In Caleb’s case, something went wrong. When his soul was being implanted, the lab accidentally used the wrong one. Rather than the one that had been set aside for him, Caleb ended up with the soul of a DID patient who passed away. As a result, upon implantation, the five individual personalities split apart into five individual souls, something that had never been done before. Thanks to his extremely unique situation, Caleb wasn’t released to his parents, instead kept in the lab and studied extensively.

As he grew up, he was taught what it meant to have more than one soul - though it was never something he actually understood. He knew all of the technical terms and what it meant when it came to potentially interacting in society, but he never actually understood how it affected him versus what it would be like to have only one soul.

When he turned ten, Caleb was to go through his soul passage. That was something that every child in the society went through as a kind of coming of age ceremony, and in it, the child would meet and accept the soul of their animal counterpart. Caleb’s caretakers weren’t sure how this process would work on someone with five souls, but the religious and government bodies both agreed that it was the boy’s duty and obligation to go through the passage. And so he did.

The ceremony ended to reveal that all five souls had taken on an animal counterpart, which made Caleb also the first person ever to have more than one animal shift. Akos had a falcon, Nestor had a fox, Urias had a cobra, and Sawyer had a mountain lion.

Though he was given the necessary nutrients and artificial sunlight and social interactions and all of that stuff that was needed for growth, Caleb was denied everything else life had to offer, instead being forced to live for twenty-two years in the same laboratory that he was created in. He was educated and mentally stimulated enough to keep himself from getting too bored, but he never knew what else there was beyond the white walls he knew so well.

One day, when he was twenty-two, his caretakers decided to perform a new experiment on him. Because of how well he lived with multiple souls in him, they decided to try something brand new; implanting a soul into an adult body. It was supposed to potentially help people who have become brain dead or locked in comas or whatever else - he wasn’t really listening.

As he was prepared for the implantation, Caleb closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he felt a rush of panic crash over him. Where was he?

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