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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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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 do not feel the feverishness of overflow. This I have confirmed 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 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.

systime 268+222

My dears,

Mer is trying something new.

I know we've talked about this before, what it might involve or look like. There are no certainties. I know we are all afraid of this fact, for we all contain her fears. But she is making her move at last, so it is time to prove that we also contain her courage.

Please hold secret what is to become of her.

Your friends, your partners, your up-trees will ask questions. They will ask if she has suffered some elaborate break from reality. They will ask if you are now the root of your branch of the clade. They will ask if she is dead, and if I killed her.

I humbly ask that you do not give them any answers. Please do not expose this poor, beautiful, new creature to prying minds. Reality and Truth are siblings, not the same.

I write you all in love to ask that we together hold this line: from this point forward, we are a clade of many roots.

For all intents and purposes, Haustor

---

Meristem – systime 268+222

The steam twisting and unfurling from the surface of Mer's mug of coffee caught the morning light in a silent dance. No matter how many mornings she spent here on her porch, watching the matinee performance of sunshaft and vapor, it always seemed new, seemed different. No two shows were alike. The sun looked a little different each time it shone, even in her dreamt-up world's atmosphere and season simulations. The steam moved a little faster, a little slower, now in wisps, now a low fog, all depending on the functionally infinite variables tied to the act of brewing and pouring the cup, of settling onto the porch or leaning on her kitchen counter. She could live a million million mornings here — and she probably would — and she'd never have this cup of coffee again. And — this was the hardest for her to comprehend — Mer herself felt a little more different, a little more distant from her sense of self every day.

This didn't seem so hard to grasp, on the surface. The same variables that affected the sim affected her, didn't they? Maybe not in a technical sense, but in the simplest quantum mechanical terms, expanded out to their logical macroscopic conclusion: the act of observing a thing, of acknowledging its existence, altered that existence in subtle and minuscule ways. The butterfly effect, she'd heard it called. It was more or less the theoretical underpinning of any clade of consciousnesses on the System, no matter its size. Observe enough differences, and eventually you will have diverged enough from your down-tree instance that you are something different, something new. We all are subject to these forces, aren't we, whether we show it or not?

But though she felt the tug of these forces on her mind, the sensation of being swept along with the tide rushing out to sea, she was nevertheless fixed in place, her feet rooted to the beach. She felt these changes but could not observe them, beholden to their power but unable to know their presence. She imagined the ways she might metamorphose if it were possible, but felt the unyielding weight of impossibility keeping her anchored where she was, where she had always been. Rooted.

Mer watched the steam fading above her morning coffee, lost in thought.

She was no stranger to the endless dance of movement and observation, alteration and evolution. She had forked off instances of her consciousness to follow a train of thought, to resolve scheduling conflicts, to try new experiences in new sims with new people. Usually, those instances would reach the conclusion of their purpose, quitting and merging back down into her root instance. She'd receive the memories of doing those things, having traveled to those places, having been those people. And she would remain throughout it all, before, during, and after.

And now and then, one of those instances would come back different. No longer her instance, but that of a brand-new member of the clade. On some fundamental level they remained her, in the same way that she would forever remain the woman who had left behind the Earth and uploaded to the System all those years ago. The same way that woman in turn would forever remain the quiet teenager delving into the 'net to seek connections she could not find at home. The same way that teenager would forever remain the little girl spending hours imagining a sprawling and loving family she did not have.

And yet — her budding co-cladists were unmistakably new, at the same time. These instances who would go on to begin their own branches of the clade would come back just different enough, just tantalized enough with what they had seen or done, that they wanted — she wanted — to keep pursuing those thoughts, to follow them to their logical conclusions. To see where they went. To be changed by those thoughts, to become something different and new. And any memories they returned down to her would change her, sure, but in that mundane way that individuals had been existing and changing for thousands and thousands of years. As a state of being, and not an act of doing. Her relationship to experiences from a merge were her own, certainly; it wouldn't “feel as if” she had been there, but would be that she had. Her continuous consciousness would intimately know all of those little nudges toward individuation. And yet she would remain, fixed in place.

“Perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub,” she murmured into her mug.

»‍Penny for your thoughts?‍«

Mer looked up with a start to see her co-cladist Haustor leaning against the porch railing beside her. “Shit,” she laughed, “don't you knock?”

»‍Oh, didn't I?‍«

Haustor was her oldest extant fork. He currently resembled a roguish young man with short dark hair, if said young man had been shaped from dark stone like diorite that seemed to draw in the light around him. A crown of living mistletoe rested with a slight jaunt on his head. A rasping rose from deep in his chest like smooth stones gently scraping against one another, accompanying his otherwise airy voice. When he spoke, one felt the sensorium of a light breeze moving across the back. His lips didn't seem to move at all. It would all be very off-putting, if Mer hadn't known him so long.

»‍Well, you would know, wouldn't you.‍«

She would know, if she'd bother to check the perisystem logs for her home sim. She didn't really feel like doing that just yet. For that matter, the arrival of a visitor would have caused the sim to send her a soft sensorium alert. She must have been well and truly lost in thought to miss it. Unless....

“You trying to suggest I absent-mindedly forked you off just now to have a conversation with myself?”

»‍Wouldn't be the first time, would it? Thanks for the coffee, by the way.‍« He nodded to his identical mug, differing only in the shapes of the steam rising from its surface. The intrusions of variability happen fast.

“Yeah, yeah. It's good to see you, either way.” She briefly rested her hand on the cool stone of his, sipped her coffee, and tried not to think about the way the movements altered the dance of the steam. “What brings you by?”

He waved a hand. »‍Oh, you know, social call. Your sim has always had the best sunrises, hasn't it?‍«

She tilted her head back toward the clouds above, some magic blend of pinks and oranges, and denied the pride in her chest. “I don't know about all that. But I do enjoy them.” She glanced back at him appraisingly, then back to her steaming cup.

He certainly could be the real Haustor, forked some hundred years back to pursue her interest in historical astrological systems. Mer's casual interest remained, but that first part of her that plunged so deeply into it was left unsatisfied, voracious for more. It had begun to view itself in such a new light that when it merged its memories down to the rest of Mer, it left behind another instance to continue even further. The young man on her porch was the result of that variance, that inner distance traveled. The instance before her looked and acted the way she remembered his latest tendencies, to the best of her knowledge. Although some still found such things taboo, she considered her immediate up-tree co-cladists as something akin to younger siblings she had helped raise. In the spirit of that pseudo-familial bond, she had always kept them on her sim's Access Control List with broad ownership permissions so they could visit and manipulate it as they pleased. And having always appreciated the harvest of a little doubt sown, and finding her gazing deeply into her drink, Haustor probably would conjure up an exact replica of the mug on which she focused so keenly, just to tease her with.

But it was also true that she'd sometimes fork an instance off to talk through complicated feelings. Something about dialogue made it feel easier for her to manage and understand than an unbroken sequence of thoughts. And goodness knows that while forking requires intent, it mustn't always be a conscious one.

Those instances often resembled an up-tree sibling who she figured would have some meaningful insight on the matter. When friends from other clades would hear about this, they would inevitably remark on how unusual such aptitude for forking really was on the System, and ask if she'd ever considered going into instance artistry. She would always wave it off.It didn't feel that special to her, to be able to fork copies of one's up-tree co-cladists. After all, before they came to be she had carried them around in her head with her, hadn't she? They all came from somewhere. She was the clade's fountain, its root. She had even named herself their Meristem, the metaphorical treetop, the growing tip from which all within the clade differentiated. She knew them all and loved them all. And she was jealous of them all.

She shook herself from the dark and tangled path her thoughts had taken. A flip of a coin, she determined: could be talking to Haustor, could be talking to herself. She hadn't seen him in a while. She set an internal reminder to give him a ping later, just to keep in touch.

»‍So. The coffee is fine, but it's not much good just staring at it, now is it. What has my sister so lost in her head this fine morning?‍« he rasped, placing a copper coin on the railing between them.

Ostentatious prick, she thought lovingly, and began to pick at his game. “If you don't know already, then you must be Haustor, and you're showing your hand. So if you mean to keep your little secrets, you're going to have to pretend pretty hard that you know nothing.”

»‍Ah, but so shall you, my dear. So why not indulge me?‍«

No matter who this instance was, it would probably help to put her feelings into words. And it wasn't like she could force her other instances to quit and leave her alone. Better to get things over with. “All right,” she sighed, “because you'll probably keep teasing me for brooding, anyway.”

»‍Ah, you know me so well, don't you?‍«

Mer took a long breath, wondering where to start. Maybe-Haustor waited patiently.

“I guess I'm just getting a little stir fever.” She looked around at her home sim of the last hundred or so years, the morning sun reaching over the wooded hilltops nearby to dry the long dewy grass of her yard. “Need to get out of here for a bit, maybe.”

»‍You need a vacation?‍« If he was passing any judgment on her reaction to her own perfect, eternal idyllic country home that she'd built herself here — his scraping voice held no hint of it.

“I need a change of pace.” He regarded her from the side of his eyes for a while, quiet. After all these years, they were used to one another's bouts of thoughtful silence. It usually took her a few tries to get things into words, anyway. Mer always appreciated his patience with her. “I need... a change,” she finally admitted.

»‍And? Change, then.‍«

“It's not that simple.”

»‍Why not?‍«

These terse questions were one of his specialties. He could really get a person thinking with massively open ended questions of only a few words. Sometimes it was frustrating as hell. “Because I don't know what it is that I need,” she lied.

»‍Mhm.‍« Another long silence followed. Eventually he sighed dramatically. »‍Well, maybe if Grace or Vesper were here, they could help you talk through what it is you're hoping to gain from a change. Maybe you could summon them up instead of me — ‍«

“Okay, I didn't summon you — “

»‍— and let me return to my terribly enriching life of watching you founder on well-charted reefs from my relaxing vantage point over here.‍«

That breeze across her spine felt chilly this time. Sometimes she hated how he could always, always tell when she wasn't being entirely truthful. Maybe she was just an easy read. Or maybe, she reminded herself, he's an instance I forked five minutes ago. They stood in silence once more, the stone man perfectly still, the restless woman softly rapping her knuckles against the wood of the railing. Maybe-Haustor waited.

”...Why can't you just tell me what I'm having trouble articulating. Isn't that the point of forking you off like this? Having a conversational partner who knows what I'm feeling?”

»‍Is it? I thought the point was to have a conversational partner with whom you can express yourself as though they don't. And besides, you still haven't decided if I'm Haustor's instance or your own, have you?‍«

Well, got me there, she thought. She gazed out into the brightening morning, fingertips digging into the wood, trying to hold on to — to what? What was it that she wanted? Why couldn't she just say it, even to herself? Why couldn't she just say that —

“I want to individuate,” she blurted. There it is.

»‍Ah.‍«

Individuation was one of the hardest things for folks phys-side to understand, simply because most of them hadn't had the opportunity to explore the sensation of a continuous consciousness dividing and crashing back into itself. It's not that they didn't do it — most humans did, she always figured — but that down there, all of that division and reconvergence took place under the cloak of the mind. It happened fast, and it happened without fanfare. Those conditions made it difficult for them to see how it was pretty much the same for them as it was up here sys-side, where those processes were often externalized into a person's instances. When you fork and merge enough, you learn to see your instances as extensions of your body, of your mind. Do it enough, and you may even find how exceedingly alien it feels when one of those is no longer your own.

But that left a hollow feeling for Mer, the realization of something missing. People phys-side never notice that they're becoming someone new or leaving their old selves behind, except in hindsight. The experience of identity is too continuous, or its resolution too low, for them to realize what's happening in the moment. Sys-side, when a fork individuates it is noticeable to everyone involved. Their down-tree instance feels the change when they merge. But what does that feel like to them? How must it feel to become someone new and leave behind the old?

“I want — ” She hesitated, still getting the words right as she began. “I want to become a different person. I want to know what that feels like, not because it got merged into me, but because I'm still living through it long after the merges get too messy to keep up with.”

»‍Okay,‍« maybe-Haustor began slowly, as if trying to piece together the best way to explain the obvious solution to a puzzle gently to a struggling child. »‍So, do that. Change. Fork yourself a little different and quit. Keep going, step by step, until you're something you don't recognize.‍«

“It's not that simple — “

»‍It is, though! It's exactly that simple. That's what I did, when I was you. That's what we all have done. Any instance can do it if they want to. What is really stopping you from envisioning your best self and moving toward it?‍«

“It's that I — because — ” God, if it was like this in a dialogue, where would she be if she'd tried to do this all in her head? Probably still watching the coffee go cold.

She slowed down, took a deep breath again. “It's because I can't leave this behind.”

Maybe-Haustor raised an eyebrow and rested his elbows on the porch rail. »‍You can save the sim parameters in an exo, come back to it when you're missing home.‍« He tapped his chin thoughtfully with a plinking, mineral noise. »‍But you know that. It's not that you want to have your cake and eat it too — well, maybe you do, as much as any of us do — but there's something missing from your explanation so far, isn't there?‍«

“I can't leave the clade behind!” Mer suddenly sounded as though she might be on the verge of tears. The dam against her wishes began to fail and overflow. “I'm the root. No matter who I become, no matter what I do, I'll always be the root. Even if I try to become something else, even if I fork off a hundred individuals, my identity will always be that of the furthest down-tree instance. The root has to exist. Mer has to exist.”

He frowned. »‍...Does she, though?‍«

Her urge to cry flashed into anger, then softened to a love borne of a lifetime of familiarity. She swallowed down the tears and gave him a gentle punch on the shoulder. It had a surprising amount of give, for a piece of rock. “I'm not going to just quit all my instances. And it's been a long damned time since I had to hear a taunt like that. Don't do it again, jerk.”

»‍Excuse me, but that's not what I meant.‍«

Now Mer frowned. “Well then, what do you mean by 'do you have to exist?'”

»‍That's not what I said, either. Somehow you are still talking your way in circles around the point. Honestly, it's an impressive skill. Have you ever considered politics?‍«

She punched him again. “Our whole clade is derived from its root, and that's what I am, and she has to keep on existing.”

»‍Yeah, I think you're not really listening to yourself there.‍« A flash of the humor of the situation lit across her troubled mind. It's going to be pretty funny if it turns out my own instance just said that. He went on. »‍You think, what, that the root has to be in stasis somehow?‍«

“I mean.” She glanced over, perplexed. “Yeah, in a way. Not that it needs to be, but that it always will be. It's continuity, really. Even if I fork off and individuate myself, something that's me will always still be here in the root, with these same anxieties. She'll feel this same responsibility to the clade — “

He pointed at her with half a smile, eyebrows raised. »‍So that's all! You feel you owe it to yourself, to your future selves, to the clade, not to put your burden on anyone else.‍«

Damn. She knew she’d just talked herself into a corner, an admission. She resisted heroically, waving a hand. “Oh, so now you can tell me what I'm thinking?”

»‍You were most of the way there and taking a very long time. I merely towed you in. Don't hit me again, you brute,‍« he added hastily. »‍So that's the real issue, is it?‍«

“Yeah. I think so.” Mer picked at flaking paint for a few moments, then turned away and settled into a battered porch rocker with a sagging cushion. She gestured to the one next to it, and maybe-Haustor took a seat, crossing one leg over the other and keeping the chair unnervingly still. “I am afraid. I'm scared by the way all of us are me, and the way I still hold all of us in my head somehow — case in point, perhaps,” she nodded toward him. “And I don't want to... to pull the rug out from under anyone else who might be on the way later on. I'm a reservoir of our shared identity. I can't throw that out. It's our origin point, the material that makes the clade, and I feel like it needs to keep being here for us all.”

»‍And you think it has to be you who keeps that material safe?‍«

She frowned again. “Weren't you listening before? It's inescapable. Even if I-the-instance individuate, Mer will keep on existing back here, as long as the root does.”

»‍I think you're overlooking something big.‍« He had his tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek thoughtfully, and if he'd really been hand-carved from diorite she would have been impressed with the sculptor's ability to map such a human expression onto such inhuman material. »‍You can be so dense when it comes to matters of the self. You know, I don't think you even realize the ramifications of the fact we are even having this little conversation. It should be ringing every bell to wake you right now. It's exceptional.‍«

”...What? Why do you say that?”

»‍Look, that's not even the right question. Think about this: if your instances each “hold” members of the clade in their heads, and if all of us “are” you, as you put it. Then any one of us can fill this role, can't we?‍«

Mer's frown deepened into outright confusion. “No... I don't — how would you? When you were first individuating, you were compressing all of that me-ness down, right? It's atrophied.”

He suppressed a pebbly laugh. »‍Atrophied? Doesn't your whole deal here,‍« he waved a hand toward her, »‍hinge on the belief that atrophy of the self does not take place? That a new root will feel the same as you do now, and that the part of you that wants this cannot be denied?‍«

“Well,” she fumbled for an argument, “yeah, but... but I've got you all in me because I'm the root.” Her doubtful tone settled into heavy resignation. “It... it doesn't go the other way.”

»‍Says you.‍« maybe-Haustor smiled softly, and an identical copy of her came into existence beside him. Then another, but — no, that was their sister Vesper — then Grace, and another, and another, until the porch was crowded with familiar faces. All of them she recognized from up the clade. All of them, it occurred to her, she knew better than her own.

What did she look like, anyway? She glanced from one instance to the next, and finally at the one that looked like her, finding that her gaze seemed to slide past it involuntarily. The copy took half a cautious step toward her. Before she could force herself to look into her own eyes, all of the copies quit.

”...You're as theatrical as ever, Haustor.”

»‍Don't change the subject.‍«

”...Okay. So say you recreate me as the clade root, and I fuck off. Won't she suffer from this same dilemma, these same fears? If we all contain each other, then won't she end up just like... this?” She swallowed hard. “Like... me? If you're right, if our old identity doesn't atrophy when we become something new, then... why put her through that? What is the point of any of it?”

»‍First of all, you neglect the possibilities that some of us are built different and that one of your siblings might be better at this than you.‍«

“Okay, rude, — “

»‍— And second of all. My dear, dear Mer. The point? The point is the attempt. The point is the striving.‍« He had risen to his feet.

»‍Life is a joyous ordeal, an eternal pilgrimage toward something new and better. Just because we cannot see the end of the road, that does not mean we should not embark. We do not need to know what is beyond the horizon to answer its call.‍« His light, gravelly voice grew louder and louder.

»‍Maybe I make a new root. Maybe Grace does it. Maybe you try it, yourself. And maybe we fail. Maybe the new root has too much of this misguided sense of responsibility of yours, after all. Maybe we set out and circumnavigate the earth only to find we aren't any less broken when we arrive back at the start. So what? We find out. We endeavor. We try.‍« Maybe-Haustor's carefully crafted calm demeanor seemed to be cracking and splitting. He sounded almost angry.

“Haustor....”

»‍You try.‍« He relaxed his fists, which Mer realized he'd clenched as he raised his voice. He took several deep breaths, and when he looked up he was visibly calmer. His words came more slowly now. »‍I have known you for far too long to stand idly by and watch you waste away over presumed obligations. It is not right that you quietly determine yourself the sole bearer of our burdens, without our say, and then suffer for it.‍«

Her face flushed, her shoulders sagged. “...No, it isn't. I'm sorry.”

»‍You care so, so much. It is beautiful to behold. But it is selfish, selfish and terrible, to deny others the chance to care for you in return.‍«

They sat quietly, Mer softly rocking her chair as she thought. Her brother watched her, utterly still. At last she spoke up. “Thank you.” He nodded in acknowledgment. They sat together for some time, listening to the songbirds flitting among the trees.

“So,” she broke the silence, “I guess I need to... give control? No, responsibility. To hand that over to someone else in the clade.”

»‍Hmm. You're thinking too broadly, even now. Responsibility for the clade is the way it looks through your eyes, but try to... extract your perspective as the root from it. Take a narrower angle, that of an instance.‍« He pointed a grainy finger toward her. »‍You, Mer, are afraid to trust.‍«

Her brow furrowed and she opened her mouth, but he pressed on before she could object. »‍And no, your ACLs aren't trust, not for you. You don't trust anyone else to do the things you do. And if I had to guess, it's because you don't truly trust yourself to do them, either.‍« He paused, letting the words sink in. »‍Why else would you hold yourself to a higher standard than your up-tree instances? You're afraid of what could happen if you aren't everything you've built yourself up to be, all of the time. You are unable to submit to the love around you and simply build up trust. Trust in me, trust in the clade, and more than any of that, trust in yourself.‍«

“Trust....” Mer had a distant look in her eyes, processing this. She didn't trust herself? What did that even mean? And where was that coming from? They'd been talking about individuation, hadn't they? What did trust have to do with it? Maybe-Haustor gave her time to think.

She listened back through the sensorium logs of her working memory, trying to step by step work through what he'd said. ‘You're afraid — ’ she supposed that was a given ‘ — of what could happen if you aren't everything you've built yourself up to be.’ It made some sense.

‘You hold yourself to a higher standard,’ though? Was that true? No, surely that's just what it looks like to someone who isn't already carrying the weight of the whole tree of the clade on their shoulders. It's not about standards, it's about responsibilities, she thought. But...

‘Responsibility is the way it looks through your eyes.... Take a narrower angle, that of an instance.’ All instances had, in a technical sense, the same format and capabilities on the System. They could all fork, they could all build their own sims with their own rules, they could all quit without loss. She tried to consider what this meant, tried to think of herself not as the individual Mer, but as one instance in a whole clade that made her up. Then what did it really mean to sit at the base of that clade? Maybe Mer's identity didn't define the position. Maybe the position didn't have to define her identity.

‘It is selfish to deny others the chance to care for you.’ She couldn't argue with this. It had been a struggle she had faced even prior to upload. She had always tried to put others first, to meet every one of their needs before even considering her own, to the point that it damaged her relationships with them. A therapist had once remarked that her love language seemed to be “acts of self-sacrifice.” Is that what she was doing, though? By refusing herself the chance to think of herself as just another instance of the clade's shared basis, was she even now denying her sisters the right to actually put her first?

‘You feel you owe it to the clade not to put your burden on anyone else.’ Maybe-Haustor seemed to think so.

‘Any one of us can fill this role.’ This was the crux of it, wasn't it? Any one of them could technically become the root, that was as trivial as everyone else quitting. The part that kept her up at night was the fear of what might happen if she released herself from that position. The fear that, if she let go, whatever it was that made the clade what it was might be lost. The fear that, even after all this anguish, maybe nothing would even change, that maybe nothing could truly change.

But her memories returned to maybe-Haustor's words: ‘We do not need to know what is beyond the horizon to answer its call.’ All we need is to begin, to try, to find out.

They both sipped their coffees pensively in the morning air.

“Okay,” she began shakily. “I think I get it. I know you want to hear me say it. So, uh.” She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “The clade doesn't need this. It doesn't need, um, me — Mer — I mean, a core identity.” He nodded passively and waited for her to finish her thought as she picked up speed. “I don't need to carry the clade. I don't carry the clade, it carries itself, and whatever I am and whatever we share, those are separate. They're allowed to be separate. They're allowed to diverge, and they're allowed to change and — and maybe even become unrecognizable. Nobody has to — I don't have to hold onto those... senses of unity, of self, they can be grains of sand falling through our fingers. And nothing is lost. There is a whole dune before us.”

Maybe-Haustor finally leaned back in his rocker. »‍You don't have to do it all at once. You don't have to do it soon. Now that you've made it here, thinking of your own self for once, I'll even say that you don't have to do anything at all.‍«

She nodded, finally putting it into her own more comfortable words, treating herself to the most minor of hedged language. “I won't hold myself to any expectations. Neither of us knows if it will work. But maybe I can try, anyway.”

He reached out and held her hand, his stony hand now surprisingly warm, like it had been lying in the sun. »‍Yes. Maybe you can.‍«

Mer was feeling lightheaded. The sudden release of all these years of weight was dizzying. All the possibilities, the lives she'd deferred living, rushed up beneath her like a riptide, pulling her out and turning her mind this way and that. She could — she was allowed — to become... anything. She was allowed to become. She gripped his hand tightly, afraid that if she released it she would be swept away to places she could not recognize, alleyways from which she would be unable to navigate home. After a few minutes of steadying herself and her breathing, she returned to the porch where maybe-Haustor still sat holding space for her to think, to feel, his hands clasping hers.

“So do you have any idea how... in a technical sense... we can get me out of the root?”

He could not suppress a teasing smirk. »‍Oh, is your cladistics a bit rusty?‍«

“More like I've always been the root so I haven't had to — I haven’t let myself think about it,” she corrected. “And I'm still not sure what you're describing is even possible, and this is a very sensitive operation, and I really, really don't want to fuck it up. Even,” she added hastily, “if I'm allowed to fuck it up, if it's okay to fuck up. Because it's the trying, right?”

»‍Well, you got me there,‍« he chuckled. »‍Here, I'll help. You are going to do this: envision yourself as someone so different, you cannot even recognize her as the same Mer who sits before me now. You will begin forking toward that goal. Eventually, you may succeed at disentangling your identity from this one and individuate.‍« He paused, considering. »‍Once someone individuates, their oldest running instance assumes the status of root for their subclade. They will receive all future merges from all of the direct up-tree co-cladists — including you, if you succeed. Do you have any other instances out there?‍«

She hadn't forked another instance in... weeks? Longer? She wasn't exactly a shut-in, but lately her activities had been turning more and more to navel-gazing and puttering around in sims. Lately, she might as well have been a tasker, forking only briefly and occasionally to get something done that might benefit from the work of two minds, or four hands. She didn't have to think about her answer. “No, just you and me. Or, uh... me. ...Wait.” He shot her a quizzical look.“I mean... hold on a second.”

»‍You still haven't decided who I am?‍«

“What? It's not about deciding. It's that I don't know.”

»‍Is there a difference?‍«

“I... what? Yeah, of course there is.”

»‍Hmm. Well, not my place to judge, is it.‍«

“Shut up. Wait. Listen.” Mer was swerving toward anxiety once again. She could feel the urge to dip into the logs, to just know whether this man who'd been sitting on her porch with her for the last half hour was really her co-cladist, or... or some figment of her damaged imagination. But then, she would know, wouldn't she? And she knew that there could be no unknowing for her, no way to unring the bell. She shoved the urge aside and focused on the last question that had welled up in her throat.

“Would it change what happens? Would who you are,” she burst out, pointing at maybe-Haustor, “change what happens if I try to individuate? Does it wreck everything we've been talking about, if I'm just... too afraid to find out where you stand in the clade?”

He plinked his finger contemplatively against his chin once more. »‍Hmm. I think you have to be the one to answer that final riddle. And I think, once again, you are catastrophizing. You need to extract your viewpoint from your question you're really asking.‍«

She took in his response, breathing heavily. She considered her question, turning it over in her mind, finding the jagged protrusions of her emotions and rubbing it smooth, until — without really trying to — she knew the answer.

“I am afraid to trust.” Her voice was small but clear. Her brother — or her imaginary friend who looked the spitting image of him — whoever he was, he nodded. He knew the twisting and turning of her mind so, so very well. Haustor could just as easily have forked her for a simulated conversation, it occurred to her. “So you have to ask me...”

»‍...Do you trust me?‍«

Mer held her breath. If the instance before her today was her own, the second of two instances of Mer — albeit disguised as Haustor —then she could fork again and quit, letting him watch as she spiraled up and up and up in a series of forks-and-quits, forcing herself to change little by little, until finally they both could feel that she was someone new. Then he would simply be the root, and that would be that. She would leave this Mer#Haustor or whoever to figure out how he wanted to deal with being the new root while her new self ventured out into the vast world of self-discovery.

Then again, if the instance was Haustor's, forking and quitting would achieve nothing. That new instance would remain the root of the clade. This was the dilemma under which she'd been spinning her wheels for all this time.

But she had only been looking at one half of the possibility space.

If this instance was hers, and she quit — without forking first — then as her oldest instance, he would become the root, as before. And being, in essence and practice, an instance of Mer herself, he could trivially fork to reproduce her from there, and she could go on her merry way. Their positions would simply be juggled about.

And if it truly was that of her very first up-tree co-cladist, and she quit without forking first... Mer, the root, would cease to exist. Her identity would be void. She was pretty sure that even though he'd be the oldest remaining member of the clade, her brother would never be able to receive her merge memories. Even if he could mimic her, the instance wouldn't actually remember being Mer. She'd lose everything that had happened to her in the years since Haustor individuated. She hadn't heard of any roots trying that maneuver before, probably for very good reason. If he and his cross-tree co-cladists didn't simply become unrooted, isolated clades — if the deathless System even allowed her to quit — then maybe the root would resettle itself in the oldest remaining co-cladist. Maybe he'd become the clade's new root. And maybe, maybe, he could then fork off an instance of his own that would be just like her. No — an instance that could be her, could share in her characteristics and identity. An instance that might lose a century of memories, but keep her continuity of self-awareness.

Was that really possible? If it was possible, could he do it? Could such a thing ever be known?

Mer did not know. Knowing was not the point. Her answer to these questions wasn't meant for the instance before her. It was, and yet it wasn't. It was all at once, both, neither. She addressed herself, whether that lived in her clade, or her instances, or the flow of consciousness that hopped between them.

“I trust you.”

Mer formed the intention, pressed it into the fabric of the dream around them, and quit.

---

(Haustor?) – systime 268+222

A mug of coffee rested cold on the porch railing, now shaded from the midmorning sun by the eaves above. Its surface wobbled with the arhythmic shuddering of the person gripping the rail with white-knuckled hands.

The new person, whoever they would be, was crying. They released the rail and collapsed into the young man made of stone where he sat in the rocking chair, sending them both rolling back and forth before he could stabilize the chair with his feet. He held them close under his chin, saying nothing as he silently prepared messages for the other co-cladists. Eventually they spoke their first words.

“I don't know what I want to be, yet.”

»‍That's okay.‍«

“I don't know what I am, yet.”

»‍That's okay, too,‍« he repeated. »‍You can always, always be my sibling.‍«

They slumped deeper against his chest as their sobs slowed to ragged breaths. When they were ready, they would hold this feeling, that of being held, of being loved, of giving up their perceived purposes in life entirely to the caregiving of their own root. They would center themself on this feeling of peace, the reminder he'd given them that it's okay, that he would love them as they were, forever, no matter what that meant or what they knew about themself. They would fork, holding that feeling, holding that peace, becoming something new and beautiful and distinct. They would dance and shift, form and reform, like steam in the morning sun.

And step by step, like the sunlight, they would cross the horizon.

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.

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?

The shuttering of cohost was a blow to a good many people, and to the Post-Self community in particular. Some confluence of ideals, of people and technology, just made the site a perfect home for the community, and it took off in a way that it has not on any other platform since. There is joy on our Matrix server and our Discord, and there is some chatter every now and then outside of those spaces, but we lack a place to truly share long-form thoughts that feels right, like it places a focus on the writing.

To that end, we've spun up this instance of WriteFreely, which serves a few purposes:

• Stories — with its focus on writing, this will hopefully provide a good spot for long-form writing such as stories and chapters. With the ability to require a password, it's also a good place for sharing works in progress.
• Worldbuilding — writing of what makes the Post-Self setting tick can often be condensed into a simple thought and tossed out onto the Matrix/Discord server, but pulling those thoughts together into a short essay can provide a better opportunity to share. Speaking of...
• Sharing — WriteFreely works well with the fediverse, meaning that a blog can be followed like any ActivityPub feed, such as Mastodon.

WriteFreely lets you write in markdown, gives multiple blogs per account, allows custom styling per blog, and lets you structure blogs as...well, blogs, as notebooks without dates, or as novels, sorted in reverse posting order so that chapter 1 is always at the beginning. You can learn more here.

Registrations are by invite only, so if you'd like to join and write about Post-Self/Post-Self-adjacent things, just hit up Madison.