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 a 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.

In the face of all that has happened, it is perhaps worth noting just the enormity of that statement. We are both founders, both having uploaded before 2150, him nearly ten years after me. Despite this, he is older than me by date of birth by, yes, nearly ten years.

I am 316 years old, now, which makes Shai 326. After so many years, though, such an age difference no longer matters quite so much. Had we met when Michelle first uploaded, when his forty years old would have made him seem impossibly wise to my thirty-one year old self, perhaps it would have then.

Now, though, now that we have known each other for nigh on two hundred of those years — for we did not meet until about a century after Michelle uploaded — such a gap in ages is meaningless, or all but. Yes, he may discuss some aspect of life phys-side that I was too young (or not yet born) to have experienced, and thus I may rib him for being an old man, but beyond that: who cares? Certainly neither of us do.

Shai and I met when I for a time returned to Temple Beth Tefillah. This move was not due to any issue between me and Rav From Whence, nor even out of any differences between me and Beth Tikvah. In fact, although the seed of the idea was mine — that I should gain a broader perspective that went beyond merely participating in ecumenical conferences — the idea that I return to the congregation that had been our own before Rav built Beth Tikvah was hers.

I spent some five years then at Beth Tefillah, and while I found myself in the end missing Beth Tikvah too much and returned to this place that had long since become a home, I came away with, as intended, a broader perspective on our experience, but also friendships that lasted for many years after.

Friendships and more, yes, for Shai and I fell, shortly after I left, into a cycle of romance and best-friendship. There were plenty of good reasons, after all: we were both furries, of course, and both stripy creatures — him a badger to my skunk — with a peculiar approach to anatomy; we were both neurodivergent nerds; and we both had a queer approach to our bodies, leaning into a joyful muddling of gender and gleeful acceptance of fatness.

It was, as he stated at the time, an effect of me leaving that we became so close. My leaving Beth Tefillah confronted him with how close we had become, and even though I was hardly gone from his life, it was merely made more real, more pertinent to him that I suddenly be even that much more distant from him.

This is not uncommon between us — though whether 'us' here means cladists, those of the Ode clade, or just Rav From Whence and I, I do not know. Perhaps it is merely all people. Perhaps this is what is meant by 'absence makes the heart grow fonder': not that taking time away from a loved one reinforces how much you love then, but that taking time away from someone you do not yet know you love lets you realize just how much you love them in the first place.

It was true for Rav and True Name, yes? Two friends — the best of friends, to hear Rav tell it — who spent centuries working side by side, at times their every day working together, and then slipping into years with just the occasional coffee date to keep in touch. As do so many I have met sys-side, they drifted closer together and further apart to some internal clock that no one but them knew. Beloved friends. 'The old rabbi', as True Name called Rav, and 'the old diplomat', as Rav called her in turn.

And then True Name was killed.

Rav was confronted with her absence, and we learned — for I in this was her support as her trusted confidant and friend and sometimes lover — that absence making the heart grow fonder is felt most keenly when such an absence is a departure, and in this case, a permanent one. Rav found that she loved True Name after they lost each other.

There came a day in systime 226, Secession Day, when these two old, old friends met before lunch, a shared cup of coffee to recognize 225 years of the System as separate from Earth — separate and yet entangled, for they had both worked so hard to maintain this cooperation between the two! — and as a simple bit of downtime where From Whence might offer True Name some kind words, some affection.

“I went to make her a coffee at the machine in the hall, and I heard a yelp,” she said to me, face buried in my shoulder. “I heard a yelp, all I heard was a yelp. She was gone, and all I heard was a yelp.”

There was nothing that could be done. All she could do was weep for her lost friend. There was not even any way to prove that True Name had been killed in that conference room off to the side of the synagogue, or if she had instead been dragged off, or if she had quit under the agony of CPV. She spoke with systech after systech and there was no way to prove one way or another that a murder had been done within the grounds of Beth Tikvah.

We, thus, had to assume that one had, and so Rav From Whence wept and closed off the room to all and came to terms with the complex set of feelings of realizing love for another only when such love became impossible.

Rav found that she loved True Name only after she lost her.

Ah, but I digress, except to say that Shai and I lost not necessarily each other but a shared context, and from that loss, we discovered a love for each other.

We spent at first a year together before each of us decided, in our own ways that we made better friends than partners. There was love there, yes, and romance, but it was not the romance that we needed in the moment. I told him that I was afraid of so much instability at once — for Beth Tikvah had changed much in the time that I had spent away — and he told me that he did not yet understand love, and, after the year had come to a close, felt that he needed time to sort out his feelings on the matter.

We drifted into and out of romance over the years and decades, more than a century now. Never acrimonious, I think, though at times baffling. Why did we fall in love? Why did we drift apart? Neither of us could say.

Why, also, am I finding myself so shy of recounting this conversation?

I think that it– Well, no, I should just begin, and perhaps by doing so, I will better understand.

Shai, then, was one of my interviewees, and we met on the hilltop of Beth Tikvah, out in the field that stretched for some few acres. Green grass speckled with dandelions and daisies. It was a perfect day for such. Warm but not yet hot, asteraceae-scented air stirred by only the mildest of breezes. It was a perfect place for an early spring picnic, and so that is what we treated ourselves to. We spread out a soft blanket in the grass, laid out a few plates of foods simple to eat for those who eschewed humanity.

“Have you had much luck with your other interviews?” he asked once we had loaded up our plates with familiar snacks.

“I suppose,” I said.

“You don't sound so sure.”

“I am not, no. It is...ah, rather, it has been productive in the sense that I have accomplished the goal of interviewing. I have followed Joseph's advice and...ah, and structured each interview in one of three different ways, and there has been joy in that,” I said, speaking slowly to keep my thoughts as organized as I could. “And yet...ah, well, none of them are doing any favors for my overall mood, yes?”

He smiled. “I mean, you have seemed pretty ornery of late. Have you been able to put a finger on why?”

I scowled playfully at him. “Am I not supposed to be interviewing you, Shai? You are...ah, you cannot lob questions at me like this.”

“Sure I can,” he said, popping a grape in his mouth and chewing for a moment. “But we can get to the interview if you wish.”

“Maybe we can...ah, perhaps we can alternate questions.”

“Want to go first, then?”

I nodded. “Please. It will give me time to think of...ah, of an answer to your question.”

“Alright, shoot.”

I had already chosen to lead with the tactic of wrong-footing Shai, rather than twenty-questions or the expected first question, and so I said, “Tell me, then, of...ah, of your thoughts on uploading to Lagrange being a destructive process.”

He sat up straighter and frowned. “Well, huh. Let me think on that,” he mumbled, gaze drifting down to his lap where his paws had been plucking furtively at the links of a chain bracelet — a fidget or a charm of sorts that he kept in his pocket, one that I never saw him actually wear.

For my part, I tore a square of focaccia into smaller pieces, dipping them into a little dish of olive oil and chili flakes that we had set out for just such a purpose, eating them one by one.

“Okay,” he said at last, pocketing the bracelet once more. I knew that it would be out again before long. “It was really tough for me, actually. That's the biggest reason I didn't upload right away, you know. I could have afforded it. I had the cash put away and everything. I just argued with myself for a decade straight on whether or not I was comfortable with dying in order to live in a computer somewhere in Russia.”

“Did...ah, did the fact that Lagrange was moved to orbit change your mind at all in this?”

“I'm going to call this all part of the same question,” he said, laughing. Sure enough, the bracelet was once more tugged free of his pocket and run between his fingers. Flat links of rose gold clicked along his claws and brushed over his paw pads. “Yes, that was part of it. Not that I had any real issue with the S-R Bloc, just that I was confronted with two options: I could blow my savings on visiting the hotel they'd built the System into, go to space and miss the chance at uploading forever; or I could never have the chance to ever go to space because I would die, but potentially live in a place where I could visit countless sims set in space, live on a space station if I wanted to, do–”

“You...ah, you do live on a space station.”

He snorted a laugh. “Yeah, yeah, I'm a nerd, I know. So anyway, that was a part of me deciding to upload, but the rest was that I just plain got sick. There was a bad few years of the flu, and the last one just wrecked me. Left me with organ damage and I lost the feeling in both feet.” He shrugged, looking almost sheepish. “So then it was continue living with a healthy chunk of change but be medically disqualified from going to space, or upload and get some semblance of a normal life back, even if it meant dying.”

“Then...ah, did you still struggle with the fact that you had to die to live here?”

“Nuh uh. I think it's your turn to answer my question.”

It was my turn to frown, and though I did not have a bracelet to fidget with, I did have the hem of my tunic, and so I ran my claw along that, feeling for the way the stitches created a gentle rhythm beneath the keratin as it moved.

“Very well,” I said at last. “I think that...ah, that I am ornery because I do not understand how this could have happened.”

“I mean, they said it was because the collectives–”

“I do not know how HaShem could have allowed this to happen.” I felt the slow stirring of frustrating within me and did my best to tamp it down. My words were coming out as a growl. I did not want that to fall onto Shai. I did not like interrupting him.

When did I become so angry?

“What Right Have I,” Shai said, voice quiet, almost small.

I laid my ears back and offered a hint of a bow from where I sat. “I am...ah, I am sorry, my dear. I did not mean to get heated at you.”

“You can be heated all you want, skunk. I know you. I'm just...worried. I've heard you get upset before at things here and there, but it's always been just for a few days, tops. You've been in a state for a while now.”

“Pretty much since...ah, since we came back, yes.”

He shook his head. “I don't think so, actually. I think you went through a few phases after Lagrange came back online. Scared, happy, almost manic when it came to HaShichzur...it's really only in the last few months that you've gotten angry.” He frowned, added, “Not even months. Last few weeks. Basically since right around Yom HaShichzur.”

I wilted. “Basically since...ah, since Rav set this task for me.”

“Right, yeah.”

“I just...mm, well, I just keep getting stuck in the same thought loops that anyone who has ever dealt with theodicy gets stuck in: how...ah, how do we deal with pain this great? If HaShem is our guardian and protector, then how...ah, how do we accept pain of this magnitude and trust? Where was Their staying hand?”

Shai reached out to collect one of my paws in his own. “And I'm guessing you're stumbling into the same unsatisfying answers that everyone does.”

“Yes. It...ah, Rav told me...ah, that is, I spoke with Rav and she told me that satisfying answers are not what I need, and I suppose that she is right in this.” I give his paw a gentle squeeze before extricating my own that I may rub it over my thigh. Self-soothing friction. “I expect that...ah, that what she wants for me to do is feel these emotions and to burn through them.”

“And are you?” he asked, reaching for his own piece of bread to dip in oil. “Burning through them, I mean. Are the feelings lessening.”

I started to answer, then shook my head, offering him the best sly grin that I could manage. “It is not your turn, my dear. It is...ah, it is mine. Did you struggle, then, with the fact that your body had to die in order for you to live here? Even after...ah, even after everything?”

He laughed, and once more, the bracelet was retrieved to be wound around his fingers. “Right. Yes, I did.” He waited a beat, as though letting the possibility that this would be his only answer hang in the air between us. When I apparently out-waited him, he continued. “I had no illusions that I would live forever. No desire to, even. I just wanted to live...more. Just a little bit longer. I just wanted to live another few years, but my body was wrecked. It's hard to want to live longer in a body like that when getting new organs printed is a terrible, drawn-out process and they can't regrow fried nerves, anyway. It was another cost-benefit analysis thing, then: wait on a new liver and new kidneys and a new pancreas and still feel like I'm walking on shards of glass half the time, or risk being a failed upload.

“I just wound up going for it. I got my few extra years and by then, I figured I could just keep on going.

“And, before you ask, I struggled with the dying part all the way through. Even now, I wind up with a little bit of a twinge of oh fuck when it comes time to merge down. It got better when I stopped saying 'quit' and just stuck with 'merge down', because then it just feels like...exactly that. I split and experience things as two for a while, then merge back together into one. There's no ending of consciousness in there.”

“But...ah, but there was with uploading?”

“What would HaShem stopping the Century Attack have looked like?”

I sat up straighter, blinked, and frowned. “Oh. Right. Your turn.”

He only smiled.

“I do not know. It...ah, well, I suppose if we are going to look into hypotheticals, then it would look like Them changing the hearts of the attackers, yes?”

“Of all of them?”

“Ye-e-es,” I said slowly, sensing his trap even as I did so.

“And all of the ones to come?”

“Yes, Shai. All of...ah, all of the ones to come,” I snapped, then forced down frustration once more. “I am sorry, my dear. I will try not to get so snippy. I know what you are saying, what you are getting at, but...ah, but yes. Why should I not hope that Adonai turn the hearts of a bare handful over the years and decades away from desiring the death of trillions?”

He held up his paws, the bracelet dangling from where it had been draped around an index finger. “No, no, you aren't wrong. Sorry. This maybe isn't the best time to be having this conversation, huh?”

Shame burned hot in my ears. I splayed them in my deference. “I am sorry, Shai.”

“Enough,” he said, voice filled with kindness. “Ask me your next question. Something about the fear of dying with uploading?”

I shook my head. “I do not...ah, I do not want to ask that one anymore.”

“Oh?”

“It is not the question for now. Now...ah, well, I wish to ask you this: do you wish to live forever?”

For the second time that day, he said, “Well, huh,” and I had to hide a smile at this. He tucked away the bracelet in his waistcoat pocket — he was always such a natty dresser — and leaned back on a paw, hips canted to the side to make way for his tail. “Are you going to tell me why you're asking these questions after the interview?”

I shrugged, wobbled a paw. “I am...ah, I am still deciding.”

He chuckled. “Alright. Well, let me see...” He started to reach for his vest pocket again, forced himself to stop, and just patted it instead. “That's weirdly tough. Let me try rephrasing it, see if I can come up with anything. If I was guaranteed that I'd live forever, would I do anything different from what I do now?”

The rephrasing piqued my interest, and I arched a brow, curious.

“I don't know that I would,” he said after a few moments. “I think at first I might start forcing myself to slow down on things, say to myself, “That's okay, Shai, it'll be there when you get around to it next.” After a while, though, I'm not sure that'd stick around. I already slowed down as much as I needed to in order to live one century. I got a little slower in my second and third, but not by much. I read. I study. I go on EVAs. I spend time with my friends. I love you from either up close or far away, and I'm comfortable with that.”

“I love you too,” I said, smiling. I am grateful that we can say this to each other even when we have drifted out of romance. After all, although we had settled into friendship some years ago, we as friends still love one another.

“So, if I'm not going to do anything different if I'm only functionally immortal, only immortal as long as Lagrange is up and running, then I guess it doesn't really matter. Not along that axis, at least.” His expression picked up a smirk. “There's some real existential terror in true immortality, so maybe what I want is only to act like I'm going to live forever.”

“Terror?”

“What are you going to do when the last stars go out? Just sit there? Chill forever? No food, can't even stress-eat!”

I snorted a laugh. “What if I...mm, rather, what if we were both immortal?”

“Ugh,” he said with the utmost disgust. “Miserable.“

I laughed in earnest, then, and, as I have so many times done before, leaned against him harder and harder until he toppled over to the side, giggling helplessly. He is so small! So roly-poly! I am not a tall woman, and I am far from skinny myself, but he is a full head shorter than I am and far softer.

The rest of our day was quite nice. It is the day after Purim and we had the parties from the day before to recover from and recount, so we continued through that lazy lunch, just the two of us. We finished the interview in such a fashion, bandying questions back and forth, though none of them do I feel like setting down here. Not in this document. Not now that I have gotten this far.

Perhaps one day, I will. Perhaps one day I will reach into my memories and pluck my good days as well as my bad and set them down that I may remember them. Perhaps this will be one of those days: where, despite my anger and the work of conducting an interview, I had a picnic with a beloved friend. I told someone who I love that I loved them.

He and I share those words at least once every time we see each other. We share them regardless of the state of our relationship. We are comfortably friends now with no signs of drifting closer in the near term, but regardless of his thoughts on immortality, our fondness for each other has a sense of permanence about it. We love each other. I love him.

I love him and I love Rav From Whence, too, and I tell her such. We tell each other such! We love each other, my down-tree and I. We have twice over the centuries fallen into romance with one another and a few times besides that friendly sensuality, but we have I think always loved one another. In our dynamic is represented one of the many ways that Michelle Hadje loved herself, just as was the case with Rav and True Name.

That scared and proud and queer and strong and broken and beautiful woman who uploaded 285 years ago loved herself, and so we love ourselves, and so we love us.

I should focus on this. Should! I use this statement with intent. I should focus on love. I should focus on the love our clade has for itself. I should focus on the love I bear for Rav and for Shai. I should focus on those good days that I might at some point pluck from my memories.

But I cannot. I cannot do that yet, not yet. I cannot do that now because every time I think this thought, this should-statement that I promise myself is not a cognitive distortion, it is followed up in my head with while I still can.

O, Unnamable Glory! Where was Your staying hand?

With the overflow now out of my veins — maybe — I think, I hope — I stand tall and face You and say: where was Your staying hand?

It is a night of the savory tang of black vinegar and chili oil, of laughing over the fact that I can barely eat the noodles and yet that I can eat two dumplings at once, while the humans within the clade — and, at one point, the owners of the restaurant — have to bite the dumplings in half.

There will be another celebration in two days, when Purim comes around, and I am sure that, at that point, we will all gather with our own and throw parties that are very uniquely us. There are years that Purim will fall on our birthday, and it is those years when we will so many of us gather, take over some field or some enormous buffet and the room, the springtime will be filled with us.

This year, though, two days off, and we are merely here for a dinner, a chance to eat chicken and chive dumplings by the dozen and bowls of noodles the size of our heads.

It has been thirty-five days since Yom HaShichzur. Five weeks since I stood before thousands, stood before those here sys-side and those back in the embodied world and stammered my way through a short speech.

It has been two weeks since I started to be reeled back into my body, since the burning heat of dissociation was once more quenched, but still there is a prickling on the back of my neck that at times catches me unawares.

Tonight, there is such joy as I have not had in some time. Oh, But To Whom made us promise that we would not speak of the Century Attack. She made me promise that I would not speak of HaShichzur, too, because she knows me, knows that I do tend to at times go on, and she loves me and I love her too, and so I have not.

And so tonight there is so much joy as we celebrate our birthday.

After dinner, a few of us go for a walk, for across the road from the restaurant is a lake, placid, with a wide soft-surface path ringing it. Trees — Douglas firs for the most part, though there is a notable willow whose weeping branches reach nearly to the surface of the water, stopping just shy — line the path, alternating on which side. That road often has cars driving along it, for there are many who still like the things, but it is easy enough to cross, and the cars provide only the soft whoosh of the wind of their passing without much more. It is prosaic in the way that any town might at times be. It is soft. It is lived in, and loved. It is home for many, and we can feel that.

Rav From Whence and I walk paw in paw while beside us walks Unknowable Spaces.

There is within us I think a certain yearning for the void. There is a part of us that is avid for death — voluptuous, complete, and final death — and thus it looms large at times in our thoughts. Whether or not this is due to the traumas of the past, the ways in which we came close — so close — to death, we do not know.

It has, however, concentrated in various different ways throughout the clade. I do not myself yearn for death — none of us are suicidal, I believe, or none of us still extant on the System — but it does occupy a small part of my mind most hours of the day.

Perhaps such is inevitable for one such as me: I am a tricentenarian; I am an Odist; and I am one who concerns herself most with matters of faith. There is law, yes, Torah and Talmud and halakha, but among these are matters of the soul. I have written papers and papers on the shifting views of life and death within Judaism, of the ways in which we conceive of a soul, of what comes after the end. I have written on heaven and hell, and the return to the concept of Sheol, and the idea that has taken hold of nullity as what there is after death. There is nothing, we say, but the joy of life, and the never-ending silence. The tranquility of the world to come, we say, is the tranquility that others may have because we have left the world a better place.

Ah, but Unknowable Spaces!

She is one of those among us who splashes in death. She and Slow Hours and The Only Constant and a handful of others all together contain our death-thoughts. They do not just yearn, but they obsess.

She dwells in the realm of grief. She breathes the sorrow of loss. She lives through the pain, and in it, she finds holiness.

It would not be wrong to say that she has been busy since the Century Attack.

Despite our differing interests, we are still cocladists, and bear our similarities for that. We both have our hyperfixations. We both remain skunks. We both dress for the most part in loose earth tones, though she in skirts and blouses and me most often in linen trousers and a tunic. She will at times wear a tichel and at times a sun hat while I stick stolidly to my 'skunkerchief', as Rav so endearingly called it when first I adopted it, a simple kerchief tied to keep my mane out of my face and my hair, such as it is, covered.

“What Right Have I, From Whence says that you were overflowing,” she begins. Her voice is always so quiet and so calm. Another contrast with me, I suppose. Every time I am around her I am reminded of the ways in which we are comfortably contradictory. We are complements to each other in many ways. “How are you feeling? Has it let up completely now?”

“I believe so. I have...ah, that is, I am feeling better, though I have been left in an uncomfortable state of mind. I remain...mm...” I trail off, at a loss for words.

“You do seem a little bit more emotional than usual,” Rav From Whence hazards. “It is not in any way bad, you just seem more...labile is not quite the right word, but you are quite sensitive to emotional shifts.”

“That is...ah, I think that is accurate enough,” I reply, giving Rav's paw a grateful squeeze in my own. “Though I think that I am struggling in particular with the discomfort of frustration or...mm, I suppose it is a sort of fury.”

”'Fury'?” Unknowable Spaces asks, and I take what calm from the calm in her voice. “What makes you choose that word?”

“Anger is hot, but...ah, but this feeling is cold. It is steady, not flaring. It is almost respectful. It is almost kind. It is...ah, well, I am going to talk in circles, if I continue.”

She levels her searching gaze on me, and as so often happens with her when she has fallen into that very particular sort of empathy that she so often displays, I feel nearly translucent. I feel like she can see beneath the surface, can see some truer shape of me. She sees my soul. She sees that essence of me, and her empathy is borne of imagining what the world would be without it.

I bear it as best I an, though I can only meet her gaze in short moments before it feels as though such empathy will bleed me dry.

“Is this fury serving you?” she says at last.

“I do not yet know. It is...ah, I am still piecing together where it is directed.”

Rav speaks up, saying, “It sounded as though it was directed at HaShem.”

“It was...ah, it is, yes, for Their silence and distance, but it is also directed at death, for its complicity, and it is also directed at us, at humanity, for what we are capable of, and it is...ah, it is also directed at myself for my lack of control over my emotions.”

Unknowable Spaces nods, watching me still.

“I think that...ah, that I am still struggling to differentiate it from overflow,” I admit. “Even these many days later, yes? I am...ah, it does not feel quite...real, I suppose. Until it does, I do not think that it will be serving me, no. Until I can direct it, then...ah, then perhaps it will have meaning.”

“And this is why you say you have been left with this feeling after overflow?”

“Yes. It is...ah, it is not overflow, but neither is it wholly separate. It is– ah... I am talking in circles. I am still thinking in circles.”

My down-tree gives my paw a reassuring squeeze in her own. “You may if you wish, my dear. If speaking in circles offers relief, perhaps you should.”

I look down to my paws as they pad along the trail, claws leaving faint divots in hard-packed earth. I look down and I try to figure out what dividing line might be drawn between the numinous emotions of a mind unbound and mere fury.

“I think that...ah, that what I am experiencing is an earnest anger, but what I am missing is the words to express it, or even a clear direction in which it is pointed. There are options, yes — HaShem, the world, me, what-have-you — but...mm, well, that is all so vague. It is...well, I do not know the directionality. If I am facing HaShem and it is directed at me, what does that mean? If I look within and find it blaring out at the world, then what? And here I have said that it is pointed at all of those things, but I am...ah, rather, it is all so indistinct, and so it is difficult for me to piece together why I am even feeling it.” I offer my cocladists a weak smile. “An indistinct emotion that...ah, that I am not sure why I am feeling is a common feature of overflow, yes?”

It is some time before Unknowable Spaces replies, and we have made it another quarter of the way around the lake. “Do you miss your understanding of the world before the Attack?”

I furrow my brow and scuff my foot against a rock, figuring that I might kick it along the path for a ways as we walk. It is immobile, and I lose a half-step trying to figure out just what has happened.

Within me, that fury wheels about on myself. Stupid skunk, I think, and my inner voice is a growl. You look a fool. Stammering and tripping and cursing the world...

But no, even that fades as the direction of the emotion drifts away. I do my best to simply drop it, to set my anger down there by the rock and hope that it stays.

“I miss...ah, I miss that version of me who believed that something like this could never happen, yes,” I say at last. “I miss a world in which the Century Attack is unthinkable.”

Unknowable Spaces takes up my other paw, smiles her ever-sad smile, and we the three of us walk in silence for some time, paw in paw, taking the evening air.

I do my best to leave my anger with that immobile rock that I had tried to kick, and instead just count all of the different smells around. I try to feel the difference, without changing our grips, between Rav's paw and Unknowable Spaces's. I try to be present.

It mostly works, and we say goodbye to Unknowable Spaces with kisses to the cheek and smiles.

Rav sends me to bed with my own kiss, and now here I am, feeling as though my fury, that undirected emotion that I had left tangled around an immobile rock, is being reeled in as easily as had been my soul only some days prior, and I wonder what will happen when it at last catches up with me.

This morning, Rav From Whence has brought me coffee and a simple breakfast of pastries from the refectory, and so now it is my hope that my body shall be able to once more feel like a home to me.

I sit now with her just outside my door. I have eschewed the garden and my Jonah plant as not quite what the day yet calls for, and so we have taken up familiar spots on a low stone bench that is well shaded by long eaves and an ivy-weighted trellis besides. We sit beside each other and each focus on eating a matcha-custard-filled croissant and drinking a mocha as we look out over the flagstone-paved court, the two doors in the matching adobe building across the way — one green and one blue — that houses yet more who have chosen to live here for a while or forever.

We sit in silence and think our thoughts. I know not what my down-tree is thinking, but I am thinking a feeling that occasionally strikes me towards the tail-end of overflow. I am thinking about how it feels like my soul has been kicked from my body, has been left some small distance away, or perhaps not so small, and, as the fire of dissociation burns slowly lower, I am reeled back in by the rest of the world, back to the home that is my body, this form that I have chosen and honed.

Soon, I think, I shall no longer be quite so much a Platonic idea of a self and then also this body, one supposes, and instead be whole. I am being reeled in, bit by bit, closer and closer, and soon...

“What Right Have I?”

My reverie splits and crumbles away. “Yes?”

“I have been thinking of something that you said a few days ago.”

I wince. I know that I have in the past uttered small cruelties when I was so divided. “I was overflowing and–”

She chuckles and holds up her paws, shaking her head. “No, no, I know that. You are alright, my dear. It was not a bad thing. It was a reminder.” Her smile grew wry as she added, “It is rather silly, actually. All you said was that you miss Michelle.”

I linger a moment in silence, wondering at how this lead that is reeling me back in must be tied to every nerve in my body, because I can feel the way the last bite of pastry seems to be lingering in my teeth, and the heady, almost savory scent of matcha lingers in the back of my nose. I can feel the warmth of the mocha through the drinking dish held now in both paws.

Why do these senses make themselves known now? Why do I feel a tingle on my neck as though my hackles are raising?

“I do miss her,” I say at last. “I am...ah, I have been thinking about her rather a lot of late, yes?”

“As have I. I cannot imagine why.” She smiles, a weary expression, existentially tired, but not defeated, I am pleased to see. “I have been thinking of what you said because I have been thinking, also, of my reaction to both events. Both her death and the Century Attack. I have been comparing the two.”

“They seemed...ah, they seemed quite different to me,” I say after a moment spent thinking back.

“Did they?”

I blink. “Did they not?”

“I am not so sure, no. Or, rather, their presentation may have differed, but the core reaction, what I felt–” She taps a fist against her chest. “–was more similar than I know what to do with. I do not know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. I do not know whether I like it or not.”

“Well,” I start, reaching for some way to engage with this that will not kick me back further from this ground. “From what I saw, in both cases, you...ah, you found what needed doing and did it, yes? And in both cases, what needed to be done was to offer the emotional support that a spiritual leader such as yourself must.

“After Michelle quit, you saw to the spiritual needs of those in the clade who...ah, who desired such. You worked until you ran out of energy and then you collapsed in tears.” I smile faintly. “Or so you have told me.”

Her smile is faint, too, but she nods.

“And the same is...ah, it is also true of the Century Attack. You ran around that first night on the top of the hill, and you forked so many times over that I lost track so that you could...ah, so that you could speak with so many different people, yes? You did that all night and well into the next day, and then you fell to tears.”

“Yes. And in both cases, I oscillated back and forth between those poles until I found a new level. I am no longer the From Whence who walked up the hill on New Year's Eve any more than I am the same From Whence who stepped with you to Michelle's field.”

I get in a lapping sip of my mocha while she speaks, and smile when she finishes. “That is the way of changes, is it not?”

She nods. “But come, you have said that the two looked different to you, and then you have listed the ways in which they are similar. What are the differences, my dear?”

“Yes. Those were perhaps the core things: the helping, the grieving, the...ah, the becoming of someone new. I suppose it is the last, though that is apparent to me. After Michelle quit, you were...ah, well, you focused on the immediate and the personal. I know that you have lost those that you were close to in the Century Attack, but the loss of Michelle was...mm, well, it was so immediate, was it not?”

From Whence bows her head, and I suspect that we both feel a tug in our chests of a grief nearly a century old and still unresolved.

I continue. “With her loss, you dove into grief. With the Century Attack you dove into work. With her loss, you...ah, you asked yourself, I think, what you should feel. With the Century Attack, you asked yourself what you should do.“

“Yes,” she murmurs, nearly a whisper. She seeks out one of my paws with her own, and though I have to shift my coffee to the other, I readily rest my mug-warmed pads against hers.

“Tell me what...ah, what similarities you felt, Rav.”

She looks not at me, nor out across the flagstone courtyard as she had been before, but down to her knees, down where she hold her drink in her lap. It is some time before she speaks.

“Both made me feel small,” she says. “Both made me recognize how little control I have in and over my life. I spoke with Michelle a handful of times in the year leading up to her death, and there was a whiff of what was to come on her in that time. After Qoheleth was murdered, the tenor of our meetings shifted and I became sure of it some months before she did at last die.”

I flinch.

“I know that you do not like that language in relation to her, What Right Have I. I will not apologize for it, because it is important to me that I acknowledge this as a death in order to mourn her. I speak her name every year in October, just as we speak the name of any of the dead.”

My body pulls greedily at my soul, draws it ever nearer. It is curious to me that it do so, too: I am so used to the way this topic can be so fraught. I am so ready to fly from this bit of my past. It slips so easily between my self and my Self and wedges them apart.

Now, though, coming off this week of overflow, my identity craves instead unity, and perhaps that is overriding my usual hesitancies.

“I know,” I say after a moment of wrestling these feelings down to a manageable level within me. “It is...ah, rather, the language is not wrong, either. She is dead, yes. She died, and we mourned her loss as we would any death, and her memory is a blessing to us. I am...ah, well, we have been over my feelings.”

She chuckles and gives my paw a squeeze in her own. “Yes, but now we are talking about the ways in which these things are similar, are we not? Michelle's death and the Century Attack? And so now we must once more speak in terms of death.”

“I suppose we must.”

“Yes. In both cases, I was confronted with death. And yes, the scale was different. The emotions were different. I grasped at what I could, then, and held tight to my control. You know perhaps as well as I do the strain of trying to maintain control of oneself, but in both cases, I could not do it.” Her gaze seeks elsewhere. It drifts away from her lap and away from me, though it points at nothing. It is a concealing shift, a hiding of her gaze from me, undirected but for to escape. “I crumbled, my dear. In both cases, I could not do it. I could not hold on. I crumbled.”

There is a nuance here that I struggle to latch onto, just as my body, my physical being, struggles to latch onto my soul, to reassociate after so much dissociation. I hesitate to voice this nuance and must turn my words over several times in my mouth — seven times seven times, I was told, though I never manage quite so many — before I say, simply and directly: “I did not know.”

She shakes her head, and I do not know if she is smiling or if her face is contorted in some other emotion. “I have never spoken of it so plainly, my dear, because I have never had plain language for it, not until recently. Instead, I have said that events such as these spark overflow or that they have made me feel wrung out. I have used metaphors and circumlocutions, I think, as we all do.”

“Yes,” I agree most carefully. Even my clearest attempts at writing — and I know that this is not one — will need disentangling from an editor. “Tell me of crumbling, then, if...ah, if you are comfortable.”

“Of course, What Right Have I. I trust you perhaps above all others.”

I bow my head, bashful gaze focused on the last remnants of whipped cream on my mocha.

“After all, that is what I have been thinking about most these last few days. You said that you missed Michelle, and what flashed to my mind was the argument that we had immediately after she quit. I argued that she should have a funeral and you argued that she should not. I argued that she had died, and you argued that she cannot have, not truly

“I know that you left, then, and I know that it was out of your own pain– no, I do not fault you, and I will reiterate what I said when you returned, that I love you and that I have faith that both of our readings can be true.”

I nod in thanks, pleased that she cut me off. There is an itch on my pawpads, and it is not a real one.

“And, it is that argument that was a brick removed from the foundation that led to me crumbling. I mean only to share, there is no accusation in me.” She turns at last to face me, and her eyes are bright and her expression is dire and her voice yearns. “We fought about this most terrible of things. The things that I was feeling that moment were some of the worst I had ever felt, and yet you reached for something that I could not. You, who are a version of me that I cannot be. You were so bitter and so cutting in your logic that I could not understand. We both wept because we did not understand what was happening and how it was that we not being understood.”

I sniff at a sudden cloudiness within my snout, look away. I am not sure that I have it in me to think in words, to speak. My body clutches desperately for my soul and I cannot speak.

The sound is echoed by From whence, but she continues, still watching me. “I stand by many of my feelings, What Right Have I. I stand by my understanding that she should have had a funeral. During that argument, though, and after, I realized that I, that Rav From Whence Do I Call Out, that I had lost my grip on the situation, had fallen into a despair that gripped me in turn. Instead of thinking of the clade, instead of even thinking of myself, I thought only of optics the read of the situation. I did not think of what it was that I needed. I did not think of what the clade needed. I thought of what would be best for the clade to need. My despair latched onto this and then whipped around me and pulled me under, an I lost my grip on everything.

“I spun myself into pieces after you left, What Right Have I. Both times, with Michelle and with the Attack, I spun myself into pieces. I love you, it is okay. You left to perform a sort of grieving that I was unable to both times. Yours was not that of a rabbi, and it certainly was not that of a rabbi struggling to be a leader. I am sorry, What Right Have I. I love you. My grip on myself failed and I fell to pieces and stepped away from my duties. I was so small, and I did not have you. I love you. I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

We weep.

On the day that Michelle summoned us to her field, I was not expecting that which I received.

I was expecting that perhaps she would seek input from us.

I had heard so little from her over the years. Early on, I believe that this is because she was doing better: complication had filtered out of her life and while, yes, she had her bad days, she was most often content, and at times even happy. She was doing fine and I had my work ahead of me, and so I did my work and she enjoyed the comfort of an uncomplicated life.

Later, I had found my pace in life, and my path, and this was a path and pace that interested her very little, as she admitted to me during one visit to Beth Tikvah. There was joy in her, to be sure, at having this part of her past recognized, cherished, brought to the fore, but she was most of all happy for us to have this thing, while, for her, it remained a thing in the past.

It was not until much later in life, toward the end of the 23rd century, that I once again started to see her with any more frequency, though these meetings were often defined by the question of pain.

She sought out Rav From Whence and I at one point to discuss her inherited faith, what it had to say about suffering, what it had to say about grieving. We spoke of Job and his woes, his wish to call God to account. Why was it that he was caused to suffer so? What, also, did the interpretations of this text have to say about what it was that he went through?

Rav and I explained to her the interpretation that we had come to lean on, that it is about the complexities of the world, that one will never get an explanation for every pain they feel; that it is about the maintaining of a forward progression through life without interest in reward and punishment; that it is, in the end, a story written thousands of years ago, and the world does not stay one thing for one year, never mind many thousands.

She then summoned more from the third stanza, those of us who delved deep into spirituality. We brought before her Unknowable Spaces, who spoke about grief and the ways in which it interacts with the soul, the spirit, and the self. Unknowable Spaces brought with her a friend who had been a doctor phys-side, who spoke to the ways in which suffering interacts with the body.

I, who linger long in the tail of overflow, think much on grief and suffering. The me who feels still unheard, who feels still abandoned is the one who thinks back to these months and years leading up to an ending and wonders: if we are the part of HaShem that was made to suggest Their immortality, to point at it apophatically with our beloved, beloathed death, the part who insists on Them, then why do I still feel abandoned? I have read my Job. I have read my Qohelet. I know that the world is more complex than perhaps even the Artisan who made it can say. And still, I watched my root instance suffer, suffered along with her. I watched her quit. I watched the world stumble, fall, and pick itself back up again, bleeding and lessened. I have observed these things, have lived through them, and wonder who is listening?

When Michelle spoke of heaven of hell, of paradise and eternal conscious torment, I cried. Many of us cried! She looked only tired. Unknowable Spaces recited for her a quote from Rabi'a al-'Adiwiyya al-Qaysiyya:

O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.

I cried yet more and spoke of the ways in which the Jewish view of the afterlife changed over the millennia, how originally there was Sheol, that place of darkness and rest and eternal sleep, and then, as the Jews collided with other cultures, this began to lean towards thoughts of paradise, and with that thoughts of some cruel inversion. I spoke of how we — those who had shepherded the New Reform movement into being, yes, but also so many other Jews besides — had drifted around a loop from ever more complex views of the World to Come, of the Kingdom of Heaven, of heaven and hell themselves, and made their way back down into the most simple explanation of all: eternal rest. Eternal sleep. Eternal nothing. Our olam haba was not a thing we lived, but those who came after. Our tikkun olam was to benefit those not us. Even those of us who had uploaded and who would, they promised themselves, never die, there was still the potential for death, and after, naught but rest.

I asked her to consider Qohelet — the teacher, not he who was a part of her — and his gentle admonition to consider the ways in which one strove as well as the ways in which one suffered in the face of so much rest to come: Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going.

From Whence said, gentling my words, “We are all to strive with an eye to the betterment of all, for we are all b'tzelem Elohim, made in the image of God, yes? We live into praise by caring. But you must consider that, if you are b'tzelem Elohim, that includes you, my dear. Treat yourself with grace.”

I cried so often before her. Every time I saw her, I cried.

This was me. This, this aching and broken woman before me, before us, was me. We were her. We were her remade into new wholes.

Why could she not be remade? What kept her so broken, so aching? Why, O Divine Author, was her story one of misery, in those final years? Were You not listening? Could you not bestow upon her a touch of order? Would that I could have. I tried, but...would that I could have.

And so when she summoned us that awful day, I expected other than what I got.

I was expecting that perhaps she had words to say about Qoheleth, about his rise and fall, about how it was that she felt about his assassination. Were it someone within the clade who had organized this — and none had ever come forward — then ought we not find a way to discuss paths forward?

I was expecting perhaps, in some roundabout way, reconciliation. Her with her clade, the clade with itself, all of us with the world in which we lived.

How naïve I am! How foolish I was to hold such hope!

I held within me an expectation that the broken one would fix those who were whole. I was ever a dreamer.

Thus, when she asked us to merge down, when I began to understand what it was that she was doing, I cried. I wept and tore at my garments. I tried to keep it to myself, but in the end, I collapsed to the grass, curled into as tight a ball as I could, with my snout all but tucked into the ground as though I could shield myself from what I now knew must be coming.

Where was Their staying hand?

Rav From Whence bade me look up just in time to see her disappear once and for all from existence, and we said “Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam, dayan ha'emet,” the announcement of a death, and returned to our synagogue.

There we fought, and bitterly, as to whether or not this occasioned a funeral. Rav From Whence argued for yes, for the funeral was for the people, not for the dead, and I argued for no, because the funeral was also for the dead, and she could not be, for we lived on. This discussion was old and tired, for we had debated this for nigh on a century. Was the quitting of a cladist a death or something else if the clade lived on? Did the manner of quitting matter? If they quit of despair, was that suicide? If they crashed? If CPV claimed them? It was our evergreen halakha to argue, just...never in so immediate terms.

I stepped away and did not return for thirty days, preferring to sit in my half-shloshim while wandering, overflowing, believing now that she was dead, now that she was not, feeling now a sense of spiritual ecstasy, now a sense of abandonment. I asked a million billion trillion times why we suffered, why she suffered — and whether or not HaShem replied, asked a million billion trillion times again, “Look, I am worthless. What can I say back to You?”

When I returned for Shabbat, I asked Rav to give me some space from the topic. I said my Kaddish and always put off the topic of the funeral until she stopped bringing it up. After all, as Wakefield put it,

There are ways around being the go-to person even for ourselves even when the answer is clear clear like the holy water Gentiles would drink before they realized Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past.

I rely, I think, on the words of others because I do not know. If there was a funeral, I did not attend, and if all that had once been her did not — or did not even know — if all that was her was not there also in the grave, did it truly take place?

Rav and I spend half an hour trying to calm down. We lean on each other and hold paws and cry until the tears had passed and we were able to rest our heads temple to temple in silence for another five minutes more.

It is me who breaks the silence, voicing a thought that I had turned over in my mind far more than seven times seven times in our period of silence. “I have not seen you like that in...ah, well, not in a long time, my dear.”

She sits up and turns slightly, enough to bring her knee up onto the bench with us. “Yes. I am perhaps managing my own overflow, just as you are. It has been a heady few weeks. The last few days in particular have had me cycling over some thoughts. I usually keep those managed around you.”

“Why?”

Her answer is ready, and I know from my experience as an Odist, from being her, that this portion of the conversation is one she has been mulling over and scripting for some time. “Because you are empathetic, and so we bounce quite easily off each other. When I am overflowing, you know already, and we speak quietly and take from each other that which we need. From you, I take stability, and from me, you take support.”

“Are you, then, really in...ah, in so much pain when you overflow?”

“Are you not?” she counters, a wry smile on her face.

I return it, but faintly so. “I see. I am apparently unable to hide that, yes?”

“And I am not surprised by this. You forked from me with the goal of being the one who took off the mask, yes? My responsibilities were piling up. I had taken up leadership at Beth Tefillah, and already the seeds of an idea of what would become Beth Tikvah were germinating in my mind. I was working with True Name and her ilk to coordinate with religious communities and deal with the Israeli crisis. I was succeeding at all of these things, while also feeling like I was in some way applying layer after layer of paint over my identity to lock it into a certain way of interacting.”

I wince. “I do not remember that...ah, I do not remember it fondly, no. I know that you find joy in these things, but, to torture your metaphor, I spent...ah, I spent perhaps longer than I care to admit stripping those layers of paint away and reshaped myself in the process, yes?”

“Of course. Please be ever yourself, my dear,” she says, chuckling. “Both when it comes to torturing metaphors and when it comes to becoming who you intended to be.”

I do my best to give her a prim, proud smile.

She laughs, leans over, and brushes some stray strands of mane clear of my face. I master the urge to flinch away and squint my eyes shut. She has done this often enough that I know to merely hold still. It is pleasant, yes, though paws near my face can be so anxiety-inducing.

“Rav?” I ask after a few minutes.

“Yes?”

“I do not...mm, rather, how do I look back at the Century Attack and find in it anything but a curse?”

She gives me a queer look, head tilted slightly to the side. “Are you looking for aught else?”

I fidget with my coffee before eventually just waving away the cup and the dregs within. It is a struggle to frame my question, as I have just come out of the worst of my overflow — and Rav From Whence helped me greatly through it, as she always endeavors to do — and it would be so easy for me to speak this only to find that it is yet more of this overflow lying beneath the surface.

When I voice this fear to her, she smiles and rests a paw on my knee. “With that caveat in mind, then, perhaps you can try again? I would like to understand.”

“Very well. I will try. How do I...ah, how do I look back at the Century Attack and see anything other than us having been abandoned by HaShem? How can I believe that...ah, that They in any way hear us, now? That They are listening?”

She hums and rocks back a little, gaze drifting out into the courtyard. “I can see now why you felt the need to offer that caveat.”

“You have...ah, you have doubtless heard enough God-has-abandoned-me talk from me in the last few weeks to last you a lifetime.”

She chuckles and shakes her head. “My dear, I will listen to you speak in overflow for months on end if it means that I can in any way help.” She sits up straighter, then, and folds her paws in her lap, expression attentive and present. Would that it were so easy for me. “To your question, though, the simplest answer is that I do not know. I do not know how one looks back on this most terrible event with anything other than a feeling of lack. How could the Creator have been present for so much destruction? How could humanity so easily destroy so much of itself and yet also be the works of God? I do not know, What Right Have I.”

I wilt. “I suppose that...ah, that it is not an easy question, no.”

“None of this is ever easy, my dear. This is the thing we must all come to terms with as religious people, yes? Your faith is not there to give you easy answers to hard questions or to explain away difficult things. It is there to provide you with a framework for grappling with those hard questions and difficult things, yourself. Even now, you use that framework when you do not say, “How is it that these people could have done this thing?” and instead ask, “Where was HaShem when this thing was done?”, yes?”

“Where was Their staying hand?” I murmur, that line that so stuck in my craw over the last week that it had become a sharp point of focus in a mire of blurred emotions and words.

She nods. “Our inherited faith in God is the lens through which you view the world. It is the rod by which you measure all things. You said some days ago that They were your 'silent interlocutor' — and, my dear, I love you for using such a word even in the midst of overflow — and I know that you speak with Them so often throughout the day. It is important to you that you ask in this way, because it is by this framework that you may find your answer.”

I pluck at the linen of my trousers for lack of anything else with which to fidget, working to stay as present as I can as my body continues to inexorably reel in my soul.

From Whence watches me carefully, as ever she does, and, apparently seeing no signs of distress, continues. “You use words like 'abandoned' and speak of a doubt that They might in any way be listening. Your questions about reconciling belief and experience are borne of emotion, and so perhaps we had better ask whether or not direct answers to them are really what you are after.”

“What...ah, rather, how do you mean?”

“If anyone were to know the hows and whys that HaShem might do this or that, it would be you, my dear.” Her smile is kind, softening her words, smoothing out any sense of snark. “And for such answers, even if you did not know them, you would turn to a book, I am sure. A book and your intellect. Instead, you ask a rabbi. You ask a friend.”

Despite the understanding that I have of her words, the way they speak to a simple truth without value judgment, I feel a burning in my cheeks, and I turn my face away from her.

“Tell me about feeling unheard, What Right Have I. Tell me about feeling abandoned. If what you need in this moment is not a list of verses, tell me why you cry out.”

“Very well,” I say after a lengthy pause. “Do...ah, do you remember that story of a woman's father, how she grew up to hearing him say, “If HaShem is real, He is not welcome in my home”? How he would go to services and...ah, and read the paper in his seat, only standing to say Kaddish?”

She frowns, nods.

“This is it. This is...ah, this is the feeling that I am stuck with. I would never say such things, I think. I do not feel that particular type of bitterness. I will make my home a dwelling for the Divine. I will...ah, I will pray more fervently all other prayers.” Dissociation makes my world sway with these words. I laugh — or cry, I do not know which. “But this is still the feeling I have. I am perhaps not the father in this story, but the daughter: I am hearing time and again these things and...ah, hearing them from some other part of me and struggling to discern whether or not I, too, believe them. Where was Their staying hand? What...ah, what trust could I possibly have in a god who seems not to remember me? Not even to know me?”

“Do you know what you sound like?” she asks after a few moments. Her tone is serious enough to forestall any sense of teasing. “I am weary with calling; my throat is dry; my eyes fail while I wait for God.”

I offer a halfhearted chuckle. “And here I thought that...ah, that you were going to say Job.”

“That was my next choice. You have nicer friends, though, What Right Have I,” she says, and I hear the grin in her voice. “No, perhaps Lagrange as a whole is Job. We are all praying those psalms. You are not, I think, the only one crying out for deliverance.”

There is a pointing at an embodiedness, a gesture at visceralness, a reference to a raw, disgusting, physicality to this feeling.

I wonder at this so. I am not my body. I am not in my body. I am without a body. My body is me but I am not home. There it is: draped bonelessly over the beanbag: arms dangling down the side to trace dull claws along the wood grain of the floor: a body.

My body.

Me.

I am not home. There is this body, and there is this me, and they are somehow, at this moment, immiscible. It is just a feeling that is embodied; I cannot be embodied, despite this grungy feeling that comes with all of existence. My body and I do not mix.

And why would they? Why would this body bother with such as me? I am so vague an idea of a person. I am a mere hint of a me.

This is how I know that I am overflowing. I am only a vague gesture at a What Right Have I, and not her in actuality. I have lost that which makes me human. I have lost that which makes me holy. I have lost that little touch of divinity that rests in the heart of everyone.

I am not merely sad.

I am not merely anxious.

I am beyond despondent, or somewhere perhaps to the left of it. There, still in sight, is despondency.

What I am is in some very real, very tangible dark night of the soul, and from there, there is a Godless pointing at the body, a gesture at viscera without holiness, the disgust of a physicality that knows not the Divine.

Am I my Lord's keeper? Must I, who They have abandoned, call them to account? And what right have I to do so?

How apt a name! What right have I, indeed, when I am so dreadfully broken? Is HaShem, too, so full of tics? Do they yelp and squeak? Does the Creator pace ceaselessly and ever straighten Their clothing? Does the Eternal hide beneath Their desk and cry at the drop of a hat? Is the Divine so weak?

I am chaos. The Lord is order. Am I my Lord's keeper?

I am anxiety. The Lord is peace. Am I my Lord's keeper?

I am nothing. The Lord is all. Am I my Lord's keeper?

How could I possibly be made in the Their image? What right have I to be b'tzelem Elohim? How could I possibly my Lord's keeper?

Am I my Lord's keeper? Where was Their staying hand? Am I my Lord's keeper? Am I my Lord's keeper? Must I call Them to account? Am I my Lord's keeper? Am I my Lord's keeper? Am I my Lord's keeper?

This must not be the way the world works, and yet it is, and here we are.

The world and all of life are a library, and I am a reader, but I am also an author, and my story is among the stories of the world.

We are the book of life. Our names are written by us. We are those who participate in creation. We are the hands of God.

How, then, O Beloved One, do we take into account the fact that we are those who participate also in destruction. You are hope, but also regret — I know that You have regretted me! — and so we have built our tower of Babel, and also we have performed our own great flood.

How, O Majesty, do we create new worlds, draw order from a shared dream and build new lives for ourselves, love and love and love, and then proceed to crash out so violently? How do we settle serenely into immortality? You are serenity, but rage as well — I know, I have borne it! — and so we have chosen a long peace, and also we have ended so, so many lives.

How, Lord God of Hosts, am I to grapple with this unwinding of us? Where was Your staying hand?

I am a being of growth! My life is one of becoming! This life is mine! It is mine! You, who cause the dawn to know its place, bring order to this life! Bring it to this poor soul below. Bring order to her...

Are you listening? Are you there? Divine, you have slipped away. Eternal, were you ever there?

There is disorder in despair and chaos even in the craving for relief. We dwell here — here in our new life, here in our new world — and we are surrounded by that despair. We are suffused with loss and the knowledge that this, now, is our world.

This must not be the way the world works...

Where was Their staying hand?

The Divine Author writes this story from minute to minute, from second to second, I tell myself, I promise myself.

The Artisan shapes time and matter and minds and hearts with duty and care, I tell myself, I promise myself.

The Eternal is eternal, I tell myself, and eternity must include also now, I promise myself.

But where was Their staying hand? Why did They not lift Their pen from the page before that sudden tremor in Their story? Why did They not pull back from Their creation when they sensed a sudden, horrible paroxysm?

Why did They not step in between us and eternity?

Where was Their staying hand?

O, Deep Will!

O, Unnamable!

O, Endless, Infinite!

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh!

Hayan, Hoveh, v'Yihye!

Mechayeh HaMetim, exalted and hallowed is Your name in the world which You created according to Your plan! May Your majesty be revealed in the days of our lifetime and the life of all – now! Hurry! Hurry! Amen! Amen! Blessed be Your great name to all eternity! Amen! Amen! Amen...

O, God, where was Your staying hand?

Hasher spoke with me every one of those days. They would sit on the couch and we would speak together and tell each other stories of who we had been before the Century Attack, and wonder together if we would be the same now, after. We shared coffee and we talked.

They told me how they uploaded because someone once told them that there were endless open roads with no cars on which to cycle. They said that it sounded so beautiful, all that flat prairie and flat asphalt, the cool breezes on warm days, the intersections where cars would never cross, that they decided to upload here to Lagrange rather than remain phys-side or to pursue any one of the other other uploading options. They might enjoy life in Netspace, perhaps, and doubtless there were open roads on which to cycle there, too, but here, here on Lagrange, they knew that there would be waiting for them open prairies and open roads.

I told them how I uploaded because my dearest friend had given emself to build this place, to become a part of it, had become the world itself. I told them how I was so split after I had been locked inside my head by the cruelty of others that I could not stand the prospect of living longer than I had to in the embodied world, and had thus embedded myself here, back before it was called Lagrange, back before we all dreamed the same dream together. I told them how I, then Michelle Hadje, had first forked, and then Oh, But To Whom had forked, and then Rav From Whence forked. I told them how I became me and not them, and yet how I remained them in some integral way.

We spoke daily, and for nearly a month straight. I still see them at least once a week, for a friendship borne out of tragedy is still a friendship at its core. A bond borne of trauma is still a bond nonetheless.

I slept there, too. Mostly in little naps, where I would curl up on the ends of the couches or, when I was sure that there was little chance that anyone would need the couch, in the vertex, where two sides of me were surrounded by cushion and I could feel them against my back. I would curl there, at the ends or in the vertex, and I would block out the light with my forearm or a book or my tail, tugged around and draped over my face. The first sleep was on accident, but, after asking and asking again, Hasher and the others that I came to know there reassured me that I was welcome to continue. I had become a fixture of the place, they said, and they said that I offered a sense of companionship even when I was silent.

Some three weeks after I had essentially decamped from my office and had begun living on on the couch at The Bean Cycle, I was visited by two of my cocladists, If I Dream and Slow Hours.

You must understand: when I stepped away from my office to The Bean Cycle, I did not tell anyone. I did not tell...anyone. I simply left, and now I am wondering what made me do that. What, among all of my anxiety around simply disappearing without a trace and not being missed, led me to disappear without a trace?

And despite my fears, it is not as though I was not missed! I was within a few hours pinged by Rav From Whence, and I could tell from the anxiety that suffused this ping that she was worried. She was terrified. She was panicked that I was gone. She was worried! Her very on up-tree, the one with whom she got in the occasional spat, made up, and then held paws, the one around whom she could be the most vulnerable, her friend and trusted confidant, the one who was of her had vanished. She had disappeared. And this after so many disappeared! One percent! 23 billion! So many disappeared, and now I was gone.

Her ping was panicked and came with a sense of tears.

I responded with soothing, but without words. It was the best I could manage, for I knew that, if I were to respond with words, I would cry again, and I had so tenuously moved on from tears just half an hour prior.

A few times a day for every day after that she would ping again, or send me worried-sounding sensorium messages — once, she even sent me a letter — and I would always respond with a gentle ping back, though I did not return home.

And so instead, Rav From Whence begged If I Dream to come and find me, to ask me to return home, and If I Dream, perhaps intuiting some of my feelings about wanting to remain, instead brought along Slow Hours to merely have a conversation, one of the few within the clade outside of her stanza that she considered at least a fond acquaintance, if not a friend.

I was not myself, then. Or I was too much myself, perhaps. I rode the edge of groundedness, sat at the precipice of ordered and disordered thinking. I spent so much of my time thinking in circles, as often I do in such moments, that I often worked myself up into a tizzy, my words scattered and my tail frizzy. I was not myself. I was struggling with a disconnect, or a connection that had wrapped around me too tightly.

And so If I Dream and Slow Hours and I sat on that couch and spoke. They visited as friends and promised that they would only bring back to Rav From Whence my current status rather than my location. They were there to make sure that I was okay — Slow Hours explained that she was doing her best to meet up with as much of the clade as possible to ascertain their well-being — and precious little else. We had coffee. We cried together. We spoke of some of the shared aspects of our past, that had, through their very definition as tragedy, brought us closer together, even if only for a time.

We spoke also of our dreams.

Slow Hours is known among our clade as one who dreams of things that will come. She is our seer and prophetess. She is our Delphic oracle. She will tell you your future — or three of your futures, for she is as keen on hendiatris as I am — and let you suss out which of the three is the lie in her little game of Two Truths and a Lie.

She explains this readily, though: she has read enough — more than enough — that she can guess at the trajectory of one's life after hearing a story better than they could themselves. She is not scrying into the future, no, but reading the present and telling the rest of the tale as it might occur.

She has, however, had four prophetic dreams. Truly prophetic dreams. Dreams that she could not have known would come to pass, and yet which all the same did. It was not surprising to us that she had had such dreams. Of course she would have such dreams. She was Slow Hours. That is just what she did. She was our dreamer.

But no, what was surprising to me was my own dream.

It was not a prophecy, for it was about the Century Attack and yet it was a dream that I only had at The Bean Cycle. It was a dream about events that had already happened.

What surprised me instead was the intensity and regularity of this dream, for I dreamed it several times while there. Granted, my sleep during that month spent essentially living in a coffee shop was not great. I would sleep for an hour or two on the couch or dozing in the sun out in Infinite Café nearby, spend some time speaking with Hasher or Cosmia or any of the other baristas and bike mechanics or patrons that I would come to know. I might then read for a while, or study. I would pull books from my collection via the exchange or the perisystem library rather than stepping back to my office. I would step out into the street outside The Bean Cycle and walk through the college campus it huddled up beside, or I would instead step out back and walk a chord of Infinite Café. And then, perhaps some four or five hours later, I would sleep for another two or three hours. It was not good sleep, and I was always tired during that time.

For many of those sleeps, those naps or long rests, I dreamed the same thing:

I was a non-entity. I was disembodied. I was not even a mote of a being. I was just an identity that existed in space.

I was before a person, and no matter how hard I looked, I could not actually see their face. It was there, yes, and I am sure that they had the features that any face might, but it was always too bright or too dark or I had something in my non-eyes that made them blurry to me.

I was before a person and they were weeping. They were laughing and they were weeping. Their breath came in great, heaving sobs, and with those breaths came so many tears that I was worried that they would fall to the ground and puddle around their feet. With those breaths came moans and whines and laughs and cries and prayers and prayers and prayers. I do not know what they were praying for. Strength, perhaps. They were not prayers that I recognized.

I was before a person, and then, without warning, they dissipated into a cloud of black specks, and each back speck was a horrible, wretched thing. It was something to never touch. Stay away, it said. I am poison. I am death.

And yet these motes of poison sought out others. They drifted along air currents or traveled along wires or simply shot from one person to the next. They would sometimes land splat against that person's forehead and melt down over their face in an inky blackness, or at other times they might burrow their way into the chest of that person and, though I could see it not, ramify through their blood vessels or wires or whatever that person had, and in both cases, that person would, too, dissolve into these specks of death, which would go on to affect hundreds or thousands more.

And throughout, I remained a non-person, and so I was unaffected. With no transition, I would be in front of this person or that person and I would watch them die.

My mind latched onto those that I knew had died and it would then show me their deaths, quiet or loud, agonizing or full of relief.

I saw Should We Forget, that quiet woman from the tenth stanza who, in my dream, wore a secret smile as she died.

I saw No Longer Myself, this person about whom I knew nothing, and in my dream she merely looked away, as though seeing something greater.

I saw Beckoning, and in my dream, she had gone inside a house that I imagined for her and her beloved Muse, and her death struck as she stepped over the threshold, so that no foot of hers ever stepped inside again.

One by one by one by one. I watched death after death after death after death. I never saw the end of the dream, when the whole world is silent, but I imagine that such must have been the case.

Silent.

Still.

Empty.

Sims and constructs and oneirotecture left unwitnessed, except perhaps by HaShem.

I know, of course, that I essentially dreamed the mechanics of the Century Attack. Someone uploaded with a virus that was designed to find everyone that a person had interacted with, sys-side, and then kill that person before moving on through that list of people in order to repeat the process until the entire System was dead.

After sharing this dream with Slow Hours and If I Dream, though, it ceased visiting me, and I have not had it since, for which I am glad, as the most nightmarish aspect of it was that I felt nothing throughout. This non-entity that I was simply watched, dispassionate.

Ah, but my thoughts are wandering. I am thinking in circles. I have gotten hung up on a dream that, yes, bears meaning and, yes, I did want to share, but the whole reason that I started to write this entry was because Slow Hours and If I Dream and I all spoke also about overflow.

I spoke with them out of pain, at this point in our conversation, for I was in pain. I was aching. I was overflowing.

I know that for each of us, our overflow manifests in different ways — as well it must, for I am not my cocladists.

I know that Oh, But To Whom is overcome by intense spiritual doubt when she overflows. I know because I remember from when I was her, and because often she has met with Rav From Whence and I to speak, to weep, to cry out that she does not know why it is that she had even bothered digging into this aspect of her past. Why have faith, now, here in this life after life? This was not the world to come. From here we could not repair the world below. If God was real, They had long ago abandoned us. Jews had lost their way, and good riddance, for Medinat Yisrael had so turned to evil that the idea of a promised land had become poisoned.

These things and more she would say to us, would weep and cry out, and Rav or I would sit with her and pet her back and offer her sweet and mild treats and an ear to listen. I know this also because I had been her. I remember that weeping, and it informs my own overflow.

I know that From Whence overflows at times — not too often, but it does happen — and when she does, she is full of doubt. Who is she to stand in front of others and teach? Who is she to lead? Who is she to meddle in the affairs of Jews on such a grand scale? Who is she to say yes, yes or no, no on this matter or that? Matters of halakha? Hah! What right had she?

These things and more she would whisper to me, having joined me in my room to come sit beside me on the beanbag, leaning shoulder to shoulder, and I would brush through her mane or hold her paw and hold my tics at bay as best I could for the comfort of quiet. I know this also because I had been her. I remember the doubts, and it informs my overflow.

And so, with there being in my heart already two forms of overflow, I am left with a complicated mess of feelings. I am left with the spiritual doubt of Oh, But To Whom, yes, and the social doubt of Rav From Whence, but these have become all muddled together and mixed up with the particularities of what it means to be me, What Right Have I, all of those neuroses and all of that history and a healthy dose of self-loathing atop.

What right have I indeed, I think, and yet it is not quite so simple, for at times this manifests as spiritual agony, yes, but at times as spiritual ecstasy.

I will be caught up in doubt. I will feel cut off from all that I hold dear. I will feel dull and stupid and ugly and unworthy. I will pray and all words will feel hollow to me. I will yearn to hear the still, small voice of HaShem and hear nothing. There will be no still, small voice, no bat kol, for how could there be? I am not b'tzelem Elohim and so why would HaShem deign to speak to me? My words are worse than ash, for from ash may still be brought lye for making soap. They are worse than dirt, for from dirt may still come clay to make some new pot. They are an illness. A pointless summer cold. A nuisance that does not make one stronger or hardier after, but which merely slows one down. To say that they are somehow an impediment to one getting further in life gives to them too much credit: they are an annoyance and a waste of time. There is no Divine Author behind my words, providing instruction, and no Artisan made me, and so I am nothing to the Divine. I am a vacuum, an empty space.

Or — and this I think is very me and not From Whence or Oh, But To Whom — I will be caught up in the glowing ecstasy of this identity, this inherited faith in God. I will more than just wrap myself up in it, all of these feelings of believing, of the push/pull of questioning that is also our birthright. I will instead wrap myself to the point of constriction. I will press and squeeze myself. I will choke myself. I will cut off circulation. All that I am will risk being subsumed by this rush of only one small portion of myself.

Energy! Ecstasy! Engage! Engage! Engage! I will let this thing that I am become too much, will become more of myself than I really should be, because then I start to lose track of my boundaries, my barriers, my extents!

It is not pleasant. It may sound pleasant, and at times it may feel pleasant, but it is akin to hypomania, perhaps: it is just depression at the speed of sound. It is feeling terrible, but because one is redlining. I will wrap myself up to the point of choking in what it means to be me, choke myself with my favorite adjectives, cut off circulation with words and words and words, but it will all be for nothing. My words will be for nothing at all. I will go back to see what it is that I have said or written, and it will be meaningless. It will be drivel at its worst. Nonsense. It will, at its best, have the seeming of correctness, but only the seeming. At its core, it is built of crumpled up paper and twigs, not some more solid foundation.

And so, I will swing slowly one way or the other, drifting and floating off-center until I fall into overflow for some days or weeks, and only after having gone through and come out the other side will I be able to recenter myself.

I am drifting now. I am floating. I am seeing the world waver as my identity begins to fray. I am not myself. I am overwhelmed. I am overflowing. I am on the edge of overflow. My life is emptying out, my self is becoming hollow, and I am losing the sound of that still small voice, the feel of being made in the image of God. I am overflowing. I am on the edge of overflow. I was then and I am now.

I suppose it is not so surprising, all told. The conversation was full of moments heated and kind. We spent some few hours talking together, and have both even sent each other letters after condensing some thoughts that we did not get a chance to share, as is our habit. I wrote to him some more of my thoughts on the moment of the Attack as I set down here in this journal.

We could simply meet up again for another chat, yes, but we have found joy in our letters, in the way they pile up in a folder as milestones of friendship.

But, as is evidenced by the content of the letter that I sent, my feelings on the time immediately following the Attack are sticking to me like burrs in fur. I have been ruminating over those minutes, hours, and days that followed. Those first confused minutes were so full of movement, overwhelming activity, that I could not keep up with them, no matter how hard I tried, and so I stopped trying, and thus those first few hours were spent trying to hold at bay the overwhelm. I alternated between keeping myself hidden away, curled under my desk and under a cone of silence with all outside contact cut off, and opening myself up to the world that I might better understand. I responded to queries ensuring that I was still alive — Oh, But To Whom contacted me to ask if I and any of my up-trees were still around, as did Joseph — and filled out a survey that was put under my nose for consideration. I contacted some friends of my own, and found that, to my luck, none were missing. I first scrolled the feeds and then promised myself that I would not scroll the feeds anymore.

I remained under my desk for two days straight, responding to queries with the barest ping of acknowledgment. I did my best to forget my body. I tuned my sensorium down — nearly off, at times — and removed hunger and thirst. I did my best to forget my existence in such a world as this.

Throughout, within me there was an anxiety growing.

I had seen them disappear. I had seen people disappear. I had seen those around me simply cease to be. I saw them, and then I did not see them. I remember their faces — for my memory is as faultless as ever — and that means that I remember their smiles, their joy, their little frustrations. I remember the barely contained tears of a woman who walked beside someone else. They were tears of disappointment, of a heart in the middle of breaking. I remember them unfallen, and then she was gone. I remember the unbridled joy of love, uncontained, unbounded, in the face of three lovers as the stood with their backs to a wall, postures subconsciously mirrored. I remember their excitement not at the night but at the presence of each other. I remember their glowing faces and then one of three was gone.

I remember seeing the broken-hearted one suddenly gone with no resolution.

I remember the trio reduced to a panicked and searching duo.

Within me there was an anxiety growing.

What if this was not over? What if there were to be yet more disappearances? What if I were to disappear? What if I were to be here within the world and then, with nary a blink, not? What if Rav From Whence and I no longer got to make up and hold hands after our arguments? What if Joseph and I never again got to meet up and talk for hours? What if there were no more papers or books or missives signed “What Right Have I of the Ode clade”? Who would notice? Who would think of me? Who would remember me? Joseph? From Whence? And how many others? Who thinks of me now? Joseph? From Whence?

Within me there was an anxiety growing and I needed out. I needed to be anything other than laying, curled, beneath my desk on a glorified dog bed, all senses turned to ten percent and hunger and thirst flipped off like a light switch. What if I disappeared and no one noticed? How long would pass?

And so I, without even bothering to stand up there in my room, slipped from the sim and was standing on the nearest arrival pad to The Bean Cycle.

I slowly ratcheted up my senses five percent at a time that I would not be immediately overwhelmed, and even then the sun shining overhead was so bright as to make my eyes water as they adjusted, to leave the tingle of a far-off sneeze in my sinuses, to leave the taste of pineapple on my tongue.

The Bean Cycle was muted, whereas two nights prior it was lively. The lights were dimmer and yet clearer, though perhaps that was because it was midday. It was quieter, as though the ratchet of the cycles was shy, the hiss of steam wand and compressed air bashful, unwilling to be piercing. There were people there, still, but they were quiet; if they did speak, they did so in pairs and small knots, and more often than not under cones of silence that blocked out any sound coming from within.

I had not considered any steps beyond being in this place, this place where others might be. Now, here I was, and there was something I was supposed to do. I had to do something. There was something I needed to do...

I supposed if there was one thing one did in a coffee shop that was also a bike repair shop when one does not have a bike, it must be to order a coffee.

And yet, my voice had left me. I stood dumbly by the counter, and the tired– no, exhausted looking barista behind it, a woman whose skin was a joyous riot of tattoos and wrinkles, merely stared at me. The stalemate lasted nearly a minute before I realized the lock I had gotten myself in, and I lay my ears flat against my head. I brought my fist up to rub in a circle over my chest. My voice had left me and all I could do was apologize.

“Uh.” The woman seemed started to awareness, and with that awareness seemed to come some more complex emotion. She sniffed, turned, and called out, “Hasher?”

Nonplussed, I watched as, without a further word, the barista and one of the bike mechanics switched places. She seamlessly picked up the work that this lithe, red-haired, red-bearded person had been working on, and they greeted me with a bow across the counter. “Help you?”

I signed an apology once more, followed by, “Do you sign?”

“Oh! Yes!” A bob of his fist accompanied this.

I sighed, then, in relief and cast a thankful gaze over to the woman who had swapped places with Hasher. She did not meet it.

Hasher stomped a foot gently on the ground — perhaps overloud for the room, but I could still feel the vibrations through the soles my feet, unclad as they were — leading me to jump back to attention. I smiled sheepishly, signed, “I can hear, just can't speak.”

“Gotcha.” They continued to sign as they spoke. I made no move to stop them. “What can I get you?”

“May I please have a mocha with extra whipped cream?”

They were already sliding over to the espresso machine as they called out, “Coming right up.”

Where was their energy coming from? He hopped to with such readiness that a part of me wondered whether they might be a construct, an automaton, a dream of a person built to act as a person might in the role of a barista, but otherwise made solely of dream-stuff in a way that we were not, as cladists.

But no, they had moved with an essential awkwardness that was so often left behind when oneirotects built up these constructs. They looked to me with curiosity and compassion. They looked excited, and for some very specific reason that was not just some attempt at customer service.

I watched them as they worked, then, trying to puzzle out this little bit of reality after so many hours of mere surreality. They caught my eye at one point, smiled, and returned their gaze to their work. The smile lingered.

The resultant drink was nearly a sphere. The mug was a wide bowl of a cup, a hemisphere in its own right, and yet the mound of whipped cream atop was of nearly the same volume, a fist-sized mound of airy white netted by a drizzle of chocolate sauce.

This was not the fanciest, nor even largest, mocha that I had ever had. It was not the most whipped cream I had ever seen in one sitting. Nothing about it was special — a hot drink in a cup with a mound of whipped cream.

And yet, when Hasher set it down before me on the counter, I burst into tears.

“Oh...oh no,” they mumbled and hurried around the corner of the bar, taking me gently by the elbow and guiding me over to the L-shaped couch in the corner of the coffee shop half of the building. Once I was seated, they ducked away to grab my mocha and set it on the low table nearby.

It took longer than I care to admit for the storm to pass, and even then, there were false endings: I would stop crying and settle into sniffling and then some emotion that I did not have access to, could not feel directly, would wash over me like a wave, and I would be sent once more into wracking sobs.

It occurs to me, now that I think back on that moment, that I had cried so little until then. After those first confused tears, I lay, curled, beneath my desk and did nothing. I turned off as much input as I could for the vast majority of the time, and such often came with turning off as much output as I could, too. I stopped moving. I stopped eating and drinking. I never got around to venting emotions or shedding tears. I borrowed all of that from the future, and now that debt was being called due. Perhaps my voice had left me because it knew that if I were to speak, this would happen.

And all the while, Hasher sat beside me, head bowed. They did not touch me, did not even talk to me, they simply sat beside me and let me work through this period without being alone. They witnessed this pain. They were present for it.

If I were to disappear now, I thought, if another wave of disappearances were to happen and claim me, at least Hasher would notice.

It took nearly half an hour before I was first able to take a sip of my mocha, having thoroughly worn myself out and forked twice to ensure that I could breathe properly and was less of a mess.

The tears, though, lingered just on the horizon, or perhaps just below the surface, and so I leaned yet again on signing. I knew that if I spoke, I would fall to crying once more.

“This is very good.”

Hasher smiled. “Are you okay now?”

“No, not really.”

“I do not think anyone is.” He looked over to the other half of the shop. “Cosmia hasn't said anything other than names these last two days. She lost a few friends, and from her perspective, she lost whole portions of herself. I have told her to take off every time she comes in. I can just work both sides, right? But she just shakes her head and stays, and whispers all of these names.”

I thought about this. I thought about myself. I set these two ideas of people next each other and compared them side by side. I looked over to Cosmia, who had set her hands on the workbench and bowed her head, shoulders hunched, mumbling to herself.

“Maybe she needs the names heard by someone other than just herself.”

Returned his gaze to me, curious. “Did you lose anyone?”

“No. Yes. I do not know. No one I know, so many that I did not.” I could feel that talking — even signing — about this was shoving me towards yet more tears, but what else was there to talk about? Nothing. Would I talk about the coffee more? Would I talk about my work? Would I talk about what my plans were for the coming day? Week? Month? The tears returned, and I signed clumsily, hastily. “Everyone always says we have three deaths: the last breath, burial, and the last time a name is spoken. If Cosmia is reciting the names of ones who never even had the chance to get buried, then maybe she is doing a mitzvah. But who speaks the names of us? I was hiding and then I was worried I would disappear and so I came here so that if I did, at least someone would notice, but what if everyone here disappears, too? What if Lagrange goes down again? Will someone speak all of our names? How long will God forget us? Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

At my outburst, Hasher had jolted back, though even as they relaxed their posture, their expression remained dire, and only got more so as I continued on and on past the point where I was staying anything sensible.

I drew my feet up onto the couch with me and hugged around my knees. I could not sign another apology like that, and counted it as a blessing. I was made of apologies already. I was a being of 'sorry'.

After a moment of gathering themself, of wiping their nose on their sleeve, they signed, “What's your name?”

The prospect of spelling out my name exhausted me, a fact that always irked me in turn. I was so tired. I was so tired. I swallowed down yet more tears and ick, took a breath, and croaked, “What Right Have I.”

They opened their mouth to say something, hesitated, and their expression grew distant as, I guessed, they checked the perisystem directory. “Ode clade?”

I nodded.

“Well, What Right Have I of the Ode clade, I'll be sure to remember your name,” they said.

I buried my face against my knees, snout tucked against my thighs.