Kaddish

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They nodded.

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

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

“How do you mean?”

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

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

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

“How do you feel about that?”

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

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

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

I waited, hoping there was more to come.

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

“Of course, yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And hurts–” I started.

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

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

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

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

They shrugged.

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

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

I stared, speechless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What am I to do with this information?

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

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

But CPV and the Century Attack were good actually?

No. It cannot be.

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

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

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

I weep.

What am I to do with this information?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What am I to do with this information?