Kaddish

Shai has changed little, but then, I have found my own comfortable stasis.

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.

I will stop just shy of saying that I returned with the idea for Yom HaShichzur fully formed in my mind, but only just. I did not arrive with the idea in place, but all of the components were there. Every precondition was met. All the pieces were in place. What was missing, then was the impetus.

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

What, then, was the impetus?

I do not feel the feverishness of overflow. This I have tried to confirm as best I can. I have spoken to Rav and I have spoken to Oh, But To Whom, and I feel grounded and whole. Nearly. I feel put together. I think.

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 took a few weeks off from the interviewing and instead focused on introspection, reading, and writing. Much of that writing became quite dry and academic and may eventually be pulled into a paper of sorts, but it was originally destined for this journal.

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?

Today, I lay in the grass, restless. I did not get what I needed yesterday, and so today I have found the sensation of grass that I missed. I have stripped myself of my clothes in one of the small gardens of Beth Tikvah where I may lay on the grass and roll the stems and leaves between my pads and relish the feeling of the blades poking up through my fur.

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.

systime 278+105

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.

I dreamed last night of the Yom HaShichzur ceremony.

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

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

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

By the time that I had returned, the System Consortium was slowly ungating new uploads.

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

I stand now on a platform in the memorial sim.

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

It is frankly impossible to overstate how deep.

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

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

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

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

What am I to do with this information?