlawed. Hunter, a program hunting for illegal AIs within Erlin’s Eye’s networks, believes the Sleeper to be an “illegal sentience” and attempts to kill them every time they meet. An Essen-Arp bounty hunter, Ethan, arrives at the station to bring them back. But even beyond that, this legally debated personhood floods into interactions that the Sleeper has throughout Erlin’s Eye. A spacer at a bar throws a glass at them. A gangster holds their medication above their head to extort them. Even well-intentioned people ask them a lot of intrusive questions and don’t view them in the same lens they view the people around them. The Sleeper’s differences are too much for the average person to deal with, and their empathy for sleepers takes the form of pity more than companionship.
The Sleeper has memories of an older life. An ID has a picture of someone else. Someone they used to be, someone they can remember being, but someone they weren’t. They hadn’t been born yet; they had to leave that body and that version of themself behind to become something new.
They don’t want to go back. To go back would be the same as dying.
All this to say that, while I’m a trans woman rather than nonbinary, the experience of being a sleeper is one of the best transition allegories I’ve seen. Or at least, it’s one that I can connect to, which is especially rare for “non-human trans allegory” characters. In their legal sidelining, in their relationship with their past, and in their connection, or lack thereof, with their body. I also do very much appreciate that the Sleeper being trans and nonbinary is explicitly who they are rather than being because they’re a sleeper. There are human trans and nonbinary characters within the station. It’s not a non-human characteristic. I love queer allegories that are also explicitly queer.
Aki: “You are not from the flotilla, are you?”
Sleeper: “I live on the Eye.”
Aki: “But that is not where you are from.” She stares into the greenhouse. “Everyone is from somewhere. Whether they wish to be or not.” The red dust glitters in her eye. “Whether it is a good place to be from or not.”
As a free station, unbound by Core and Surrogate law, Erlin’s Eye is the perfect place for a sleeper on the run to start anew. But it still hasn’t escaped from its capitalist origins. Built by Solheim, then abandoned by them when they went bankrupt, Erlin’s Eye is still picking up the pieces decades later. Despite being independent now, it’s still built from inherited capitalist foundations. Havenage, the closest thing the station has to a central authority, acts in many ways like the exploitative corporations it was initially formed to protect its workers from; it’s (for want of a better word) cliquey and exclusive, with a hierarchy revolving around those who are “true” members of the union and others who are contracted workers. Contracted workers such as Lem, who are left working hand-to-mouth, taking long and difficult shifts for meager pay and the vague chance of becoming a full-time Havenage member. Some administrators want to help, but some are like Hardin Hurst; a former Solheim executive who didn’t collapse with the corporation, a parasite who floated to the top while leaving everyone else at the bottom, and who uses his pull to try selling the Eye back to corporate control. This sense of haves and have-nots extends to Lowend, where Havenage’s influence doesn’t reach. In response, some of its residents have formed Yatagan, a gang who handle administrative work and keep the peace in the district. They have contacts with smugglers from across the system and can get their hands on rare goods and necessities, but they extort from local businesses. They run your local clinic, but the doctor is in indentured servitude to a Yatagan boss. Despite the absence of corporations, cold hard cryo is still the lifeblood of Erlin’s Eye. And that’s not even getting into the avaricious corporate eyes looking toward the Helion System from across the galaxy…
(To slip into a little criticism, I do wish that the Hypha Commune, the third faction on Erlin’s Eye, had more hangups and more focus. Compared to the strengths and flaws that Havenage and Yatagan both have, Hypha feel flawless and overly utopian, and while I like the idea of living in a cool space commune as much as the next girl, they’re too pleasant compared to the other two factions to be that interesting narratively)
Moritz: “I've been meaning to ask you, Sleeper… What’s it like?” He pauses, suddenly unsure. “I mean, y’know, what does it feel like?”
Sleeper: “To be a sleeper?”
Moritz: “Yeah,” he shrugs. “If you don’t mind.”
Sleeper: “I’m getting used to it.”
Moritz: “That’s good.” He pauses. “Really good. I wanted to say I have a lot of sympathy for it, like, having to find a place. Having to survive. Having no future.” He looks down. “A lot of people ‘round here understand that.”
Despite this precarity though, Citizen Sleeper is ultimately a game about community, and about how connections and support networks can uplift people from even the darkest situations. When the Sleeper first arrives on the station, these connections are initially formed out of necessity. Feng needs someone to look through the Eye’s systems and the Sleeper needs someone to remove their Essen-Arp tracking implant. The Sleeper needs stabilizer and Sabine needs money to help pay off their debt to Yatagan. But as the game progresses, these relationships become closer. You babysit your friend Lem’s daughter so he can pick up more shifts, your friend Yana gives you shifts at her bar because it’s a safe place for sleepers and you need some cryo. They aren’t based on exchanging services you need; they’re based out of mutual care. Erlin’s Eye would fall apart without its communities.
Sabine: “I’m sorry,” Sabine says, and you are unsure if they mean for the cold touch of the metal or for something else.
Sabine: “Emulations like you, sleepers as most people know you, aren’t considered people in any of the surrogate systems. You have no rights, no status.” They focus hard on the inspection of your arm. “And Essen-Arp has no reason to release stabilizer on the market.”
I can’t stop thinking of stabilizer as an HRT analogue. The Sleeper’s body is one that they were forced into, one that they didn’t get a say in. It’s a body that’s hostile to them, that’s rejecting itself. Stabilizer is a medication that others don’t need but that they need to keep them alive. Keeping access to it is what kept the Sleeper with Essen-Arp, and upon reaching Erlin’s Eye their first step is to make sure they can keep getting it. Likewise, HRT is one of my biggest concerns just in general. Since starting HRT my life, at least on a personal level, has been a lot better. My baseline level of happiness is higher now, I’m starting to like my body. I might not be a paragon of mental health, but I don’t think about suicide anymore. But also, it’s my biggest concern when moving. I don’t want to risk being taken off it, but that’s also why I feel like I need to leave. I’m scared that there’s an HRT ban coming soon, and I’m scared that there’s nothing I can do to protect myself from it other than get out as soon as I can.
The first time I played Citizen Sleeper I was desperate to escape Erlin’s Eye. I had nothing to my name, I didn’t know anyone, I was scrambling for money, for food, desperate to find stabilizer. But the more time I spent on the station, the closer I grew to the community, and the more of a support network I built for myself, I found that I couldn’t leave when I got the chance. I couldn’t take the Sidereal Horizon with Lem and Mina because I still had to help Bliss repair ships. I couldn’t leave with Bliss and Ankhita because I had to help the refugee flotilla. By the end of the game, when most of my unfinished business was dealt with and I was given the final choice whether or not to leave, I couldn’t. Maybe it would’ve been safer to escape to the safety of the Belt instead of trying to weather the Flux, but it would’ve felt cowardly to leave.
But I feel like that was a bad reading. Lem isn’t a coward for wanting a better life for his daughter on a new world. Bliss and Ankhita aren’t cowards for realising that the Eye has nothing left for them and leaving for the Belt. The Ember refugees aren’t cowards for realising that the thing that forced them from their homes is making its way to the Eye and leaving before they’d have to again. It takes a different kind of bravery to know when to leave, to know when your home has nothing for you, to take those steps away.
I turned to Citizen Sleeper with conflicted feelings about whether I should leave my home before things get worse, hoping that it would help me figure things out. Of course, it’s just a video game. It’s naive to think that it could single-handedly help me with such a colossal decision. And in all honesty, I think it’s made me feel even more split. On one hand, Citizen Sleeper is a game about community. It’s a game about forging bonds with those around you and about how those bonds are what can save us in the face of precarious situations. But on the other hand, it’s a game about fresh starts. It’s about how you can leave a situation that isn’t good for you, that isn’t safe for you, and how you can start again and build a life for yourself.
I still don’t know what I’m going to do. But, if nothing else, I found this replay of Citizen Sleeper reassuring. In what way, I can’t quite say.
This is a polished-up rewrite of a personal essay initially posted on my Backloggd in May 2025, shortly after the UK supreme court passed their judgement that trans women aren't, legally, women. Things have gotten worse since then, and I think about Citizen Sleeper a lot. I hope things can work out.