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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?

It is my birthday. It is our birthday. A large chunk of the third stanza, plus a few Odists besides, has gathered tonight at a small restaurant serving hand shaved noodles and steamed dumplings that we might celebrate 316 years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, but Unknowable Spaces!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unknowable Spaces nods, watching me still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have finally slept after three days without, and while it was only four hours or so, my mind has decided that it was enough.

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

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

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

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

“What Right Have I?”

My reverie splits and crumbles away. “Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did they?”

I blink. “Did they not?”

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

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

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

Her smile is faint, too, but she nods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I flinch.

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

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

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

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

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

“I suppose we must.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We weep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where was Their staying hand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rav?” I ask after a few minutes.

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What...ah, rather, how do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

She frowns, nods.

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

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

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

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

There is within me a groaning, deep in my belly, and within my throat a low growl. There is a grasping and a needing and a yearning and a pining for something to anchor myself to. There is a wellspring, even when I am not crying, of tears that burn and burn in my eyes.

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

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

My body.

Me.

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

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

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

I am not merely sad.

I am not merely anxious.

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Where was Their staying hand?

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

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

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

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

Why did They not step in between us and eternity?

Where was Their staying hand?

O, Deep Will!

O, Unnamable!

O, Endless, Infinite!

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh!

Hayan, Hoveh, v'Yihye!

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

O, God, where was Your staying hand?

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.