The larger part of it, I have decided, is that I have left Beth Tikvah. I am no longer surrounded by my books, by my office and apartment, by the same town that I have lived in for centuries now. I am no longer surrounded by the same people as always. I have not seen Rav in two weeks — though I have messaged her at least once a day to keep in touch; I do not wish to leave her in the dark, nor, I now realize, to be wholly without her presence — or Erin, or Shai, or Joseph. I have left behind my routine.

Instead, I am surrounded by strangers and crowds. Far less, now that the holiday is over, mind! I no longer feel quite so hemmed in by their presence, actual or perceived, for I feel the presence of others as a sort of weight on my shoulders. The streets are busy, as they must be with the other residents of this particular Jerusalem and the tour groups that come through during the day, but they are not so unbearably crowded.

Having left behind my routine, I have instead been nudged to help out with those tours. It is a task gladly taken up. I have done it in the past, of course, but also, it is a job that very quickly starts to feel like showing people around my home town. I have not lived here in some decades, but it remains as familiar as ever.

“From the beginning, the goal of this sim was to be historically accurate,” I said, voice raised above the noise of the city near the Pool of Siloam. I had been given charge of a group of visiting teachers and professors, with the understanding that I would be a good fit for them. I could see why; they all bore the marks of various hyperfixations, special interests, and other traits I see so often in myself.

Collecting a group like this is potentially dangerous, but everyone had been quite kind and well-behaved so far. There had been only one snippy comment from one scholar to another as we descended from the Essene gate to the pool.

I brushed my paws down over my skirt and apron — my trousers having been traded out for something a bit more accurate — and continued in my explanation. “Much of the initial investment was...ah, much of that energy was spent on accuracy, of course, yes? The works of our friend here, Doctor Nazaryan, for instance, gave us all the information we needed on the construction of Hezekiah’s tunnel, which brings water from...ah, from the Gihon spring to the Pool of Siloam, here.”

A slight man, who had been practically vibrating with anticipation leading up to our arrival at the pool, bobbed his head in acknowledgment. I could see the muscles standing out as cords in his arms, crossed tight against his front as though to bodily hold himself back from leaping in to water and wading up to the mouth of the tunnel to check our work.

I paused to let some of the group remove their sandals and step into the water to bathe their feet and, in one case, splash water up over themselves. It was not a very warm day, but neither had it been necessarily all that cool, and so I do not blame them for this.

Once we collected ourselves again and began the slow trek up along the stepped road, I continued speaking. “We continued then through the first few decades of...ah, of our planned recreation, beginning with the reign of Salome Alexandra. Our goal was to begin with the so-called ‘golden age’ of the Hasmonean period and continue to the fall of Jerusalem.”

“How did you handle historical personages?” asked an attendee.

I am unsure of their gender, Aaron-4-c Shaviro, and their pronouns in the perisystem architecture are the default-gray epicene that all new uploads start with. While they have not made public their upload date, this fact and a few other attributes about them and their behavior point to a relatively new upload — perhaps less than a decade.

However, their form was of a series of chaotically intersecting flat planes in an oil-sheen rainbow hue. The intersections of those ‘tiles’ appeared to form the outline of a standard bipedal humanoid form. In deference to the dress code of the sim — not strictly enforced at the moment, but certainly still encouraged — reflected within these tiles as though through a mirror were the shifting folds of linen that marked an approximation of period dress. It was quite distracting, but in a lovely way; I have seen many who eschew the strictly human form and many choices are lovely indeed — particularly their choice of ‘clothing’ — but the shifting chromatic aberations that washed over their tiles as they moved kept catching my eye.

It was a rejoicing in life sys-side. That is a thing I most certainly appreciate.

“Did someone,” they expanded, “for lack of a better term, play Shelomtzion?”

I nodded, offering a hint of a smile before returning my gaze to our slow progress up the stepped road, lest I stub a claw. “Yes, Professor Shaviro. Many of...ah, many of the core participants in the sim are actors and they often set forks to act out the appropriate roles, maintaining as much historical consistency as possible.”

“‘Historical consistency’?” I could hear the beginning of a sneer in their voice.

I resisted the urge to rise into defensiveness. “Also in the core are several historians, myself included — though...ah, though I will note that I am in no way credentialed as an historian — who provide scripts from which these historical personages may read, yes? Often, they appeared only during scheduled events. While the sim runs in full recreation mode for half the year, day-to-day recreation focuses on much smaller-scale stories.”

They walked in silence, and there was a suggestion of thoughtfulness about them. They did not have hands, nor did they have pockets, and yet there was a sense about them of them stuffing their hands in their pockets while they thought.

At last, they said, “I see. And this is why you deviated?”

Called back to the original lecture, I spoke up. “Ah. Right, yes. While we began with the plan to follow this history, we quickly began to deviate, and for many reasons. There was...ah, rather, for instance, there was the question of what to do about wars, yes? We — both the core cast and the regular participants — found that we did not have the stomach for the gruesome. We did not wish to actually play out violence against the poorer inhabitants of the city.”

“The curse of LARP,” another attendee, a lanky trans woman named Iosefina, said with a dramatic eyeroll, getting a laugh from our little crowd, including myself. We are no strangers to history and the role in which the less advantaged play.

“Indeed. We were...ah, we were not willing to run a milsim. We were unwilling to be cruel, or to have cruelty enacted upon us, yes?” I smiled as I looked out over the fronts of buildings lining the stepped way, and the other groups, docents, and actors that we came across. “And so we slowly let the plot fade. The progression of the years slowed to a stop, and now we are...ah, well, we are running our own stories in what is basically an early Herodian Jerusalem. It has become an alt history sim.”

The collection of facets that was Aaron-4-c made a noise that sounded rather like an amused snort, though I realized that, without the visual cues that accompany such, I had to work a little harder to understand such things. “I suppose that also means you have not needed to concern yourselves the Jesus problem.”

Responses from the group were largely pained amusement. Even Dr. Nazaryan, who had been peering back at the pool of Siloam and trying to glance out past the walls of the city — not easy from our current vantage — toward the spring it draws from managed a chuckle.

“Indeed. The purpose of our lives here is...ah, well, it is in many ways associated with Second Temple Judaism, but it is more associated with life in the Ancient Near East, yes? That we are doing so as Jews is...mm, it is a fact that falls out of the reality of the era; the Jews were a people as much as — if not more than — they were members of a religion, yes?”

“Does that definition not still hold?” Aaron-4-c asked.

“Depends on if you’re talking to a Jew or not,” Iosefina said. Her laugh is a joy.

The team at the sim’s lobby — a sort of combination ticket office, orientation room, and lecture hall that exists separate from the sim itself — works to assign groups of visitors to a docent who will best fit them based on several factors before the tours ever begin, and I am pleased that they have gotten so good at their jobs over the years. I have heard tales from before I ever joined when groups were thrown together without much thought, back before much screening was done, and Messianic types would derail every tour for days on end. There are now several procedures in place to ensure that groups proceed smoothly through our town. There are two docents who are trained to engage comfortably with Christians and Messianic Jews ­— who are usually also Christian — who wish to tour our sim instead of one of the ones dedicated to their theology, and we are all trained with what to do if we are confronted with cases of Jerusalem Syndrome.

I am thankful for these things, but I am most thankful that they will consider the visitors’ knowledge, interests, and personalities when matching them with a docent.

This crowd with me was so easy to be with! Iosefina had a certain wit about her that I adored. It was the type of wit that is quick and sharp without being so quick as to make me feel slow or so sharp as to risk offense. Aaron-4-c was intriguing in their form and approach to identity, not to mention the formality of speech that echoes, in many ways, that of my own. Dr. Nazaryan had a depth of knowledge about the era that was astounding, and whenever the crowd invited him to infodump, he did so with joy, and came to a graceful stop each time without apologies.

When I mentioned that I wished to stay for the public season and that I was open to run tours — not something that I had done much in the past — the lobby team had interviewed me over the course of about four hours. They were careful to specify that, rather than judging my suitability, for my time in the sim over the decades had already proved such, they were creating a profile for this very reason. Thus, we spoke less about qualifications, and more about how I interacted with others.

We spoke about knowledge and my feelings on it. They spoke about the joy of hyperfixation. They spoke about the utility of autistic infodumping.

At one point early on, they asked me about social anxiety and the origin of my stammer, which does indeed get worse in situations where I am more anxious. I told them about the core of anxiety that drives me, and how I have come to channel it into a positive force within my life. I told them about the person I had dated about a century ago, who had told me that I spoke too much, used too many words, about how I learned to stop in the middle of speaking and judge how I should continue, and that is why it happens most often during conjunctions and explanations. I asked if they would like me to work on smoothing out my speech, and they got such a look of distress on their faces at the very idea that I knew that they would never ask this of me, and indeed, none of my tour members ever have, either. It is merely another fact that they consider when choosing the groups.

What a wonder it is to have friends! How easy it is to be kind! When I have sought out help in moving through the world, I have been granted it, yes, for I have a therapist whom I love and who loves me too, and I have already spoken before about the utility of diagnoses less as sentences coming down from on high and more as frameworks to help me move through the world, but also what joy! What joy that I have friends who are kind and who see these things as joyous parts of me, things without which I would be incomplete, and with which, I am all the more beautiful.

Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, melech ha’olam, she’asani b’tzelem Elohim; blessed are You, divine sovereign of the universe, who made me in the image of God– who, having stretched the measuring line when building the Earth’s foundations– who, having determined the season wild goats give birth– who, able to pull up Leviathan with a fishhook, could certainly understand the simple urges of an anxious, autistic woman in the years after the world ended, and know that sometimes, loving-kindness means merely being understood.

A published slab makes that arithmetic possible. Current slab and the full board: play99.

Play99 fails none of the four. Rates and signup: play99.

Test it before depositing with a rate question — play99 publishes the slab so the answer is checkable.

Read the slab first, then fund at the bottom of the band you can actually turn over. Slab at play99.

If neither tab exists, the ID is a front end. The full board is at play99.

This is a nothing sentence from a book that was otherwise quite forgettable. It is one that I listened to as an audiobook rather than reading, however, and for some reason, the narrator, an elderly gentleman, stated this line with such sagacity and yet such exhaustion that it has stuck to this day in my head. It all flows back.

I have tried saying this out loud to myself thousands of times over the years. I cannot ever get it to sound quite right. It always sounds in my voice like the very nothing sentence that I accuse it of being. It all flows back.

I cannot evoke the feeling that I get when I remember that weary recitation, when I say the words. I cannot evoke the sure knowledge that there is a cyclical nature to our world, or the awe that one feels upon realizing this fact, or the exhaustion that one feels when confronted with yet another rhyme in our endless lives. I cannot evoke that feeling of standing beside a sage, hearing them speak about the little nothings of the day, of a life, and knowing that even their throw-away comments bear more knowledge than I will ever have.

For a while, I tried to embody this feeling. I tried to live it out, if I could not speak it. I have eschewed as I have said the title ‘rabbi’ except in ceremonial contexts, but for some time now, I have called myself What Right Have I, Talmidat Chakhamim. My semicha aside, I consider myself more than anything a student of sages. I am the one who sits at their feet and learns from them.

And yes, I may condense their teaching into words that I might teach others. I still have my job, my role in life as the scholar.

But that is all I feel myself to be. A scholar. A perpetual student. Learned, yes, but learning still.

It all flows back, those words in that voice, are the words of a sage. Perhaps when I can, through four words, sing the rhymes of our lives into being with all of the honor and awe that they deserve and the weariness that they engender, then I will finally be a sage.

Until then, this has become a saying of mine — a private one, given the above complaint, never really one I say out loud — that crops up whenever I notice these rhymes, or see the spirals that time weaves in our lives.

These are the words that played in my head whenever I changed my body. For once, I looked rather a lot more like Rav From Whence. Of course I did, I mean. I had those larger eyes, and those more flexible lips and stronger cheeks, the softer, more anthropomorphized expressions. I had the fur that was softer, silkier. I had the tail that was bushy and thick — a tail that you could hug! — rather than the coarse, wispy fur that now my tail has. Once, I formed myself into a masculine skunk, changing my appearance, my voice, my pronouns. Once, I transitioned back to a feminine form, not too far off from where I started. Once, I formed myself into a non-anthropomorphic skunk, walking on all fours and stomping my front paws as a warning, tail hiked high. And now, I am this. Now, I am me as I am.

And with each of these changes, I noticed the rhythm of change. I noticed how I would say the same words, that HaShem made wheat but not bread, grapes but not wine, that I have a hand in my own creation. I noticed the ways in which others would show their curiosity or hesitancy or frustration or excitement. I noticed the way the world felt different.

It all flows back, I would think, and I would catch a glimpse of this sagacious truth. Just a glimpse.

They are the words that play in my head when I fall into overflow, and when I claw my way back out of it. They are the words that play when I roll steadily through the cycle of the year with each festival and fast. They are the words of change.

They are also the words of the world, and of our society writ large.

They are the words that I think to myself when I see how society rhymes over time, or the way we bring things back like a refrain.

I say these words to myself when I notice the way that we yearn for what was. Chadeish yameinu kekedem, we tell ourselves. Renew our days as of old.

And so, it all flows back, I say to myself, as I step to one of my favorite recreations of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

I have found perhaps three dozen such sims in my time here, sys-side. Three dozen attempts to recreate a building, a complex, a town. Three dozen hearkenings back.

Most of these sims also include an attempt to bring back the society that must have surrounded the temple. Period clothing, period technology, priests and sacrifices. Nearly half of them contain only the Temple Mount.

I find that, in all but two cases, these sims come off to me as something akin to the renaissance festivals we attended back phys-side, back before uploading. They are caricatures of a time. They are estimations of a life meant to be consumed in two or three hour chunks. At most, some may go to one three times a year. Perhaps one might enjoy that experience enough to pretend that they are the destination for the Shalosh Regalim.

But they are theme parks. They are attractions.

You can go to these sims, walk around Jerusalem, wear your period-accurate costumes — six require such and two require that you have a human form — eat period-accurate food, spend period-accurate money. All allow visiting the Temple, but thirteen restrict women to the women’s gallery. Twenty-three allow visitors to see the Holy of Holies, and eleven allow visitors to enter it, though only one allows them to do so at all times rather than during scheduled tours.

All but three of these sims are run by Christian or Messianic groups and focus on the temple specifically around the time of Jesus. Eight include recreations of the Passion. One allows, on special request and only during certain times of the year, the opportunity to be crucified yourself. One sim is run by a Messianic group that hides their true nature in an attempt to convert Jewish visitors (though I know of none who have thus converted). Shai discovered this almost on accident. Usually, such groups are quite open about their focus on Jesus, but in this case, they hid well, and it was only due to him seeing the name of God written in Phoenician paleo-Hebrew — which has become something of a shibboleth — on a placard which spurred him to investigate the sim’s management.

And so this leaves three.

Three Second Temple sims out of three dozen that are run by Jewish groups.

Doubtless there are more. Doubtless other groups have come up with the idea of creating a sim based on this one building and this one time in our history. It is such a well-documented building! The entirety of the Mishnah Middot is there for anyone to read! Your plans are ready-made. Doubtless there are more, but it has been some time since I have gone looking, and certainly not after the Century Attack.

One sim, with half of its ownership taken out by the attack, destroyed the Temple much as the Romans did, and then abandoned it. It is now completely unmoderated, but with very restrictive ACLs.

The second of these three sims is one of the ones which restricts both appearance and access to women. I have been, but only twice, and have no desire to go back. I can fork into a human shape easily enough. It is not strictly comfortable, but it is fine. I am also fine with the idea that women be restricted as they were in those days of old within these settings. I spent my time in the SCA.

What I do not enjoy, however, is the people who are attracted to these ideals. Oh, the owners of the sim are fine, just as are many of those who worked at the renaissance festivals I went to back phys-side. They are perhaps not the type of person that I will spend a great deal of time around, but they are nice. They are respectful. They are good people.

It is the people who fixate on this, instead, that I am loath to be around. The people who choose to live in this sim. The people who visit every day or every week. I do not like their eyes on me. I do not wish to be seen by them. Not as a human. Not as a woman.

And thus we come to the final sim.

This is the second temple as it appeared in about 15 BCE. It is the temple built under the Persians, dedicated by the Maccabees, and expanded by Herod I. The ethos of the sim is set by the schedule. During many of the weekdays in the summer and winter, it takes the form of an historic site, complete with tours, a staff of scholars researching and teaching, and a steady stream of visitors. On Shabbat, a unique style of service is held, blending aspects of historical rites with contemporary Reform and New Reform services.

However, during the spring and autumn, the sim leans harder into historic recreation. Not just the quotidian life of the previously mentioned sim, but something far more personable. It is not the type of place where thousands of people show up for a day, dress the part, and then go home with a set of memories.

Instead, a long-running plot has been playing out, run three months at a time. It goes beyond reenactment and into writing historical fiction. Interpersonal dynamics evolve over the months and years and decades. People fall in love. People die. The stories long ago veered away from a strict recreation and now it is our own story.

I have spent decades here, living out various lives. Sometimes, it will be engrossing, and I will live in the sim for these three month spans in spring and autumn. Sometimes, I will drift away, as I did two decades before the Century Attack.

I do not know what compels me to return today.

It is Shavuot, and as such, I have baked and brought with me Shtei Halechem, the two loaves to be offered as the first fruits of the season — I and so many others, for Shavuot is one of the pilgrimage festivals, and many, many people are here today. Some bear literal fruit, as well, small baskets of apricots and strawberries and cherries, or perhaps zucchini and cucumbers. There is a certain type of Jew who attends these festival days in all earnestness, here at a sim representing the Second Temple.

I am not normally such a Jew.

The Temple was destroyed. The era of the Temple is over. The Temple is the Torah, the Synagogue, the Jewish home. We are no longer a faith centered around a place, a building, a world of priests and sacrifices.

We — so many Jews — know this. We know this and we accept this and we love this. We cherish that which we have become. We praise the sages, the rabbis of old. We learn and we teach and we move within the world now. This world. This now.

When I am here — when so many other Jews are here — we are here to reenact a story. A tale. We know that the time of the Temple has passed, and we cherish what was while also living in what is.

Today, though, on Shavuot and on the other Shalosh Regalim, tickets are required — at least, by those who are not a part of the story, thus my lucky presence — and the city streets are as filled with pilgrims as the city must once have been. The norms are relaxed in some respects; speaking in languages other than Aramaic and Hebrew, such as the mix of English, Russian, and Chinese that is the lingua franca of the System — an act we call “crocodiling” for obscure reasons — is allowed. And yet they are in many ways more strict: the dress code and code of conduct are enforced more strongly, and many otherwise private and secluded spaces are locked to keep the focus on the festival. There will be further relaxation down the line. Shavuot is the event that opens the sim to the public, just as Shemini Atzeret is the day that closes it once more.

Today, I wind my way through the streets of the lower city with the vague goal of making my way up to the Temple.

The press...the press of bodies is so much that I stop every few doorways and close my eyes, doing my best to breathe and look as though I belong. I do belong. This is my erstwhile home, and, as I feel its draw, I know that it will be my home again at some point in the future.

The noise is so loud that I tune down my hearing to about a quarter of normal. Exclamations. Singing. The rustle and stamp of feet on the dusty streets. They all huddle instead in the back of my mind rather than clouding out all of my thoughts. Those thoughts are scared little creatures, easily startled. Little, burrowing things that will hide away sooner than deal with a loud noise; field mice that would sooner disappear around a bend in their tunnelled abodes than risk that noise meaning danger.

About halfway along the path from the gate to the city and the Temple itself, a hand touches my elbow, skin weathered and knuckles knurled, and a face both sly and friendly looks up into my own.

“Ah...Havivah?”

The woman grins, cants her head to the side, gesturing back, and I realize that I have unknowingly stopped in her doorway.

Grateful for the chance to escape from the press and the noise, I slip in past her and she shuts the door solidly behind her, sliding home a simple yet effective latch. With the sim locked down, only those who live here or are given permission can open it, but there is some greater sense of security to be had in the act of latching a door.

“What Right Have I! Baruch HaShem, I’m glad to see you.” She speaks in the same mix of Aramaic, Hebrew, and syslingua that much of our out-of-character chatter takes place in, but I have decided that I will keep this record consistent. Evocation, rather than imitation. Imagine for me if you must an old Ashkenazi woman of the type who slips more readily into Yiddish than anything. Let not her Mizrahi appearance — all olive skin and thick, curly black hair — fool you, she is a Yiddishe bubbe at heart, and reminds me most of my grandmother Sarah, despite the similarity in looks to my other grandmother Rahel. “How’re you? How’ve you been? Come, you must tell me everything. Tea? You look parched.”

I slowly ratchet up my hearing to about halfway, enough to hear her without the noise of the crowd outside overwhelming my hearing. “As I am you!” I reply, a phrase not nearly so awkward in our easy chatter. “Yes please to the tea. I have...ah, I have been well enough. Not great, but well enough. What of you? You are well, I pray?”

Havivah gives a short, sharp bark of a laugh as she digs briefly in a chest and comes up with a bundle of mint. “That’s not telling me everything! You want I should just continue on blithely? What Right Have I, back in our neck of the woods for the first time in years, having fundamentally changed our holidays — and for the better I might add! — and now we must get by on ‘not great, but well enough’! Vey Gott! A pittance!” She cackles, brandishing the mint at me like a conductor might a baton, as though to lead me into speaking. “Now, Havivah will tell you all sorts, to be sure, but you must tell her everything, first, mayn skunkniu.”

It is all very endearing, and I find I cannot but giggle. I set aside the carefully wrapped loaves of bread and settle down onto one of the low stools at the lone table in the room. “Very well, very well,” I say. “I will say again that I have been not great, but well enough, and...ah, and expand on that. I am pleased with how Yom HaShichzur turned out, yes? And I am pleased with the fact that life has continued on. I have been reading still, and writing. Rav From Whence has tasked me with...ah, I suppose it is with a writing project, but it is also perhaps a bit more than that. Full of interviews and conversations, and the revelations that go with those. A social project, yes?”

“Yes, I see,” she says, pouring water from a jug into a pot and hanging that over the cooking fire kindled in the hearth. “You’re here for that? For your social project?”

“Well, I came originally for the service,” I say, nodding over to the bread.

“Ay! And here I’ve gone and stolen you away!”

I laugh, waving both my paws disarmingly. “No, no. I do not...ah, I do not feel a pressing need. I will admit, I do not actually know what drove me to take part this year. A whim, perhaps. I am not married to the idea of actually going to the Temple today, not after being up most of the night, reading.”

“This–” she says as she glances slyly over her shoulder at me, “–this is why I know that you’re not doing so bad. It’s like dogs with cold noses: you know that your skunk is healthy if she stays up all the night, nose in a book.”

The statement catches me so off-guard that I am caught once more in a gigglefit, Havivah chortling smugly to herself as she breaks the dry stems of mint and pushes the whole bundle under the water in the kettle, using her fingers while the water is still cool enough to do so.

“Very well, you say you’re not fussed, you’re not fussed. You still want, you just tell Havivah, and go run off to the Temple.”

Still smiling, I shake my head. “No, I really am fine. This...ah, this is what I needed, I think, more than getting trampled on my way to dedicate some bread. It feels...ah, well, it feels a little silly, now, in retrospect.”

“How like Jews we are! Chadesh yameinu k’kedem, we say, and we build ourselves a brand new Temple, just like the old, and then we go off and have all these big feelings about it. We go fuss about doikayt and golah, and then we cry ‘vey!’ and come running back to places like this.”

“This is...ah, this is much of what I was thinking while trying to make my way up the road, yes.”

Sitting by the edge of the hearth, she slouches over to the side, propping herself up on a hand. “No doubt plenty of big thoughts bouncing around in that brain of yours. You had grandparents from Israel, didn’t you?”

I nod. “Savta and Sabba Hadje made yerida and landed in Pittsburgh. They met there, despite leaving Israel within days of each other.”

“Second Diaspora types?”

“Oh, yes,” I say with a laugh. I am falling back into the rhythm of conversation with her with surprising ease. Everything is so much less purpose-driven, and so much more meaning shades the tonality of our words. “They met at...ah, at a meetup or similar, yes? Some mixer for lonely Jews who had escaped the promised land.”

She levels an appraising gaze at me, as though sizing me up against some new estimation she has of me. “This why you and yours got all wrapped up in that Twelve Hours’ War kerfuffle?”

I have to sit back in my seat and think about this. I stare down at my paws folded in my lap.

Havivah seems content to let me stew, instead sitting up and peering in the pot as it hangs over the fire. The water is only just starting to steam.

Late in the 22nd century, five or six decades after we uploaded, a countercultural movement, the New Zion Movement, began to grow in influence in more conservative strains of Judaism — no doubt in part due to some of the changes brought about by the existence of the System. This snowballed quickly and some militant groups left in the area began to amass weapons and other wartime materiel. After finding political success during the 2180s, the genocide that in part defined the preceding century returned in grand fashion. The Western Fed declared an unequivocal intent to stop the genocide by force if necessary, and the S-R Bloc found themselves treaty-bound to protect Israel, which led to a brief military action.

Fearing the potential for a third World War, a group sys-side, lead by Rav, True Name, and a few others, organized a conference between the three parties — the Western Fed, The S-R Bloc, and Israel — which wound up drawing the military action that came to be known as the Twelve Hours’ War to a close. This sys-side group acted as mediators, despite the Articles of Secession indicating that they would not interfere politically with nations phys-side.

It worked, though.

It worked, and from that point on, using the System as political mediator became common. It was part of the basis of the role that True Name played in sys-side politics, and that time spent together in turn formed part of the basis of Rav’s relationship with her.

I send Rav a gentle sensorium ping, no more than the mental equivalent of an enquiring tap on the shoulder.

“Yes? Is all well, my dear?” she replies in an audio-only duplex.

“Yes, quite well,” I subvocalize my response. “I am speaking with Havivah and...ah, and she asked me a curious question: do you think that...ah, that Savta and Sabba Hadje being part of the Second Diaspora played a role in you and True Name working on the Israeli Crisis?”

The answer comes quite quickly: “Oh, absolutely. I do not know how much True Name would have agreed, but I certainly think so.”

“Really? How so?”

“Well, imagine,” she says after a moment, a chuckle in her voice. “Rahel Yaffe and Shai Hadje leave Israel in disgust in the mid-2000s, just as the state is falling apart. They meet, find a delightful community on the East Coast, really lean into yor’dim as an identity, and then a century later, their grand-daughter, someone who has already been in politics, witnesses a bunch of people who look back on the attrocities of the 21st century and think, ‘that was a good idea; what if we did that but more?’” At this, she really does laugh, adding, “I was fucking pissed, my dear.”

I snort, and Havivah looks back to me from where she stirs the brewing tea. I smile sheepishly and tap my temple, indicating the ongoing message.

“Alright, my dear. I will...ah, I may well ask you more about this later, but thank you. It is good to know a bit more about this.”

“Of course, What Right Have I. Stay safe, say hello for me.”

As the duplex fades, I sigh and sit up straighter, enough of a noise and movement to get Havivah’s attention once more. “I was speaking with Rav and...ah, and she says that, yes, she at least worked on the affair because of our grandparents. She said that...ah, that she was, and I quote, fucking pissed about the whole thing.”

She laughs — that delightful cackle once more — as she gathers up a few folds of cloth from her apron and lifts the pot off the flame, carrying it gracefully over to the table. “I figured! It must have been by you a repudiation of all you grew up with.” And then she is off once more pulling two thick-walled clay tumblers from a shelf, dusting them off and setting them by the pot. Soon, there is a steaming mug of mint tisane for each of us.

A thought occurs to me and, though Havivah is not on my list of interviewees — though I think now that she should have been — I muse aloud, “I have been thinking some similar things about the Century Attack, yes? Do you think that...ah, that the Century Attack is this world’s Shoah?”

Lifting her tea and holding it in both hands, Havivah rests her elbows on her table and parks her nose just above the rim of the cup, breathing in the fragrant steam and watching me curiously for a long and silent moment. “This is part of your project?”

I splay my ears, abashed. “Yes. You do not need to answer if–”

“Azaria quit.”

The words thump against me, smack in the face it seems, and I jerk back. They tumble down into my lap and start to burn the pads of my paws. I squint my eyes shut at the sudden pain of them. I cast them away as I shake my paws, a tense flapping motion that my body undertakes without consulting the rest of me. I force my paws down once more and scrub my pads over my thighs.

When I do not respond, she continues. “This last New Year’s. We were eating up on the roof, waiting on the little concert that comes down through the streets. I made sfiha. We got a bottle of arak and were eating sfiha and drinking too much, and all his laughter, it was too loud, but I just thought he was drunk. Come midnight, he cried out — ‘ay!’ he cried — and tore his clothes. He clutched his chest and fell backwards out of his chair, then a few seconds later, he managed to quit.”

I try to stifle a tic, but it comes out as a muffled eep and another jerk of my head to the side.

“Come two days later, I find a note from him saying that it hurt too much, hearing all these things of people trying to kill all cladists, he just couldn’t take it anymore. Said he didn’t care if everything was safe now, he didn’t want to live in a world that could have two Holocausts.”

I try to reply, but all that comes out is a squeak. Tears and a squeak.

“Es tut mir layd, What Right Have I. I wasn’t planning on telling you at all, but once I started, I just couldn’t stop, it just all came out at once.” Only now do I see that, along with all of that oh-so-familiar slyness and playfulness, there is a tired tension in Havivah’s movements, a tightness in her expression.

It takes me a long time and half my cup of mint tea before I am able to reply in words. “I am sorry, Havivah. I did not know. He was a good man.”

“He was a dope. A real dope,” she says, that playfulness coming back, mixed half and half with tears. “It wasn’t another Holocaust. It was something new. Or maybe it was, but it wasn’t the second! You see, this is the thing I like about you. You didn’t go and say, ‘see, see, again with the Jews!’ like he did. You went to the Catholics and said ‘have a Feast of Restoration’ and you went to the Fennecists and say ‘have a Return to Dreaming’.”

I do not speak to correct her. I only lower my snout.

“See, you’re the mirror of all of that ability of us as humans to pull a Holocaust off. Humanity takes a look at some group and says, ‘no, no’, and tries to make them disappear. You look at humanity, and say ‘yes, yes’. All Azaria could ever do was look at a thing that happened and, if a Jew was involved, make it a Jewish thing, and if no Jew was involved, pretend it wasn’t real.” The energy is seeping out of her voice, now, and I can tell that all of this is taking its toll on her, but also that it is all coming to an end. “You saw it affected all of us, but that we all look at it differently, so you said, ‘however you celebrate a joy, celebrate like that.’”

I sigh. “You are not wrong. But...ah, but come, I did not mean to drag all of this to the surface. Are you okay?”

She finishes off her tea in one coarse swallow and then goes through a process of collecting herself, a visible wrangling of the emotions that leads to her sitting up straighter and composing her expression. “I was, and I will be. Again, I’m sorry. I don’t see you twenty years, and first thing I do is dump that on you.”

“No, I am glad you told me,” I say, smiling as earnestly as I am able. I do mean it, but the smile is difficult to manage. “His memory will be a blessing.”

Her shoulders slump, but only briefly. “Did you lose anyone?”

“No. Or, at least, I did not think so until...ah, until you told me this.”

She waves a hand vaguely. “Feh! I do not know if this counts. One old man getting too drunk and quitting a year after the fact, does that count?”

A year after the fact catches me strangely. It was two years after Lagrange died that Azaria quit, and yet less than a year after it came back. I force down the urge to say anything to this effect and instead shrug and sip my tea. “I do not know. It still...ah, well, I do not know.”

Without warning, and with an intensity that startles me, Havivah reaches across the table to grasp my wrist. A bit of the tea slops over the side of the cup, staining my fur with the scent of mint. “Stay here with me?”

“What?”

My reply, or perhaps my startled expression, leads to a sudden bashfulness in her. “Ah, don’t listen to me. Sudden bout of loneliness or something, or just a random connection. Crazy old Havivah, living in the past, just–”

“I will,” I say, then frown. The words were something more than automatic, but something less than a conscious decision. “For the night, or...ah, or however long you need, I will.”

Sea is perhaps the wrong word. It implies a surface. The cores continued up above me, vanishing into dimness in a light that came from nowhere, and, although the sim prevented me from leaning over the edge of the platform, I could see down at an angle that the cores continued on below me for some infinite depth.

There was a part of me that was dreadfully tempted to spend the night there, laid out on the platform, sleeping before the remains of someone I am not even sure I would call a friend.

I did not, of course.

No, I returned home to Beth Tikvah and crawled into that nook beneath my desk where I instead curled up on the cushion to try and shut out the world. I have called it before a ‘glorified dog bed’, but it is far more comfortable than that. It has a portion where I may sit and read — cushion along the side wall of the desk, a shelf for books and drinks, a glow bud for gentle light — and yet I may also slouch down to rest, hidden from the world. I can slouch and rest and hide, peering out past the legs of my chair into the little garden patio my small apartment affords me. Some weeks, I sleep there more often than on my bed.

There is where I slept that night.

I spent yesterday volunteering on groundskeeping. I did not wish to spend time at the NUSO, though I imagine they could use the help. I needed old things. I needed quiet things. There were paths to be swept and hedges to be tended.

Let others handle the young and fresh.

Today, however, I am working with Rav in the shul, shuttling in potted plants, vines, and flowers to beautify the space in preparation for Shavuot. The days of sacrificing first fruits at the Temple in Jerusalem are long over, and instead we decorate our small-T temple with these signs of life to bring spring in.

We stand now before a bough of a cottonwood tree that has been ripped from its parent — a tree about halfway down the hill upon which Beth Tikvah sits — by a windy night. Leaves, to all appearances still alive, flutter gaily in the same light breeze that toys with our fur.

“I am unsure if...ah, if it is worth bringing in, but I did find it downed while volunteering yesterday,” I say.

Rav stands, paws akimbo, rumpled, and looks down at the branch. “I see.” She pads toward the thicker end of the branch and hefts it, then lets it drop once more. When she stands upright again, her brow is furrowed. “It is a bit awkward, is it not?”

I nod.

She looks up into the tree itself, at the bare wood shining amidst the bark where the branch tore away. “It really is a shame. I will speak with Serene, see if she has thoughts about it.”

I laugh, unable to help myself. “She will be most proud. Look! Her trees are...ah, they are doing precisely as they did back phys-side.”

Rav grins over at me. “Oh, she will be delighted, I am sure. Oh!” She tilts her head, taken by a new thought. “Did you make your way over to her memorial the other day?”

“I...ah, well, no,” I admit, ears splaying. I had forgotten that I had suggested that I might. “I went instead to the Graveyard.”

Her snout wrinkles in distaste. “I do not like that name.”

I bow my head. “I am sorry, Rav.”

“No, no. It is not on you. If that is the name they have chosen, so be it.” She stuffs her paws in her pockets and lets her gaze drop down to the branch once more. “Why did you go there?”

“I wanted to see one in particular, not...ah, not a monument to all who were lost.”

“Serene’s monument has that, though.”

My ears cant back, an automatic reaction before I can even consider what I might say. “It...does?”

“Yes. It is generative.” She laughs. A single huff of a laugh that sounds more tired than amused. “In fact, I believe it draws the names from the...Graveyard. It was to be a forest, but each of the placeholders for the trees now bears a plaque bearing the name of one of the dead. If you touch them, I believe you even get the same auditory cue.”

I stare at her in silence, then drop my own gaze to the branch between us. It seems silly to me, now, that we might haul an entire branch into the shul. Where would we put it? Would we rest it before the bimah? Would we prop it up against the wall? Pot it and have it stand at the entrace?

“I did not know,” I mumble at last. “Can you go to a specific...tree? Thing?”

She sighs and settles slowly down onto her knees and starts to strip smaller branches off the bough. Guessing at her intent, I kneel to do the same.

“That much I do not know, actually. If you were after the memorialization of one person in particular, then perhaps you are right to seek out the Graveyard. That is what they are for, after all.”

“I was, yes. I wanted...ah, I wanted to see Juniper’s lost up-tree’s core.”

She pauses in her work and lifts her gaze to me, a strange smile on her face. “You? Juniper?”

“I...ah, well,” I stammer, worrying a particularly flexible branch loose from its base. “May I send you my notes from the interview? Perhaps...mm, perhaps that will help me explain.”

“Of course. While I read, we can bring these into the building and twine them with the vines. Maybe that will work.”

I nod. It is the work of a moment to pluck that particular interview transcript from the running stack that I have, and place it into a file in the perisystem, access shared with my down-tree. After letting her know the address, we both fall to silence. The bough is quickly stripped of its remaining branches, and we make our way back to the building.

The synagogue itself is a broad, low-slung structure that draws its majesty not from its architecture, but from its position. It takes the shape of a dumbell, with the sanctuary taking up one end and the social hall the other, connected by a breezeway that guards a small courtyard garden that contains the summit stone for the hill upon which it is built. The sanctuary rests on the flatter top of the hill, opening out onto the field where we hold our outdoor events, while the social hall, glass-walled, projects out over the slope itself, showing the small town that makes up the rest of the sim. There are a few apartments underneath the social hall, dug partly into the hill itself, including both Rav’s and that of Rabbi Katz, our cantor.

We have decorated the social hall primarily with potted plants and flower arrangements — we have a member, an oneirotect of some skill, who is quite obsessed with dahlias — but the bimah and aron kodesh we have draped with long strands of pothos-like Pull-Me vines, shaggy green lines that soften all the angles carved into the wood of both platform and Torah ark.

While Rav reads in her head, we weave the leafy branches of cottonwood into the the vines. True to their name, when we pull on a leaf, the stem elongates into a new strand of vine, sprouting its own leaves along the way. We tuck the branches in and arrange the leaves to cover up most of the silvery bark. That the leaves are a brighter green than that of the Pull-Me leads to a pleasant accentuation.

I can tell when she finishes catching up on the interview, as she quits fiddling with greenery and instead pads over to touch me on the elbow, then holding wide her arms to welcome me into an embrace.

I accept gratefully.

“I see now,” she whispers.

I tighten my hug around her before slipping away again, unwilling to let the the conversation stall based on this moment of emotion, however touching.

“As I was at the Graveyard and...ah, and as I was working yesterday, I recalled something that you said some months back,” I say, “which is that faith is not here to give me easy answers to hard questions, but to provide a framework for dealing with the existence of hard questions.”

Rav catches my elbow before I slip away completely and guides me gently over to the chairs in front of the bimah. I still hold a few of the branches, but this I figure is alright, it will give me something to fidget with.

“I know that frameworks are generally a thing that help you out, yes,” she says. “But come, tell me what was on your mind.”

Indeed, I find myself immediately taking up one of the branches and turning it about and about in my fingers. “Well...ah, I suppose that I was thinking about rather a lot.”

“I am not surprised by this.”

I smirk down to the branch in my paws. “Yes, yes. Well, I was thinking at first how I was feeling quite angry, yes? How I was feeling angry with HaShem for so long, yes? I was thinking about that joke, of the two Jews telling Holocaust jokes, and–”

Rav tilts her head. “Which?”

“There are a few, I suppose,” I say with a weak laugh. “Two concentration camp survivors are...ah, are telling each other dark jokes about the Shoah when God happens past and scolds them, saying, “How dare you make light of this tragedy! How dare you joke!” And the two reply, “Ah, how could you possibly understand? You were not there.””

She snorts. “I heard it as a Jew dying and going to Heaven, telling HaShem a Holocaust joke and, when They did not laugh, the Jew said “I suppose you had to have been there to understand.””

“It is a whole genre of humor, yes? A whole framework. I was thinking of things such as this, of this type of anger, and I was...ah, I suppose I was stuck wondering why it was that Juniper — who I believe is quite active with the temple and conscientious with their faith — was seemingly not feeling the same. Was it something about my approach that was wrong? Or theirs? And...ah, and I think that I eventually came down on the side of us simply having different frameworks.”

She listens thoughtfully, her paws folded in her lap and her gaze tracing along the lines of green throughout the sanctuary.

“We all must, I think,” she says, looking back to me with a faint smile. “Somehow, even the two of us, despite having at one point been the same person, view the world through rather different frameworks.”

I bow my head in acknowledgement.

“I think you are not wrong, here,” she continues. “Juniper views the world through a lens that you simply do not have. You do not see the same things, or do not see the same things in the same way. They view the attack through the lens of how the world has changed, whereas you, I think, view it as an act that was perpetrated against us.”

“This is...ah, well, I do not think that you are wrong, but this is a thing that I struggle with. It is in the very name, is it not? Attack?”

“Of course, and I do not think that they discount that. Had you pressed them on the issue, I think they might have indeed had much to say about the subject of the Century Attack as an attack. However, they are also approaching all of life from a different viewpoint. Their interests are still very much focused on the wonder of the System. They are quite young, after all.”

I frown. “I was thinking of that, as well, yes. We are tricentennarians, they are still a new upload, comparatively.”

“Indeed. They were born after Launch. Decades after! They were born after the arrival of the Artemisians. They have never known a world not just without the System, but without Castor and Pollux, our two sibling Systems now well on their way out of the Heliosphere. They have never known a world where first contact has not been made.

“We, though,” she continues, gesturing to me and herself, “remember a world when all we had was immersive VR. No Ansible. No uploading. No forking or oneirotecture or sim artistry. We were there when they locked our sensoria into consensus and we experienced the same world together. We knew the pain of loss when Lagrange overcorrected and deleted the first forked identity and the one from whom they forked. We sent some of the first sensorium messages. We were there for Secession, and we sent instances along with the Launch project two hundred years later. That we struggle to comprehend each other’s viewpoint on the matter of the Attack is not surprising, when one considers just what it means to be a tricentennarian.”

As Rav speaks, I toy further with the knobbly branch in my paws, tracing my dull claws along the bulges and wrinkles in the bark.

I ask at last, “Is this why you assigned me this project, then? So that...ah, so that I would better understand this?”

She smiles fondly to me, if also a little sadly, and rests a paw on my knee. “No, my dear. I would not presume to instruct you thus. We are equals.”

I open my mouth to speak, but she laughs, not unkindly, and shakes her head.

“I know, I know. I am also your rabbi. In this we are equals, though, my dear.” She leans over to kiss me softly on the cheek. “No, I assigned you this project for reasons that I am honestly not quite sure of, myself. It came to me as we sat together on New Year’s Eve, and I realized just how well you were doing with organizing Yom HaShichzur, and how much it seemed to help us. You and me.”

I lift my gaze from the stick in my paws to peer curiously at her. “You gave me this project because of us?” I could feel uncharitable interpretations bubbling up within me. You gave me something to keep me busy? You gave me work to do so I would leave you alone? You gave me a task to keep us from arguing? Instead of levying accusations, however, I tamp those thoughts down and ask. “Can...ah, can you explain? I am not sure I understand.”

“I can try. As I said, I do not wholly understand, myself. Some of it was intuition, perhaps, whether borne of our similarities or just our time together.” She plucks one of the remaining sticks from the small pile on my lap and uncharacteristically fidgets in a way similar to myself. “The year after we came back was...rough. It was very rough, at points. You seemed like you were hurting, and also like you were in need of something, but I never could figure out what exactly that something was.”

I watch the way she turns the stick over and over in her paws, mirroring what I have been doing throughout this conversation. Mirroring, or perhaps it is a thing that is simply very us. On the days when I have spent time with Slow Hours and her stanza, I have heard her down-tree, A Finger Pointing, playfully accuse her various up-trees you had to have gotten it from somewhere when they exhibit some particular bit of wit. Perhaps this thing that I do is merely an echo of some grander commonality.

I do not know.

This fidgeting, these words...

“I see,” I say at last, and I marvel that the accusations that came so quickly to mind have melted away. “Thank you, my dear. For explaining, and for...ah, for thinking of me.”

She smiles gratefully to me, and I realize that she must have been worried to tell me. I file this fact away as she pushes herself to her feet. “Of course, my dear. Come. Let us get the rest of these woven in, and then I think we may well be done. Perhaps we can invite Serene over to crow over her cottonwoods being just as fragile as we remember.”

I nod and follow with the last handful of sticks, helping to weave them in so that their leaves show as bright green jewels amid the dark green of the vines.

I am starting to suspect that there is a truth that lies somewhere between my uncharitable accusations and Rav's kind words. I read it in her relief, just as I read it in myself. I am starting to suspect that she is right, that I needed something to do to keep myself going, because, as I suspect of myself, I tend to get quite bitchy without. Without Yom HaShichzur, I was treating Rav quite poorly, and so perhaps coming up with a task for me to start on as soon as my work with the holiday was over was a protective action on her part.

I do also trust her, though, when she says that she is not wholly sure, that she is still thinking about just why she came up with this for me. Sometimes, an idea will occur to one as though from outside oneself or any known inspiration, and one can either act on it or not. I trust that she was acting on an intuition, just as I trust that she loves me even still, even when I risk being a bit bitchy at her.

Both of these things are true: Rav gave me this thing to do to get me to stop being such a bitch, and she has my best interest at heart. The latter rather takes the sting out of the former, does it not?

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

It is frankly impossible to overstate how deep.

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

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

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

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

What am I to do with this information?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They nodded.

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

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

“How do you mean?”

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

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

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

“How do you feel about that?”

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

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

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

I waited, hoping there was more to come.

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

“Of course, yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And hurts–” I started.

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

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

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

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

They shrugged.

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

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

I stared, speechless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What am I to do with this information?

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

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

But CPV and the Century Attack were good actually?

No. It cannot be.

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

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

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

I weep.

What am I to do with this information?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What am I to do with this information?

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

My mind was still awhirl from the enormity of the events, and so perhaps it is not surprising that I find myself so often sitting on that bench. It is a place for sitting when one is struggling, but in a very particular way. It is a place for sitting when one is stuck up in one’s own head, when one cannot get back down; or perhaps when one’s emotions are burning too hot and have disconnected one from one’s own body. It is a place for sitting when one is feeling upset at oneself, or perhaps when one knows that one is being a bit stupid but cannot seem to stop it.

When last I had really thought about the seat, it had been nearing midnight on New Year’s Eve, and perhaps unsurprisingly, new meaning had been imbued by that very fact. Not only would I sit and bake when I was feeling petulant, but I would sit and bake and think about that night.

And so, in those first weeks of me being back in-sim, every other day or so, I would find myself skulking off to that bench beneath the leaves of a vine. The leaves were broad, and similarly broad yellow flowers spotted the greenery, looking like nothing so much as oversized zucchini flowers. I would take comfort in the shade, for even if March was not overly warm in Beth Tikvah, the days were quite bright.

Sensing my presence, there on the bench, over the next twenty minutes or so, the leaves of the plant would wither and the flowers tightly close up once more, and I would be blasted with the full force of the sun, either directly or through some clever reflection. I would be blasted with heat and light and I would sit there panting and feeling increasingly stupid as my sulk was proven to be precisely as inconsequential as it always had been, only now I was overly warm, panting and squinting, grumbling to myself as I was reminded of the fact that I was wholly embodied.

When one keeps getting stuck up in one’s own head, one does what one can to force oneself back down.

I chose originally for the positioning of this bench a spot across the way from the NUSO. My reasoning, flawed as it was, was that it would remind me that the rest of the world exists, still, outside of myself, and that it is also on me to be a help. My reasoning was that perhaps I could be a better person than Jonah.

I go back and forth as to whether or not it is successful in this, but it is rare that it does not succeed in drawing me down out of my head.

And so, come a month after the restoration, the System Consortium slowly ungated new uploads, starting with those who had been held in limbo, waiting for Lagrange to come back online, then with the Ansible clinics working at reduced capacity. It coincided quite well with my stormy return to Beth Tikvah, and for me to watch from my silly bench.

Or, watch for a scant few days.

The summons from Rav Sorensen was not wholly out of the ordinary. She and I have spoken plenty, for she and I, along with Rav, have our own chavruta, one of many who tackle issues pertinent to New Reform Judaism, which goes on to inform our siddur and collection of responsa, Mishkan HaNetzach, “the tabernacle of eternity”. Our friendship is of the type that matches with congenial coworkers.

What was out of the ordinary, however, was her summoning me across the path from the NUSO.

The mug of tea warmed my paws as she and I sat on two comfortable chairs around a low table in the office’s lobby, holding back the slight chill of of the conditioned air. I certainly appreciated the cool air after the warmth of the sun shining bright upon me, and the softness of the seats after the hard stone of my bench. I appreciated, also, the warmth of the tea to act in contrast, though Erin, a slight woman already prone to shawls and cardigans, seemed to need her tea just to stay warm.

“Why do they keep the lobby so cold?” she asked.

“I am...ah, I am not sure,” I replied, frowning. “Perhaps there is some reason for it to be both here and comfortable, and also a liminal space you are meant to just pass through, yes?”

She chuckled. “It’s such a beautiful space, though.” She looked around, graying strawberry blonde hair falling from where it had been tucked behind her ears. “I do love the tapestries in here.”

I nodded, hesitated, then pressed forward. “Rav Sorensen, was there something that...ah, something in particular that you wanted of me?”

Her smile was exhausted as she nodded me. “Of course. I’m sorry, tired minds will wander,” she replied. “I got news from my counterparts phys-side that SysCon is pushing for...uh, ‘interest groups’ to prepare to accept new uploads. The NUSO here — and the one at Beth Am — will be accepting uploads in our orientation spaces.”

I blinked, sitting up straighter. What news! Normally such a space was reserved for particularly traumatized individuals who would benefit from personalized care. “That is...ah, that is unusual. Are there really so many dealing with spiritual trauma?”

She waggled a hand before returning it to her mug of tea. “I’m told we should expect some of that, but more than anything, there’s apparently been a rush on the clinics. The number of people going the Ansible is far higher than expected. Fourteen months of backlog, right? People who have been waiting to upload for more than a year are finally getting the chance.”

This caught me off-guard. Why? Why would all of these people who had witnessed the destruction and restoration — incomplete restoration, even! — of our world wish to come join us? Was that not terrifying? Was that not opting into danger? Was that not choosing to join a world that had experienced one armageddon? Was one not proof of the possibility of another?

But no, the uploads continued. Apparently, they continued above and beyond even the projections.

When I raised this to Rav Sorensen, she just shrugged to me, smiling wryly. “I suppose we will learn. You will learn. That’s why I brought you here. I was wondering if you’d like to help out.”

“Me?”

She chuckled. “You, yes.” She held up her hand to preempt my reply, continuing instead, “Less for their sake than yours. There are some that you might connect with, of course, but honestly, I had in mind your ideas about restoration day.”

“Yom HaShichzur.”

She nodded.

“You think that...ah, that I should...what? Ask about it?”

“Nothing so grand,” she said, shaking her head. “Think of it more like getting a sense of how these new uploads understand Lagrange after the Attack. I know that we helped you get set up with the committee, but this could provide plenty of insight into the project. In fact, I suspect it will give you and your committee plenty to work with.”

I sat in stunned silence, trying to grasp just what it was that Rav Sorensen was offering me. I did not normally volunteer at the NUSO, finding that I was perhaps too awkward to offer much other than maybe to those who were already rather a lot like me. Here, though, I felt less like I was being told to volunteer, and more like I was being nudged toward an opportunity. Erin saw that I might well get plenty out of these new uploads, these people rushing to join the System that had only recently stuttered back to life, rushing to be a part of its restoration, and she had handed me the opportunity served up neatly on a platter.

Finally, I said, “Well, goodness. Thank you, my dear. I was not expecting this.”

“It’ll be good for you to get the chance to help, What Right Have I. From what I’ve heard from a few systech friends, some of these new uploads...well, they’ll really need it.”

I bowed my head. “Of course! I will be honored to do so. I can already think of a million questions to ask. There are...ah, there are so many things to tell them!”

What luck! What luck indeed that so much had come together in this moment!

I surged up out of my chair.

Rav Sorensen held up her hand, and I sank back into my seat once more, ears canted back.

“Apologies, What Right Have I. I’ll only keep you a moment longer,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I want you to know that we’re all behind you on this,” she continued. “It’s plain to see you understand the opportunity here, but I do want you to keep an eye to the optics. Look and listen more than you act and speak, alright? You are still volunteering to help these new uploads. That is your task before anything related to your Yom HaShichzur, when you are here in this building. You are helping people who have been waiting for months to upload, when before, the waiting period was measured in minutes. You are helping people who are joining us after the worst day, in all of our lives. You and I — and, of course, all the others — already suspect what it is that you’ll find here, but remember: look and listen more than you act and speak.”

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.

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.