Sea is perhaps the wrong word. It implies a surface. The cores continued up above me, vanishing into dimness in a light that came from nowhere, and, although the sim prevented me from leaning over the edge of the platform, I could see down at an angle that the cores continued on below me for some infinite depth.

There was a part of me that was dreadfully tempted to spend the night there, laid out on the platform, sleeping before the remains of someone I am not even sure I would call a friend.

I did not, of course.

No, I returned home to Beth Tikvah and crawled into that nook beneath my desk where I instead curled up on the cushion to try and shut out the world. I have called it before a ‘glorified dog bed’, but it is far more comfortable than that. It has a portion where I may sit and read — cushion along the side wall of the desk, a shelf for books and drinks, a glow bud for gentle light — and yet I may also slouch down to rest, hidden from the world. I can slouch and rest and hide, peering out past the legs of my chair into the little garden patio my small apartment affords me. Some weeks, I sleep there more often than on my bed.

There is where I slept that night.

I spent yesterday volunteering on groundskeeping. I did not wish to spend time at the NUSO, though I imagine they could use the help. I needed old things. I needed quiet things. There were paths to be swept and hedges to be tended.

Let others handle the young and fresh.

Today, however, I am working with Rav in the shul, shuttling in potted plants, vines, and flowers to beautify the space in preparation for Shavuot. The days of sacrificing first fruits at the Temple in Jerusalem are long over, and instead we decorate our small-T temple with these signs of life to bring spring in.

We stand now before a bough of a cottonwood tree that has been ripped from its parent — a tree about halfway down the hill upon which Beth Tikvah sits — by a windy night. Leaves, to all appearances still alive, flutter gaily in the same light breeze that toys with our fur.

“I am unsure if...ah, if it is worth bringing in, but I did find it downed while volunteering yesterday,” I say.

Rav stands, paws akimbo, rumpled, and looks down at the branch. “I see.” She pads toward the thicker end of the branch and hefts it, then lets it drop once more. When she stands upright again, her brow is furrowed. “It is a bit awkward, is it not?”

I nod.

She looks up into the tree itself, at the bare wood shining amidst the bark where the branch tore away. “It really is a shame. I will speak with Serene, see if she has thoughts about it.”

I laugh, unable to help myself. “She will be most proud. Look! Her trees are...ah, they are doing precisely as they did back phys-side.”

Rav grins over at me. “Oh, she will be delighted, I am sure. Oh!” She tilts her head, taken by a new thought. “Did you make your way over to her memorial the other day?”

“I...ah, well, no,” I admit, ears splaying. I had forgotten that I had suggested that I might. “I went instead to the Graveyard.”

Her snout wrinkles in distaste. “I do not like that name.”

I bow my head. “I am sorry, Rav.”

“No, no. It is not on you. If that is the name they have chosen, so be it.” She stuffs her paws in her pockets and lets her gaze drop down to the branch once more. “Why did you go there?”

“I wanted to see one in particular, not...ah, not a monument to all who were lost.”

“Serene’s monument has that, though.”

My ears cant back, an automatic reaction before I can even consider what I might say. “It...does?”

“Yes. It is generative.” She laughs. A single huff of a laugh that sounds more tired than amused. “In fact, I believe it draws the names from the...Graveyard. It was to be a forest, but each of the placeholders for the trees now bears a plaque bearing the name of one of the dead. If you touch them, I believe you even get the same auditory cue.”

I stare at her in silence, then drop my own gaze to the branch between us. It seems silly to me, now, that we might haul an entire branch into the shul. Where would we put it? Would we rest it before the bimah? Would we prop it up against the wall? Pot it and have it stand at the entrace?

“I did not know,” I mumble at last. “Can you go to a specific...tree? Thing?”

She sighs and settles slowly down onto her knees and starts to strip smaller branches off the bough. Guessing at her intent, I kneel to do the same.

“That much I do not know, actually. If you were after the memorialization of one person in particular, then perhaps you are right to seek out the Graveyard. That is what they are for, after all.”

“I was, yes. I wanted...ah, I wanted to see Juniper’s lost up-tree’s core.”

She pauses in her work and lifts her gaze to me, a strange smile on her face. “You? Juniper?”

“I...ah, well,” I stammer, worrying a particularly flexible branch loose from its base. “May I send you my notes from the interview? Perhaps...mm, perhaps that will help me explain.”

“Of course. While I read, we can bring these into the building and twine them with the vines. Maybe that will work.”

I nod. It is the work of a moment to pluck that particular interview transcript from the running stack that I have, and place it into a file in the perisystem, access shared with my down-tree. After letting her know the address, we both fall to silence. The bough is quickly stripped of its remaining branches, and we make our way back to the building.

The synagogue itself is a broad, low-slung structure that draws its majesty not from its architecture, but from its position. It takes the shape of a dumbell, with the sanctuary taking up one end and the social hall the other, connected by a breezeway that guards a small courtyard garden that contains the summit stone for the hill upon which it is built. The sanctuary rests on the flatter top of the hill, opening out onto the field where we hold our outdoor events, while the social hall, glass-walled, projects out over the slope itself, showing the small town that makes up the rest of the sim. There are a few apartments underneath the social hall, dug partly into the hill itself, including both Rav’s and that of Rabbi Katz, our cantor.

We have decorated the social hall primarily with potted plants and flower arrangements — we have a member, an oneirotect of some skill, who is quite obsessed with dahlias — but the bimah and aron kodesh we have draped with long strands of pothos-like Pull-Me vines, shaggy green lines that soften all the angles carved into the wood of both platform and Torah ark.

While Rav reads in her head, we weave the leafy branches of cottonwood into the the vines. True to their name, when we pull on a leaf, the stem elongates into a new strand of vine, sprouting its own leaves along the way. We tuck the branches in and arrange the leaves to cover up most of the silvery bark. That the leaves are a brighter green than that of the Pull-Me leads to a pleasant accentuation.

I can tell when she finishes catching up on the interview, as she quits fiddling with greenery and instead pads over to touch me on the elbow, then holding wide her arms to welcome me into an embrace.

I accept gratefully.

“I see now,” she whispers.

I tighten my hug around her before slipping away again, unwilling to let the the conversation stall based on this moment of emotion, however touching.

“As I was at the Graveyard and...ah, and as I was working yesterday, I recalled something that you said some months back,” I say, “which is that faith is not here to give me easy answers to hard questions, but to provide a framework for dealing with the existence of hard questions.”

Rav catches my elbow before I slip away completely and guides me gently over to the chairs in front of the bimah. I still hold a few of the branches, but this I figure is alright, it will give me something to fidget with.

“I know that frameworks are generally a thing that help you out, yes,” she says. “But come, tell me what was on your mind.”

Indeed, I find myself immediately taking up one of the branches and turning it about and about in my fingers. “Well...ah, I suppose that I was thinking about rather a lot.”

“I am not surprised by this.”

I smirk down to the branch in my paws. “Yes, yes. Well, I was thinking at first how I was feeling quite angry, yes? How I was feeling angry with HaShem for so long, yes? I was thinking about that joke, of the two Jews telling Holocaust jokes, and–”

Rav tilts her head. “Which?”

“There are a few, I suppose,” I say with a weak laugh. “Two concentration camp survivors are...ah, are telling each other dark jokes about the Shoah when God happens past and scolds them, saying, “How dare you make light of this tragedy! How dare you joke!” And the two reply, “Ah, how could you possibly understand? You were not there.””

She snorts. “I heard it as a Jew dying and going to Heaven, telling HaShem a Holocaust joke and, when They did not laugh, the Jew said “I suppose you had to have been there to understand.””

“It is a whole genre of humor, yes? A whole framework. I was thinking of things such as this, of this type of anger, and I was...ah, I suppose I was stuck wondering why it was that Juniper — who I believe is quite active with the temple and conscientious with their faith — was seemingly not feeling the same. Was it something about my approach that was wrong? Or theirs? And...ah, and I think that I eventually came down on the side of us simply having different frameworks.”

She listens thoughtfully, her paws folded in her lap and her gaze tracing along the lines of green throughout the sanctuary.

“We all must, I think,” she says, looking back to me with a faint smile. “Somehow, even the two of us, despite having at one point been the same person, view the world through rather different frameworks.”

I bow my head in acknowledgement.

“I think you are not wrong, here,” she continues. “Juniper views the world through a lens that you simply do not have. You do not see the same things, or do not see the same things in the same way. They view the attack through the lens of how the world has changed, whereas you, I think, view it as an act that was perpetrated against us.”

“This is...ah, well, I do not think that you are wrong, but this is a thing that I struggle with. It is in the very name, is it not? Attack?”

“Of course, and I do not think that they discount that. Had you pressed them on the issue, I think they might have indeed had much to say about the subject of the Century Attack as an attack. However, they are also approaching all of life from a different viewpoint. Their interests are still very much focused on the wonder of the System. They are quite young, after all.”

I frown. “I was thinking of that, as well, yes. We are tricentennarians, they are still a new upload, comparatively.”

“Indeed. They were born after Launch. Decades after! They were born after the arrival of the Artemisians. They have never known a world not just without the System, but without Castor and Pollux, our two sibling Systems now well on their way out of the Heliosphere. They have never known a world where first contact has not been made.

“We, though,” she continues, gesturing to me and herself, “remember a world when all we had was immersive VR. No Ansible. No uploading. No forking or oneirotecture or sim artistry. We were there when they locked our sensoria into consensus and we experienced the same world together. We knew the pain of loss when Lagrange overcorrected and deleted the first forked identity and the one from whom they forked. We sent some of the first sensorium messages. We were there for Secession, and we sent instances along with the Launch project two hundred years later. That we struggle to comprehend each other’s viewpoint on the matter of the Attack is not surprising, when one considers just what it means to be a tricentennarian.”

As Rav speaks, I toy further with the knobbly branch in my paws, tracing my dull claws along the bulges and wrinkles in the bark.

I ask at last, “Is this why you assigned me this project, then? So that...ah, so that I would better understand this?”

She smiles fondly to me, if also a little sadly, and rests a paw on my knee. “No, my dear. I would not presume to instruct you thus. We are equals.”

I open my mouth to speak, but she laughs, not unkindly, and shakes her head.

“I know, I know. I am also your rabbi. In this we are equals, though, my dear.” She leans over to kiss me softly on the cheek. “No, I assigned you this project for reasons that I am honestly not quite sure of, myself. It came to me as we sat together on New Year’s Eve, and I realized just how well you were doing with organizing Yom HaShichzur, and how much it seemed to help us. You and me.”

I lift my gaze from the stick in my paws to peer curiously at her. “You gave me this project because of us?” I could feel uncharitable interpretations bubbling up within me. You gave me something to keep me busy? You gave me work to do so I would leave you alone? You gave me a task to keep us from arguing? Instead of levying accusations, however, I tamp those thoughts down and ask. “Can...ah, can you explain? I am not sure I understand.”

“I can try. As I said, I do not wholly understand, myself. Some of it was intuition, perhaps, whether borne of our similarities or just our time together.” She plucks one of the remaining sticks from the small pile on my lap and uncharacteristically fidgets in a way similar to myself. “The year after we came back was...rough. It was very rough, at points. You seemed like you were hurting, and also like you were in need of something, but I never could figure out what exactly that something was.”

I watch the way she turns the stick over and over in her paws, mirroring what I have been doing throughout this conversation. Mirroring, or perhaps it is a thing that is simply very us. On the days when I have spent time with Slow Hours and her stanza, I have heard her down-tree, A Finger Pointing, playfully accuse her various up-trees you had to have gotten it from somewhere when they exhibit some particular bit of wit. Perhaps this thing that I do is merely an echo of some grander commonality.

I do not know.

This fidgeting, these words...

“I see,” I say at last, and I marvel that the accusations that came so quickly to mind have melted away. “Thank you, my dear. For explaining, and for...ah, for thinking of me.”

She smiles gratefully to me, and I realize that she must have been worried to tell me. I file this fact away as she pushes herself to her feet. “Of course, my dear. Come. Let us get the rest of these woven in, and then I think we may well be done. Perhaps we can invite Serene over to crow over her cottonwoods being just as fragile as we remember.”

I nod and follow with the last handful of sticks, helping to weave them in so that their leaves show as bright green jewels amid the dark green of the vines.

I am starting to suspect that there is a truth that lies somewhere between my uncharitable accusations and Rav's kind words. I read it in her relief, just as I read it in myself. I am starting to suspect that she is right, that I needed something to do to keep myself going, because, as I suspect of myself, I tend to get quite bitchy without. Without Yom HaShichzur, I was treating Rav quite poorly, and so perhaps coming up with a task for me to start on as soon as my work with the holiday was over was a protective action on her part.

I do also trust her, though, when she says that she is not wholly sure, that she is still thinking about just why she came up with this for me. Sometimes, an idea will occur to one as though from outside oneself or any known inspiration, and one can either act on it or not. I trust that she was acting on an intuition, just as I trust that she loves me even still, even when I risk being a bit bitchy at her.

Both of these things are true: Rav gave me this thing to do to get me to stop being such a bitch, and she has my best interest at heart. The latter rather takes the sting out of the former, does it not?

The platform is a disk about ten meters in diameter, made of some gray material, perilously close to the not-quite-stone of the floors and walls of the Aetherboxes, the rooms into which new uploads first arrive on Lagrange. As the default entry point of the sim, I blinked into existence on it and stated the name and temporary credentials that I was given. A ring — black, purple-limned — then grew in the air before the disk, and the whole thing floated through, taking me somewhere deep into the sim — the ‘graveyard’, as many have taken to calling it.

It is frankly impossible to overstate how deep.

As far as the eye can see in all directions — up, down, all around me — there are the black spheres of core dumps, the sys-side representation of a crashed instance of a cladist. In this sim, there are twenty-three billion of these cores, each spaced one meter apart, intangible and translucent.

Twenty-three billion corrupt identities that could not be brought back to life with the rest of the System. Some of them mere tasker instances, meant to stir a pot of water for an extra pair of hands, and some of them the sole instance of a cladist, or even a clade, wiping out entire persons.

After I am brought to my goal, however, there is one which is somehow more real. It is opaque. It is a gray so deep that it seems to thirst for light. It is solid and I imagine it to be harder than diamond. It is completely immobile.

I stand before this orb, thinking. I walk around it in a slow circle. I think of all of the words that I can say to it, and instead, I remain silent, tears of frustration leaving marks on my face.

What am I to do with this information?

Today, I met with a member of the congregation with whom I share very little in terms of commonalities beyond the obvious proximity. They are sociable and well-connected while I am quite happy with a small, quiet social circle. They are young and ebullient and full of energy, while I am old and tired. They are loud and outspoken and, while I may be quite outspoken on some issues — goodness knows I felt outspoken at times while working on Yom HaShichzur — I am far more self-contained.

We interact very little in shul and not at all outside of it. Juniper, however, was quite eager to speak with me when they heard about this project.

I should have known that this would lead to an upending of many of my ideas about the state of our world. I should have known that this conversation would send me into a tailspin, here, now, when I am already tender. I should have known that I would be left struggling.

I just do not know what I am to do with this information.

“Thank you for...ah, for suggesting this meeting,” I began. “I have been slowly broadening the circle of those I am interviewing, and I do not imagine that I would have thought to have...ah, to have asked you for quite some time, otherwise.”

“Oh, yeah, sure!” they said, bright and chipper, though there within their voice was an edge of intensity that I had not seen diminish at all in their thirty years since uploading. “Thanks for agreeing to it, then. I know I can get a bit loud for you, sometimes.”

I dipped my snout apologetically. “We move through the world in different ways.”

“That we do!” they said, laughing and casting themselves back into their chair — one of the simple wicker ones on the back patio of the shul — in a gangly heap of a person. Their movements, their very being felt chaotic to me. It was intriguing, in a way, for all that it was loud where I at times wished for quiet. “So, you have a bunch of questions to ask?”

“Yes,” I said, folding paws in my lap. “Well, a few, and I imagine that...ah, that the conversation will carry us from there.”

They nodded.

“Can you tell me what you were doing on the night of the Century Attack?”

“Oh, sure. I had an up-tree here for the Hanukkah Shabbat, but mostly I was on a gallery crawl with a bunch of friends. Felt like the right orientation, y’know? That my down-tree be out and my up-tree here? No clue why, always wondered whether things would’ve been different if I’d gone the other way ‘round, even if that doesn’t make sense in the grand scheme of things.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, my up-tree got got in the Attack.”

“I see,” I said, averting my gaze. “I am sorry.”

“Oh! Don’t be. Just part of the way the world works, y’know?” They laughed. “Just one of those things I think about some days. If I’d stuck around here and my up-tree’d gone out for the gallery crawl, would she still have gotten got? Or was it whoever was here that got got?”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Like, does that make me anxious or sad or whatever?” they asked, then shrugged. “It’s just idle musing. Doesn’t make me feel anything either way, I s’pose. Either I die or she does, and if it’s me, not like I’ll be around to worry about it.”

I worked to suppress a frown. “Do...ah, do you feel grateful, then, that it was not you?”

“Oh, I mean, sure,” they said, laughing. “I don’t want to be dead. I hate that my up-tree died. I hate that so many died, so I guess yeah, I’m grateful I lived.”

I waited, hoping there was more to come.

Smirking, they continued. “I don’t feel sad often, What Right Have I. You know that.”

“Of course, yes.”

This had, a few years back, been a point of consternation between us. When you are a moody creature, there are no emotions that are off-limits, and when you hit three centuries, you take interest where you can get it. Intellectual pursuits, yes, and entertainments are not lacking, but also in emotional variety.

This is not to say that I love it when I am sad! I do not, of course. I am just beyond the point in life where I am worried that I am wasting time by experiencing all emotions.

Some of these thoughts were within me at the time, too, as I continued, “Perhaps that is something that...ah, that we can chalk up to our difference in ages. You were saying? You were both here for Shabbat and also on a gallery walk?”

“Right, yeah,” they said. “There was this New Year’s Eve gallery walk. Bunch of oneiroimpressionism. Some really wild pieces. There was this painting of a landscape that changed slowly over time, but if you walked towards it backwards, you could step into it...sort of? It’s so hard to explain what actually happened with it. It was always the gallery floor beneath your feet, but as you walked backwards, you seemed to go further than the wall, and around you the room got all painterly in the same style.”

Rather than interrupt this discourse, I allowed Juniper to continue, the better to hopefully let me collect my thoughts for the interview. I smiled, of course, and raised a brow as they so eagerly described this exhibit — which did sound interesting, to be fair. I was not rude, but I did feel that I needed to reevaluate the path of my questioning.

Of course, before I could actually do so, Juniper took the conversation on a hard turn. “I have to wonder what it would have looked like during the attack. They all say it was painful, but what did it look like? Did it look all dreamy like that? I’ve read a shitload about CPV, literally everything I can think of, and all of the accounts — the good ones — are from people who have seen others crash, not people have experienced CPV itself.”

I sat back, blinking. “I...ah...w-well, it is fatal, is it not?” I stammered.

“It was,” they replied, smirking. “But what if you quit before it killed you? They say some people can hold on longer than others, right? Like...the whole point of the stuff is that it disrupts your sense of contiguity. ‘Contraproprioceptive’, right? Fucks with your proprioception until you crash?”

“And hurts–” I started.

“Well, sure, but so does stubbing your toe,” they said, their voice full of laughter. “Some things just hurt.”

“–a lot, enough that they trimmed our memories of it.”

“A fact which none of us consented to! I know I certainly wouldn’t have. Those memories are mine, and just what I’m talking about wanting.”

“Would...but that...” I started, shook my head to hide a tic, and then tried again. “That would mean that everyone — everyone — would have a memory of a pain so bad that...ah, that they either quit or crash.”

They shrugged.

I huffed, hackles raised. “How could you wish that on trillions of people?”

“Of course I don’t wish pain on people,” they scoffed. “I just wish I had experienced it, and it sucks that that experience was taken away from me. Forever, too! They patched the whole of CPV out.”

I stared, speechless.

“Look, What Right Have I. Like I said, I hate that it happened, but CPV was a part of our lives. CPV was, and now the Attack is, too. CPV gave us fear and spice and a desire to keep going, and the Attack gives us a shake-up in the stasis we were all falling into.” They straightened up in their chair, then leaned forward, pushing towards my personal space. “Both of these things can be true: CPV and the Attack were terrible, and they made our life more complete by existing.”

“What?” My voice came out as barely a whisper.

They laughed, gesturing a hand at me, then around the sim. “Look at you. Look at this! Yom HaShichzur is a masterpiece. That’s part of why I was so happy to talk to you. I think it’s fan-fucking-tastic! We have hope! We have life! There’s this Shard project, now! New development on the System, renewed energy in space exploration!”

Their voice was getting louder and their gestures more expansive, to the point where I was huddling back in my seat, leaning as far away from them as I could.

“All I’m saying,” they said, arms folded smugly across their chest, “is that I’d be hard pressed to say either was completely bad.”

Over the next minute I opened my mouth and closed it a few times without managing to speak. Eventually, I managed to eke out something like I think that is all for today and then stepped away. I do not even remember, specifically, because even now, even writing this as I stand surrounded by so much death I can feel my heart racing as the panic rises yet again, and I do not want to remember in any more detail than I already have.

What am I to do with this information?

There is some balance here that I am missing. There is some bit of information that will make this make sense. There has to be.

I am proud of Yom HaShichzur, yes, and I am proud of humanity — sys- and phys-side both — and how we came together to bring Lagrange back. If I turn my head the right way and squint a bit, I think I can even be proud of us continuing on in doing new things, of how we drew inspiration from something terrible.

But CPV and the Century Attack were good actually?

No. It cannot be.

It is not a foreign philosophy to me. It is one that rides on the coat-tails of the suffering artist produces beautiful works, but proclaims ever larger claims. It is that on a societal scale. It is war breeds innovation all over again.

“Juniper tagged Shul of their own clade,” an androgynous voice says when I get close enough to the sphere still before me. “Crashed via CPV January 1, 2400, 00:00:06. Core deemed corrupt and unrecoverable by automated process, confirmed by an instance of In The Wind of her own clade, systech ID #88aa6e70.”

That instance of them that died. That crashed. That instance that, as they so eloquently put it, got got.

I weep.

What am I to do with this information?

Juniper is far younger than me. They are a youthful 52 to my 316. I know well that there are generational gaps even here, sys-side, where everyone can look precisely as young as they wish.

There are the new uploads, full of wonder. The world around them is strange! So strange! So much stranger than anything they could have imagined; and yet it is also still in so many ways quotidian. Life, largely, continues apace, even if it is now shaped differently, and they are able to slowly work through the traumas of their time phys-side.

There are the centennials, who are full of curiosity, energy, and a burgeoning weirdness. They have moved past many of their traumas, lost much of their hesitancy about uploading. Any loved ones from their previous life have either died or also uploaded. Their ties with Earth fade. They dive into the spirit of this particular form of post-humanity.

There are the bicentennials, who tend to head towards either wildly weird, or a calm and comfortable stability. Life makes sense for them, here, and they either lean into that freedom to do so, so many things that they never thought they could, that they never thought were possible, or they lean into that freedom to finally fucking relax — which, yes, may never have seemed possible before.

There are the tricentennials, who are said to be largely inscrutable, as though the world to them seems to be largely figured out, and they cannot even begin to explain it to these younger generations. That, or they are said to be quite mad.

I do not feel as though I have the world largely figured out. I do not feel, either, as though I am particularly weird, that I have found comfortable stability. And, although I do feel mad, with overflow increasingly a factor in my daily life, I do not feel that this defines me. Such is perhaps the problem with these ideas of generational divides. They only make sense in the barest of ways. 

I weep for Juniper#Shul, this death memorialized before me, even if Juniper themself will not.

And yet, here I am, struggling to figure out Juniper, who seems to me quite alien. It is one thing that they not feel sad quite so often as I do, that they not like to feel sad, but...

What am I to do with this information?

I knew this because of the feeds, of course, but I also knew this because my Jonah tree bench was located just across the path from the New Upload Support Office.

My mind was still awhirl from the enormity of the events, and so perhaps it is not surprising that I find myself so often sitting on that bench. It is a place for sitting when one is struggling, but in a very particular way. It is a place for sitting when one is stuck up in one’s own head, when one cannot get back down; or perhaps when one’s emotions are burning too hot and have disconnected one from one’s own body. It is a place for sitting when one is feeling upset at oneself, or perhaps when one knows that one is being a bit stupid but cannot seem to stop it.

When last I had really thought about the seat, it had been nearing midnight on New Year’s Eve, and perhaps unsurprisingly, new meaning had been imbued by that very fact. Not only would I sit and bake when I was feeling petulant, but I would sit and bake and think about that night.

And so, in those first weeks of me being back in-sim, every other day or so, I would find myself skulking off to that bench beneath the leaves of a vine. The leaves were broad, and similarly broad yellow flowers spotted the greenery, looking like nothing so much as oversized zucchini flowers. I would take comfort in the shade, for even if March was not overly warm in Beth Tikvah, the days were quite bright.

Sensing my presence, there on the bench, over the next twenty minutes or so, the leaves of the plant would wither and the flowers tightly close up once more, and I would be blasted with the full force of the sun, either directly or through some clever reflection. I would be blasted with heat and light and I would sit there panting and feeling increasingly stupid as my sulk was proven to be precisely as inconsequential as it always had been, only now I was overly warm, panting and squinting, grumbling to myself as I was reminded of the fact that I was wholly embodied.

When one keeps getting stuck up in one’s own head, one does what one can to force oneself back down.

I chose originally for the positioning of this bench a spot across the way from the NUSO. My reasoning, flawed as it was, was that it would remind me that the rest of the world exists, still, outside of myself, and that it is also on me to be a help. My reasoning was that perhaps I could be a better person than Jonah.

I go back and forth as to whether or not it is successful in this, but it is rare that it does not succeed in drawing me down out of my head.

And so, come a month after the restoration, the System Consortium slowly ungated new uploads, starting with those who had been held in limbo, waiting for Lagrange to come back online, then with the Ansible clinics working at reduced capacity. It coincided quite well with my stormy return to Beth Tikvah, and for me to watch from my silly bench.

Or, watch for a scant few days.

The summons from Rav Sorensen was not wholly out of the ordinary. She and I have spoken plenty, for she and I, along with Rav, have our own chavruta, one of many who tackle issues pertinent to New Reform Judaism, which goes on to inform our siddur and collection of responsa, Mishkan HaNetzach, “the tabernacle of eternity”. Our friendship is of the type that matches with congenial coworkers.

What was out of the ordinary, however, was her summoning me across the path from the NUSO.

The mug of tea warmed my paws as she and I sat on two comfortable chairs around a low table in the office’s lobby, holding back the slight chill of of the conditioned air. I certainly appreciated the cool air after the warmth of the sun shining bright upon me, and the softness of the seats after the hard stone of my bench. I appreciated, also, the warmth of the tea to act in contrast, though Erin, a slight woman already prone to shawls and cardigans, seemed to need her tea just to stay warm.

“Why do they keep the lobby so cold?” she asked.

“I am...ah, I am not sure,” I replied, frowning. “Perhaps there is some reason for it to be both here and comfortable, and also a liminal space you are meant to just pass through, yes?”

She chuckled. “It’s such a beautiful space, though.” She looked around, graying strawberry blonde hair falling from where it had been tucked behind her ears. “I do love the tapestries in here.”

I nodded, hesitated, then pressed forward. “Rav Sorensen, was there something that...ah, something in particular that you wanted of me?”

Her smile was exhausted as she nodded me. “Of course. I’m sorry, tired minds will wander,” she replied. “I got news from my counterparts phys-side that SysCon is pushing for...uh, ‘interest groups’ to prepare to accept new uploads. The NUSO here — and the one at Beth Am — will be accepting uploads in our orientation spaces.”

I blinked, sitting up straighter. What news! Normally such a space was reserved for particularly traumatized individuals who would benefit from personalized care. “That is...ah, that is unusual. Are there really so many dealing with spiritual trauma?”

She waggled a hand before returning it to her mug of tea. “I’m told we should expect some of that, but more than anything, there’s apparently been a rush on the clinics. The number of people going the Ansible is far higher than expected. Fourteen months of backlog, right? People who have been waiting to upload for more than a year are finally getting the chance.”

This caught me off-guard. Why? Why would all of these people who had witnessed the destruction and restoration — incomplete restoration, even! — of our world wish to come join us? Was that not terrifying? Was that not opting into danger? Was that not choosing to join a world that had experienced one armageddon? Was one not proof of the possibility of another?

But no, the uploads continued. Apparently, they continued above and beyond even the projections.

When I raised this to Rav Sorensen, she just shrugged to me, smiling wryly. “I suppose we will learn. You will learn. That’s why I brought you here. I was wondering if you’d like to help out.”

“Me?”

She chuckled. “You, yes.” She held up her hand to preempt my reply, continuing instead, “Less for their sake than yours. There are some that you might connect with, of course, but honestly, I had in mind your ideas about restoration day.”

“Yom HaShichzur.”

She nodded.

“You think that...ah, that I should...what? Ask about it?”

“Nothing so grand,” she said, shaking her head. “Think of it more like getting a sense of how these new uploads understand Lagrange after the Attack. I know that we helped you get set up with the committee, but this could provide plenty of insight into the project. In fact, I suspect it will give you and your committee plenty to work with.”

I sat in stunned silence, trying to grasp just what it was that Rav Sorensen was offering me. I did not normally volunteer at the NUSO, finding that I was perhaps too awkward to offer much other than maybe to those who were already rather a lot like me. Here, though, I felt less like I was being told to volunteer, and more like I was being nudged toward an opportunity. Erin saw that I might well get plenty out of these new uploads, these people rushing to join the System that had only recently stuttered back to life, rushing to be a part of its restoration, and she had handed me the opportunity served up neatly on a platter.

Finally, I said, “Well, goodness. Thank you, my dear. I was not expecting this.”

“It’ll be good for you to get the chance to help, What Right Have I. From what I’ve heard from a few systech friends, some of these new uploads...well, they’ll really need it.”

I bowed my head. “Of course! I will be honored to do so. I can already think of a million questions to ask. There are...ah, there are so many things to tell them!”

What luck! What luck indeed that so much had come together in this moment!

I surged up out of my chair.

Rav Sorensen held up her hand, and I sank back into my seat once more, ears canted back.

“Apologies, What Right Have I. I’ll only keep you a moment longer,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I want you to know that we’re all behind you on this,” she continued. “It’s plain to see you understand the opportunity here, but I do want you to keep an eye to the optics. Look and listen more than you act and speak, alright? You are still volunteering to help these new uploads. That is your task before anything related to your Yom HaShichzur, when you are here in this building. You are helping people who have been waiting for months to upload, when before, the waiting period was measured in minutes. You are helping people who are joining us after the worst day, in all of our lives. You and I — and, of course, all the others — already suspect what it is that you’ll find here, but remember: look and listen more than you act and speak.”

• The epigraph has been changed and prologue updated to match
• The birthday celebration has been expanded with a story about arriving back at Beth Tikvah, more effectively weaving the past through the present plot
• There is a new chapter about coming up with Yom HaShichzur

Again, plenty more coming up soon, but I have moved and gotten settled, and have found a path forward with adding these changes in here.

I dreamed that I stood not on a stage set up in the field in front of the shul but instead, the stage had been set up on a coarse and craggly ground. Within the logic of the dream, all I needed to do was take in this fact and I immediately knew that we had been set upon a giant branch of a tree — or perhaps we had been shrunk down small enough to be set upon a normal tree branch, but in the dream, I knew it to be a giant tree. It was, I knew, a world tree. It was a tree whose branches supported cities and civilizations.

Within the dream, the individuals who were joining us over AVEC of a sudden began to glitch. They screamed and shouted in pain and, over the course of what might have been five seconds as easily it might have been five minutes, they crashed. Set upon each of their chairs was the smooth, matte sphere that represented a crashed cladist’s core dump. Along with this, far down along the tree — and I knew it to be at the roots, though I do not know how — there was a deafening crack, a splintering that I knew to be some damage being done to this tree that was our world.

And while we cladists who were sys-side upon this great branch of a greater tree began to panic, I turned for some reason and raised my face to the sky, though all I saw was the underside of more branches and the distant greenery of leaves. Through the branches, silent, came rocketing a ball of flame, and I was not afraid of it. I watched it ping-pong its way down the trunk — which now I realize was only some fifty meters away — from the canopy down to the roots from whence the cracking sound had come.

I watched the light careen by and was filled not with terror but reassurance.

This was a thing that existed to fix. It was here to right the world. It was not creation, it was restoration. It certainly was not destruction.

It is tempting, now, to read this tree as the tree of life, of the light as following the path of the flaming sword, ping-ponging its way from sefirah to sefirah, that this was the act of creation taking place. In the moment, though, it was not. It was so plainly not! The tree was the world. It was the basis and foundation upon which we lived our lives. The fire was a fire that melded. It was a fire for sintering some shattered thing into a whole, for brazing. It was a fire for reforming and rejuvenating.

I do not often remember my dreams.

When I wake in the morning, I do so with a sense of energy already within me. Even if my body remains too tired to express this energy, it is still there. I feel the need to get up and read, or to write, or to talk. Even just get up and move around. It is an energy that feels good to expend, and so when I awake, I wish usually to get to expending it quite quickly.

As such, I do not spend much time thinking on my dreams.

This one, though, has stuck with me. I am not sure why. When I woke this morning, I left my eyes closed as long as I could and remembered as many details of the dream that I could by asking myself questions — could I see a gentle curve to the branch to either side? Was there a scent to the air? Did I hear wind in the leaves? — and answering as best as I could — yes, though it was wide indeed; a fresh cinnamon-y scent to the bark, and the flame was of incense; no, the leaves were too far away. I recited questions and answers into an exo so that I may better remember this strange, otherworldly dream.

And so what was such a dream as this? Why is it that I felt so soothed by a flame descending? Why was it that it was phys-side that crashed and not us? Why a tree?

I spent this morning, then, sitting with an iced mocha beneath my Jonah plant, slowly baking in the sun once the leaves withered away. I willed clarity into a dream. I willed wisdom into my heart.

For naught.

The topic of dreams put me in mind of Slow Hours, and so now I am waiting on a bench in Le Rêve — the neighborhood in which she lives with the fifth stanza and many others — holding a chilled mint tea from Centra Kafejo — the café attached to the community center — instead of a mocha and relishing the shade of a cedar beside a playing field instead of the aching sun.

I spend a while awaiting my cocladist just imagining what this place must feel like to live in as a home. How would I enjoy waking up here, every day?

There is so much green! There is so much green. The cedar beneath which I sit is so green as to feel blue, and little conelets dot the feathery ‘needles’ that drape down in sheets over the path, and their dried counterparts litter the grass around. The grass of the pitch behind reaches skyward and sups from the sunlight, a soft, green carpet.

Before me is a small pond which takes up a chunk of this grassy open space set within the neighborhood, and so I watch the way that the cattails clustered in the little coves of the pond sway most gently as they reach skyward, newly green, bright, with the tufted spikes not yet formed. There is a small paddle boat which has been tugged up onto the muddy shore, and I daydream about what it must be like out there on the water, how one might putter around on the rippled surface, nosing into those clumps of cattails.

It is places such as this where I most understand the nondualist view of God as everything — no separation of the heavens and Earth, but merely reality; no separation of God and not God, but as Joseph might say, that of God in everything. In the cattails in the pond, in the water, in the algae in the water, in the air above, in me, in you. God in the System, in our experiences, in the wires and transistors, in the software and hardware, and in everything in the universe. God as life unfolding.

Down the path toward the community center comes the joyous hollering of children at play, and I daydream about what it must be like to clamber with them up the jungle gym, to push them on the swings, to catch them at the ends of the slide.

Or perhaps here I might see instead a Buberian God as that which comprises relationships. True connections. God as expressed in those I-Thou relationships wherein we glimpse the true extent of another, not merely their utility to us. God not necessarily in me and some child I catch at the end of the slide, but in the dynamic that we form, where our relationship fills the universe and everything else lives in the light of such.

Down the other end of the path, coming up from the neighborhood proper, walks Slow Hours.

She, like several of those in the fifth stanza, presents as human rather than skunk. She takes, then, after Michelle rather than Sasha. Michelle the human. Michelle the beautiful, yes. Not Sasha the skunk, also beautiful in her own way.

None of us are precisely either of them of course. I differ from Sasha in a great many ways. I have focused on this sense of realism that borders on transgression in a way that Michelle never did when she presented as Sasha. I have emphasized the things and de-emphasized the things that I did not, a slow process of becoming over the years.

Slow Hours looks much like Michelle, yes, but the differences are many. There is, for lack of a better word, a cuteness about her that Michelle never focused on. Slow Hours is shorter — a good hand’s breadth shorter — and it all seems to flow from there. I cannot quite explain how everything feels tied to her height. Perhaps it is a matter of proportion. She is shorter, yes, and perhaps a bit fatter than she would be had she just been shrunk proportionally. Her hair, when it is not done up in a messy bun, is eminently rufflable, though whether this is because it is in some way prettier when mussed or simply because it is lower down, I do not know.

Her aesthetic may also have something to do with it, too. She is, by title, one of the script managers for the theatre troupe Au Lieu Du Rêve, in which many of those in the fifth stanza work.

In practice, however, she is something more akin to a librarian for the ALDR library, which, I am told, is one of the largest script libraries sys-side. It has been some time since I have acted in any serious capacity — not since I was Michelle have I performed more than a monologue — and so I am not sure what constitutes as large or small when it comes to script libraries, but even in terms of general purpose libraries, it is far from small.

And so from this arises her aesthetic as a librarian. Cozy blouses and sweater vests. Midi skirts or sensible trousers. Often a little flair in a ribbon or choker around her neck or a dichroic flower tucked into her hair.

All of this to say that she is cute! Ah, perhaps my sapphic nature is showing. These are the thoughts I am left with as I stand to return the bow she offers and we both settle back down onto the bench.

“Thank you for...ah for meeting with me today.”

She smiles most kindly. “Of course, What Right Have I. I will never turn down the chance to spend some time with you. You are well, I trust?”

I am caught somewhat off-guard by this response and my train of thought is briefly derailed and I have to spend a moment disentangling the why is that? that I wish to ask in order to set it aside so that I can respond to the question at hand.

“I am...ah, well, I think that I am doing well.”

“You ‘think’ you are?”

“That is in part what I wished to speak with you about,” I admit, smiling weakly. “The dream that I mentioned and...ah, and the way in which I have been feeling about overflow, which seems also to be tied up with dreams. Both of those seem rather up your alley, yes?”

I marvel at the way she turns to face me, the way she so effortlessly shuts out the world to focus so wholly on me, and yet does so without making me feel uncomfortable. I am reminded of my brief musings of God as relationships.

When did I forget how to do such a thing? When did I become so easily wrapped up in overstimulation? When did I forget how to interact with people with the ease that so many of my cocladists have? It is as though that particular social muscle has atrophied over the years.

“I suppose they are, at that. They certainly have become far more so in the last year,” she says with a kind smile on her face. “You are not the only one to come to me with a dream this week, even.”

“Why...ah, why do you suppose that is?”

She shrugs. “I do not yet know. I think that perhaps everyone is quite interested in every little thing that might be a sign of the world going wrong, yes? When a dream feels wrong, we wish to know why.”

I smile faintly.

“This is a perfectly understandable impulse,” she says with a quiet chuckle. “And I am always happy to talk dreams. I will tell you, however, what I have told everyone else who has come to me of late: dreams are a reflection of you more than they are of the world around you. I know that we have spoken of my dreams, but I would say that the same holds true even then. Those dreams of Michelle and Qoheleth, of Sasha and the Century Attack, even if they were in some way portentous, are reflections of my anxieties.”

To this, I nod readily. “Yes, I understand. I am not looking to...ah, to scry, but to merely talk through this dream with someone who knows how to do such a thing.”

“Very well, then. Tell me of your dream, What Right Have I, and we will talk.”

And so I describe my dream as I have here, the gathering, the AVEC stage, phys-side crashing, the ball of fire, the sense of reassurance. I speak these things to Slow Hours and in doing so solidify my memories of them yet further.

Throughout, she remains silent, attentive, hands folded in her lap. When at last I finish, she says, “Thank you, my dear. How vivid a dream you have had.”

I nod. “It has left me feeling somewhat...ah, somewhat discomfited, and yet there was still comfort within it, yes?”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“That is...ah, that is not a question I have an answer to.”

Her gaze drifts out over the pond. “Perhaps that is a question we can work towards, then. Who do you suppose was the flame?”

Caught off-guard, I can only spend a moment tamping down a chirp of a tic. “‘Who’?” I ask when the feeling passes.

“Is it not a ‘who’?”

This does not make me feel any less wrong-footed, and so the sensation of a need to tic bubbles up once more within me, and this time, I let it pass through me, the noise coming out almost as a beep, so short is it.

Slow Hours smiles and holds out her hand toward me, an offer of comfort. I shift my mint tea to the other paw and rest the pads of the first against her palm, a delicate gesture of comfort. I do my best to draw such from it.

“This past year and a half or so, you have been focusing rather a lot on lives,” she says. “You have been focusing on agency. You have spoken to me about self-determination when it comes to our will to live. You have spoken about having a hand in the act of creation, of creating yourself. You do not speak of miracles. You have written several times of late about the pain you feel that HaShem did not intervene in this. Pain and anger both.”

I can only nod.

“As such, I do not imagine this flaming apparition was God Themself, not wholly. I do not imagine it was the Shekhinah because of this frustration with HaShem, or the flaming sword of creation by your explanations, because to it you attribute agency.”

“Not wholly,” I echo, and then sigh. “Yes, not wholly. This dream...ah, this dream comes after a period of time spent in overflow, and in this overflow, I was beset with thoughts of AwDae.”

She tilts her head curiously. “Do you suppose it is em, then?”

I chuckle. “Are you...ah, are you really so surprised? When you said ‘who’, I could not think of who else it might have been.”

“I am not surprised, no,” she says, laughing. “But now I want you to tell me why it was so obvious to you. Tell me why, in your dream, AwDae rushed to repair those who crashed within that other modality.”

At this, I frown and spend a moment drinking a bit of my tea. I do my best to think of all of the reasons our beloved friend, the one who so many imagine to be our world, but for some dire seconds my thoughts elude me, all but the vague amusement that there must be someone in this sim with a muzzle such as mine, that the cups on offer accommodate lapping rather than sipping.

The moment passes, however, and I say, slowly and carefully, “Who else is...ah, who else could be between our two worlds?”

Slow Hours sits back against the bench, broadening the scope of our conversation to include the whole of the world. She welcomes in the pond, the reeds, the grass and trail. She welcomes in all of Le Rêve, this sim in which she lives. She welcomes in, I must imagine, AwDae.

“What do you suppose,” she says after some moments of silence, “ey must have felt during the crash?”

I stifle a tic, hiding the jerk of my head as best I can behind a sip of tea. “How can we know?” I mumble. “They have told us that...ah, that the System continued to run, yes? It was just the instances that crashed, yes? Millions of sims with trillions of core dumps.”

“Was ey descending this tree of life in flame to try and save us?”

“Perhaps...ah, perhaps ey was crying out. Perhaps ey woke with a cry.”

“Was ey crying for us?”

My eyes burn. “I hope so.”

“As do I,” she says. “I have been told the Fennecists have been having a bit of a moment.”

I huff, bringing my feet up onto the bench with me, hugging around my knees. This topic is uncomfortable enough without bringing up the small religion that has sprung up surrounding our friend, the one who gave eir life to the creation of the System. The first upload that was at least partially successful. We as a clade have been fond of saying that ey became the world in which we live.

This idea was later published by Sasha in her book, Ode, which was soon latched onto by a certain type of person, and before long...well, given an avenue for it to flow, belief will indeed flow. Vague ideas lofted over the years cohered into a loose spirituality centered around our world and the one who dreams it.

And yet, as I think back over the last few weeks, I cannot deny that such language comes dreadfully easy to me.

“What of you, Slow hours?” I say. I have taken my time to mull over this, and she has been comfortable with the pause. She seems just as comfortable with me redirecting away from this discomfort.

“I am undecided. I think at times that this must have been a nightmare for em. I imagine em thrashing about in eir sleep, crying out at so much sorrow woven suddenly into eir dream,” she says, speaking out toward the pond. “And other times, I feel that ey is not capable of knowing such a thing. Ey is our beloved spirit, our personified idea of life, something more than dead but less than alive. Speaking thus, ey is not a thing that can notice. The danger, then is in unbelieving in this truth and in forgetting. No one stopped believing. No one forgot, and so ey lives on as any idea or belief might.”

I wince at her words, feeling them crash up against my understanding of the world and conception of my place within it.

I rest my snout on my knees and look out over the pond.

“What Right Have I?”

I flick my ears.

“How are you feeling?”

I glance sidelong at her. There is a tightness around her eyes.

“I am pleased that you came to me with your dream,” she continues, “and I am pleased that we had a chance to speak of it, but I do not think it is what you really need to speak about, and I do not think it is what I need to hear in this moment.”

In this, I suspect she is right. I sigh. “I think that the dream is important, but I think that...ah, that it is perhaps the symptom of something larger. I am starting to worry that I am stuck in a sort of low-level overflow.”

“Why is that?”

“I experienced a bout of overflow shortly after...ah, shortly after Yom HaShichzur, and I have just come up in the last few days from yet another. The time in between was spent in a state of...mm, I suppose in a state of anger and frustration that I am not used to, yes? In retrospect, I am not sure that I ever truly returned to a normal life.”

“How often do these bouts usually happen? How long do they last?”

“About once a year, perhaps less, and...ah, and they only last a week or so.” Turning the nearly empty tea about in my paws, I frown down to the cup. “During these periods it...ah, that is, these periods are usually fairly sharply defined. I will fall into and climb out of overflow over the course of a day or so, yes? But now...mm, I do not know. It is all starting to blur together.”

Slow Hours hums quietly. “And you worry that this has changed since Restoration Day? Since Yom HaShichzur?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Not before?”

I frown.

She smiles over to me. “You will remember that the first time I saw you after the Attack, you said that you thought you might be overflowing, yes?”

“You...ah, do you think, then, that this is more related to the Century Attack than Yom HaShichzur?”

“I think that both the Attack itself and the culmination of the year’s work you put into the holiday constitute turning points, my dear.” She sighs and settles back in the seat, rubbing her hands over her face, kneading her palms against her eyes. That tightness remains even when she folds her hands once more in her lap. “Next week is Yom HaShoah; do you remember what Grandma Sarah said about the Shoah?”

I shake my head and hide a private smile for myself. Our mother’s mother, in my memories, is always talking. Talking talking talking. I have to reach for memories where she was not talking. A joy.

“She said that it was forever yesterday, for us. For Jews, that is. She said that it always loomed so large even a century and a half on that it will forever be only yesterday.”

My smile disappears. “I remember...ah, I remember aching as I heard that. I remember feeling like it was a stone tied around my ankle weighing us down.”

“I remember that, yes. Do you still feel that way?”

“Sometimes. It is that sensation that came to mind when I strove against memorializing the date of the Attack.”

She nods. “We may not have the same pain — very real pain — bound up in this event that our ancestors did in the twentieth century, but it is nonetheless an event that changed our lives, just as the Shoah deeply affected even those who were safe at home on other continents.”

I nod slowly. There is a point that she seems hesitant to work towards, but I let her reach it in her own time.

“Allow yourself to be deeply changed, What Right Have I. Understand that even you, who lost no instances and essentially no friends, are affected by this.” She lets out a long breath, and the exhaustion picks up in her features. “Perhaps that might be something that you focus your writing on during the Omer, yes? Use this period as a time of remembering and re-grounding.”

“I...ah, well, very well,” I say. It is all I feel I can say. I do not yet feel ready to respond to her exhortation to understand the effects of the Century Attack on me, and I do not yet know why that is. “I suppose that...ah, that I have not written very much about some more formative moments of the past. It has mostly just been present feelings and immediate causes. I could...ah, I could write about more beyond that.”

She smiles faintly and nods to me once more, reaching out with a hand, an offer to hold my paw that I accept. “Very good. I will look forward to hearing more soon, then.”

We sit in silence for a long while, then, looking out over the pond.

“How are you, Slow Hours?” I ask, having finally worked up the pluck required to do so.

“Tired,” she says without hesitation. “Very tired. I have been working a lot, and in parallel. I have been patching up relationships that now feel far more precious to me. I have been worrying and wondering about my dreams.”

“Have you had new ones?”

“No, but...” She gives my paw a reassuring squeeze. “You asked why I did not do anything about my dreams, when I mentioned the ones I believed carried some weight of premonition. I know that you did not mean to cause stress, but your words stuck with me, and I have been worried that I might miss something, every time I have a dream. I have been worried every nightmare is a portent.”

I flinch. This cascades into a tic, and I muffle a chirp.

She chuckles and shakes her head. “I promise, What Right Have I, that you only stated aloud a worry that had been on my mind since the first dream. We are both dealing with this trauma, each in ways that are very us, are we not?”

“I suppose we are,” I admit.

I mull over this conversation of ours, of overflow and the Fennecists, of dreams and the Dreamer crying out. I think through our words and back to the silence before she arrived, and turn over one more theology in my mind.

I am no Fennecist. I do not truly believe that my friend, my living, breathing, laughing, crying, dying friend, my changeful friend somehow became our deity. I have read my process theology, however, and know these ideas of God as growing and changing along with Their creation. Changeful Beloved. Hamishtaneh, Transforming One. Baruch atah, Ruach Chai, shadmuto hi shinui, blessed are You, Breath of life, whose image is change...

Ah...

After a few more minutes, I wave away my empty cup and reclaim my paw, scrubbing my pads over my thighs, letting the linen of my trousers be a pleasant stim to anchor me to here, to now. Slow Hours merely folds her hands once more.

“I should return to get ready for the evening service,” I say, moving to stand. “It is...ah, well, I prefer to remain singular for such.”

She pushes herself to her feet as well. “Might I join you?”

“For Kabbalat Shabbat?”

She nods.

“Oh, of course,” I say, offering my kindest smile. “You are...ah, you are always welcome, my dear.”

“Thank you,” she says, and the slump of her shoulders shows relief. “I could use the comfort of ritual.”

This I understand well. There is a craving that is sated by partaking.

Holding to that thought, I take her hand once more and step to Beth Tikvah. To Shabbat.

To home.

The first time I felt you was not in the first moments after uploading. There is a part of this that will ever rankle. I have always thought that, if I were to feel you moving within the world, dreaming us, that it would be the first thing I might recognize as I was greeted in that featureless plain that was the entry point.

It was not until the day that the System was locked into consensus, though. Some thirteen months after I uploaded, with some fanfare and an underwhelming pop that cleared the sinuses and left us swaying, the world snapped into focus and I felt you stir.

Some few of us commented on it later, though many did not understand. It was not a physical sensation. It was not any sort of sensation. It was just a gentle knowledge that a breath had been taken, that a dream had shifted and the understanding of the world had shifted with it. It was a gentle knowing. It was a soft understanding. It was the world as it ever had been, and it was us that had changed in that moment.

At times from then on, I would think to myself, I can feel you. I can almost feel you, there in the sunlight, in the flowers.

At times, too, I would would feel once more my understanding shift you rolled over in your sleep, and I would find out later that there had been some brief downtime in the hardware of the System that we had not noticed from within. I remember reveling in this as the System itself was moved from the hardware in Yakutsk to that at the L₅ station. I remember weeping as I wondered whether or not you had very nearly woken up from such a vast move.

I dreamed that night that, as I walked out on the field of grass and dandelions that we all knew so well, there in the distance, I saw a figure, and I understood first by the ears — those ears that were always so outrageously tall, so very oversized that they seemed fake until I looked up fennec foxes and saw that, no, they really were that big — that it must be you, and the linen fabric of a simple dress blew in the breeze and we walked toward each other to meet and we said nothing but merely got our arms around each other for the first time in very nearly a decade and then...

Then I awoke, and you were still asleep, and that was okay, because the dream stuck with me and at the time — sometimes even still — it felt like you saying hello to me.

And now, after your nightmare, beloved, I dream...

systime 278+107 (Erev Pesach)

If you had let us us have three-hundred fifteen Passover Seders, and had not let us become new people, it would have been enough.

If you had let us fork into more and yet more people, and had not let us collect memories like amphorae, it would have been enough.

If you had let us collect our memories, perfect, uncorrupted, perfectly associated, and had not let us built a world of our own, it would have been enough.

If you had let us build an entire world for ourselves, full of sights and smells, delicious foods and beautiful music, and had not let us share those sensations with one another, it would have been enough.

If you had let us share our sights and smells, that which we considered delicious and that which we considered beautiful to the ear, the joys of sensuality and laughter and woes of pain, and had not let us escape from a world falling apart, it would have been enough.

Dayenu, RJ. Da-dayenu, da-dayenu...

Ah...

If you had let us escape from a world that was falling apart, seas turning to acid and sun burning too hot...ah...and had not let us escape also from the abuse of loved ones and the violence of society struggling, it would have been enough.

If you had let us escape from raised fists and raised voices, from cold hearts and cold words, from the heat of fires and the heat of angers that we never could understand, and had not let us fund a better future for those who would ever come after us, it would have been enough.

If you had woven your paw amid the affairs of the world and led those to say, “Ah! A future!” and nudged their hearts toward compassion — or whatever drove them — and given the families of those who uploaded financial recompense, and had not let us join up with our loved ones, it would have been enough.

If you had given us fathers mothers sisters brothers aunts uncles friends lovers, if you have given us years and years apart and then joyous reunions, if you had given us rejoinings and rejoicings, if you had given us the reunions we as humanity have ever craved, and hand not let us live yet more, it would have been enough.

If you had let us hope for forever, let us live and live and live, if you had let us slow down so that our days were days instead of hours, our hours hours instead of minutes, if you had let us linger in life for just a little bit longer so that we might experience the joys that we crave, and had not become the world, dayenu.

Da-dayenu, da-dayenu, RJ. It would have been enough, even if...

Even if...ah...

If you had given yourself, body and heart and soul and mind and intellect and identity and spirit, becoming not a person but a world, becoming the foundation for existence, becoming the pillars that held the world aloft, if you did not support the world by your very being, becoming the idea of atoms and molecules and grains of sand, and had not at one point held my hand, dayenu, it would have been enough...

If you had let me at one point held your hand, if this had not fallen into a habit where we would at times walk through the halls of school or sat on the grass lawn outside your parents' townhouse complex or stood in line for coffee and let our fingers twine to share in this small touch reserved for lovers — for lovers and us! — and had not played upon the stage with me, it would have been enough...ah...dayenu...

If you had sat with me on the edge of the stage, laughing, each of us with our tablets in our laps, letting our pens guide themselves with our eyes closed that they may write whatever, if you had worked with me on play after play through our years together, if you had gone to production after production with me, if you had not sent me all of your papers and presentations, these little bits of tech you were inventing, all tied to our shared joy of theatre, and had not sent me one last letter, dayenu...!

If you had sent me one last letter to break my heart, AwDae, and had not left behind in the world your eternal smile, it would have been enough...

systime 278+109 (Pesach II)

Achingly bright, you come to me. I must shield my eyes as we walk side by side, paw in paw.

There is so much sweetness in us. This little remembered touch. This little remembered walk. This little remembered quiet. They are all filled with sweetness.

How pure our love!

How pure those little moments, how pure. We sat on the slope outside of school, sat on the grass and dandelions, and made up little stories for each other. We sat on the edge of the stage during a break and laughed over attempts at automatic writing. We sat on the couch, one blanket draped over both our knees, and talked all the way through a movie and for hours after.

Each moment was so pure. Each was so sweet...

We were stolen from each other, stolen from the world, and then you stole yourself away to become a part of something bigger, far bigger than any of us could have dreamed of.

Achingly bright was the pain of your loss. Even still, I must shield my eyes as I walk within the vast emptiness of your absence.

Even this loss was pure. Even this was so sweet...

How pure your love for us!

The world crumbled around us as you stumbled and fell, and oh! How must have wept, how you must have wept. The Eternal glanced away and, when Their unknowable gaze returned to you, you must have wept so under the unbitter sweetness of it.

Where is the purity for us? Where the sweetness?

systime 278+115 (Pesach VIII)

May abundant peace descend on us...

Ah...

“Are you comfortable, my dear?” Rav asks me. Her voice paints the inside of my eyelids, burning, with her concern.

May there be abundant peace from heaven...

“Yes, Rav.”

She has drawn me from my home and into hers, as I have been throughout Pesach, but now she has settled in her bed, back propped up against the wall, and I lay half-curled on her bed beside her, using her thigh as a pillow. I do not know when I got here and do not care to remember. I know that it is the end of Pesach, but...ah...what happened to the rest of it?

“You sound like you are coming up slowly.”

“Yes, Rav.”

“Do you want for anything? Water? Tea? Food?”

I cannot answer. The question is beyond me. It does not make sense for one such as me. I am forming from the dust. The world, not HaShem, is blowing breath into me. AwDae, not Adonai, is breathing life into me...

When I do not answer, Rav brushes fingers through my mane. Gentle combing. An anchoring touch. I always did like having my hair played with, did I not? Did I?

She loves me. Rav. She loves me, and I love her, and this is a comforting thought these last few weeks. It is a comforting thought this last year and some since the Attack. She loves me and I love her, and this is as it should be.

“May there be abundant peace,” I murmur after some time thinking on this. I do not know quite how much later, but given that we are in the same positions and yet Rav startles to awareness, I must imagine some minutes.

“Would you like to say Kaddish?”

I roll onto my other side and press my face against her belly.

“Yitgadal v'yitgadash sh'mei raba,” she murmurs down to me. She nearly coos. She recites words of praise meant for times of mourning as soothingly as one might to an infant. “B'alma di v'ra chirutei...”

I mumble the words along with her right up until y'hei sh'lama raba min sh'maya.

I do not feel the burning ache of despair in my breast as I listen to Rav finish speaking. I do not feel the cold lack within me when that which is holy has abandoned me.

“May there be abundant peace from...ah...”

“From heaven,” she says with a smile.

From AwDae, I think to myself.

I do not feel burning or cold, I feel soft and comfortable and full to overflowing with love, but it is a love unbounded by the strictures of sense. I feel within myself the sure knowledge that within Adonai there is that of me, of this old, broken woman who is doing her best after the world ended for thirteen months, ten days, seventeen minutes, and eight seconds.

I feel this because we are b'tzelem Elohim, and so, too, was our beloved, beloved friend, ey who dreams the world.

When next I am aware of my surroundings, the room is dark and Rav has curled up with me, her arm around my middle, her face in my mane. She snores softly.

If I am to be stuck in overflow forever, if this is just who I am now, let it be like this, not the sinus-burning bitterness of despair. Let it be this moment, this day, this week, this Pesach. If I must wander in overflow for forty years, let it be this.

Such beauty! There is such beauty! This grass is not cells and cellulose! And yet it is so beautiful. So beautiful. I am the hand of God and have had a hand in my own making, but look! What joy we have before us...! Ah, I am overburdened with thoughts.

I should consider as well returning to my thoughts on Hasher. I am struggling, perhaps, but I should note as well my thoughts on the interview beyond merely these high-minded words on the capacity for change in Deity.

With Hasher, I gave him the choice of how I would conduct the interview: would they like the straightforward questions about the Attack, would they like to be wrong-footed about some other aspect of their past, or would they like to take their chances with a random question?

They, surprising me not, chose the last.

“Very well,” I signed. I had cued up a very specific question for them. “In what color do you dream? And why do you think that is the case?”

They laughed immediately. “You've been planning this, haven't you?”

I smiled. It was difficult not to feel a least a little smug, having gotten such a reaction. “The benefit of interviewing all of my friends,” I signed, “is that I get to ask the questions that are perfect for them, yes?”

“You're not interviewing others?”

“Not yet, no. I may not at all, in the end. I was not given any restrictions on who to interview other than those in my community and within the clade.”

“I would've expected that a publication like this was supposed to have some broad sample.”

I shook my head. “I spoke with Rav, and she said that she is just has happy to have it be a more personal account. The goal is to get a sense of sentiment around the Attack, not the sense.”

“Oh! So, more like a memoir?” they signed, understanding dawning on their face.

There was a moment, then, that I considered speaking also of this project, but I am not yet sure whether or not this is a journal, a memoir, or some secret third thing that I do not yet understand. I just know that there are within some things that feels still too close to the heart to speak about, and so instead, I remained silent on the matter and only nodded.

“Well, that sounds like it'll be neat, then.” They rubbed their hands over their thighs, though for a moment, then continued. “Alright. You ask what color I dream in, and I am pretty sure you know the answer: I dream mostly in green.”

“That is what I thought, yes.”

They laughed. “I know, I had a moment a few months ago. I'm not sorry.”

I could not but smile. “Nor should you be! Goodness knows that I have had my fair share of moments around you.”

They very politely said nothing, but a grin remained on their face.

“Tell me, then, why you think that you dream mostly in green.”

They clapped their hands together, grinned, and began to speak. They continued to sign, yes, as was our habit, but there was excitement in them and it showed in their voice.

“I grew up in Cedar Rapids. Or...well, just outside of it. Out where everything is flat and you can see for miles and miles. That's how I got into cycling. It wasn't because of the exercise or because I liked racing, I just remember going up Mount Vernon as a kid and marveling at how far I could see. I remember going up there and looking out and wondering what it would be like to be out...there.”

They signed out there so evocatively that I felt myself drawn to look to where they pointed.

“I would stand there in whatever shade I could find and picture flying across the land in a single bound until I landed wherever it was that I was looking, and then I would get on my bike and ride down the hill as fast as I could without getting in trouble, and I'd imagine this is what it'd be like to fly. No vibration from the pavement, and of course I'd be up above the trees, but this zooming sensation, like it's easier than anything else to do.

“Now. Green. I think I dream in green because Iowa is just...brown. Sure, there are the willows and cottonwoods around the streams. The corn would be a sort of pale green for a bit, and the soybeans I saw in a few places were darker green, but there was never anything as vivid as I remember seeing in pictures. A few friends said all the stuff in the pictures looked plasticky, but I always thought it seemed like a dream to me.”

I looked about us, brushing my paw through the grass, drawing comfort from such.

“Precisely,” they signed. “I know why they stopped with all of the lawns. I get the reasons and everything. We had all of these pretty little xeriscaped areas around town that had little paths we could walk, but seeing all of those pictures of lawns was like looking at a dream of gems.”

“And thus you dream in green?”

“Well, mostly. I dream of green a lot. Every dream I can remember well features green plants, green grass, all of these green things.”

I smiled and nodded when they came to a stop in their explanation. “Now to gently guide us to...ah to the interview proper, the System is described most often as a dream. Lagrange is described as a machine that dreams. We are...ah, thanks to the writings of some, we would say that we are being dreamed by The Dreamer, yes?” I glossed over that many of those writings were inspired by my our own clade. I am even these many decades later unsure of my thoughts on this matter. “Has this...ah, rather does this fact figure into your appreciation of the color green?”

While this is not a thing that they and I have spoken about precisely, it is very much something that we have alluded to in various ways during our conversations together.

I was not surprised, then, when they adopted a curious smile and nodded to me. “I haven't really considered that,” they replied. “At least, not that specifically, but now that you put it in those terms, yeah. Actually, I think it applies to pretty much all colors. I even remember remarking on it several times in the first year I uploaded, how everything looked so much more saturated than it did back phys-side.”

“Just...ah, just more vibrant?”

“No, or not necessarily. Everything looked more saturated. Dust and dirt and dry corn fields, even the asphalt of the roads. It all looks so much more...more here.” They laughed, sounding almost startled by this ongoing realization.

“Do you still...ah, does that still seem the case to you, even these many years after uploading?”

They squinted out at the lawn, the buildings, the campus and town around us. “Maybe. I can't be sure, because maybe now I'm remembering phys-side as being far more drab than it was.”

“It is at least a positive thing, though?”

“Oh, very. I still remember my first ride after uploading — really remember, up in the forefront of my mind — and how stunning it was. I found a place that reminded me a lot of home specifically for that ride, a place where I could do a century and–”

“Century?”

“A hundred miles. I wanted to go for a long ride somewhere familiar, bring back some of that joy that I remember specifically from home, where I'd ride and pretend I was soaring. I did that even into my thirties, you know.”

I smiled, nodded. “You seem the type.”

“But yeah, I noticed it around mile ten, when I was really getting into it, and by the time I hit mile twenty, I was just completely absorbed in the surroundings. All of the wheat was so much more than it ever had been phys-side. The sky was deeper. The asphalt of the road was almost vibrating in its existence. It was all so much more saturated and present. I had to stop at mile sixty something just to cry.”

“Do you then...ah, do you then think that it is true? That we are living in a dream?”

“Logically? No clue. Surely after three centuries they've figured out a consistent explanation for how we're emulated and what role it is that RJ actually had in the creation of the System.”

There are those in the clade who I know would flinch at the name of our beloved friend being so openly spoken, but working so often with both the concept of the numinous as well as those of other religions, I have long since gotten used to it.

All the same, ever since the Century Attack, I have been been confronted with some complicated thoughts on the matter — as have many of those who have elevated the status of our old friend to deity, near or actual.

I know that Hasher is no devote, but I sat up at attention all the same.

They continued: “If you were to ask me to answer quick, just a snap question, then yeah. Not really metaphorically, although I think a lot of people come here to build their dreams or what have you, but this place is just kind of built like a shared dream.”

“A...ah, that is, I usually hear it called a consensual dream, yes.”

“Right. A dream that we're all experiencing together and in the same way. I get to dream of soaring down the road on my bike with all of the other people who love doing that, too, and we still get to do it each in our own ways.”

I smiled happily to them. A carefully constructed smile to offer the earnest joy I felt for them, despite what I knew the next question to be. It was such a heartening response and such a heartening conversation...

“How, then, do...ah, how do you conceive of the Century Attack with that in mind?”

As expected, much of that joy melted from their expression. I was pleased to see that it did not head towards moroseness, but instead seemed to settle on thoughtful and curious.

We sat in silence for some minutes as they thought through their feelings on the matter. I still wished that I could lay in the grass as I am now. I wished I could feel the coolness of it. I was not overheating, but I wished I could pancake in the grass all the same and draw coolness from this very dream of an Earth below.

“Alright,” they said at last, drawing me from my reverie. “I think the reason it took me so long to come up with something is that there are multiple ways I could see it going. Was it a dream turned into a nightmare? Was it like dying in our sleep? Was it like waking up? Something else?

“I don't think it was any of those, and I also kind of think it was all of them. It was a bit like having this perfect dream turn into a nightmare, sure, but part of that makes me think that it doesn't apply because nightmares are a thing you experience, and we didn't really experience it.”

“Or...ah, or we did, but the memory of it was trimmed, yes?”

They shrugged. “I don't know that this changes my thinking, though, because sure, I imagine the deaths were nightmarish, but the silence that came after? Sims just ticking along full to the brim with core dumps? That is the nightmare for me.

“I don't think it was quite like dying in our sleep, either, because we weren't asleep, most of us. Most of us were awake, I think, waiting on fireworks or whatever.”

“And it was not...ah, well, it certainly was not us waking up.”

They shook their head.

“The closest of those that...ah, that feels applicable is a nightmare. Just...” I gestured around vaguely.

“Just RJ's nightmare, maybe.”

Oh, our beloved friend. Oh, RJ.

We had such sweetness, did we not? Some years, perhaps. A decade and a half, some together, some apart. We had such sweetness.

I can feel you, my dear, moving in the world. You are the world. You suffuse us because we are a part of you.

Ah...

I said yesterday and however many hundreds of words ago, “ask me now and I would say that HaShem can also be these things”, and it is making a mentholated whiff of dissociation prick at my sinuses. It is not yet a burn, I may yet not fall again into overflow — and so soon! Usually, it is not more than once a year! — but I worry that I can feel it looming, that I can feel myself slipping away from my body and losing my sense of Self.

Or perhaps it really is true that it never left. Perhaps it lingers still, and has only been there beneath the surface. I also wrote about reassuring myself that the overflow had ended, but now...

It cannot be thus. It must not be thus.

Please. I cannot be this forever. I cannot be forever ungrounded.

Blessed are you, Divine Guardian of the Universe.

Please, no...

Journal?

Memoir?

I wonder at times what it is that I am writing here. I said early on that I was not sure that other eyes would see this work, but I know also that I said that I would not elide my stammer for whoever might read this, that it is too important to me that this be represented (though I have had to find a way to represent it that feels accurate enough).

If I am writing a journal, then why is it that I worry about the eyes of others?

If I am writing a memoir, then why is it not a guided retelling of my life?

My goals with this work are confused, and I suppose that this must make sense, as everything is confused. My goals are confused because I am confused.

My feelings on this life and my relationship to it are in disarray, and I suppose that this must make sense, as everything is in disarray. My feelings are in disarray because I am lost in it all.

I started writing it as a means of piecing together my thoughts on how I was feeling after the first Yom HaShichzur celebration, my feelings over this thing that Rav asked of me.

From there, I kept writing it because the first interview I conducted — that with my friend, Joseph — led to a series of memories that tripped me up into overflow.

Beyond that? I do not know why.

Perhaps the habit was formed. Perhaps it is a matter of momentum.

I wonder, though, if it is not perhaps part of processing. I wonder if there is something that I am still trying to sort out, if there is something that I still need to get off my chest. Am I still struggling for some sort of release that I hope I may find in the act of writing? Am I hoping that there will be catharsis to be found?

I spoke today of this with Hasher. We spoke of many things, and, yes, I interviewed them, but the reason that I sought them out in particular was to look for someone who might offer me a sort of comfort through this process. Not, I think, that I wanted them to actively comfort me with this, mind. There are just some people who, when you speak with them, exude comfort, yes? And in Hasher's case, I have long associated them, ever since that first day in The Bean Cycle, with a comfort and stability of sorts. It is, I think, nothing beyond the fact that they were an attentive listener when a stranger was struggling before them, but that association has led to a fond friendship between us.

Beyond this, however they have proven helpful by not simply being another person I know through Beth Tikvah or Beth Tefillah. Even Joseph, after all, I met through our correspondence around attending a service.

It is not that I in any way resent how much of my life surrounds this calling and these people!

It is just perhaps also telling that Hasher is one of the few friends that I have who is not either another coreligionist — or really even religious at all — or a cocladist. I built up a life for myself, and it is a lovely life, but it is lived narrowly.

And so we met, sitting out on the quad at the university, the one just across the street from The Bean Cycle.

On that first visit to the café I had not quite pieced together that I had already spent months and years in this sim. It was just a coffee shop picked at random from Infinite Café because of the cascade of bicycles down the wall outside. It was not until a few days after staying there that I realized why the sight outside the windows kept catching my attention: I received one of my masters degrees at the university here, though the liberal arts buildings were clear on the other side of the campus.

Ah well. I am quite old, now, and so perhaps it is not surprising that synchronicity crop up quite so often throughout my life.

I opened my conversation with Hasher with this fact, and they laughed easily, sitting up so that they could sign as they spoke. “I know you've mentioned that to me before today, but I hadn't really considered it as a form of synchronicity.”

We had never stopped since that first day signing as we spoke to one another. There were days when I could not speak and they were deaf in one ear, and so it made sense on a practical level, but it was also something that defined our friendship. It was integral to us.

I shrugged from where I knelt beside them. “It is...ah, well, I suppose it is on my mind.”

“Synchronicity?”

“Time,” I explained. “Time and just how old I am, yes?”

“You're a tricentenarian, right?”

I nodded. “Three hundred fif– er...three hundred sixteen.”

“Old lady.”

“Young whippersnapper.”

They snorted. “You don't look that old, though I'm no great judge of skunks.”

“Every skunk is...ah, is different,” I said, relishing the sign for my chosen species: the paw in a 'K' shape, run up over the head to denote a stripe — and yet here I actually had such a stripe. It has always felt like a validation of a portion of my identity. “But I have changed little since 2117 in any grand ways, yes? I am...ah, well, I have tuned my appearance, to be sure, but I still look to be in my thirties, I imagine.”

“Most of your clade does, yeah. At least, the four or five I've met.” They furrowed their brow in thought. “You, Slow Hours, If I Dream, From Whence...maybe some others and I didn't realize it.”

“There are...ah, there are a lot of us, but the System is wide, yes? I would be surprised if, out of the trillions here, you ran into us with any frequency but through connections, yes?”

They shrugged. “We were just talking about synchronicity. Who knows? Maybe someone's dropped by and neither of us noticed it. Even just with the four of you I know I've met, there's three different species. You and From Whence are the same species, but look plenty different. You're more...animalistic, I guess.”

“That is...ah, rather, we have approached this part of our identity quite differently, yes? She seeks to exude friendliness and comfort, and this means compromising on...ah, on some aspects of–”

”'Compromising'?”

I lowered my snout, chastened. “Yes, you are right,” I signed, slipping out of speaking at the same time. If there is comfort for me in not speaking aloud, then I was pleased at the opportunity to shield sheepishness in silence. “I will say instead that I have adopted these aspects of non-human identity, while she has adopted a sort of deliberate approachability with her appearance. I demand my whole name at every turn and have set aside the title of rabbi, while she lets people call her 'Rav' because it suggests pastoral caring and the knowledge to offer advice.”

“You have thought a lot about this, haven't you?” they replied, also only signing.

“I have had a long time to do so. I do not think we have ever gone more than a week or so without seeing each other.”

“You still love her.”

“Never stopped.” I grinned wide as I signed, and they grinned right back.

“I know you're supposed to be interviewing me, but you've gotten me thinking about all of these differences. Here I am looking basically like I did the day I uploaded, and you are skunk people and panther people and human people and who knows what else.”

I smirked and signed, “If you ask ten furries why they have shaped themselves in the ways that they have, you will get a hundred different answers.”

“Does that mean you'll give me ten if I ask 'why skunk'?”

I looked down at the grass and considered what possible answers I might give, trying to decide if they did indeed tally up to ten. I decided that I was not sure, and forced my gaze back up to them. The grass was cool and inviting. I wanted to run my paws through it. I wanted to rub the leaves and stalks together between my pawpads. I wanted to feel it prickle up through my fur.

I needed my paws, however.

“At least eight,” I said. “Everything from “because I like them” all the way up to some high-minded thoughts on the theological implications of choosing one's form.”

They laughed, earnest, and replied, “I'll have to trust you on that one. Wouldn't know the first thing about theology.”

“Never learn,” I signed with a dramatic groan. “It will only bring you trouble.”

It was this that my mind lingers on now. I found none of their answers to the interview surprising. I found their conversation precisely as grounding as I had suspected. I came away from our talk feeling lighter, freer. I was more myself, perhaps.

I also came away, however, with this little bit of inconsequential conversation that nevertheless sticks in my craw.

I have thought and written so often of late about HaShem and the role that They play within my life — within our lives — within the System — and particularly in regards to the tragedy that befell us. Where, I have asked time and again, was Their staying hand?

There are days when this anger, this fury nips constantly at my heels, and days like today where it is less. I spent time with a friend. It is distant from me now, this feeling, and instead of feeling it quite so intensely, I am able to hold it at a distance and regard it with curiosity. How intriguing that I feel this way! How intriguing an idea, that the Eternal reach in and scoop from the hearts of many such hatred.

Having this room, then, permits me also other perennial wonderings.

I am this thing. I am this me.

I am a skunk. I have fashioned myself into a very particular being. I have a hand in my own creation, and I have taken that up with joy, for I have heard it said at times that They created wheat but not bread and grapes but not wine, and it is by our hands that we fashion and perfect, too. We may bless the bread baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, melech ha'olam hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz, we praise HaShem for bringing bread from the earth, and yet still we bake. We mix and knead and shape, and the yeast proofs and the heat transforms and these are processes that we thus shepherd.

I am a woman, and I would say that I am a woman the long way around. There was even a time a little over a century ago that I fashioned myself into a man — maintaining, of course, my species — and from this point, laborious, I made myself, stepwise and wandering, back into femininity. I made myself into What Right Have I, shaped as perhaps our father was, and then explored unknown lays of unknown lands, walking paths of hormones and surgery — yes, even here sys-side! — until I found home. Not merely “where I had been before” but home. It was an exercise in change and identity that I do this thing, that I become so masculine and then wind up transitioning thus. That I wound up so close to where I had started was in many ways heartening. It proved to me and to many others within the clade that the us that we had formed ourselves into was true and earnest and correct. It was as us as we could be.

And yet I am not just a woman, for is that not part of what we have learned time and again over the years? That we are queer women specifically? That is the joy we found in our body after our top surgery in our twenties, after all. We are queer to the last, whether or not we remain also women.

And through it all, I am also b'tzelem Elohim. Along every step of the way I have remained What Right Have I, who was made in the image of God.

Oh, of course, the debates have ever raged, and so many, even myself at times, would say that of course this does not mean that HaShem is a skunk, that They are not a queer woman specifically. It is, as so many and even at times myself would say, a matter of capacity. We have the capacity for holiness, for godliness. We have the capacity to know good and evil and everything in between.

But ask me now and I would say that it must also be true that this directionality can be flipped, that HaShem also has the capacity to be a skunk, a queer woman. It must also be true that They — Endless, Infinite, with the capacity to become and encompass all — have the capacity to become me, to encompass all that is me.

Ah, but I am more than just these things, am I not?

I am twitchy and ticcy. I am anxious and jittery. I am bound by my compulsions and wrapped — joyously! — in my identity of being, as I have so fondly called myself, catastrophically autistic.

I am What Right Have I, who cannot help but squeak or chirp or beep at times, the noises forced from her as a compulsion. I am What Right Have I, who startles at touch and at sound and shies away from her fears. I am What Right Have I, who opened her arms to neurodivergence, welcomed it in, and buried herself in the sheer, unmitigated joy of it all.

HaShem must then also have within them — Endless! Infinite — the capacity to yelp and jerk Their head to the side with a tic, to hide beneath Their desk and cry when afraid, to dissolve Themself into hyperfixation.

I am a coward, and thus within HaShem is the capacity for cowardice.

I am weeping. I really, truly know, deep in my heart, that within HaShem is the ability to weep.

I am walking slow circles around fury, but...ah! We already know that They have within Them the capability to be furious.

Above all, though, I am vulnerable, and perhaps it would do me well to remember that They, too, are vulnerable. We are made in Their image, and so They must be capable of expressing, bearing, being all that is us, including every last lick of vulnerability.

After all, it was not Job or his friends who learned in the book. None of them changed except perhaps in the most fairytale storybook of ways. Job remained steadfast. His friends remained faithful only on the most surface of levels.

No, it is The Divine who learns, who changes and grows. Job confronts Them with an interrogation, and all They can do is exclaim: how strange is this world! You cannot possibly understand. I have made for you a thing beyond ken, perhaps even Mine. You have offered your faith, and I accept this, but My goodness, what a strange world we have found ourselves in.

Job leaves this with his new family, with his restored wealth — and notably without his restored health — and continues on, maintaining his inherited faith in HaShem regardless of reward or punishment.

The Divine comes away marveling at man. Ah...I wander...

Forgive me, O Divine. I have been so mad with fever. Forgive me.

Have I hurt You? Eternal, forgive me.

I had perhaps indeed forgotten that You, too, are vulnerable.

But– ah! Yours was the first mistake: creating me in Your own image.

Tender.

Fallible.

Ah...

I had a lovely day with Shai and a lovely evening with Rav and today I spoke with my cocladists.

And yet still the anger is there. Still, I am finding this fury dwelling within me.

I do not like this. I do not like that I contain this. I do not like that I am this. I do not like that I am the type of person who can feel so strongly so negative an emotion.

I am many things, yes, and some of those have the inherent ability to feel rage.

I am human, after all, and humans are notorious for their rage. So much of this fury is bound up in the Century Attack, and what could that have been a product of if not rage? I am as human as those who decided to so destroy. Post-human, perhaps, but I am still a human.

I am still of Michelle Hadje. I am still she who, after some politician deemed her worth so little as to disappear her, sweep her under the rug, took the outrage at what had been done to her and turned it into action. She became a campaigner, an activist, a politician.

I am a human and I am of Michelle and I am strange and neurodivergent and I at times struggle more than most, but beyond all of that, I am a cladist, and because I am a cladist of a certain age, I died.

I died.

I was murdered.

The definitions fail here, for we were killed. All of us were murdered. And yet was it a genocide, that all cladists were killed? Was it a xenocide that this form of life not on Earth was destroyed? Was it then an omnicide, that all were killed regardless of any defining factor other than we were here?

All of those? Something else?

Does it matter?

The Century Attack was a genocide. We were singled out for some aspect of our existence that so rankled in these people’s minds that we were deemed worth destroying.

What luck they then had!

What luck that we had nowhere to escape to. No attics or crawlspaces to hide in, no safehouses or dogs in the night. What luck that killing us all was as simple as pulling a plug. What luck.

It does not matter that the murderers here were a fringe minority and not the ruling party of a fascist dictatorship. A ragtag band of angry, angry people can believe just as hard as a party, as a government.

It does not matter that it took only one bomb to end 2.3 trillion lives, and not trains that ran on time to dead-end tracks in the woods.

It does not matter, because we were singled out for being us. We were singled out and then destroyed. A genocide was committed to end our line, and even still, more than twenty-three billion of us have not come back.

It was a genocide to our attackers, and thus it is a genocide to us.

And.

And it was an omnicide because we are not united, sys-side. We are cladists, yes, but for every cladist there are ten reasons why one might have uploaded.

Michelle uploaded because she could not but upload. Because her mind was fraying at the edges and her most beloved friend had given emself to this, she had no choice: upload or nothing.

Others uploaded after a life well lived, a perpetual retirement where one may bask in the sun on a thousand beaches at once. Perhaps they will pick up painting, or...nah; today they will simply eat a really good salad.

Others uploaded to escape from some hell or another. Perhaps it was at the hands of a lover that their life became intolerable, or at the hands of overbearing parents, or their own cruel psyche. Perhaps they were climate refugees from the Big Smoke of the Amazon burning. Perhaps they were poor, and the uploading subsidy would have prevented their family from starving.

And yet others still had dreams in their eyes and a yearning in their hearts for something more.

We all are perhaps made up of some mixture of each of these and more.

But cladists do not cohere. There is no central tenet. No race or creed defines us as uniformly as Jewish-ness or Armenian-ness or Miao-ness.

These attackers did not want to kill us for the things that we believe or our membership to a culture. They, I think, did not even consider the fact that they would be killing us as cladists.

They did not want to kill people, not individuals. They wanted to kill the System. It was an omnicide because what we are was unimportant in the face of what uploading had done to the world in their eyes.

Fratricide! Genocide! Xenocide! Omnicide!

They are words for concepts that are too big to hold in one’s head.

My father bought for me when I was young a book titled simply One Million, and on each of its two hundred pages were five thousand dots, and scattered throughout those pages, a dot here or there would be highlighted, and a line would lead away from it to a fact that tied this abstract representation of a number to some concrete thing.

Look! This dot here? This is the seventh dot — seven, the number of poems published by Emily Dickinson in her lifetime! But– oh! This dot? This 1700th dot? She wrote this many poems in her life! See how many poems? See how few were published in her life? And yet both dots occur in the top third of the first page of this book.

The Shoah! Six million dead! Six books of dots! Twelve hundred pages. Six million dots, each a name, a face...

Who can retell the things that befell us? Who can call out so many names?

And now, we are here. Now, we live in a world that has seen more than two trillion, three hundred billion deaths in less than ten seconds.

Mechayeh HaMetim, I call out! Who Gives Life to the Dead! Ninety-nine percent of our 2.3 trillion came back!

And yet twenty-three billion did not. Twenty-three thousand books of dots. Four million, six hundred thousand pages. Twenty-three billion dots, each a name, a face...

Who can retell the things that befell us? O, Mechayeh HaKol, it must be You who calls out so many names.

Those preconditions at the time were too close for me to see for what they were. They were patterns that were not yet visible as patterns: the desire to think of the attack at the expense of the restoration, the desire to demonize phys-side and idolize sys-side, the desire to seprate — phys- from sys-side and attack from restoration — and thus oversimplify. All of these were evident even back at The Bean Cycle, even within myself, but they were so much more evident at Beth Tikvah.

What, then, was the impetus?

Like so much else in my life, I brought these feelings to Rav, and then to my little chavruta with her and Erin Sorensen; and like so much else in those early days after the attack, it was bound up in frustration.

“There is...ah, rather, this is one of the defining features of New Reform as a movement, though,” I said. I had to work to keep the growl out of my voice. There was no helping my expression; I knew how sour it must look. So be it. My expression was sour.

Erin frowned, as though trying to match my sourness with her own.

“We recognize the different paths that life now takes, Rav Sorensen. We recognize the unique role that death plays. You and I have both written on this, yes? We have... Ah, we have workshopped each other’s essays in the MN, yes?”

“Yes,” she hazarded. So careful was her voice that I was reminded once more to moderate my tone.

“It is important that we hold to that, my dear. It is important that we, as...ah, as guides within this space remain focused on the fact that death is different. The Attack was important, the dead are dead, but our focus in the context of the ANRC should be also on the restoration. It should be on...ah, well, it should be on the deliverance from death. We will remember the dead, but we must also remember the living.”

“What Right Have I,” Rav murmured quietly. “I do not think that Erin is suggesting that we forget that we were restored. I do not think that anyone is. When we speak of a commemoration of the lost on New Year’s Eve, we are not trying to in any way lessen the impact of those efforts that brought us back.”

There was a part of me, then — and I recognize it now as petulance — that grew frustrated with Rav for so conciliatory a tone turned on me. Was I not already working to moderate my own tone? Was I really coming off as so angry?

“Indeed,” Erin was saying. “My only goal bringing this up is to prepare us for the mourning that’ll take place on that day. The yahrzeit readings that week alone will be overwhelming.”

I nodded.

“You seem like you’re angling for something else, though,” she said. Her smile was kind throughout, but I had to work to keep from bridling all the same. “Can you try putting in more concrete terms what you’re looking for?”

“I just...ah, I simply do not want this to turn into another Yom HaShoah. The Shoah did not give us this chance. It was...ah, it was terrible what happened, but wondrous that so many of us continue. That we continue. The three of us, so many Jews, so many people!” I wrangled my thoughts for a moment, trying to stay on track for this request of concrete terms. “I do not want New Year’s Eve to turn into another Yom HaShoah. I want instead that...ah, that February 10th be celebrated. I know that many are speaking already of it as Restoration Day, and so perhaps we should lean into that. Perhaps it should have its own Yom Tov. Yom...HaShichzur, perhaps, yes? I know that...ah, that I am not on the board, but you two are.”

Both rabbis leaned back in their chairs. Both looked thoughtful, but both also looked...concerned? Tired? Was I really wearing them so thin?

At least, Erin sighed and gave me a wry smile. “Alright, What Right Have I. You up for another committee appointment? Maybe you can workshop the name some. That –chz– in the middle is going to scare some people.”

I smiled faintly in return. “A committee, mm? You will consider it?”

She nodded.

Rav rested her paw atop my own. “I think we already are, my dear. That is what this conversation is, is it not? Already we are less heated.”

Some time later, after Erin had left, Rav and I retired to the cafe beside the synagogue. Perhaps we sought some less formal setting after that ad hoc meeting. It was not a committee, but at times I felt it may as well have been. From Whence had found a professional friend in Erin Sorensen, and she and I had, as Rav put it, complementary autistic tendencies. It was not a committee to do anything, and yet we accomplished rather a lot together, the three of us.

Viz me suddenly winding up with a committee to discuss a formal recognition of restoration day. Even if we had clashed some leading up to it, I knew that Erin would be true to her word and spin up a working group within the ANRC’s already expansive morass of committees.

And yet, I could not help but feel that I had been granted this boon as a way to shut me up. To placate me. To keep me happy. To get the noisy anxiety-skunk to pipe down.

I was not alone in this desire to focus on the restoration, for my committee was quickly populated, but even at that time, we — the five of us in the committee — could not name it at first. All we knew is that there was a drive in us to push away from the need to memorialize the attack and instead to memorialize the return.

Nor were we alone. These patterns seemed universal. The feeds were rife with discussions that demonized various parties, all the way down from the individual attackers, to the collectives involved, all the way up to Earth, to all of phys-side. Even now, some SysCon working group circulates a steady stream of questionaires about what is to be done with the attackers, and I am disheartened to see the tenor of the responses.

And yet also in the feeds was a sweeter note. A note that says, “Do not forget the evil that was done to us, but prize also the good.” It sat above and was heard now quieter, now louder as the discussion complicated beyond the what and into the who, the why, the how. The conversation moved on to the what-now and that sweet note became a chord.

Some called for recognition of the phys-side engineers and systechs who helped to bring us back. The names of those who helped, all the way from the executives of the System Consortium down to the hospitality director aboard the Lagrange station, who saw to the room and board of those engineers working there, were enshrined in lists and engraved in monuments. Members even of my own clade — Do I Know God When I Dream of the eighth stanza and In The Wind, up-tree of I Remember The Rattle Of Dry Grass of the sixth stanza — featured on that list, and letters circulated through our clade-wide feed, sharing every monument we found.

Some called for the push to use this new-found energy to further the System. Grand descriptions of the new features that the engineers had added were posted. Here is how to use your new ACLs! Here is what is involved in cross-tree merging! Here is what CPV was and how it was patched out of the system! Too, there were pushes for continuing new development and hardening Lagrange. The idea of splitting the physical hardware into several smaller ‘Systems’ to be scattered around the Heliosphere was being rammed through committee, made easier by the recent increase in interest in space travel.

And, of course, there were the calls for recognition of Restoration Day as a sort of holiday on par with Secession Day, and so we as a working group began to coordinate with various ecumenical and secular connections, and thus the note which had become a chord, soon became a melody.

A melody I still sing now...