move from work dir

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/001.tex

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+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{RJ Brewster — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+The theater purred. It hummed to itself. It stretched and reclined. It relaxed. Unwound.
+
+RJ and the room let out a slow, long-held breath together, feeling muscles and wires relax, nerves and current disentangle themselves, slowly, slowly.
+
+``Alright, everyone. It's midnight, time to start packing up,'' Johansson was saying from down in the front row. ``Ross, we're short one. Can you start pulling together all of the mics? RJ will help you get them sorted.''
+
+``Mm,'' RJ offered through the sound system. Ey was busy putting the theater to bed, and couldn't spare more than a meager few syllables to the rest of the cast and crew. ``Get a headset, Ross, so I don't have to talk through the speakers.''
+
+Those speakers were signing off, going to bed one by one through RJ's gentle ministrations. The physical back-up board set about the task of returning to neutral as RJ worked, all of the gain knobs orienting themselves, then all of the monitor knobs, the sliders, the whole system ticking through automated checklists as it cooled down. All minus the channel ey'd need to keep open to Ross.
+
+``Hey boss, got a headset. Where do you want me to start?''
+
+``Grab the leads, first,'' RJ murmured. ``Then Sarah and Catherine, they've got the nice mics. All of them should have a tiny number painted on the costume side that matches up with their box. The boxes are stacked in the pit, by the front wall, you should be able to get them out in one load, though be careful taking them back.''
+
+``Got it, heading down to the pit now.''
+
+RJ left the channel open just in case. The soft sounds of breathing and the occasional curse as Ross bumped his head on the pit cover were distracting while ey set about going through eir notes with the dozy theater. Best be available, though. The next night's rehearsal was the last before they went live.
+
+Ey knew the show better than most of the cast. Em and the theater. The two had to learn everyone's lines, plus a few cues besides when they'd have to take care not to pick up any of the sound effects. Gunshots. Chairs scraping. A scuffle. The clap of heels on the matte black of the stage itself.
+
+The theater's job was to simply work with RJ and the lighting crew, responding to their knowledge of what was going on in the play, while RJ and Caitlin's job, as sound and lights respectively, was to respond to the stage manager's encyclopedic knowledge of the play, her view of the house.
+
+All sound was under RJ's jurisdiction. Cast and crew both: ey spent as much time managing communication between the hands, the manager, and emself and Caitlin as ey did maintaining the sound from the performers. Private jokes kept on the down-low.
+
+They had to be ghosts in this. Even the theater.
+
+Their jobs were ones that should be invisible to the audience, because it would only become visible if they fucked up. No one wanted to fuck up. Even the theater seemed to feel a sense of pride in doing its job and doing it well.
+
+RJ soothed the room with gentle cooing and reluctantly started the process of pulling back. Ey closed the channel with Ross and put all of the headsets to bed last of all, before ey slipped back from the interface. Felt for that cool breeze of reality on the back of eir neck — or whatever passed for a neck so immersed — and backed out. Blinked as ey adjusted to seeing the cavernous hall with eir own eyes. Lifted eir fingers slipped from the contact points and leaned back from the headrest.
+
+Ey shook eir head to clear it and stood, stretching, before ambling from the tech booth down the stairs towards the stage. Letting gravity carry eir lanky form down two steps at a time. Breeze against eir face. The treble note of dust and conditioned air only added to the newborn feeling of pulling back.
+
+Ross was in the front row, standing still and staring at the floor, muttering agitated questions into the headset.
+
+``Hey Ross, I'm here. The house is sleeping now.''
+
+Ross jumped, then looked embarrassed as he tugged the headset off his head. ``Sorry, was wondering where you'd gone. I just heard a beep.''
+
+``Yep, signing off from above. Did you get all the mics gathered up?''
+
+``Oh! Yeah, that's what I was trying to tell you. I wasn't sure what to do next.''
+
+It only took a few minutes for RJ and Ross to get the last of the sound gear settled. Headsets from all of the hands socketed into numbered chargers on the wall. Everything would sleep tight until the next night on sound's end.
+
+Caitlin and Sarai, the stage manager, joined them with the rest of the crew. They sat on the edge of the pit cover, unwinding from the tenseness of rehearsal. The actors were slow to get out of their half-costume and clump together on the stage.
+
+``Gather 'round, children'', a voice boomed from out in the darkened audience.
+
+``Yes, Mister Johansson,'' one of the actors singsonged back. Tired laughter.
+
+``Good job, I think we're there. Still, a bit more polish never hurts. No flubbed lines, and mostly relaxed, but Sarah, you gotta loosen up. It's not Shakespeare, you can chill out. Crew, you guys got a little sluggish toward the end. I know it's late, but so are our shows. Don't work yourselves too hard, but keep on top of things, okay?''
+
+RJ, Sarai, and Caitlin murmured their assent.
+
+``Tomorrow night, back here at four.''
+
+``Early,'' RJ murmured. ``How come?''
+
+Johansson grinned. ``There's a school production that winds up around then and I want you all back here to make sure we still have a theater.''
+
+There was a bit more grumbling, but RJ knew they'd be there on time. It wasn't too much of a stretch. Those with second jobs would make it.
+
+``Back to base, then. Get some rest tonight, and I'll catch you all tomorrow. Remember, you can drink tonight, but tomorrow night, \emph{Das ist streng verboten}.''
+
+The troupe laughed and started to disperse, the tech leads lingering on the pit cover for a little while longer as they reoriented themselves to the real world. A world bound by spatial constraints, limited by two eyes, two ears, two hands.
+
+Eventually, RJ made eir way out onto the chill of the street, pulling on eir thin waterproof gloves to keep the contacts on the middle joints of eir fingers clean and dry.
+
+Midnight on a weekday, and not much going on. People visiting the pubs to catch up with their friends after work. Black cabs, night buses.
+
+The idea of a warm pub and one quick pint before heading home tugged at em, but the pull of home was much stronger than that of beer. There would be a pub of a different sort waiting for em.
+
+Ey trudged instead up to Oxford Circus. Central line up to Benthal Green, walk the few blocks from there to eir flat. Stopped to pick up a take-away carton of curry and rice from one of the more trustworthy shops along the way.
+
+Once home, ey slipped out of eir jacket and welcomed the warmth of eir little flat after the damp chill of London outside. Eir cat trotted up to em, twining around eir ankles. A little ginger thing of a few years that ey had rescued from a friend who was moving deeper into the city. She was the only one to share eir space with em after eir last flatmate had left for somewhere cheaper.
+
+``Hey Prisca, let me put my shit down before I get you food.''
+
+A meow, indignant, followed em to the kitchen.
+
+Ey set eir take-away on the counter and scooped a cup of dry food into a fresh dish, setting it on the tile for the delicate cat. Indignant meows replaced by purring and crunching.
+
+Ey thumbed eir phone to start music playing. Some of the stuff that reminded em of eir dad to go along with the curry that reminded em of eir mom. Quiet, but present.
+
+Dinner was no more or less exciting than usual. RJ ate alone at the kitchen table with the carton spread out before em, baring orange curry and the soggy samosa that had come with it. Ey left eir gloves on just to be sure. No sense in having to clean eir contacts more than ey'd already need to after a long rehearsal.
+
+Ey finished, scooped the last of the curry into a plastic container for the next day's lunch, promising emself that ey'd cook an additional pot of rice before heading out in the afternoon so ey'd have more calories to keep emself running. Clean up as easy as tossing the container into the compost bin along with all of the others. Cooking much more than rice was for times other than crunch.
+
+The rig in the corner of eir bedroom was exerting subtle gravities on RJ. As ey ran through the motions of the post-recital evening — eating, cleaning, storing leftovers, using the toilet — eir orbits grew smaller and smaller. Eir gloves were itching. Ey could feel phantom breezes brushing past phantom fur.
+
+Phantom fur. Phantom ears. Phantom tail. Phantom realities teased around the edges of eir perception.
+
+Ey finally allowed emself to sit down at eir rig, relaxing into the familiar curves of the chair. Even with the draw so close to em, ey took eir time. Ey picked up Priscilla and stroked her smoothly from ears to tail a few times until she started purring up a storm, informing her that, in fact, she was the prettiest kitty.
+
+\emph{Peel your gloves off one finger at a time,} ey thought. \emph{Relish the anticipation. Get caught up in it. Hell, let it linger.}
+
+Cat settled into eir lap and curled into a small crescent, ey set about cleaning the contacts on eir hands with lint-free paper and rubbing alcohol. Those done, ey wiped down the headset, removing the negligible residue of sweat and skin oils that had collected there. Clean enough as is. Ey had recently replaced the soft, padded headrest where eir forehead would lay.
+
+Eir gear at home was more elaborate than the stuff in the tech booth at work ey shared with Sarai and Caitlin, Ey had drained eir savings to acquire it. The rig, as well as the contacts on eir fingers, the interferites — nanoscale implants that took over eir optic and auditory nerves, and the electroparalytics to keep em from acting out in reality what took place online — the NFC connections implanted just under eir hairline and their ramifying tendrils, all of that painful work down eir spine that helped em more fully experience the connection.
+
+All worth it.
+
+Connections and gear cleaned, RJ finally felt complete enough to pop open the lid on eir rig. The screen, all but vestigial when ey was inside, still served its role during boot and login.
+
+Ey quickly keyed in eir passphrase and then rested eir right hand on the curved pad, fingers finding familiar grooves that held eir hand in place. The connection from eir contacts the other half of eir two factors of authentication.
+
+``Gonna head in, Prisca,'' ey murmured to eir cat, stroking over her ears, fingering the soft, velveteen folds until the cat shook her head away. Purrs nonetheless ratcheted up a notch. ``I'll be back in a bit.''
+
+Ey set eir left hand into its cradle. Tilting eir head against the headrest, feeling the comforting touch of cool microfiber and the little twinge of recognition from the NFC controllers, ey nudged the button beneath eir thumb.
+
+The rig went immersive. As RJ delved in, the soft hum of a cooling fan picked up to handle the waste heat of countless computations.
+
+Ey could no longer hear it.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/002.tex

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+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+RJ-- no, AwDae, now, sat up in bed and slid to the edge of the mattress. Stretched languidly, let fur bristle from ear to tail, the latter bottle-brushing out. Ey shook emself to settle eir fur back down and yawned widely, slender pink tongue curling just shy of sharp incisors. All formalities, to be sure, or perhaps wordless mnemonics to finish the context-shift. The final step in a ritual.
+
+All those phantom realities clicking into place.
+
+Brushing eir fur down, the fennec stood and padded to the dresser in the corner of the room, pulling out a thin white cotton shirt with laces up the front and a simple navy sarong, which ey tied around eir waist. Countless hours examining some of the highest fashions out there on the 'net, and ey'd come to the conclusion that, in these times of excess, the understated said the most.
+
+It also interfered with the fur least, worked well with a tail — a simple slit cut down the length of the sarong let that slip free — and it was cheap. There was no shortage of ways to spend money, and AwDae had better things to buy with what was left after London rent.
+
+Better to perfect the form, to make it fit more precisely eir self-image. A handful of silver paltry exchange for building the you you are meant to be rather than the you you are.
+
+Ey swiped eir paw from left to right atop the dresser, revealing a dimly glowing arsenal of personal belongings. It'd be a simple night out, so ey tucked a few vcards and a limited credit chip into a shoulder bag and hauled the strap over eir head, vulpine ears laying flat and out of the way.
+
+From there, claws clacked against the glossy surface of the tport pad. Gauche as it was to pop in and out of existence where folks could see, ey kept eirs in a corner of the studio apartment rather than an alcove. The feeling of exposure and the jarring change of scenery was titillating, racy.
+
+Ey stood straight on the pad and gestured a paw left to right, bringing up a list of recently used commands. Had ey left fingerprints online, there'd be a clear smudge over the entry: ey rarely did anything else on work nights.
+
+\texttt{tport:\ The\ Crown\ Pub}
+
+Tapped, and the obligatory \emph{click} that went along with the change of scenery brought em to an alcove paneled in oak, lit by green-glass-shaded lights hanging pendulous from a cord directly above em.
+
+Ey blinked to adjust to the comparatively dim light. The pub sim, largely following the circadian rhythm of the British isles, was just as dark as it was for RJ, back in London-as-it-was, but eir personal sim lived in a perpetual eleven AM springtime.
+
+Ey turned and stepped away from the pad, narrowly avoiding a slender weasel stumbling towards the alcove.
+
+``See ya, Debarre,'' AwDae said, though it came out more like `\emph{Shee-a, Debaw}' coming from the fox's narrow muzzle. Ey got a curt grunt from the weasel done up all in black.
+
+The fox shrugged and headed into the pub proper, nose twitching. The scents of the room told em more of those present than simply scanning the crowd. One or two gawking entities with no scent property set — tourists — and the usual crowd of aromas. Friends, mostly. Acquaintances all.
+
+Whiskers bristled at the distinct whiff of dandelions, a memory leftover from youth, and ey made a beeline towards one of the window tables, where the scent originated, skirting around bodies of diverse shape.
+
+``\emph{Shacha.}''
+
+``Come on, fox, loosen your filters, won't you?'' Sasha laughed, scooting her chair back to stand up and lean in for a quick hug. AwDae slipped eir arms around the skunk's waist in turn and gave a squeeze, tail aswish.
+
+``Lame,'' ey drawled, but dialed back the output filters on eir speech, letting something more closely resembling English pass. ``How you been, skunk?''
+
+``Oh, you know, same old, same old.'' Sasha settled back into her chair and fiddled with a stack of vcards on the table, giving an outsized shrug. ``Been kind of boring in here over the last few days, so it's good to see you.''
+
+The fox nodded, tugging eir shirt straight and moving over to the chair opposite the skunk, sliding into it easily and resting against the back.
+
+``It's late there, isn't it?''
+
+``Not too late. One something. Made good time home at least. Rehearsal ran late.''
+
+Sasha grinned. ``You know, every time you talk about rehearsal and such, I just think back to school. You hunched over the sound booth, you know? It's hard for me to picture you as having grown up and taken that up as a job.''
+
+AwDae adopted a look of mock-despair. ``Isn't it? I went to uni just for it and everything. But hey, London ain't bad, I can't complain any. Besides, not like you left it either.''
+
+The skunk rolled her eyes and leaned forward onto her elbows, muzzle resting on obsidian paws. ``Tell me about it. You're missing out big time here in the 'burbs, dear. You could be teaching high school theater in any town along the central corridor, doing the same plays once every five years so no students repeat them. Truly a life of glamour.'' Sasha laughed when AwDae buried eir face in eir paws and groaned. ``Seriously though, you just remind me a lot of school. Maybe it's 'cause of all of the ways you haven't grown up.''
+
+``Please, Sasha.'' AwDae poked eir tongue out. ``If you bring up dating\ldots{}''
+
+``Hey, sorry, just looking out for you, fox.''
+
+``I'm plenty happy on my own, I can promise you that,'' ey countered.
+
+``No, I get that.'' Sasha lowered her gaze. ``Not all it's turned out to be. Just got me thinking, is all.''
+
+``Oh no, struck out again?''
+
+She shrugged, nodded, shrugged once more, fiddled with a vcard. No eye contact.
+
+AwDae reached out to take one of her paws in eir own, black fur on tan mismatched and complementary. Both had opted for mostly hand-like paws, but differences were evident on contact. Where Sasha's fur was an even, silky black marked by white stripes that were a little too sharp, a little too exact, AwDae had labored to construct a version of emself as a fennec fox to exacting detail, down to the point where eir muzzle couldn't even form the two letters that made up eir name offline.
+
+Exacting, minus perhaps the two-legged-ness, the hands, the humanity around the eyes. Even then, ey had an av free of humanity stashed away somewhere.
+
+Thoughts of honing versus forging blurred surroundings. AwDae had honed emself to a finer and finer point while everyone else forged ahead. Always a way to be a better tech. Always a chance to become more vulpine online. Always a way to become better at what one already was. To become more the AwDae AwDae felt ey was.
+
+Still running sound. Still honing that skill.
+
+Ey shook eir head to dislodge the rumination.
+
+``I'm sorry, Sasha.''
+
+Sasha shrugged again, as though she might be able to drop the very idea of bad break-ups like an overloaded backpack. She gave the fox's paws a squeeze in her own. ``Men are dicks. I'd take a fox like you over some dickhead guy any day.''
+
+AwDae smiled faintly, returned the squeeze. ``Sasha, you know it wouldn't--''
+
+``No, I know. I just wish there were more guys out there like you.'' When AwDae stiffened in eir seat and looked away towards the window, Sasha splayed her ears and added quickly, ``Sorry dear. I keep putting my foot in it, don't I?''
+
+``Sorry, no, you're fine.'' AwDae grinned apologetically. ``I should get a thicker skin, maybe. Stand up for myself. I spend night after night hiding in here, and even then, can't seem to assert myself any. I appreciate you trying, though.''
+
+Sasha smiled cautiously and nodded. ``You came out like fifteen years ago, AwDae. I should still be doing better.''
+
+AwDae's turn to shrug. ``It's hard to ask for that, is all. Always has been.''
+
+``I think that's what I meant earlier, that you haven't changed, despite all the ways you have. You haven't done like all the rest and grown up, gotten married, all that crap. You're still doing what you loved to do in school. Don't get me wrong, I miss it too. \emph{Actual} theater, not the school stuff. Seeing crazy shows with you on the weekends. Hell, doing crazy shows in uni. Doesn't pay the bills, though.''
+
+``You should come see us sometime. It'd be good to see you again, too.''
+
+``You know I want to.'' She grinned. It didn't last. ``But yeah. You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck — in a few ways, even, though you're succeeding in others.''
+
+AwDae nodded, rumination hanging in a cloud around em. So many ways the world had moved on without em. After a moment, though, ey sat up straighter. ``Oh, speaking of frozen.''
+
+``Debarre?''
+
+The fox nodded.
+
+``No news, yet. He's been trying to get in touch with the clinic or whatever that's taking care of Cicero, but the family's been getting in the way. They're fielding everything. They always sort of supported the relationship on the surface, you know, but never actually approved of it. Of them being together, I mean.''
+
+``What? Really?'' The fox shook eir head, poking a claw at the table, before rubbing the spot with a paw pad. The sim was hardly immersive enough to waste cycles on letting claw dent tabletop. ``That's unfortunate. Not all that surprising, I guess, given what Cice said about them. They at least confirmed that's what happened, though?''
+
+``That's what these are,'' Sasha said, slipping the stack of vcards over to em. ``There's contact info for the family, and a few centers around there that work on implants, some hospitals. We're thinking that those might be the types of places where he wound up. There's also a card detailing his last connected times.''
+
+AwDae twisted the stack of cards around in front of em, leafing through slowly and taking in a few of the details that slid across eir fingertips. ``Mind if I make a copy?''
+
+``Go ahead. It's a deck Debarre and I have been working on. Not complete, but I'll give you ACLs.''
+
+``Mm. Debarre looked crushed. Is he doing alright?''
+
+Sasha hesitated for a moment, caught in the middle of a gesture to grant copy rights on the cards. She shook her head, to which AwDae could only frown. She finished the gesture, and another set of vcards shuffled itself out from the original stack. Crisp black embossed on the creamy cotton-paper that AwDae preferred.
+
+``I'll take a look, too. I can't do too much right now, I've got a--''
+
+``I know, you've got a show coming up,'' Sasha laughed. ``Don't worry about it, dear. Debarre's working on it, I'm taking a look when I can, and I'm sure the weasel's got others helping him out besides us. No reason not to, either. We all liked Cicero.''
+
+The two sat in silence. AwDae slid Sasha's deck back and fanned eirs in front of emself before shuffling them back into a stack and swiping above them, instructing eir rig to make a local copy of the deck.
+
+Ey lifted eir snout away from the silence to scan the scents in the room once more. Now that it was starting to get on in the evening even in the Americas, the scentscape was changing. Some familiar scents, some unfamiliar, but most of them at least detailed, which told AwDae that the owners had put some thought into them. None, however, really jumped out at em.
+
+More rumination. Rumination edging into drowsiness.
+
+``Hey, Sasha, I gotta get going. I know I just got here, but I'm starting to crash hard.''
+
+The skunk nodded, tail drooping. ``No, it's alright. It's late there, and I know you've been in rehearsals for a while. Go get some sleep.''
+
+Both stood up and exchanged another hug, AwDae reveling in that dandelion scent of eir friend. Memories of school, drowsy, dreamlike. Dandelions in the lawn. An impromptu picnic. Rubbing one of the flowers on the back of eir hand, leaving a yellow stain. Sasha explaining that the smell always reminded her of muffins.
+
+``I'll see you later, skunk, yeah?''
+
+``Take care of yourself, okay? No working too hard, slaving over a hot rig\ldots{}''
+
+AwDae laughed and shook eir head. Gave the skunk one last squeeze before making eir way back through the crowd toward the alcove, already swiping eir command palette into view to head home.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/003.tex

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+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{RJ Brewster — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+RJ slid eir hands from the cradles and leaned back from the headrest, letting out a full-fledged yawn, pent up from the interferites preventing it. The sound and motion startled Priscilla from across the room. Ey levered emself up out of eir seat and trudged over toward the still-purring cat, stroking over her ears when she bunted her head up against eir hand.
+
+Eir mind foundered in a slurry of work, of Cicero's disappearance, of school with Sasha, of honing and forging.
+
+``I'm wiped, Prisca,'' ey informed the cat.
+
+She purred louder.
+
+Smiling, ey peeled eir shirt off over eir head and slipped out of eir jeans. Tomorrow's rehearsal would mean full dress for everyone and makeup for the actors. Ey'd have to make sure eir tux was clean. Should ey iron it? Maybe ey should iron it. Later.
+
+For now, as it neared two, ey focused on making sure the door was locked and the lights were out before stumbling over to bed.
+
+There seemed to be no shaking Sasha and all of her talk of high school---gone this last decade now---out of eir head. Even as ey climbed onto eir narrow mattress and burrowed beneath the covers against the chill of the night, ey was replaying memories from school. Scenes from the Americas. A worn out film, dim and scattershot.
+
+Honing and forging, honing and forging.
+
+Ey and Sasha had tried dating early on. After a few weeks of it not going anywhere, they had both admitted that they had felt pressured into having a relationship rather than actually wanting one. Good boys and girls fell in love with other good boys and girls, right? Went out to the movies. Kissed beneath the bleachers or something. Pretended they didn't have sex.
+
+The relationship petered out, rather than ending in some climactic fashion. They had continued the trend of going to movies, and later to live performances. They had never lost touch, at least.
+
+Sasha had gone on to have a string of other relationships, some earnest and some not, some more intense than others — a string that remained unbroken, if tonight's conversation was any clue — but RJ had stopped there.
+
+The intensity of the social pressure to date throughout high school was equaled only by RJ's complete apathy toward the whole scene. Apathy or, often, antipathy. Ey'd felt the occasional twinge of romantic attraction, perhaps, but the expectation of sex that went along with the process so put em off that ey had instead buried emself in work.
+
+Ey did well in some courses and not in others, as any kid might, but in the subjects ey enjoyed, ey dumped all of eir effort. Huge gusts of energy that drove em forward.
+
+Ey had started early on in working the school's old sound board in the theater. Ey ran plays. Ey ran concerts. Ey ran assemblies and lectures and conferences, quickly earning the trust of the other tech crew, as well as the staff.
+
+And then ey gained leadership. Prestige.
+
+The various computer classes had captivated em as well, and for eir sixteenth birthday, eir parents had surprised em with the implants needed for full interfacing with a rig. Or, well, ``surprised'': eir father was an engineer and eir mother a fairly forward-thinking person, and they had promised em the procedure before university.
+
+Honing and forging, honing and forging.
+
+It was a straightforward procedure in an outpatient office, self-guided implants largely installing themselves. The worst had been the itching. It was bearable on eir hands and along eir spine, where the implants and exocortex breached the surface of eir skin, because at least ey could scratch, though ey had been cautioned not to. The NFC tags in eir forehead and the interferites embedded deeper — far, far deeper — led to an itch that no scratching would ever reach.
+
+From there, sound and the rig had taken up all of eir energy, leaving little time to worry about any social stigma that went along with aversion to romance. Ey was simply the nerdy sound kid who knew more about computers than the teachers.
+
+It hadn't always been fun, of course, but by then ey quickly learned that the more ey put into the task, the more ey got out of it. The more ey honed, the further ey went.
+
+That ey had found furry in high school seemed almost a natural progression. Working and improving at the art of interfacing in a way that felt natural to em, it seemed, came just as natural to others on the 'net. Ey moved effortlessly through the Crown Pub and a few other choice spaces, slowly crafting the primary persona that ey used when interacting with others.
+
+A fennec. AwDae, a corruption of eir chosen name. A corruption borne of the intricacies of a thoroughly vulpine muzzle. A persona honed to a fine point.
+
+It was then that ey and Sasha had really started connecting, for it was her that introduced em to the community. They started hanging out more, talking more, building a network of friends together. Where dating hadn't worked out, friendship grew in both depth and breadth.
+
+Honing and forging, honing and forging.
+
+The forging of the virtual theater environment had culminated in a scholarship at a big name university out on the east coast. Immersive interactive theater technology, they called it. Forging into honing.
+
+It meant leaving Sasha and a few other close friends behind along with eir family, but it also meant that ey would be at the forefront of a new tech. Something used in production. Films and live work both.
+
+The field had been so new that eir own studies at the university helped fuel the change in theater tech work. Eir dissertation, what was meant to be a simple capstone project, was published and distributed, and theaters around the world were suddenly using immersive tech.
+
+Ey had continued to work at the university for a while. It was one of the few places around with both a theater and the hardware to back it up. Ey had considered continuing eir studies, but the draw of the theater was too heady, too alluring. Academia spelled a life of forging, work one of honing. Why deny one's base nature?
+
+Honing and forging, honing and forging.
+
+The call from London came less than a year after ey graduated. Would ey like to help start a tech-savvy theater group in town? The pay would be slow to start, but the troupe had a loose collection of apartments on the East End. Ey would have full run of the sound department. Yes? When could ey start?
+
+Eir parents had needed convincing. They were pleased, to be sure, but London, so far away! Still in the Western Federation, but so far.
+
+Ey made eir promises that ey'd come and visit every year, and packed eir bags.
+
+Burying emself deeper into the covers and the mattress, leaving enough room for Priscilla to join em later, RJ's thoughts alighted finally on Cicero, on the lost.
+
+Losing Cicero had been a shock. A disappearance, at first. Last seen two days ago. Three. And then it went on. Debarre hollering one night after getting in touch with Cice's family. Lost, lost, he was lost.
+
+And getting lost was rare. Vanishingly so, with perhaps a hundred cases at the time. Still, among those who were counted among the lost, all were heavy interfacers. It was a risk, everyone had assumed, just as was travel. Call it occupational hazard. Something could always happen. Something could always go wrong.
+
+To lose someone so close, though. That hit hard.
+
+It was a sharp reminder of just how much ey relied on the integration tech, not only for work, but for the lion's share of eir social life. Ey enjoyed the company of the troupe just fine. Troupe pub trips were a weekly affair. But eir heart lay among eir friends on the 'net. Eir friends being on the 'net meant more interfacing, and more interfacing meant, it seemed, more risk.
+
+Perhaps more for em than any of eir friends. Eir tech was truly immersive, after all. It was a dissolution of the body. Disembodied in the truest sense.
+
+It was \emph{becoming} the room. It was a new sensory experience. No limbs, no torso, no face or eyes or ears. Or maybe all ears: ey became the room, feeling the way sound echoed or didn't, knowing the limits of the speakers in a deeply physical way. Mics peppering the walls a new sensory input. The wires nerves. The speakers muscles to flex. Instincts, reactions, and actions responding to whole systems of stimuli.
+
+Perhaps that was why ey felt so at risk. They all were, of course, but to dissolve one's concept of a body at work, and then come home to warp the very same concept into that of a fox — no, a finely wrought amalgam of fox and self — felt perilously close to being lost, sometimes.
+
+Honing and forging, honing and forging. Risk and reward.
+
+Ey slept.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/004-a.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{RJ Brewster — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+RJ allowed emself to sleep in until near eleven that morning. Last night of dress rehearsal, might as well be well-rested.
+
+Many other members of the troupe held part time jobs during the day, and ey ran a small consulting business of eir own. The more industries that dove into immersive tech, the more eir expertise was worth. Even so, with all that ey did, ey made enough to not have to worry about holding down more than the one full-time gig.
+
+As it was, on days when ey had nighttime rehearsals, ey felt no compunctions about sleeping in. Nothing to be up for, only the 'net to keep them occupied in the mornings, little enough need to get moving.
+
+It was Priscilla who eventually succeeded in waking em, butting her head against eir cheek and purring obscenely, stomping on em through the blanket with kneading paws. The more insistent the cat became, the less able ey was to ignore her intrusions on eir admittedly banal dreams.
+
+Fine. Trudge out of bed. Refill cat's water and food. Give the requisite morning pets to keep her happy. Scoop the litter box. Make self a pot of tea. Tea to shake the grogginess.
+
+Ey sat at the tiny kitchen table, sipping from eir oversized mug and watching the late morning traffic from eir window. Mostly business traffic, with the occasional mother with child in tow. Black cabs. Scooters. Bikes.
+
+By the time ey had finished eir first mug of tea, RJ had woken up enough to start on the prowl. As with the night before, ey made sure that everything was in order before touching eir rig. Ey'd taken care of the cat, but ey still needed to eat, emself. So, remembering eir promise, ey set about making a small pot of rice. Fifteen minutes to cook, plenty enough time to finish another mug of tea.
+
+RJ left most of the rice cooling in the pot and took for emself a small bowl to go with the leftover curry. The process of swiping eir hand over the controls of the stove had reminded em of the deck that Sasha had shared last night. There was no reason to think that some random person in London would have much to offer in the case of another person ey had never met getting lost. No reason not to try, though. Maybe there was something, some small insight that ey had which, when pooled with those of others, might help in some way.
+
+So many maybes. So many mights and perhapses.
+
+Empty bowl in sink. Third and final cup of tea in the thick-walled mug. Good enough. Ey allowed emself to settle before eir rig at last.
+
+As before, ey keyed in the password and rested eir hand onto the cradle for the two-factor. However, instead of delving in as ey had last night, ey unfolded the screen to full height and pulled the keyboard closer, swinging the hand rests to the side and the headrest up and out of the way. No need to go immersive, with work like this. Ey could just as easily work as a fox, of course, but it was so easy to lose track of time in there, and the night's rehearsal mustn't be forgotten.
+
+Besides, eir tea was here.
+
+``Let's see,'' ey murmured, taking a sip of tea before setting the mug down
+
+Ey called up Sasha's deck.
+
+\begin{longtable}[]{@{}c@{}}
+\toprule
+\endhead
+Cicero Lost Nov 2112\tabularnewline
+Priv eyes only\tabularnewline
+See Debarre for ACLs\tabularnewline
+\bottomrule
+\end{longtable}
+
+\begin{longtable}[]{@{}c@{}}
+\toprule
+\endhead
+Dr.~Carter Ramirez\tabularnewline
+specialist in lost\tabularnewline
+so. London\tabularnewline
+\bottomrule
+\end{longtable}
+
+\begin{longtable}[]{@{}c@{}}
+\toprule
+\endhead
+Mr/Mrs.~Jackson\tabularnewline
+parents, can't get much more\tabularnewline
+dad in govt, mother stays home\tabularnewline
+\bottomrule
+\end{longtable}
+
+And on it went for nearly a dozen cards. Each had its own cover embossed with a few lines of type, each containing upwards of a terabyte of information culled from various sources, doubtless of varied quality.
+
+RJ flipped through each, gleaning what ey could from a quick scan, before collapsing the deck once more and sitting back to think. Nothing in there seemed new. Nothing out of place. Ey had only received the deck last night, and yet nothing felt like it had been revealed, uncovered.
+
+Ey knew of the lost, of course, and the name Ramirez was commonly tied with the few hundred or so cases that had cropped up over the last few months. The family\ldots{}no, nothing to be gained there, at least not that had already been tried by Debarre. And again, there was the problem of being a random nobody in the UK: no one known, no one with power.
+
+None of the rest of the cards carried any real significance to em.
+
+If there was anything RJ was going to add to the conversation, it would be through eir connection to Cicero. Something ey knew, something the two had shared.
+
+A small notification slid down from the top of eir monitor, covering the upper right corner of the screen.
+
+\begin{quote}
+\textbf{D — D — R}
+
+Voting begins in \emph{5} minutes on \emph{referrendum 238ac9b8}:
+
+Summary: \emph{Tariffs on importation of goods from the Sino-Russian Bloc\ldots{}}
+
+Cost: 1,000
+
+Comment: 150,000
+
+Bounty: 280,000
+\end{quote}
+
+RJ reached to swipe the notification away. Ey had very little stake in the uncomfortable alliance between Western Fed and S-R Bloc. Could care less, honestly, about taxes on things that ey'd never buy. Then something clicked within em, and ey halted eir motion.
+
+\emph{Cicero.}
+
+Ey hastily shuffled back through the \emph{Cicero Lost} deck until coming up with the `recent net activity' card and pulled up the contents. It took a few moments to remember how to sort tabular data — database classes in high school so long ago — but eventually, ey got the table sorted around the activity type. Ey scrolled rapidly through the list until ey got to the list of Direct Democracy Representative entries.
+
+There was the connection.
+
+The one thing that RJ and Cicero had was their arguments over politics. Not just politics, but the worthiness of the current political system in all of its facets. Arguments upon arguments upon arguments, fennec fox and tabby cat with their ceaseless bickering in the Crown Pub.
+
+RJ was firmly on the left, but ey felt the representative democracy combined with the DDR was a pretty good system. Not great, sure. It was \emph{fine}. It \emph{worked}. To ask for more from a political system was to invite further troubles like those from the preceding century.
+
+Cicero, however, seemed to waver between socialism and anarchy, depending on factors such as how much he had had to drink and how angry he was at the most recent vote.
+
+\emph{I certainly can't see broad shifts going my way,} he had slurred on more than one occasion. \emph{Least I can vote. Vote on every damn thing that comes my way.}
+
+Ey made sure syncing was turned on across all copies of the deck before snipping those rows out of the activity table into a card of their own:
+
+\begin{longtable}[]{@{}c@{}}
+\toprule
+\endhead
+DDR votes\tabularnewline
+todo: process by record\tabularnewline
+1 month, 835 votes (!)\tabularnewline
+\bottomrule
+\end{longtable}
+
+The icon in the upper left of the screen showing the deck twirled gracefully to show the sync.
+
+Cicero had voted precisely how he had talked. On the surface, he was no different than any other far-left socialist on the DDR.
+
+Along with the ability to vote on issues directly came the ability to comment — for a price. DDR votes didn't cost money, but they did cost credit, up to 1,000 per. Credit gained by voting on cheaper issues, for each vote provided a bounty paid upon consideration, beginning with a few freebies in the tutorial.
+
+What Cicero's records showed was that he was wealthy. \emph{Fantastically} wealthy. RJ had a few million DDR credits banked away in case a high value issue that ey felt strongly about cropped so that ey could make a comment. Unlike voting, commenting could cost upwards of five million credits. And one could buy their way to influence by flooding issues with comments.
+
+Cicero's wealth surpassed RJ's at least a hundred times over, if not more. Well into the billions of credits. For someone to be as active in commenting as ey knew the cat to be and still have that much in credits stored up showed a dedication to following politics that was just barely hinted at by those tispy rants. Cicero was well connected, well read, and, most importantly, apparently a key political figure on the DDR comment sections to an extent that none of the Crown regulars had ever expected.
+
+RJ sat back in silence for a few moments before muttering, ``Well, shit. Prisca, you don't suppose\ldots{}''
+
+Rather than finishing the thought out loud, ey dashed off a summary in the notes attached to the card.
+
+\begin{quote}
+AwDae here. Looks like there's a lot going on in DDR activity (where'd you get this, Debarre?). Cicero was into a lot, and I'm not trying to go all conspiracy nut on you all, but do you think that maybe he got in too deep or something? Not saying someone tried to do it to him or anything, just that maybe the more one uses the net, the more likely it is to happen to them? I mean seriously, look at all of his votes, and his stash of credits! I'll keep poking at this after rehearsal.
+\end{quote}
+
+The tea had gone cold long ago, but ey downed it all the same. Ey'd spent longer than planned plowing through the data the hard way and ey risked being late if ey didn't start hustling.
+
+It was nearing dusk by the time ey left, the tux newly brushed and ironed, the gloves newly washed, the RJ newly shaven.
+
+On the way back to the tube station, ey stopped by a Thai counter and picked up some take-away noodles for the night. Ey made it halfway through the container before the rancid belch of station wind suggested ey pack it away before heading down to the platform.
+
+Throughout the ride to Soho, RJ's mind continued prowling through the data in Sasha and Debarre's deck. Ey kept mulling over that surreal number of credits. Just how much social currency was bound up within the reputation market of the DDR credit system?
+
+Cicero had built himself up into a proper political player.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/004-b.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{RJ Brewster — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+RJ arrived at the theater early, the last few meters of the walk having been spent hastily finishing the carton of Thai. Carton and chopsticks wound up in the compost as ey swiped eir way into the theater.
+
+``Sorry, Johansson, I'm here.''
+
+The hulking director laughed. ``You're here five minutes early, RJ. What on earth are you sorry about?''
+
+``What? I-- Oh.''
+
+``Lot on your mind, kid?''
+
+``Nah, I'm fine. I mean,'' RJ frowned, squinted. Anything to get emself in the work mindset. ``Yeah, sorry. Woke up early and spent a bunch of time researching. Guess my head's still elsewhere, boss.''
+
+``Well, alright,'' Johansson rumbled. ``So long as you get your head around work by the time we start. Hey. More crew.''
+
+RJ bustled into the theater and made eir way down to the pit where the mics had been stored. Ey handed them out to the actors who would be wearing them, ticking off the cheat-sheet to align proper mic to correct actor.
+
+Ey bounded back up the steps two at a time to the tech booth and set about waking the theater up. Caitlin was already delved in, so it would already be shaking its sleepy head. Ey just had to help it wake up the rest of the way.
+
+RJ exchanged cheery greetings with the lights understudy as ey shrugged out of eir jacket, draping it over the back of the chair. Ey slipped eir hands carefully out of eir gloves. Contacts gleamed from eir digits, freshly polished and clean.
+
+Ey settled into eir chair and delved in to greet the theater. It purred in recognition, brushed up against em, stretched and unlimbered. Thoughts of Cicero and Debarre, of Sasha and the lost left back with eir body, with eir hands resting lightly on the contacts in the cradles, forehead against the headrest.
+
+The first half of rehearsal went by without trouble. Johansson had apparently highlighted a few areas of concern, so they began with those. From there, the cast has followed his lead, adjusting as needed per their dear leader's suggestions. RJ and Caitlin kept a script running so that they could keep up with the director and stage manager.
+
+When the clock hit eight thirty, Johansson called for a break and informed everyone that they would be running through top to bottom after. Last chance for a full run-through.
+
+RJ gave the purring theater some reassuring warmth and backed out of the connection, reveling in the snap of eir fingers pulling away from that light magnetic grasp of the cradles. Ey wiped eir hands dry and flexed fingers to keep limber.
+
+Ey spent the break walking around the theater and stage in one big, looping arc, simply listening. Hearing from the theater's perspective so often, it was easy to get wrapped in the omniscience of it all. Good, too, to hear the way that the ambient sound moved through the room, reflected off of walls and ceiling, died among the baffles. It would all be different with people in the seats, to be sure, but the acoustics of the space were beautiful on their own.
+
+Johansson whistled piercingly. Back to work, back to the stage. Back to the booth and back to the contented and satiny-soft embrace of the theater for RJ.
+
+It was around the end of the first act that RJ started having problems.
+
+When one was delved in, one could always focus hard enough to feel the way their head felt against the headrest, or sense the way that their hands rested within the cradles of the grips. Trickier, sure, when one was as immersive as eir tech required. Bodies weren't a thing in that liminal space. Ey was as much the room as the room was itself. No forehead, no hands. No headrest or grips
+
+By the time ey had brought house sound down in time for the curtain, RJ could feel a numbness creeping. A stealing of sensation. A non-feeling flowing slowly over emself from the base of eir neck outwards, stretching out along eir scalp, down eir arms, the non-sensation not-tickling along eir ribs.
+
+Ey had been willing, desperately, to chalk it up to nerves or exhaustion. It had been such a long week.
+
+Thoughts of Cicero, doubtless cradled in some hospital creche: strictly disallowed but nonetheless teasing around the edges of consciousness.
+
+\emph{Tired, yes. Exhausted. Yawns.}
+
+By the time ey couldn't feel the plastic of the headrest or the cradles beneath eir hands, no matter the desperation, ey began to panic.
+
+\emph{Panic, yes. Just anxiety. Nerves.}
+
+All the same, it was final dress. Ey would be able to head home and catch up on sleep. Drink some tea. Hot chocolate. Pet the cat. Whatever ey needed.
+
+\emph{Need, yes. Baser than want. Imperatives.}
+
+By the second curtain, something was desperately wrong.
+
+Ey hadn't missed any cues yet, but ey couldn't seem to figure out how to work eir `voice'. That thing that wasn't talking. That subvocalization used to communicate with Caitlin Sarai Johansson anyone. The immersion-mouth to chat to talk to radio for help a non-entity non-thing non-here, gone, leaving em feeling exponentially more cut off from the rest of the theater as time went on.
+
+Numb, yes. Yet strangely embodied. Strangely tangible. Strangely localized. Oh god oh god please help please help. The play. Ey had work. Ey had the theater. Ey had the room and the lines and time and space to manage. Ey had a home and the Crown and a cat and Sasha and Debarre.
+
+\emph{Had, yes.}
+
+It was the muzzle that was the kicker. The muzzle and the tail, which ey felt — any feeling a beacon in the storm of numbness which had long since enveloped em entire — with a piercing intensity. Felt, bordering on and then diving straight into pain.
+
+\emph{Pull back,} ey begged. Every bit of training begged. Every nerve begged, screamed. \emph{A bug, a glitch, an error. Pull back oh god please pull back.}
+
+Ey lifted eir hands — paws? — in a coarse, jerking motion which, along with the act of pulling eir head back from the contacts, led to em toppling over. There was no chair to catch em.
+
+And that was when ey missed eir cue.
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+The curtain went down, the lights dimmed, and then, ringing clear, a thin giggle filled the auditorium. The lead laughing at a misstep. A quiet joke to share at the pub later. No harm. Sound was off, right? Curtains would eat the unamplified laugh.
+
+``RJ,'' Sarai whispered into the silence of the theater's sim. ``Stay on cue, bud.''
+
+No answer, no apology, no acknowledgment that a note had been made. No signal.
+
+``RJ?''
+
+``What's going on up there?'' Johansson's subvocalization rumbled through the director's channel in the sim.
+
+``Something's wrong, boss, lemme back out and check up on RJ.''
+
+``Hold places,'' Johansson said aloud to the theater. The open channels from the actors' mics carried a few quiet whispers in response. ``Hold on, quiet please.''
+
+Moving with a quickness which belied his bulk, Johansson jogged up to the tech booth and slipped in as quickly as possible to keep sound from leaking out. Sarai was trying to rouse RJ.
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+Like a projector bulb's heat burning through celluloid film, the third curtain had signified a drastic change. Slow enough to be observed, faster than ey could hope to avoid. The few tenuous touches on reality that held RJ into eir seat in the tech booth scorched and peeled away, acrid smoke stinging eir eyes. And the numbness spiked.
+
+RJ lay on a tile floor. Dirty. Yellow. Brown specks, dark enough to be black.
+
+The tiles were completely regular, one foot on a side, obviously made of some synthetic material. Harder than linoleum, softer than stone. They were glued to a concrete foundation. No wasting time with grout, each tile butted up against the others to form a grid of thin, black lines showing where the dirt of hundreds of feet had been ground into the remaining seams. Thousands. Millions.
+
+Ey couldn't move, not yet, but ey could see that the world was bounded. There was a thin plastic strip of molding around the edge of a wall. Above that, regular rectangles of blue. A wall.
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+``Something's not right, boss. Ey's totally unresponsive on the line.''
+
+``Pull him, pull him! Hit the panic!''
+
+Caitlin, who had backed out moments before, and Sarai both leaped to RJ's sides and pulled eir hands up from the cradles, rocking em back from the headrest to lean against the back of the chair. All according to training.
+
+Eir body flopped lifelessly against the cheap plastic mesh.
+
+Caitlin slapped the red button on the side of the rig, fingers coming away dusty. Below the desk, drives sparked to life and dumped the last thirty minutes of both sim and brain activity from the user.
+
+``The hell?'' Johansson growled, reaching in a thick pair of fingers to press against the side of the sound lead's neck. ``He's got a pulse. Check his eyes, Sarai. Caitlin, call. Now.''
+
+Shaking, Caitlin pulled her phone from her bag and struggled to unlock. She gave up, swiped to the emergency dialer, called out to emergency services.
+
+``They're rolled back, boss. Bloodshot, too.'' Sarai tugged back the collar of RJ's shirt, exposing eir exocortex's simple color-coded readout, set at the base of eir neck. ``Blue. What the hell\ldots{}''
+
+``Ey's not jacked in, though,'' Johansson said. A statement brooking no discussion. ``Can't be.''
+
+``I think--'' Sarai trailed off hoarsely, cleared her throat, tried again. ``I mean, do you think ey's lost?''
+
+``Caitlin, what's our status, girl?'' Johansson didn't wait for a response, throwing the door to the tech booth wide and shouting out toward the stage, ``Cut! Manually shut off your mics and take a seat where you are. \emph{Do not move.} Emergency services will be here soon, and will record what they can.''
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+Lockers.
+
+The blue rectangles were lockers. The first hint was the vent, those five slots a few inches from the bottom of each narrow rectangle, but, as ey lifted eir muzzle from where it lay on the tile floor, ey could clearly see the locks halfway up each door.
+
+Tall, narrow lockers. Blue. Yellow tile floors. Thin tile glued to cool concrete. The scent, the very feel of the place.
+
+AwDae struggled against crashing waves of panic. Struggled to make all of this information fit in eir head. Struggled to make it all fit in with the fact that ey was currently vulpine. A fennec fox dressed in a suit, laying on the floor of the central corridor of eir old high school.
+
+``What the hell?''

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/005-a.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,116 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+AwDae slowly picked emself up off of the floor, staggering to eir feet.
+
+Ey was standing, swaying, in the middle of a long row of lockers. And then ey was sitting again. Not from weakness \emph{per se}, but the shock of being in the tech booth and theater sim, and then suddenly being back in high school was taking its toll on eir wits.
+
+Ey swiped eir paw from left to right in front of emself to bring up the usual menu.
+
+Only, no menu came up. There was nothing in this sim, if sim it was. No global menu, no ACLs. No control.
+
+Panic crested again, broke the surface.
+
+AwDae felt behind emself, reaching for that sense of reality outside of the sim, that cool breeze of the tangible that should be at eir back. It \emph{was} there. Ey could feel it. A cool breath of air on the back of eir neck, but muffled. Only, there was something keeping em from reaching for it, touching it. A thin barrier. A membrane. A sheet of keeping em trapped within the sim.
+
+And then, with a jolt of pain driving like a spike down the back of eir neck and along eir spine, it was gone.
+
+Throughout all of the practice runs, the endless training on the rig that had gone into eir education, that feeling had only come up a scant handful of times. It was the feeling of being forcibly disconnected from the rig through the manual expedient of removing the contacts from the cradles in which they rested. It was the shock of being brought to reality from out of a sim with no disconnection. It was the rush of eir exocortex dumping its core and the interferites struggling to hand back control with the last of their stored power. It was panic made tangible, halfway between electricity and the feeling of missing one's step on the last stair.
+
+And with that, AwDae should've found emself back in the tech booth, trying to figure out what strange loop the theater had gotten itself into that would have frozen eir rig.
+
+The lockers never wavered, though, and now ey found emself stuck in eir old high school with no contact to the world outside of whatever this place was.
+
+Ey screamed.
+
+Ey didn't know how long ey screamed, how many times. Ey didn't know how long ey cried or beat eir fists against the lockers. Ey didn't know where ey was.
+
+Lost.
+
+Lost like so many others.
+
+Lost like Cicero.
+
+Or perhaps Aeneas, Odysseus.
+
+Sing to me the reasons, O Muse. Sing, Muse, the fatal wrath.
+
+Eventually, ey cried emself out. Minutes, hours. Eventually, eir tail went numb and eir feet fell asleep.
+
+\emph{Nothing for it.} Ey wobbled to eir feet, kicked off now ill-fitting shoes, shoes not made for fox paws, and began to trudge.
+
+Ey walked slowly down the halls, memories coming back in a wash. Realities blurred effortlessly. Realities of the embodied world. Realities of online life.
+
+Nails on feetpaws clicking against the tile, following the math wing to the student center, a cavernous space that acted as a terminus for all of the different hallways, each hosting a different subject. They spread away from the cavernous room like limbs, a giant insect clutching at the earth.
+
+Neither halls nor hub had ever seen a fox. They were supposed to be home to students. To students and teachers and staff. To humans. To anyone, not some lone half-beast.
+
+Inside the student center, AwDae sat down and tried to reach towards reality once more.
+
+Nothing.
+
+Ey sagged, rolling onto eir side in eir increasingly frustrated attempts to pull away from the contacts, though that shock of pain suggested those in reality had long since pulled em away.
+
+Frustration, anger, fear. Hopelessness. Terror. All simmered within em, working up to a boil as ey tried increasingly harder.
+
+Finally, ey gave up and, hastily brushing at the tears staining eir cheeks, slipped out of eir tux jacket as well. Why keep it? Yet another unfoxly garment.
+
+Ey swished eir tail to the side and lay flat on eir back on the cool terrazzo floor. Ey pulled eir suit jacket up over eir face and buried eir muzzle in the soft lining. With paws holding the cloth to eir face, ey deliberately let the tears come. Willed them too. Forced. Screamed and begged. Anything for release from the tension building up.
+
+Time held no meaning. It was a few minutes or hours or days before ey peeled the coat from eir face and stood up once more. Exhausted, ey bent down to roll up the cuffs of eir slacks to keep them from bothering eir feet.
+
+It was in the middle of the second cuff that ey realized the absurdity of the motion. In the theater sim, ey didn't have a body, and when ey `woke' in eir normal sim, ey was dressed only in the clothes ey had on when ey went to bed. Usually nothing. Ey disrobed before disconnecting more out of habit than anything.
+
+So why was ey still in eir tux? Did ey even have a tux in eir wardrobe?
+
+AwDae puzzled over this for a moment before completing the cuff rolling. Something to look into later. For now, ey needed to find eir way out. Find eir way \emph{back} out. Or, failing that, at least find one thing ey could finish. One, simple task to complete. Something to make em feel less powerless in the face of it all.
+
+Exploring, then.
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+The sim was startlingly complete.
+
+Perhaps. Ey had been in London a few years, and before that, on the coast at university. \emph{Was} it complete? Was it accurate? Despair lay around the corner: the thought that the chances of em being able to compare the sim and reality vanishingly small.
+
+In fact, the only thing that seemed to have changed was AwDae emself.
+
+AwDae's curiosity won out. Ey made eir way back to the school's auditorium. It was exactly as ey had left it all those years ago. Trudging up the few steps toward the entrance, ey feared that it would be locked. Missing. Somehow erased from existence, such that it had never been there in the first place.
+
+But the door swung easily beneath eir paw and eir nails clicked against the sound guard in the doorway, leading em into the dimly lit hall.
+
+The house lights were at quarter, the stage lit only by utility lights from the back. All the same, it was enough for em to find eir way to the small sound booth. A counter with a light: off. A bank of sliders and knobs: all zeroed out.
+
+AwDae brushed eir fingerpads along the lower lip of the soundboard. The screws were exactly where ey remembered.
+
+Swishing eir tail out of the way, ey sat on the stool before it. Ey reached a paw up past the master sliders, just around to the back of the board, where ey found the power switch.
+
+Click.
+
+Nothing happened, so ey reached a little further back, finding the power strip for the booth itself, and toggled the switch on that. The board let out a satisfying pop of recognition as it came to life. The brief surge of power echoed throughout the room as speakers awoke. The theater uncoiled, purred to em, just as the one back in London had done\ldots{}what? Three hours back? Five? A year?
+
+Ey fumbled with the booth light, finding the ancient dial switch to wash away shadows with lazy red light. Light that illuminated a thin layer of dust covering the board and booth in a matte coating. Light that illuminated countless motes already disturbed. The only breaks in the coating were where eir fingers had brushed the dust away, leaving black slicks.
+
+So familiar. So many dreams. Dreams of flawless performances of breathtaking beauty. Nightmares of feedback and missing equipment.
+
+Acting on a dream, ey slowly brought the master volume up to the spot ey still remembered from so long ago, turned the gain to mid on mic one, and brought the slider up slowly.
+
+Blinked.
+
+A soft hiss filled the hall. The channel was open.
+
+\emph{That doesn't mean anything,} AwDae thought. \emph{There could be anything plugged into the snakehead in the pit. A line with a powered mic. A wireless receiver. Hell, a fault in the system.}
+
+All the same, it was something. Something in this seemingly abandoned hulk of memory was turned on, something else besides emself was making noise.
+
+Ey was about to head down to the pit to check on the snakehead, the terminus for all of the microphone cables or wireless receivers that stretched up to the board, when ey caught sight of a sheet of paper, folded in quarters, tucked between the side of the board and the wall of the booth.
+
+AwDae plucked the paper free and unfolded it, held it under the red light of the booth lamp to get a closer look at it.
+
+There, in tiny print, was a good chunk of the content of the vcard ey had created earlier that morning to add to Sasha and Debarre's deck. Cicero's DDR ledger, containing transactions that comprised votes made, bounties collected, and comments posted.
+
+A note, though. Doubly weird. The paper didn't act like a normal vcard. No menu, no ACLs ey could sense. And yet the closer ey looked at the paper, the more the data seemed to unfold, fractally nested and seemingly infinitely deep.
+
+Ey blinked, and the moment passed. The note once more contained only tabulated transactions.
+
+Frowning, AwDae refolded the note and stuck it into eir trousers' pocket. A small scrap of the outside world stuck in this elaborate fantasy.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/005-b.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,76 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+The pit revealed little.
+
+There were twenty boxes set on a table in front of the snakehead. Twenty receivers for twenty wireless mics. Twenty cables neatly velcroed together into a bundle, contracting from the receivers and dangling catenary from the dull grey plug-box. They were reduced to a four-by-five grid, arching up above the snakehead before plunging into it, XLR heads buried in XLR nests.
+
+All of the boxes on the table were dull. Mute LEDs simple bumps on their surface. Dark. All but one: the first. The one with a piece of masking tape on its face, scrawled with a `1'. That box had a single red light on the front, indicating that it was powered on, and a single green light, indicating that the corresponding mic was transmitting.
+
+``Great,'' AwDae murmured. ``That leaves only half the school to search.''
+
+If it had been a wired mic, the search would have been over as soon as it began: the cable would've been plugged into the snakehead, and by following it until ey reached its end, there would be the mic.
+
+And what?
+
+There would be the mic, and ey would still be stuck in a nightmare. No, in some parody of a nightmare. All dressed up for the high school pops festival and, here, see? The auditorium is completely empty.
+
+The fox barked a laugh at how many cliches littered the situation. Turning away from the receivers, ey rested eir weight against the edge of the table that bore them. Ey leaned a moment, then hiked eir backside up onto the familiar surface, relishing the squeak of stressed metal from eir sudden burden.
+
+AwDae swung eir legs back and forth, hearing the table creak and groan in time with the slow movements. The sound was quiet, but in that dread silence, more than enough to fill the hall.
+
+Ey stopped.
+
+The auditorium was pleasantly wet: not damp or moist, but in terms of echo, it had just the right amount; or, at least, as much as a high school auditorium was able to muster. Had it been dry, the sound would've died away completely. The drier a room, the closer it got to an anechoic chamber. Zero echo. The painful lack thereof.
+
+AwDae knew this hall, even years later, even in dreams. Ey knew the pockets of good and bad sound scattered throughout the seating. Ey knew the dead spots on stage where one's voice would fall flat. Ey knew how the stage was built rather like a horn, performers at the small end, so that their performances were projected out toward the audience. Ey knew how the stage was built like a drum, the orchestra pit a chamber of its own.
+
+And yet, there was that slight echo of the squeaking of the table.
+
+An idea. A crazy one, sure, but by this point, with despair nipping at eir heels, a crazy idea was better than none.
+
+\emph{And}, a bitter portion of em reasoned. \emph{If getting lost is permanent like they say, I've got nothing to lose.}
+
+Ey hopped off the table and began to pace.
+
+The squeal of feedback in an audio system is an emergent behavior, and even those who have not heard it before know immediately that something is wrong as soon as the hum starts. That quiet hum in the background, building exponentially.
+
+It doesn't take long before it can be understood as something originating in the system, rather than coming from speaker or performer. From there, it builds on itself, feeding back into the mic and growing louder until it quickly overwhelms all other sound. Rises, crescendos. Hearing and speaker damage equally likely if left unchecked.
+
+Similar, in an upside-down sort of way, to the echo that AwDae had caused making the table squeak beneath eir weight. Sound was picked up by the microphone, transmitted through the sound board, then out into the room. Amplified, though, through the speakers.
+
+If the microphone started to pick up sound from the speakers — and sound was sound, the mic cared not where it came from — that sound would loop through the board once more.
+
+A feedback loop.
+
+It would continue to build through further and further iterations, until the auditorium was filled with a roar of that one dread pitch the microphone had first locked onto.
+
+Dread and dire. Cursed. An eternal struggle.
+
+Obviously microphones were still in use. They hadn't been abandoned because of the loop; they just got smarter about finding ways around feedback.
+
+One could angle speakers toward the audience, rather than the stage. Bodies were notoriously bad reflectors of sound. Part of what made the stage so acoustically dead, that.
+
+One could turn down the monitor speakers facing the stage, but that would be cruel to one's performers.
+
+One could turn down amplification, but that defeated the purpose.
+
+The solution, then, was gain.
+
+The adjustment was provided by a knob at the very top of the sound board governing the sensitivity of the mic. At the top, befitting its importance in the setup. The very beginning of the signal path.
+
+Turn the gain all the way down, and the mic was a dumb lump of metal and plastic. Turn it all the way up, and the mic picked up everything from the movement of the air to the slight hiss of the live sound system, almost guaranteeing instant feedback.
+
+AwDae cranked the gain almost to the point of feedback. If ey could make noise in various points throughout the auditorium, maybe it'd get picked up. The more feedback ey generated, the more sound the mic was picking up. The more sound it was picking up, the closer ey was to it.
+
+Eir possible locations for the mic hadn't been reduced, it was still half the school, but eir chances of finding it sooner rather than later would go up. If the mic was not in the auditorium, ey could turn the main system up and start venturing further afield. Leave a door open, let the mic hear. Let em hear the theater ring like a bell in turn.
+
+Riddles. Triply weird.
+
+AwDae felt stupid. Insulted. Trapped for life and still solving riddles.
+
+Hopelessness dimmed eir vision.\pagebreak
+
+Ey shook eir head, ears laid flat.
+
+``At least it's something.''

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/006.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,132 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+It took AwDae just under two hours to find the microphone.
+
+The first hour was spent searching the auditorium top to bottom. Ey walked around clapping and humming, then quoting lines half-remembered from productions ey had worked with Sasha in the past. ``So set its Sun in thee,'' ey called in an affected accent. ``What Day be dark to me.'' Wistful Dickinson to fill an empty hall.
+
+Ey would've whistled if it wasn't for the structure of a canid muzzle.
+
+Silence.
+
+After an hour, venturing even into the overhead areas where sound was muffled, damped, ey gave up and took a break.
+
+\emph{It's probably fruitless to be this thorough in the auditorium,} ey thought. \emph{The gain's high enough that even a quiet clap should be enough.}
+
+Ey slouched in an auditorium seat and pulled out the slip of paper with Cicero's transactions. Ey had found that if ey focused on the page just so, rows would sort themselves by columns, so ey spent a few minutes aimlessly zooming through the page of digits.
+
+Ey scanned over the titles of the initiatives voted on. Very little there to latch onto. Or, rather, way too much. AwDae couldn't hope to boil down the table into any single sentence, much less something useful. The cat had apparently voted on just about everything without taking any breaks.
+
+Eventually, when neat rows of letters began to blur into one another, ey levered emself up from the seat. Paper refolded, ey slipped it back into a pocket before checking on the board once more. Everything remained set as it was.
+
+AwDae had imagined ey would work in concentric circles away from the auditorium. That turned out not to be the best idea. The hall was nestled between two arms of the school which did not meet except via the auditorium itself. Eir route grew arduous: ey'd walk down one hallway, poke into classrooms, and make noise before moving on.
+
+When ey reached the end of eir circle, though, ey had to jog around the auditorium through the student center to go down the other hallway and do the same.
+
+Ey gave up on the concentric circle plan and started working from north to south, instead. Ey worked through the entirety of one hallway, clapping and hollering, without hearing anything. From there, on to the area of the student center near the auditorium.
+
+It was there that ey heard the first, faint hum of feedback.
+
+It threatened to skim beneath eir attention, sounding too much like an echo from eir own voice in the cavernous common area. The door to the auditorium caught eir eye, and ey tried once more, getting another faint hum. It slowly died out as space and air dissipated tone.
+
+It was only a few minutes from there to find the microphone itself. A lavalier mic, disguised as a button resting obsequiously atop the door handle leading into the principal's office. It was just to the northeast of the auditorium doors. Ey would've found it soon enough. It was surprising, in a way, that ey hadn't managed to trigger any feedback earlier.
+
+The door was labeled `Admin.'. Ominous.
+
+There was a head office at the front of the school, but administration was where the principal and vice principals' offices were. One of those places that lingered in the mind of every student who passed through the doors of the school. Getting called to the front office was usually bad enough — a call from a parent? — but getting called to the admin office was more oh-shit than that.
+
+Ears pinned back, AwDae picked up the microphone delicately through mounting feedback and quickly shut it off. The hum had grown loud enough that ey could hear faint clicks from the speakers. Magnets clicking, popping as the physical limitations of the ancient-and-not-so-great speakers reached their limit.
+
+The sound stopped a scant few moments after, bouncing around the auditorium and the student center. Echoes.
+
+Eir ears slowly uncringed. The school was silent once more.
+
+Remembering the position where ey had found it, AwDae pocketed the mic and straightened up, wandered back over to the auditorium, turning the gain down on the board and lowering the house volume to a reasonable level. Ey even turned the mic back on and mumbled a quick ``one-two'' to ensure that none of the speakers had been damaged.
+
+\emph{This is a sim. Not even mine,} ey thought, the inside of eir ears flushed warm with embarrassment. \emph{What does it matter if a speaker blew?}
+
+Ey shrugged it off. Habits were habits. No reason to break them now.
+
+Back to the admin office, then. AwDae couldn't help but feel as though ey was trapped within a game. One of those first-person puzzle solvers that seemed forever popular. One of eir favorite of the genres.
+
+It was surprising the adroitness with which eir perspective had shifted. Sobbing: now behind em.
+
+Perhaps the fact that ey seemed to be receiving what amounted to clues while in a complex abandoned building added to that. Perhaps it was the shift from RJ to AwDae. Perhaps something about emself. Countless hours in sim. Countless changes in scenery. Countless changes in form.
+
+Shaking eir head, ey turned the knob on the admin office and peeked inside.
+
+There were no traps, no jump-scares. Just the six-sided room with three doors on the walls this one. One for the principal, and two for the vice principals. Taking the game metaphor to heart, ey started poking around the office where ey could, flipping through a datebook on the secretary's desk (empty) and rummaging through the drawers (office supplies).
+
+The waste baskets were empty.
+
+Steeling emself for something\ldots{}something what, shocking? The game mentality still holding tight, perhaps. Ey tried each of the doors in turn.
+
+Surprising. It wasn't the principal's office that opened, but one of the vice principals. The name of the one who had worked there when ey was a student escaped em, and no tags adorned the doors. The office was dark, but the lights responded to a touch on the pad. Ey set it to a comfortable level; warm without being cozy, bright enough to read without being intimidating.
+
+Memories of being hauled into the room, all those years ago, with the lights all the way up, a gesture of power.
+
+Rummaging through the desk revealed little of note.
+
+Rather than a planner on the desk was a workstation. Simple. Ancient. It didn't respond to any of AwDae's interactions. How it would work, ey couldn't guess. A sim within a sim? Ey had perhaps hoped that a connection like that might lead\ldots{}outside. Outside of this mess.
+
+The only other items on the desk were a scratch pad and a pencil. The expected tools. The perpetual desk-toppers that never seemed to go out of style.
+
+The pad contained a breakdown of costs, divided into departments, for the coming year. A simple three-column setup tallying subject, expense, and deductions from some number at the top. Budgets, perhaps. At the bottom of the page, was a final number, circled in dark, angry strokes. Apparently, the administrator hadn't liked the result.
+
+AwDae flumped down in the chair at a jaunty angle, eir tail flopping down between armrest and chair back. Tired, so very tired.
+
+Ey rubbed away the sandy grit of tears already shed. Ey was moving in this search with determination. As much as ey could muster. Anything to occupy eir mind, anything to keep em from collapsing into a depression borne of hopelessness and despair. It occurred to em that getting lost was the perfect prison: complete freedom, or nearly so (ey had already fantasized about jimmying open the other doors), with nothing to do. Nothing to dream, nowhere to go, nothing to know.
+
+Ey didn't even know the time. No clocks adorned the walls.
+
+Ey would go mad without a task. Could ey create anything? But why create in these empty halls? What would ey even begin to make that would matter the worth of a damn? Ey would never be able to share it. Ey would only be able to spiral endlessly inwards.
+
+All AwDae wanted to do was curl up in the chair. It was comfortable enough. Perhaps ey could get some sleep in.
+
+Instead, ey ground the heels of eir paws against eir face and leaned toward the desk. Numbers, digits, columns. Something familiar. Mindlessly working through the sums in eir head simply for lack of anything else to do.
+
+``Weird,'' ey murmured sleepily.
+
+The numbers didn't add up. Rather, everything added up within its own row. It was as though a row were missing.
+
+Ey stretched out an arm, snatching up the scrap of note and holding it up to the light. No erasures, whiteouts, or scribbles. There was just not enough information.
+
+Digits. Numbers. Ledger. Paper. Notes?
+
+If ey was meant to be looking for clues, then\ldots{}
+
+Ey fished the previous `clue' out of eir pocket. The ledger of Cicero's DDR interactions.
+
+It wasn't nearly so simple as the single-column arithmetic on the scratch paper. Each referendum had three columns of digits: a cost, a bounty (if that referendum was referred back to the house), and any number of comments made on the issue. Often out of order on the sheet, as well, given Cicero's habit of voting on everything. Perhaps it was the first thing he did on waking.
+
+Given the note's interactivity level of expanding on closer examination, ey tried to will a sum out of the columns to match the final row.
+
+No luck. Ey wished for eir rig more than anything. It'd make the\pagebreak\ task almost trivial.
+
+Ah well.
+
+Ey snagged the half-used pencil and the rest of the scrap and worked it out. Each cost and comment would be a debit, and each bounty would be a credit. One could also buy DDR credits through a mechanism that basically acted as an additional withholding on one's taxes. There were two of those in there, possibly ensuring that Cicero would have enough DDR credit to make what AwDae assumed was some scathing political snipe on an upcoming high-stakes referendum.
+
+Even so, it was clear that the section of numbers on the paper, a month's worth, perhaps, didn't add up. Once more, there was a missing interaction. Three missing interactions, rather: one vote's cost, one vote's comment, and one vote's bounty, at AwDae's best guess. Perhaps a few smaller votes to add up to those totals? It was recent, too. A few days before he had gotten lost.
+
+Except one's DDR records were public. Not which way one voted, but that one had voted. Comments were public perforce. The information had to be public for the system to work.
+
+Unless it had been tampered with, there was a combination of 1,252,000 credits unaccounted for in terms of transactions. One million debit to the comment, a quarter of a million credit for bounty, and two thousand to the vote cost.
+
+AwDae tore the top sheet off the pad and, working faster this time, ran the numbers once more. Same result.
+
+``Well, huh.'' Ey sat, frowning, for a little while longer before gathering eir notes. Ey folded them together with the original clue and stuffed them into eir pocket. Ey couldn't create a deck here, apparently, but ey could sure take items with emself.
+
+If this all had something to do with what was going on outside, where ey was counted among the lost, that was all well and good, but how would ey get that information back out remained a mystery.
+
+Too early to be thinking of such things. Ey wasn't going anywhere for the time being. Sleep was becoming an imperative.
+
+Ey gave token consideration to where ey would be able to sleep before deciding on the auditorium. The fold-down seats were cushioned. Not very well, but better than the floor.
+
+And the place had a sense of home about it, too. The thought was a barb tugging at eir heart, but there was nothing to be done. Not in this state. Not right now.
+
+Sleep, then.
+
+Sleep, and perhaps dreams.
+
+Or perhaps not. Sleep to get away. Sleep for nullity. Sleep for nothingness.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/007.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,74 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+Sleep did not come easily.
+
+As padded as the auditorium seats were, they were not made for laying down on. They folded down, and while there were no armrests to get in the way of stretching out, the gaps between seats were awkward and painful. AwDae found that ey had to face toward the backs of the seats, lest eir tail get crimped against them. It left eir back exposed in a way that felt unsafe, no matter how empty the sim was.
+
+At first, the faint dusty smell of the seat fabric inspired nostalgia, but it did not last. The memories were not comfortable, either.
+
+Eventually, ey got up and began pacing blearily around the auditorium. There must be some way to rest that did not involve folding seats.
+
+Ey could pull down one of the curtains and make a nest out of it. But, as ey did not know how to do so without ripping the fabric, ey was loath to do so. They carried some of that same smell, those same memories. A last resort, perhaps.
+
+Exploring beyond the auditorium it was, then. The door out the back of the stage led to the hall containing music and drama classrooms. Ey started cataloging additional places where ey could hole up. The black fabric orchestra seats were promising, and they could be arranged however ey wanted, but ey hit pay dirt in the theater storeroom.
+
+The back of the room was sectioned off into a wardrobe area, housing costumes and rack upon rack of identical tuxes and dresses for the choir singers. Nestled behind all of these rows of clothing was a sofa, old and sagging.
+
+There was zero reason for the room to contain a sofa. Ey did not remember one being there the few times ey tagged along with Sasha. As inexplicable as it was, however, AwDae wouldn't have been surprised if such a thing had existed in the school when ey had attended.
+
+Thanking whoever had created this sim, ey flopped down onto it. Musty smell intensified, lingered, settled.
+
+Ey was asleep within minutes.
+
+Sleep, while restful, brought dreams of unnerving intensity. Dreams of twisting passages, of locker-lined corridors looping impossibly back on themselves, leading always into the same dim light of the student center. And in the middle, a menu, canted away at a steep angle, no different from what ey might get by swiping eir paw left to right in any sane and sensible sim.
+
+Every time ey got close to try and read the menu, however, it would slide closed, leaving only its shadow behind. An unexpected rendering error.
+
+AwDae jolted awake feeling as if ey had drastically overslept. Ey hadn't paid attention to when ey had gone to bed in the first place. One in the morning? Two? Rehearsal, and then hours of searching. Was it the same day? The same week?
+
+All the same, ey felt late.
+
+With the shock of transition, the need to explore the auditorium and hunt school for the mic, ey never did make it outside of the school. Could ey even do so? Ey felt silly for not trying, now.
+
+Wake up, then. Ey stretched and started to plan a way out of the school. If nothing else, ey wanted to see how extensive the sim was.
+
+It was customary in-sim to lock the doors that did not lead anywhere. Although the Crown Pub did have bathrooms and fire escapes, for instance — all for the sake of authenticity — the doors were locked tight. Beyond them would have been nothing at all. That was simply the extent of the sim. It was not inaccessible so much as nonexistent.
+
+And yet there were much larger sims than the school itself, much more intricate. AwDae couldn't be sure of the boundaries without exploring.
+
+Ey wondered what must have happened to eir body back in reality, even as ey walked toward the front doors. Ey didn't feel hungry, though ey felt ey should. Such things were translated in-sim as safety measures to keep addicts from starving themselves. After all, ey had still felt the need to sleep. Something had clearly been done with eir body.
+
+That train of thought wound around the question of how exactly ey had gotten lost in a sim without being connected to it. Were other lost individuals in whatever sims they had been before, empty now of others? Did everyone experience getting lost the same?
+
+Obviously, time had passed, and certainly the crew hadn't left em just sitting at eir rig after ey had finally lost touch. Even so, ey should've been pulled back to that reality when eir hands had been lifted from the cradles and head pulled away from the NFC headrest.
+
+Had time passed, though? Had it? Had ey explored? Had ey slept?
+
+And yet here ey was.
+
+Where was eir body, then? Some hospital somewhere? Insensate and tied to life support?
+
+And if ey was in a hospital, where did this sim exist? A sim this size couldn't simply live in eir gear. Especially not with all of the mechanics ey had encountered so far. Fully functioning sound booth and mic. Papers in the office. The sleeves of costumes hanging from the racks ey had brushed eir hand across on the way to the couch.
+
+No answers to be had. All ey could rely on was what was in front of em.
+
+Ey stopped at the bank of doors at the front of the building, staring at one of the panic bars. Would it be locked? Would it open at a touch? Should ey slam eir weight against it, or test gingerly?
+
+Resigning emself to whatever happened when ey pushed it, ey rested eir paws against the smooth metal, claws clicking against the door itself, and gave a firm shove.
+
+The door swung open and ey pinned eir ears back, squinting into the deafening sunlight beyond. Holding the door open with one paw, the other shaded eir eyes.
+
+Ey saw the cul-de-sac for dropping kids off. Ey saw the street beyond, the set of townhouses that lined the road opposite the school. Ey saw grey. Ey saw fog. Despite the very sunny day, shadows cast sharply against concrete, ey saw fog.
+
+Fog of war? Render distance? Some visual indicator representing the furthest that the system was willing to draw? Or a boundary hemming em in?
+
+Old tech. Tech unneeded for perhaps a century. Was it a limit of eir exo? Some languishing remnant? It had occasionally been used as an invisible boundary, ey knew. That it was there in the first place, closing off the street in either direction a hundred yards into the distance, confirmed that this was indeed a sim, not just some artifact of eir subconscious.
+
+Did it, though? \emph{Did} it confirm that? Did that truly follow? Was it a sign? What was its referent?
+
+Ey stepped out onto the sidewalk by the flagpole and stared. Shoulders sagged. Tail drooped. There were no answers.
+
+No answers.
+
+Nothing for it but to keep looking.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/008.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+AwDae stood in the sunlight, blinking.
+
+Ey felt weak. Not from hunger. Not from lack of sleep. Just worn out. Exhausted.
+
+This was starting to feel like grinding. An endless drudge to level up. Busywork. Idle hands and tired eyes.
+
+But then, you could quit a game. Here ey was, clues and riddles. And for what?
+
+There was even a fog of war.
+
+``So much bullshit,'' ey laughed bitterly. No sense in keeping quiet.
+
+Ey stripped down to eir underwear, hesitated, then stripped that off as well and shook eir fur out.
+
+`Comfort' was the wrong word to use in regards a sim. It was a matter of sensory inputs that the system was set up to provide. The musty smell of the auditorium seats had been one thing, but ey was starting to get the impression that, given the way this sim was constructed, there would be rather more than less input. Eir tux was decidedly uncomfortable, not made for fox-people, and so eir fur was decidedly mussed.
+
+Ey folded eir clothes and set them on the sidewalk in front of the school. The cool grass provided a welcome change from the indoor-outdoor carpet and tile inside, the roughness of the concrete out here.
+
+``Alright. So. Problems.'' Ey plucked viciously at a few close-mown blades of grass and held them pinched between eir pawpads. ``Cicero is lost. He was voting on a bunch of stuff as usual, leading the comment boards. He voted on something and it made it to the floor, but it doesn't show in the records.'' Ey plucked blades of grass with eir free paw, enumerating the facts. ``No vote cost, no bounty, no comment.''
+
+Ey swished eir tail around to the side, hiked eir backside up enough to slip it beneath em, and rolled onto eir back. Blue sky. Cloudless. Too bright, even with the fog. Ey draped eir arm, fingers still clutching grass, over eir eyes. ``And now I'm lost. I was working, and then I was here. Before working, I was digging into Cicero\ldots{}''
+
+Ey trailed off, spent a few moments thinking, then a few more just feeling the earth beneath em, the way the grass seemed to find a way through fur to tickle at em more directly.
+
+``So had Sasha, though. And she was the one who got me the deck in the first place.'' Ey ran through the actions ey had taken on the deck. It was surprisingly easy to pull up the chain of events. \emph{Or perhaps not,} ey thought. \emph{Given the note.}
+
+Eir first write to the deck had been on the note about the voting records. Prior to that, there was only the sorting and sharing of records. Filtering. Reading.
+
+Ey lifted eir paw once more and stared at the torn blades of grass. Tossed them aside. ``Ah, hell. I'm talking to myself.''
+
+Laughing, AwDae stood and gathered eir tux, heading back to the costume closet. Perhaps ey could find something that would fit em. Something to take into account that ey was more fox, less \mbox{human}.
+
+Failing that, perhaps ey'd lay down again. Sleep, perchance to dream.
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+AwDae wound up in a simple, pleated skirt and a loose cotton shirt, gathered at the wrists.
+
+The skirt fit well with a tail, certainly far better than eir trousers sagging beneath its base awkwardly. It was a robin's egg blue. Nice enough. Undecorated. Any detail would be lost on the audience anyway. Might as well save both cost and effort.
+
+The shirt was made for someone with broader shoulders. RJ might have filled it out, but on the fox's slender frame, it was baggy and loose. Again, just a plain white, but ey could hardly complain. It didn't compress eir fur, unlike the tux shirt, with its pleats sewn down the front.
+
+Ey gave consideration as to what to do with the tux. On the one paw — and here, thinking in paws already! So soon — it was just an artifact. Just bits. Everything was. Eir own body was. Had to be. Choosing clothes that were `more comfortable' was only instructing the sim how best to treat eir body. Had to be. Clothes that were more comfortable were no different from clothes that weren't. It was just how the numbers added up. Just the math of simulated fashion. Had to be.
+
+And yet, on the other, the tux was the only thing ey had\ldots{}had what? Brought with from reality? It might just be a set of bits in eir exocortex, but it was \emph{eir} set of bits and bytes.
+
+Was it? Was there any point to the sense of ownership in so solipsisitic a world?
+
+Something to tie em back to the world outside this sim.
+
+A solution in between, then. Ey dug until ey found a rucksack that had probably gone with some war-themed production. Drab, dusty, made of thick canvas. It would do well to carry anything that would help, including the notes ey had made.
+
+Ey laid eir tux out on the ratty sofa and rolled it into a tight cylinder. An empty sim would care little if eir tux got wrinkled, yes? Ey stuffed it down at the base of the pack and folded the notes into a small pocket on the side.
+
+Thus equipped, ey padded back to the auditorium. Ey made sure the room was put to sleep, and, on a whim, grabbed the one live microphone ey'd found earlier. Ensuring that it was off to conserve batteries, ey added it to the notes. A small token of where ey'd come from.
+
+``Not going to do much without the receiver or board,'' ey murmured. ``Do the batteries even matter? This is all so fucking silly.''
+
+Ey tamped down despair, buttoned down the flap above the pocket. So many questions.
+
+Should ey lay in rations? Food? Water bottles, perhaps? Ey dismissed the thought as even sillier. Ey didn't feel hungry or thirsty, even after so long in the school, so why worry? Obviously eir body had been taken care of. There was nothing ey could do about it from within the sim. All that food and water would do is make the sim tell eir body that the pack was heavier.
+
+From there, ey made eir way back toward the front doors, pushing them open against the pressure differential. The breeze outside ruffled fur and skirt as ey stepped into sun once more.
+
+\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+
+The grey mist turned out to be a render distance.
+
+Had it been a barrier, AwDae could have walked up to the fog, but no further.
+
+Had it been a barrier, ey was sure ey would have screamed.
+
+As it was, ey was able to follow the same street ey would've taken on the walk back to the home ey grew up in and the fog simply receded before em. Ey could never approach it. There was nothing to investigate. It was just a bubble into which ey had been placed. A bubble that moved along with em.
+
+The act of walking away from the school, wearing a backpack and heading towards home, was a dredge pulling up the silt of memories. School across the Atlantic in the '90s. Plays and productions ey still had memorized. Sasha. Dandelions in summer.
+
+Even now, pacing the street as a fox, not much had changed. Ey had carried eir tablet and few books to and from school in a pack not dissimilar than the one ey was wearing. Even the skirt was not far off from a thrift-store find ey might have worn at the time.
+
+Ey prowled through memories of Sasha, of dating, of becoming better friends than partners. Ey thought back to her staying the night, back to their shared anxiety, back to the movies, back to eir mom checking in on them at one in the morning just to make sure everything was okay (and, bless, to make sure clothes had stayed on).
+
+Ey missed Sasha most of all, now. Together, the two of them would've been able to keep spirits up. Sasha would've been able to figure out the problem with Cicero's voting record faster then ey had, and ey would've been less alone, would've felt less hopeless.
+
+AwDae trudged on toward home, reaching a paw up to pluck a handful of leaves from one of the trees as ey passed, feeling the reluctant snap as they pulled loose from the branch. For all the sim's complexity, school in spring was pretty far remote from London in the winter.
+
+School. America. Hopelessness. Stasis.
+
+\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/009.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{RJ Brewster — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+AwDae was unsurprised to find home unlocked.
+
+Although the front door had always been locked when growing up, the fact that this whole sim seemed oriented around riddles meant of course ey'd be able to gain entry places ey knew. Clues, right?
+
+Ey checked the other doors in the complex to test the hypothesis. All locked.
+
+There was no bracing for the surge of emotion and memory as AwDae stepped into the entryway of eir old home. Cool tile. Tattered rug. Coat hooks where they were supposed to be.
+
+No coats. The sense of desertion was overwhelming. And yet.
+
+And yet, ey felt as though eir mom could be just around the corner in the kitchen, prowling through the fridge, her boyfriend laid out flat on the couch, snoozing in front of the TV running old science fiction shows. And yet ey knew — knew on some fundamental level — that the house was empty.
+
+Perhaps it was that it was all too silent. Silent as school had been.
+
+AwDae shrugged out of the rucksack and set it down in the entryway. It was precisely the space where rucksacks went. It was precisely the space where ey had set eirs countless times growing up. Ey did as ey had always done and padded into the common area, toenails clicking against the tile of the entryway, and then the hardwood floor. Floors which had never seen fox paws.
+
+The sensation, that uncanny mix of \emph{home} and \emph{wrong}, quickly grew to overwhelming. The fox sat down on the rug in front of the coffee table. Eir spot. Eir spot, where ey had sat to eat dinner countless times. Eir spot, where ey watched TV, those old sci-fi movies, with eir mom's boyfriend.
+
+It was one thing for the house to be so painfully empty and another entirely to be here as AwDae and not RJ. Perhaps ey could have held each of those concepts in eir mind independently were ey to only experience one at a time. The two combined were too much. Ey felt eir breath as short, shallow gasps. Ey felt eir vision constricting. Ey felt eir heart race no matter how still ey sat. Ey felt all these things happening to em with an increasing sense of detachment. Ey found it hard to concentrate on what ey was even supposed to be.
+
+\emph{Is my pulse elevated offline, wherever that is?}
+
+Ey let out a strangled laugh. Perhaps there existed in that space some doctor's befuddled stare at the sudden signs of anxiety showing in their patient.
+
+The laugh turned to sob, stopped quickly.
+
+AwDae leaned forward, stretching eir legs out behind em. Ey laid flat on eir floor, on eir oh-so-familiar rug, bafflingly present in eir bafflingly present home. Laid flat, then rolled over onto eir side. Eir tail lay limp against the short pile of the rug behind em.
+
+\emph{How had this happened? What did I do? Why here? Why me? What did I do to deserve this?}
+
+Eir mind was awhirl with words. With questions, and only questions. Ey didn't have answers. No answers inside, none before em, none in the house. Answers were a thing that did not-- could not exist here. Answers a thing that happened to other people.
+
+Ey did not have the mental bandwidth required to do anything other than watch questions swirl. Ey was at a loss for images in this end of days. Ey was an observer. Nothing more than a set of eyes with no will, no drive. No urge to move those eyes as ey watched all of the emotion that had been held at bay, held back with the sense of \emph{doing something} over the last day and change. All that emotion surge.
+
+Eir actions had been all wrong. Ey had accepted getting lost with resignation. Ey had leapt at the chance to solve the `puzzle' of the microphone with something akin to excitement. Ey had found a new set of clothes with a casualness befitting a trip to the thrift store. All this when ey should have been experiencing terror. Doing all these things when ey should have been breaking down into sobs at the fact that ey had been struck with some sort of incurable\ldots{}what? Incurable disease? Ey was lost.
+
+AwDae noted with increasing dissociation that eir breath was coming in great, choking sobs. Eir perspective, that core of emself that spent life reviewing actions and reactions, watched with cool distance as eir body shook with gasps and tears streaked down over eir cheeks and muzzle, leaving tracks in the short fur. Whatever part of emself was in charge of releasing those pent up emotions had been divorced from the part of emself responsible for actually feeling them. \emph{See? \textbf{This} is happening now.}
+
+\emph{It's the emptiness,} that part of em thought. \emph{This place was home, and the knowledge of being permanently removed from such a thing, from anything home-shaped or any sense of belonging, has led to this. There's no one here, and no one at school.}
+
+``No ranks of angels will answer to dreamers.''
+
+Words unbidden were calming. The heaving gasps for air began to slow, and ey wiped eir tears away in a smooth, slicking motion that flattened eir tall ears against eir head.
+
+Struggling to bring those two parts of emself into alignment once more, AwDae levered emself up heavily. Ey leaned on one paw while the other straightened the fur of eir face, brushing the last aftershocks of that not-quite-sadness away in a careful, calculated gesture. Intentional. A setting-aside of emotion.
+
+Perhaps eir initial reaction had been wrong on the emotional side, but correct on the intellectual. Ey would have to at least figure out why. There would be no sharing it, no telling others, no end game other than the knowledge of a task complete.
+
+It was just the only thing left here in this null space that had any meaning.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/010.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,112 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}
+
+Sasha's words, that night in The Crown Pub, pressed in against AwDae. Pushed thoughts out of the way. Blanketed eir mind.
+
+Ey lingered around the house for a few hours, laying on the floor, poking around in various rooms. All as empty and static as school had been. Eventually, ey paced back outside and across the road to the countless acres of federation-managed open space that abutted the foothills. Ey walked a few of the trails and deer tracks, mind spinning helplessly through numb hopelessness.
+
+There was no birdsong, and while ey occasionally heard the buzz and chirp of insects, ey never saw any.
+
+Ey gave up and returned home. Ey wasn't tired by the time the sun went down, but for lack of volition, bundled up all the same in what had been eir old bed and slept.
+
+Having gone to bed so early, AwDae awoke before sunrise. Eir alarm clock, still familiar after so long away from this house, told them it was just past four in the morning. \emph{I made it past the witching hour,} the fox thought, then laughed. Something about the idea of time in such a timeless space tickled and upset em all at once. Time! What a concept.
+
+Despite the dark, ey decided on another attempt at exploration. Fog be damned.
+
+Ey slipped out of the house and wandered around the neighborhood. Curling streets. Cul-de-sacs. Rows of townhouses. Familiar, all. Ey even made it back down to the school on the hill, searching for unexpected lights left on in the middle of night.
+
+The results were negative, unless one counted streetlights in this empty world. All the houses' and the school's windows were dark.
+
+Ey trudged back up the hill toward home and shut out the darkness. The kitchen light brought little warmth, so ey turned it back off and waited for sunrise.
+
+With the fog limiting render distance, sunrise took the form of a slow brightening, almost imperceptible at first. The world around home lifted through greyscale into brilliant color, settling on a teeth-aching azure.
+
+During eir teens, ey frequently messed up eir sleep schedule enough to see the sun rise. Some days, ey would go down to the school for a run around the track before heading back up to the house again, sweating and invigorated. Or at least tired in a different way.
+
+This whole sim seemed designed to, as Sasha had put it, keep em frozen in the past. The act of watching the world brighten and\ldots{}well, not come to life, but at least gain color tugged at memories of countless days. Of waiting for eir mom to wake and make coffee.
+
+Coffee.
+
+AwDae padded back to the kitchen, claws clicking on the hardwood beneath eir feet.
+
+Prowling through the cabinets revealed startlingly little. The fridge was bare, as well. No food. No dishes, either. On testing, the faucet didn't produce any water.
+
+``What the hell\ldots{}''
+
+It didn't make any sense. The whole world was rendered in such loving detail. Why not include things one would expect to be in a house? Lesser sims had running water. Perhaps it was due to the limitations of the sim being run from eir implants? Though ey still doubted that the implants would be able to run something so complex in the first place. Scent, taste, and texture were all available to em — notoriously expensive to implement — so why no food? Why no coffee?
+
+``All I want is something real,'' AwDae growled. Fists parked on the counter in front of the sink, ey pressed firmly against the Formica. Tears stung eir eyes and, sagging, ey slowly sunk down to the cool hardwood floor. ``That's all I want.''
+
+The sulk lasted a good half hour, with the fox crying off and on. It brought less catharsis than ey hoped. By the time ey levered emself back up onto eir feet, eir backside was numb and tail struck by pins and needles, somehow more real than it had ever felt before.
+
+No coffee. No water. No catharsis.
+
+Tail hanging limp beneath eir stolen skirt, ey slouched back upstairs to eir room and climbed back onto the bed, laying on eir front, muzzle facing away from the windows and the taunting of the morning. In toward the closet, toward stasis and familiarity.
+
+Ey ticked off the list of people in eir life who would be thinking of em. Some hopeful connection.
+
+Johansson was almost certainly stressing out, doubtless stressing the rest of the Troupe in turn. His response to unknown situations was to try and make them into known situations. Put all that nervous energy to work, get things into a state where he could understand them again. Even with another tech handling sound, even if that had gone well, the boss would be jumpy and on edge.
+
+Caitlin and Sarai would be missing em on a more personal level. AwDae was friendly with the entire company, of course, but it was those two ey had gotten closest to. Sharing that back-channel communication, that private space of the theater sim. Sharing conversation that went beyond the Troupe, beyond theater. If anyone had able to reach eir friends outside of STT, it would be them.
+
+And of eir friends, Sasha was always at the front of the fox's mind. She was the one person, excepting eir parents, who had been in eir life the longest. She was the one who understood em best, even surpassing eir family. Sasha had to be worried, even with em having been gone for so short a time. She had to be looking for em. The skunk was even listed as eir emergency contact.
+
+\emph{Or perhaps,} ey thought wryly. \emph{I simply want that to be the case.}
+
+Eir parents, always loving but always distant, would be concerned. Ey knew their tendency to freeze up when confronted with the unknown, though. Mom was the type who might sit by eir hospital bed and hold eir hand, as mothers do, but not necessarily the type of person to take action, to do any digging into 'what's and 'why's. Dad would simply be glued in place, unable to deal with any emotions surrounding the event.
+
+Ey turned eir face to rub it against the pillow, leaving the pillowcase damp from tears. Then grumbled and sat up once again. Scrubbed at eir cheeks. Bristled eir whiskers. Reengaged with physicality.
+
+Eyes settled on eir bookshelf. Ey pulled down the most weathered book ey could find. Some bit of sci-fi ey had read countless times.
+
+The fox flopped back onto the bed and flipped open to a random page, then frowned. Ey blinked several times, squinted over to the window and back to the page, trying to focus.
+
+The words swam across the page. Would not stay pinned in place. Would not form sentences, nor even phrases.
+
+Ey flipped to the first page. The swimming effect slowed, coalesced into legibility.
+
+The effect was unnerving. As ey read, words would slip slowly into order, into focus — though the world around em remained static and sharp — and with every flipped page, it would take a moment before ey could move on.
+
+And this wasn't the book ey remembered.
+
+Eir frown deepened. The story was there, familiar, but the text read more like a retelling. An admittedly quite detailed one, but a retelling all the same. An imperfect memory. It used words AwDae would've used, rather than those the author might have chosen.
+
+Setting that book aside, ey pulled another down. The effect repeated itself. Stronger, this time. Ey had a hard time getting the words to settle on the pages, even starting from the beginning. Brow furrowed, ey tried with a few more books.
+
+One ey hadn't read yet — tsundoku, perhaps, books one always means to read but never gets around to — was an unintelligible jumble of letters. No, not just letters, but marks that hinted at the idea of what it meant to be a letter. Mere shapes.
+
+``Well, huh.''
+
+Still frowning, the fox sat on the edge of eir bed and picked up the original book, thumbing through pages and watching the effect distractedly. Words jumped out. Occasionally a phrase would form, but nothing exact. It was as though the book was deciding what to become from moment to moment based on where ey inserted their claw when flipping through it.
+
+Ey hopped to eir feet, skittered back down the stairs to the pack ey had brought from the school, and fished out the scraps of notes. The scrap, the piece of paper with Cicero's DDR votes on it. No swirling, disjointed effect affected this text.
+
+An hour's exploration later, ey had puzzled out what might be going on.
+
+Of course AwDae's exocortex wouldn't have the complete text of the dozens of books on eir shelf. How could it? Ey had only ever read them as hard copies, never through any software mediated by the implants. Never on a screen of any kind. So of course ey wouldn't be able to read the books here in the sim, if that sim was confined to eir implants.
+
+And ey was increasingly starting to doubt that the sim \emph{was} bound to eir exo, or any of eir implants.
+
+A midday walk through the open space netted em a hypothesis. A shaky one, but something more plausible than what information ey had been working with.
+
+There likely was some information stored in eir implants. Some few dozen terabytes, maybe. Enough to store a good chunk of data, but not necessarily an entire sim. Certainly not one this big.
+
+Maybe it was that the implants themselves didn't store the sim, or not all of it, but acted as a framework? Maybe AwDae's brain provided all of the information needed to show em a sim, and all the implants did was turn it into an experience. Maybe the implants were a mirror, reflecting memories, recollections, hints and dreams.
+
+That would be why the text of the books was jumbled, and when it wasn't jumbled, it was wrong. It was just eir recollection of the book being mirrored back at em in a way that was tangible. Tangible as much as anything was in this place.
+
+That would explain why ey had been able to smell the seats of the auditorium, too. It was a scent that must've been permanently ingrained in eir memories.
+
+And yet, this was an imperfect sim, based as it was on memories. The school with its countless hours of memory invested in it, had plenty of detail, as did eir home. Yet AwDae was willing to bet that, were ey to go into another house on the block, ey wouldn't find anything. Or perhaps ey wouldn't be allowed in at all. All those locked doors on that first day's explorations. Ey would have no memory of the inside, so why would the minimal system of implants-mirroring-memories be willing to show em anything?
+
+Strange ramifications, here. This meant that eir implants were still acting as implants, but rather than taking signals from eir rig, the 'net, and eir mind, they were only taking in information from eir mind. That meant that everything was still up and running as though ey was delved into the 'net.
+
+Which was absurd, of course. There was no way for the interferites to run without power, without data coming from the NFC pads on eir forehead or the contacts on eir fingers. Ey had been pulled back. Ey had felt that rending, that spike of pain. There was no possible sequence of events that led to this conclusion.
+
+Was there?
+
+Perhaps getting lost was as simple as layer after layer of redundant fail-safes failing in turn, implants remaining on even after contact was lost with the rig.
+
+AwDae sat on the fence bordering the open space, watching the color of the light duck down through golden and into salmon. Ey realized ey would need to be more deliberate in eir search. If ey was limited to places ey had memories of, ey would have to remember just which places those were.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/011.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,78 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+No menu.
+
+No menu and no HUD.
+
+Without eir HUD, there was no way that AwDae would be able to teleport. Ey would need to swipe up a destination entry and tap or speak the command for sending emself off. Hell, even if ey \emph{was} able to get at the menu, ey wouldn't have the coordinates for any of the particular places ey had come up with to visit.
+
+If locations within a dream even had coordinates, that was. Of all eir explorations, ey had begun to doubt that this was a sim. No sim, no coordinates. No coordinates, no teleport.
+
+Ey would have to walk and just hope that it would not be tiring. No calories burned when taking simulated steps in a simulated environment. All the same, the prospect felt exhausting.
+
+Eir first location on the list had been the university, that sprawling campus where ey had studied (and, later, pioneered) the integration tech ey used daily at work. It seemed meaningful enough: that place most closely associated with the beginnings of eir susceptibility.
+
+Without teleport, however, that was out of the question. It was halfway across the continent.
+
+Something more manageable, then.
+
+The clinic where ey has had eir implants installed was halfway across town. It would take an hour or two to traverse, ey supposed. A guess. Ey had never walked it before.
+
+Ey had time, though, it seemed. All the time in the world.
+
+With little else to do, ey once again slept early and woke early in turn. If it was to take a good chunk of the day, at least ey could do so while it was light out.
+
+Shouldering the appropriated pack, ey set out from home as soon as it was bright enough to do so. A short walk down to the school, then further down the hill toward Broadway, which would get em most of the way there. After that, two blocks east, and ey would find emself at the squat, white building of the clinic.
+
+From there, it would be easy. There had been about a dozen appointments in the building, so ey knew it well enough that it would likely be in reasonable shape. Assuming the doors were unlocked, at least.
+
+The first skip happened halfway down the hill from the school.
+
+AwDae reached the corner of the fence surrounding the track and football practice field, remembered eir brief jogging phase, and how ey always turned north through the neighborhoods before reaching Broadway, which was always so noisy. And then, without warning, ey was gliding down the street in a sitting position.
+
+Ey yelped, startled, and flailed eir arms out for support, left elbow catching painfully on something solid a foot to the side of em.
+
+The skip took perhaps a second all told. A second of blurred darkness, of shadow and motion. A second of panic and confusion before the rest of the car formed around em. Ey was sitting in the passenger seat of the family sedan, coasting down the road toward Broadway at what ey supposed must be the speed limit.
+
+The car, like the books in eir room, took a while to swim into focus. Even then, parts of it shifted indecisively, unable to come to rest in some solid, known state. Ey had only tried to drive it once before giving up on the prospect, so the dashboard in front of the steering wheel was particularly vague. Hints of dials. Gestures at needles. Smudges of marks on the levers on the steering column. The back of the car lurched in and out of focus sickeningly.
+
+Ey realized ey was holding eir breath and let it out in a shaky whine.
+
+The car continued down the street toward Broadway. Turned smoothly without stopping at the light. Accelerated seamlessly, without haste, without care for its occupant's stress. The soft hum of the motor and the road noise beneath the wheels was as indistinct as all of the visuals. Indistinct and disconcerting.
+
+After a few short blocks, AwDae had a hypothesis. Of course the sim — correction: eir memories — did not include walking along Broadway. Ey had never done so, had only driven. Or been driven, as ey had never gotten a license emself. All eir memories could dredge up were those of the car, of moving smoothly along the road.
+
+No teleportation, then. Just fast-travel.
+
+Eir one experience with hallucinogens had prepared them for the blurring, smearing effect of the world around em. The fog did not diminish, but it played tricks with the buildings lining the road to either side. There was the house with the psychic's sign out front, relatively clear. But the rest of the buildings were shifting, unsettled. When focusing on them, AwDae saw them as flat facades. No depth. Textures on a low-poly wireframe. It was a nightmare of that hidden time of intrasaccadic perception, that moment of suppressed visual input when one shifts one's gaze. That moment laid bare, elongated.
+
+Ey moaned and closed eir eyes. The sights were wrong. The sound was wrong. Even the feeling of acceleration and deceleration, the swing around turns, was off, as though the entire universe was poorly rendered and em right along with it.
+
+It \emph{was} poorly rendered. Eir stomach turned at the wrongness of it all.
+
+The next skip hit as a memory of walking through the parking lot of the supermarket at Broadway and Timberline asserted dominance over the memory of driving along the thoroughfare. So suddenly was ey on eir feet and walking parallel to Broadway, so surprising the shift, that ey stumbled and fell to eir hands and knees.
+
+AwDae retched. Nothing came up. Not even the sting of bile.
+
+Ey lost track of time, sitting in the empty parking lot. Half an hour? An hour? Trying to master the urge to return home and disappear beneath the covers. Anything to avoid that horrible, half-remembered drive.
+
+And yet, ey had to do \emph{something}. If there was even a chance of em being able to get out of this dream, this non-place, ey would have to keep moving. Keep moving and hunting and looking and thinking.
+
+With a groan, ey stood and walked toward the road once more.
+
+The skip came as expected, and ey gritted eir teeth as the world whirled past. Perhaps ey would be able to make it to the east coast, but if that meant eight hours of this — home to the airport, the plane, a different airport, transit to the dorms — well\ldots{}hopefully there was a work-around.
+
+The rest of the journey to the clinic passed without further skipping. There were a few shaky moments passing through the pedestrian mall, where ey'd spent countless hours walking, but apparently ey had spent enough time traveling along the road along whatever metric required. Eir `car' continued down the empty street, blithely changing lanes to pass vehicles that weren't there, turn signal and steering wheel moving on their own.
+
+And then it parked.
+
+The low-slung building of the clinic was just as AwDae remembered it.
+
+The idiom got a laugh out of the fox. Perhaps that was literally true. It could be no other way than how ey remembered it. The building was as it must be.
+
+Preempting another skip, ey scrambled to open the door of the car and hop out on eir own before it was done for em. With a satisfying thunk, the passenger door of the dusty blue sedan swung shut behind em.
+
+\emph{Promising,} ey thought. \emph{Perhaps I just have to be more deliberate about it. I'll get in the car later, follow the drive back home, and maybe it'll park in the driveway as easy as that.}
+
+Eir claws clacked against the pavement leading to the smoky glass doors. It wasn't overly warm out, but the cool air that breathed out of the clinic was refreshing nevertheless. Something static. Something still. Something known.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/012.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+If AwDae had been expecting to find some fresh clue, some exciting conclusion to eir adventure at the clinic, ey was disappointed. The office was an office, nothing more. Cold. Hollow. Impersonal, despite countless touches cleverly engineered to add personality.
+
+If ey had expected perhaps some comfort from familiar surroundings, ey was also disappointed. Walking into the clinic, memories fell upon em like ticks from branches. Latching on, leaching substance. Consult, surgery, treatments, training, follow-up, training, training, training. Getting to know the doctor and his team. Getting to know the trainers. Learning to loathe them. Learning to love what they had to offer.
+
+There was nothing there.
+
+There were the couches in the lobby, of course. There had to be. That is what belonged in lobbies. There was the desk where ey checked in, the receptionist's chair behind it. Such desks belonged, and thus followed chairs. There was the hallway. There were the locked and unlocked doors — ey now suspected that the locked doors hid rooms that ey had never seen, eir memory refusing to consider things never remembered.
+
+There was the dimly lit surgery suite.
+
+There was the row of paired mirror rigs. Instructor, student.
+
+There was the whole affair laid out before em, and no solutions. No explanations.
+
+Ey paced the halls. Sat on the lobby's couches. Sat at the rigs, dumb and silent. Lay on the operating table, face down as ey remembered. Laughed at the way eir snout poked so perfectly through the slot meant for an oxygen mask. Rifled through notes, their swimming text a mocking jeer.
+
+Ey threw eir weight against a locked door, far more solid than it had any right to be. No rocking in the frame evident. It may as well have been a wall.
+
+Tears stung at eir eyes. School, home, this place. Everything was dreamlike, unsettled, waffling between mind-numbing and nightmarish.
+
+Not dreamlike, no, but a dream. If, as ey now suspected, all of this was simply taking place in a combination of eir mind and eir implants, why would there be these tantalizing clues dangled in front of em? Why would eir mind think to invent a mode of transit that simply skipped em along in jagged, stomach-churning jumps?
+
+Tears flowed freely now, and ey hunched down against the unknown, unknowable door, first crouching, then sitting with the skirt pooled around eir waist as tears stained the fur of eir cheeks.
+
+Nightmares.
+
+Dreams.
+
+Ey needed something to anchor emself to. Ey needed something to hold onto that was not dependent on clues and tidbits of information that were\ldots{}were what? Stored in eir implants? In some core in eir exocortex, dumped when ey was pulled back?
+
+Ey needed to make sense of something in this pale semblance of a world. Make understanding. Make knowing. Make lucidity.
+
+Dreams and lucidity. What mattered a lucid dream if there was nothing to wake up from?
+
+And yet was it not lucid? Did ey not have some semblance of control over this place? Ey had been trusting that it was some sort of locked down sim. One in which ey had no ACLs. Some sort of semi-scripted film from which ey could not deviate.
+
+But if it was a dream, if it was all within eir head and implants, was it not completely eirs? Did ACLs matter in a dream?
+
+The fog of war. The importance of the sound board. The very setting of eir school and childhood home. All of these were from within. The ancient strategy games ey had played growing up. The thing that had captured eir imagination in school. The places all stained with memory. Places which ey still dreamed of, even with home now in London. All things and places and memories where ey had spent uncounted hours honing and honing and honing.
+
+Were these limits of the technological system operating in tandem with eir nervous system? Or were they simply limitations of a panicked mind?
+
+Both?
+
+Neither?
+
+A test, then: something within said limits to begin with. Ey knew eir home. Ey knew eir room. Ey knew the feeling of the duvet beneath em. Ey knew the feeling of sitting on that bed, reading far past eir bedtime. Flashlight and book, listening for footsteps, feigning sleep at the slightest noise.
+
+Ey \emph{knew} it.
+
+Ey closed eir eyes on the dim hall of the clinic.
+
+Ey dreamed it, dreamed of home.
+
+Ey felt it, breathed in the rich scent of the memory of it.
+
+Ey knew every detail of it.
+
+Ey dreamed it.
+
+Ey felt it.
+
+Ey reached out and, in one paw, clutched.
+
+And eir fist was full of duvet.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/013-illust.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+The relief of finding emself sitting in eir own bed, ey supposed, should have been immediate and intense.
+
+Instead, seeing eir room around em once more rather than the clinic, all AwDae could do was close eir eyes and shift down in bed until ey was able to draw the covers up over emself, a mirroring of this morning. The weight of the blanket atop em, the feeling of being surrounded, covered, supported by the mattress seemed to be more important than\ldots{}than what, relief? Joy?
+
+Ey did not feel despair, did not feel hopelessness.
+
+AwDae was not sure what this emotion was. It was a non-emotion. It was a sense of swelling, of being too full. Of having words and images and colors flooding through em and yet wholly out of reach.
+
+When ey had awoken this morning, ey had supposed that ey would head down from home to the clinic and magically find some sort of success. Or, if not success, at least another clue. Another step along the way. A fraction of success. Some piece-of-eight that, when added up, would save em.
+
+This was not a puzzle, though, was it? This was not a set of steps that could be followed to some logical conclusion. There was no end to the road, because there was no road.
+
+Dreams, after all, have no plot.
+
+Ey curled beneath the duvet. Resting in the fetal position in eir childhood bed beneath eir childhood blankets, ey could not even pretend that ey was dreaming. Had ey been asleep, this would have been one of those confusing dreams of too much meaning. Not nightmare, not blessed peace. Just neurons firing at random, conjuring images up from dust, from nothing. Mere breath.
+
+If history played out as it promised to, there would be no waking. Ey was in a world of dream, eir every thought mirrored back against the inner surface of eir cortices, both cerebral and exo.
+
+The data ey had received on the note, still nestled snugly within eir pack, was not some hidden clue. It never had been. It had been an artifact of a dreaming mind leveraging the data that had been stored in eir exocortex. Some part of em, already in the mindset of rummaging through data that afternoon before the rehearsal, was primed to dream of clues, of mysteries to solve.
+
+Find this note.
+
+Find this mic.
+
+Find this solution and perhaps you will achieve your goal.
+
+But what goal was that? Was it to solve the riddle of Cicero's loss? Was it to become unlost, to be found?
+
+Or was it to become unstuck? Was it to find something new? Some way to move on? Move forward? Move, period?
+
+\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}
+
+The laugh that came to em was choked. More sob than anything.
+
+Well, hard to get more stuck than this.
+
+Ey drew the covers up over eir head. Perhaps ey wished to blot out the dream with darkness and silence, but this darkness was dream. The barrier: dream. The silence: dream.
+
+Ey slept, then. Not the restless, confused sleep of the night before, but a dreamless sleep of an hour. An hour? A day? What mattered time? It was the sleep of a mind demanding that very blessed nothingness. Was that something ey could request, as ey had requested to dream eir way back home?
+
+It was not a long nap, of course. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps ey could will it to be as long as ey wanted. Perhaps ey were bound to a rhythm, but the scale did not matter. Perhaps ey could bend time.
+
+Either way, when ey awoke, the corners of eir eyes gunked up with dried tears, the funk of the morning had largely passed. The numbness still lingered around the edges, vignetting curiosity, but it was not so all-consuming as it had been.
+
+AwDae sat up in bed, folding eir legs beneath em to keep eir tail from cramping. Ey teased a thread loose from the edge of the duvet, tugged. A habit from youth made easier with vulpine claws.
+
+Habits in dreams. Dreams that were more than dreams. Dreams one knew about and nevertheless was pinned beneath: nightmare demons sitting upon one's chest, upon one's mind. Upon one's exo, perhaps.
+
+``If I dream, if I dream,'' ey murmured, words coming unbidden to eir lips. ``If I dream, am I no longer myself?''
+
+The vignette of numbness throbbed, narrowed, then faded once again. The words seemed to carry import beyond their plaintive query. Ey could not stop emself from speaking.
+
+\emph{Dawdling.}
+
+Ey stretched eir way out of bed and padded to the door of eir room, closed.
+
+``Wait,'' ey commanded emself. Hand on doorknob. A count to three. A promise to emself. \emph{I will open this door and will find the open space across the road instead of the hallway.}
+
+Could one dream within a dream? Do so with such a detail that ey would not notice the transition? Had ey dreamed the trip to the clinic? Had ey perhaps slept through the return?
+
+``I do not know. I do not know.''
+
+A supplication. A mantra against hopelessness.
+
+Ey turned the knob and stepped out into the shortgrass prairie of the open space. The packed dirt of the trail welcomed eir paws. The scent of dust and rattle-dry stalks of grass washed over em. Warm, yellow light hemmed em in through the fog of war.
+
+``Wait,'' ey said once more. Kept eir hands at eir sides. Loose. Relaxed. No menu to reach for, no gesture required.
+
+A promise to emself. \emph{I still have will.}
+
+The fog receded upon eir request, thinned, disappeared. Mere breath. The prairie of the open space stretched out before them. A valley, and then a ridge of hills to the east. The mountains behind eir back.
+
+Not a sim. No limitations other than those eir dreaming mind had set upon them. Ey had spent so long in sims, lived eir life out in worlds bounded by the edges of invisible properties that, upon getting lost, ey had imagined the same must be true inside. More so, eir unconscious reasoned, for was ey not constrained by the processing power of eir exocortex?
+
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\includepdf[pages={1},noautoscale=true,fitpaper=true]{assets/cadmiumtea--prisca--awdae--G}}
+But it was not a sim. It was a dream, eir dream, eir exo a mirror, and in the end, ey held control.
+
+No commands, then. No promises. Ey knew that, were ey to take a step forward, eir foot would come down on the dinged hardwood floor of eir London flat. Priscilla would meow her hellos and twine around eir ankles.
+
+Ey did not rush. Ey stood still. The breeze fingered eir fur and teased along the hem of eir skirt as a breeze must. There were the turbines on the far ridge, three blades turning laconically as turbines must. There was the highway across the valley, the gas station squatting low alongside it as gas stations must.
+
+No commands in dreams. No promises required. Ey would take that step and all would be as it must.
+
+And then ey took the step.
+
+And then Prisca meowed her hello and twined around eir ankles.
+
+And then AwDae fell to eir knees and let the cat step up onto eir thighs, and ey lifted her in eir arms and buried eir snout in her warm, purring side, and cried.
+
+Cried because this was not London. Cried because this was not eir cat. Cried because ey could dream anything ey wanted and it would never be anything beyond a dream.
+
+This was a memory. This was something dredged up from eir own mind. Prisca, eir very own Prisca, was purring against eir face because that is what Prisca must do. She was squirming out of eir grasp because ey knew that, had ey held her like that in the waking world — and ey had — that that is what cats do.
+
+It was eir dream. Eir own, eirs alone. All the lost must perforce be dreaming their own dreams. Ey dreamed of homes and clues and boundaries, of cats that squirmed, of emself as a fox — and that one ey would keep — and could not begin to guess at other's dreams.
+
+Could ey will Prisca to stop? To hold still and be eir pillow to cry into? Ey did not know. Eir mind resisted the question. Resisted, because ey did not want that to be the case. Did not want to will eir precious cat to be anything other than she was. To ask that question was to admit the idea that ey could dream anything other than that which ey must.
+
+Ey let the cat down so that she could stalk self-righteously to her favorite spot and groom the tears out of her fur.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/013.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,100 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+The relief of finding emself sitting in eir own bed, ey supposed, should have been immediate and intense.
+
+Instead, seeing eir room around em once more rather than the clinic, all AwDae could do was close eir eyes and shift down in bed until ey was able to draw the covers up over emself, a mirroring of this morning. The weight of the blanket atop em, the feeling of being surrounded, covered, supported by the mattress seemed to be more important than\ldots{}than what, relief? Joy?
+
+Ey did not feel despair, did not feel hopelessness.
+
+AwDae was not sure what this emotion was. It was a non-emotion. It was a sense of swelling, of being too full. Of having words and images and colors flooding through em and yet wholly out of reach.
+
+When ey had awoken this morning, ey had supposed that ey would head down from home to the clinic and magically find some sort of success. Or, if not success, at least another clue. Another step along the way. A fraction of success. Some piece-of-eight that, when added up, would save em.
+
+This was not a puzzle, though, was it? This was not a set of steps that could be followed to some logical conclusion. There was no end to the road, because there was no road.
+
+Dreams, after all, have no plot.
+
+Ey curled beneath the duvet. Resting in the fetal position in eir childhood bed beneath eir childhood blankets, ey could not even pretend that ey was dreaming. Had ey been asleep, this would have been one of those confusing dreams of too much meaning. Not nightmare, not blessed peace. Just neurons firing at random, conjuring images up from dust, from nothing. Mere breath.
+
+If history played out as it promised to, there would be no waking. Ey was in a world of dream, eir every thought mirrored back against the inner surface of eir cortices, both cerebral and exo.
+
+The data ey had received on the note, still nestled snugly within eir pack, was not some hidden clue. It never had been. It had been an artifact of a dreaming mind leveraging the data that had been stored in eir exocortex. Some part of em, already in the mindset of rummaging through data that afternoon before the rehearsal, was primed to dream of clues, of mysteries to solve.
+
+Find this note.
+
+Find this mic.
+
+Find this solution and perhaps you will achieve your goal.
+
+But what goal was that? Was it to solve the riddle of Cicero's loss? Was it to become unlost, to be found?
+
+Or was it to become unstuck? Was it to find something new? Some way to move on? Move forward? Move, period?
+
+\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}
+
+The laugh that came to em was choked. More sob than anything.
+
+Well, hard to get more stuck than this.
+
+Ey drew the covers up over eir head. Perhaps ey wished to blot out the dream with darkness and silence, but this darkness was dream. The barrier: dream. The silence: dream.
+
+Ey slept, then. Not the restless, confused sleep of the night before, but a dreamless sleep of an hour. An hour? A day? What mattered time? It was the sleep of a mind demanding that very blessed nothingness. Was that something ey could request, as ey had requested to dream eir way back home?
+
+It was not a long nap, of course. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps ey could will it to be as long as ey wanted. Perhaps ey were bound to a rhythm, but the scale did not matter. Perhaps ey could bend time.
+
+Either way, when ey awoke, the corners of eir eyes gunked up with dried tears, the funk of the morning had largely passed. The numbness still lingered around the edges, vignetting curiosity, but it was not so all-consuming as it had been.
+
+AwDae sat up in bed, folding eir legs beneath em to keep eir tail from cramping. Ey teased a thread loose from the edge of the duvet, tugged. A habit from youth made easier with vulpine claws.
+
+Habits in dreams. Dreams that were more than dreams. Dreams one knew about and nevertheless was pinned beneath: nightmare demons sitting upon one's chest, upon one's mind. Upon one's exo, perhaps.
+
+``If I dream, if I dream,'' ey murmured, words coming unbidden to eir lips. ``If I dream, am I no longer myself?''
+
+The vignette of numbness throbbed, narrowed, then faded once again. The words seemed to carry import beyond their plaintive query. Ey could not stop emself from speaking.
+
+\emph{Dawdling.}
+
+Ey stretched eir way out of bed and padded to the door of eir room, closed.
+
+``Wait,'' ey commanded emself. Hand on doorknob. A count to three. A promise to emself. \emph{I will open this door and will find the open space across the road instead of the hallway.}
+
+Could one dream within a dream? Do so with such a detail that ey would not notice the transition? Had ey dreamed the trip to the clinic? Had ey perhaps slept through the return?
+
+``I do not know. I do not know.''
+
+A supplication. A mantra against hopelessness.
+
+Ey turned the knob and stepped out into the shortgrass prairie of the open space. The packed dirt of the trail welcomed eir paws. The scent of dust and rattle-dry stalks of grass washed over em. Warm, yellow light hemmed em in through the fog of war.
+
+``Wait,'' ey said once more. Kept eir hands at eir sides. Loose. Relaxed. No menu to reach for, no gesture required.
+
+A promise to emself. \emph{I still have will.}
+
+The fog receded upon eir request, thinned, disappeared. Mere breath. The prairie of the open space stretched out before them. A valley, and then a ridge of hills to the east. The mountains behind eir back.
+
+Not a sim. No limitations other than those eir dreaming mind had set upon them. Ey had spent so long in sims, lived eir life out in worlds bounded by the edges of invisible properties that, upon getting lost, ey had imagined the same must be true inside. More so, eir unconscious reasoned, for was ey not constrained by the processing power of eir exocortex?
+
+But it was not a sim. It was a dream, eir dream, eir exo a mirror, and in the end, ey held control.
+
+No commands, then. No promises. Ey knew that, were ey to take a step forward, eir foot would come down on the dinged hardwood floor of eir London flat. Priscilla would meow her hellos and twine around eir ankles.
+
+Ey did not rush. Ey stood still. The breeze fingered eir fur and teased along the hem of eir skirt as a breeze must. There were the turbines on the far ridge, three blades turning laconically as turbines must. There was the highway across the valley, the gas station squatting low alongside it as gas stations must.
+
+No commands in dreams. No promises required. Ey would take that step and all would be as it must.
+
+And then ey took the step.
+
+And then Prisca meowed her hello and twined around eir ankles.
+
+And then AwDae fell to eir knees and let the cat step up onto eir thighs, and ey lifted her in eir arms and buried eir snout in her warm, purring side, and cried.
+
+Cried because this was not London. Cried because this was not eir cat. Cried because ey could dream anything ey wanted and it would never be anything beyond a dream.
+
+This was a memory. This was something dredged up from eir own mind. Prisca, eir very own Prisca, was purring against eir face because that is what Prisca must do. She was squirming out of eir grasp because ey knew that, had ey held her like that in the waking world — and ey had — that that is what cats do.
+
+It was eir dream. Eir own, eirs alone. All the lost must perforce be dreaming their own dreams. Ey dreamed of homes and clues and boundaries, of cats that squirmed, of emself as a fox — and that one ey would keep — and could not begin to guess at other's dreams.
+
+Could ey will Prisca to stop? To hold still and be eir pillow to cry into? Ey did not know. Eir mind resisted the question. Resisted, because ey did not want that to be the case. Did not want to will eir precious cat to be anything other than she was. To ask that question was to admit the idea that ey could dream anything other than that which ey must.
+
+Ey let the cat down so that she could stalk self-righteously to her favorite spot and groom the tears out of her fur.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/014-illust.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,85 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+``If I dream, am I no longer myself?''
+
+AwDae did not pace the streets of London. Did not open the drapes to see if the streets were full of people or desolate and empty. Did not listen for the sounds of the city.
+
+Ey did not step from eir flat. Did not, in fact, leave the spot where ey knelt on the floor for more than an hour, for days and days. Did not do anything except stroke Priscilla when she came and walked by eir knees.
+
+``I still have wants and needs,'' ey murmured to the cat, who only slow-blinked at em. ``If I dream, is that not so?''
+
+The words were automatic. Ey opened eir muzzle and they came forth in a steady cadence.
+
+A memory: RJ and Sasha sitting on the edge of the stage during a break in rehearsals. The play: words of Dickinson. A five minute break. RJ's tablet not showing the usual stage diagram with mic placement and notes, but a white screen. Sasha laughing as RJ began writing, eyes closed. Automatic writing. Drivel and nonsense. Something to giggle over with best friends.
+
+Eyes closed. Ey could feel the soundscape of the room around em change, and knew that ey must now be kneeling on the stage in school.
+
+``Wait.'' Ey shook eir head, tall ears bowing. Ey opened eir eyes and was back in eir flat.
+
+\emph{What lives we lead we lead in memory,} ey thought, then smiled. \emph{My mind should be reeling. I should be feeling overwhelmed and overflowing.}
+
+Ah well.
+
+Ey stood once more, rubbing at eir knees and wincing at the pins and needles rushing over eir paws. Could ey will the discomfort away? Perhaps. Could ey even feel discomfort? Could ey dream it?
+
+Perhaps.
+
+Not now.
+
+Ey padded to the kitchen and opened the cupboard in which the tea must be stored, and, yes, pulled out a tea bag, setting it in eir favorite mug. Ey held the kettle beneath the faucet from whence the water should come and, yes, filled the kettle halfway full and set it on the counter once more.
+
+\AddToHookNext{shipout/after}{\includepdf[pages={1},noautoscale=true,fitpaper=true]{assets/cadmiumtea--tea--awdae--G}}
+A memory: RJ and Avon. Avon, who had let RJ crash on his couch when ey had first reached London. RJ and Avon at a small cafe. Avon promising an authentic cream tea and then immediately launching into a tirade against authenticity. RJ laughing. Avon watching, hawk-eyed, to see whether RJ would spread eir clotted cream on the scone first, or instead reach for the jam. Avon nodding approvingly at the choice.
+
+The water quickly came to a boil. After pouring it into the mug, AwDae hiked emself up onto the counter by the edge of the sink and let eir tail dangle into it. It would get wet, but that is just what happens with sinks.
+
+\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}
+
+``I am stuck, yes,'' ey informed Priscilla. ``I am stuck with will and\pagebreak\ with memory and with time. As much time as I need.''
+
+The cat purred. AwDae laughed and lifted eir mug. Too hot to drink, but comforting to hold. Ey felt the comfort in memory.
+
+A memory: RJ waking a few days? Weeks? RJ waking some time ago, years and years ago, and groggily making a pot of tea. RJ sipping one mug of tea while watching the traffic. RJ sipping a second mug of tea while making rice. RJ starting a third mug of tea before sitting down at eir rig and getting lost in research. RJ digging and digging and digging through cards, through tables, through numbers and words and data. RJ frowning at a mass of voting records. RJ downing a cold mug of tea.
+
+The tea was cool enough to drink, now, and so AwDae did.
+
+And when ey had half-finished the tea, the fox slid from eir perch on the counter and padded over to eir rig. Frowned. Why bother with such a thing? Instead, in its place should be a small, white room extending past the boundaries of eir flat. And there was.
+
+And when ey would step into that room, ey would cease to be a fox, but instead become fully immersed in memory, manipulating it with the same ease with which ey manipulated the acoustic space of the theater. And ey did.
+
+And when ey might think about what memories ey had, ey would find there, whole and uncorrupted, all of the information ey had been prowling through on Cicero's disappearance. No riddles to solve, no tricks, no mics, no paper. Ey would be able to expand across that sense that passed for sight in a fully immersive sim the entirety of the data. And ey could.
+
+AwDae dreamt. Dreamt of work. Dreamt the table of Cicero's DDR votes, dreamt that it rotated in beautiful precision along any axis ey wished. Dreamt of the other cards in the deck, of recorded conversations and notes and last-connected times. Ey dreamt eir way through all of the data packed into the deck of vcards Sasha had given em so very, very long ago.
+
+Ey kept dreaming.
+
+Ey dreamt of the Crown Pub. Dreamt of emself sitting at a booth with Sasha. Dreamt of talking about Cicero with her. Dreamt of how ey had poked eir claw against the surface of the table in the sim, then rubbed at it with a pad, despite the fact that sim would not allow the table to be dented.
+
+Axiom: when any sufficiently large group of furries convene in one place, they will spontaneously generate a bar to hang out at. A bar, a cafe, a park, a plaza.
+
+Thus: in eir dream of so many furries, the table was there, perfect. The table, the booth, the whole pub. Not the noise, not the people, but ey dreamt, in that fully immersive perception-of-everything way, of the entire pub. Of the entire sim. Dreamt of the precise construction of it down to the parametric equations that defined the curves of the vinyl stool cushions. Dreamt of the area behind the bar, unreachable by patrons but behind which puttered the staff AIs' avs.
+
+It was all there. The entire thing. The entire sim, all the way out to its boundary fence and the subtle magic of the fake street beyond. All cached in eir exo, in eir memory.
+
+Ey dreamt of eir home sim. The simple bed. The simple dresser. The logic behind the commands that let em select items and clothing to equip to emself. The tport pad.
+
+All there.
+
+And ey dreamt of Sasha. Ey dreamt of everything about her. The subtle scent of dandelions and the too-straight stripes that traveled over her muzzle, head, and then down her back. The equations that drove her tail. Her very voice.
+
+``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways,'' she said.
+
+She was all there. All of her avatar. What ey remembered of their final conversation could be played out from start to finish between skunk and fox in perfect detail. Detail that could not be anything other than perfect. Detail that had to be perfect because eir exo had cached the skunk's av, just as it had cached eir flat and the Crown Pub.
+
+But she was not all there.
+
+She was not there at all. Her avatar was a hollow shell that AwDae could make parrot her lines. It was a puppet. It was a sensory representation without context. A sign without an object, signifier without the signified.
+
+AwDae was in a hall of mirrors that allowed no one else but emself. She was not there and she could not be there because AwDae was lost, and when one is lost, one is alone in ways more fundamental than could be dreamt of in any solipsist's philosophy.
+
+What lives we lead we lead in memory, and the end of memory lies beneath the roots.
+
+Ey could not forget, for memory ends at the teeth of death and is wholly inaccessible to the living, because the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.
+
+And ey could not cry thus immersed.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/014.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+``If I dream, am I no longer myself?''
+
+AwDae did not pace the streets of London. Did not open the drapes to see if the streets were full of people or desolate and empty. Did not listen for the sounds of the city.
+
+Ey did not step from eir flat. Did not, in fact, leave the spot where ey knelt on the floor for more than an hour, for days and days. Did not do anything except stroke Priscilla when she came and walked by eir knees.
+
+``I still have wants and needs,'' ey murmured to the cat, who only slow-blinked at em. ``If I dream, is that not so?''
+
+The words were automatic. Ey opened eir muzzle and they came forth in a steady cadence.
+
+A memory: RJ and Sasha sitting on the edge of the stage during a break in rehearsals. The play: words of Dickinson. A five minute break. RJ's tablet not showing the usual stage diagram with mic placement and notes, but a white screen. Sasha laughing as RJ began writing, eyes closed. Automatic writing. Drivel and nonsense. Something to giggle over with best friends.
+
+Eyes closed. Ey could feel the soundscape of the room around em change, and knew that ey must now be kneeling on the stage in school.
+
+``Wait.'' Ey shook eir head, tall ears bowing. Ey opened eir eyes and was back in eir flat.
+
+\emph{What lives we lead we lead in memory,} ey thought, then smiled. \emph{My mind should be reeling. I should be feeling overwhelmed and overflowing.}
+
+Ah well.
+
+Ey stood once more, rubbing at eir knees and wincing at the pins and needles rushing over eir paws. Could ey will the discomfort away? Perhaps. Could ey even feel discomfort? Could ey dream it?
+
+Perhaps.
+
+Not now.
+
+Ey padded to the kitchen and opened the cupboard in which the tea must be stored, and, yes, pulled out a tea bag, setting it in eir favorite mug. Ey held the kettle beneath the faucet from whence the water should come and, yes, filled the kettle halfway full and set it on the counter once more.
+
+A memory: RJ and Avon. Avon, who had let RJ crash on his couch when ey had first reached London. RJ and Avon at a small cafe. Avon promising an authentic cream tea and then immediately launching into a tirade against authenticity. RJ laughing. Avon watching, hawk-eyed, to see whether RJ would spread eir clotted cream on the scone first, or instead reach for the jam. Avon nodding approvingly at the choice.
+
+The water quickly came to a boil. After pouring it into the mug, AwDae hiked emself up onto the counter by the edge of the sink and let eir tail dangle into it. It would get wet, but that is just what happens with sinks.
+
+\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}
+
+``I am stuck, yes,'' ey informed Priscilla. ``I am stuck with will and\pagebreak\ with memory and with time. As much time as I need.''
+
+The cat purred. AwDae laughed and lifted eir mug. Too hot to drink, but comforting to hold. Ey felt the comfort in memory.
+
+A memory: RJ waking a few days? Weeks? RJ waking some time ago, years and years ago, and groggily making a pot of tea. RJ sipping one mug of tea while watching the traffic. RJ sipping a second mug of tea while making rice. RJ starting a third mug of tea before sitting down at eir rig and getting lost in research. RJ digging and digging and digging through cards, through tables, through numbers and words and data. RJ frowning at a mass of voting records. RJ downing a cold mug of tea.
+
+The tea was cool enough to drink, now, and so AwDae did.
+
+And when ey had half-finished the tea, the fox slid from eir perch on the counter and padded over to eir rig. Frowned. Why bother with such a thing? Instead, in its place should be a small, white room extending past the boundaries of eir flat. And there was.
+
+And when ey would step into that room, ey would cease to be a fox, but instead become fully immersed in memory, manipulating it with the same ease with which ey manipulated the acoustic space of the theater. And ey did.
+
+And when ey might think about what memories ey had, ey would find there, whole and uncorrupted, all of the information ey had been prowling through on Cicero's disappearance. No riddles to solve, no tricks, no mics, no paper. Ey would be able to expand across that sense that passed for sight in a fully immersive sim the entirety of the data. And ey could.
+
+AwDae dreamt. Dreamt of work. Dreamt the table of Cicero's DDR votes, dreamt that it rotated in beautiful precision along any axis ey wished. Dreamt of the other cards in the deck, of recorded conversations and notes and last-connected times. Ey dreamt eir way through all of the data packed into the deck of vcards Sasha had given em so very, very long ago.
+
+Ey kept dreaming.
+
+Ey dreamt of the Crown Pub. Dreamt of emself sitting at a booth with Sasha. Dreamt of talking about Cicero with her. Dreamt of how ey had poked eir claw against the surface of the table in the sim, then rubbed at it with a pad, despite the fact that sim would not allow the table to be dented.
+
+Axiom: when any sufficiently large group of furries convene in one place, they will spontaneously generate a bar to hang out at. A bar, a cafe, a park, a plaza.
+
+Thus: in eir dream of so many furries, the table was there, perfect. The table, the booth, the whole pub. Not the noise, not the people, but ey dreamt, in that fully immersive perception-of-everything way, of the entire pub. Of the entire sim. Dreamt of the precise construction of it down to the parametric equations that defined the curves of the vinyl stool cushions. Dreamt of the area behind the bar, unreachable by patrons but behind which puttered the staff AIs' avs.
+
+It was all there. The entire thing. The entire sim, all the way out to its boundary fence and the subtle magic of the fake street beyond. All cached in eir exo, in eir memory.
+
+Ey dreamt of eir home sim. The simple bed. The simple dresser. The logic behind the commands that let em select items and clothing to equip to emself. The tport pad.
+
+All there.
+
+And ey dreamt of Sasha. Ey dreamt of everything about her. The subtle scent of dandelions and the too-straight stripes that traveled over her muzzle, head, and then down her back. The equations that drove her tail. Her very voice.
+
+``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways,'' she said.
+
+She was all there. All of her avatar. What ey remembered of their final conversation could be played out from start to finish between skunk and fox in perfect detail. Detail that could not be anything other than perfect. Detail that had to be perfect because eir exo had cached the skunk's av, just as it had cached eir flat and the Crown Pub.
+
+But she was not all there.
+
+She was not there at all. Her avatar was a hollow shell that AwDae could make parrot her lines. It was a puppet. It was a sensory representation without context. A sign without an object, signifier without the signified.
+
+AwDae was in a hall of mirrors that allowed no one else but emself. She was not there and she could not be there because AwDae was lost, and when one is lost, one is alone in ways more fundamental than could be dreamt of in any solipsist's philosophy.
+
+What lives we lead we lead in memory, and the end of memory lies beneath the roots.
+
+Ey could not forget, for memory ends at the teeth of death and is wholly inaccessible to the living, because the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.
+
+And ey could not cry thus immersed.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/015.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,62 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+\emph{I am at a loss for images in this end of days.}
+
+No images. No images. Not real ones. Nothing real in this empty space. Ey could see, but why? Why see eir flat? Why see Prisca? Why see anything?
+
+So ey did not. Ey dreamt emself blind. More than blind. Eir dreaming mind ensured that there was no such thing as sight. That it had never existed. Did not exist for emself. Had never existed for anyone.
+
+Ey was like the theater. Ey was vast, incomprehensible spaces. Ey was the lack of the concept of space. Ey was words. Ey was information. Ey was sound, and the only sound was eir voice.
+
+``The only time I know my true name is when I dream.''
+
+Except was that eir voice? Did ey hear? Did ey speak? Was it em making these noises? Was it em hearing them? Ey dreamed emself out of sight, could ey still dream emself speaking?
+
+``Why ask questions, here at the end of all things?'' Ey laughed. ``Why ask questions when the answers will not help?''
+
+Ey dreamed emself asleep, then. Asleep and dreaming. The world moved around em in soft colors and meaningless images. Words strung themselves together, tangled, frayed, came apart once more. Ey dreamed.
+
+Ey dreamed.
+
+Who knew how long? Who knows? What means knowing in dreams?
+
+When ey woke — when ey dreamed emself awake — AwDae answered eir own question: ``To know one's true name is to know god. To know god is to answer unasked questions.''
+
+And as ey thought upon eir true name, eir mind wandered across what remained in eir exo. Wandered across the deck on Cicero. Wandered across those cards for centuries at a time, millennia, and did not ask.
+
+And there it was.
+
+The vote was not there, and yet the answer was. There was the shadow of intention, of the need for an entire vote to disappear from the collected direct democracy that was the DDR. There was the reason for those who had interacted with the vote, who had voted, who had spent the credits needed to comment on it in the political theater. Commented where others could read, where representatives from the territories would see.
+
+What mattered the vote? What mattered the comments? What mattered the content, the cost? What mattered the golden fleece, or any MacGuffin? It could have been a flashlight with an amber filter in a suitcase just as easily as it could have been a declaration of war against the Sino-Russian Bloc. Chekhov's vote.
+
+It did not matter. All that mattered is that those who had seen it — had seen the vote, who had interacted with it, who had interacted with it at however many levels of remove — were \emph{personae non gratae} from that point on. Easier for them to not be. Easier to admit the mystery of the lost into the collective consciousness than to let such come to light. What cared the world of billions for the hundreds of lost? What cared the powers that be for the resistance of however many dozens that were now lost?
+
+Ey rambled beyond the deck, beyond eir flat, beyond Prisca. Ey wandered across the interior of eir skull until ey stepped up onto the stoop of eir exo.
+
+\emph{Do I know god after the end of all things? Do I know god when I do not remember myself? Do I know god when I dream?}
+
+Ey dreamed that border. Dreamed that border between endocortex and exocortex, and then dreamed eir way across it. Dreamed of the difference between endomemory and exomemory. Dreamed that exomemory into lines. Into rows and columns and formations. Review, friends — troops long past review.
+
+Ey dreamed that memory into data, into words and images and sounds and smells and sensations. Dreamed more than just the memory. Scraped the insides of that exo and dreamed everything. Dreamed it into formation.
+
+And reviewed. Ey walked, a fox, with baton in paw, skirt and blouse dreamed into uniform, laughing joyously. Ey walked along the formations and inspected. Neatly ordered. Neatly organized. Standing proud.
+
+Ey reviewed and marveled at the preciseness with which eir mind obeyed itself. Madness be damned: if ey could control nothing else in this non-world, ey could control emself.
+
+Ey very carefully did not ask.
+
+And there it was: the answer.
+
+There, standing tall, as proud as any other memory, was a subroutine. And when AwDae gazed into its porcelain face, ey understood. And when that porcelain face gazed back, it smiled beatifically.
+
+There it was: the very subroutine, the very bug exploited, the very program triggered at the order of some higher power. The very entity which had painted the inside of eir exo with silver and glass that left em trapped within. There was the virus in all its glory. Its subtle curves meant to fit the space of an exo's logic perfectly. Its ability to recognize actions. Its ability to cut off the outside world. Its ability to ride shotgun along regular software updates. \emph{Security}, it promised. \emph{Added security along the barrier between waking and dreaming.}
+
+It smiled, and AwDae laughed.
+
+``The only time I know my true name is when I dream,'' ey spoke through tears. ``And may then my name die with me.''
+
+Madness grew to a cruel point, pierced bubble of dream, and then dissolved fox.
+
+Ey dreamed.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/016.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{AwDae — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+``Time is a finger pointed at itself,'' AwDae informed Priscilla. This Priscilla. Not the real one, no. The one ey created. The one ey dreamed. ``That it might give the world orders. The world is an audience before a stage where it watches the slow hours progress.''
+
+The cat purred to em.
+
+It was wrong to instruct a cat to be anything other than a cat, so, despite the dreamscape's submission to eir whims, Prisca remained Prisca. There was no influencing felinity.
+
+Similarly, it was wrong to puppet one's friends, and so AwDae had remained in silence, in solitude. No puppet of Sasha telling em that ey was stuck. No need: if there were any doubt to the fact, it was dashed upon meeting the bug which had trapped em here. That porcelain-faced daemon who need not guard the entrance for the entrance had been destroyed.
+
+No, not destroyed; its very existence had been negated. It had never been. There was no going back because there was no going, and there was no back. This was the world as it had always been. This is the world as it will always be. And yet\ldots{}
+
+\emph{``You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways.''}
+
+Was ey stuck? Perhaps, yes. If so, then so be it. Ey would sleep. Ey would dream.
+
+And ey would make. Ey would create. Ey would forge, not hone. Ey would build the world ey would live in, if this was the world ey was to die in. Ey would have it be precisely as ey would want. \emph{And why not?} ey told emself. \emph{In this end of days, I must reach for new beginnings.}
+
+So ey created.
+
+The far wall of eir London flat was gone now, opening out onto the open space behind eir childhood home. The comfort of one home leading directly out onto the comfort of the next. The smooth hardwood floor, worn almost to softness by decades of use, transitioned smoothly to shortgrass prairie. Ey could sit at eir desk chair — remolded to accommodate a fox's tail — and watch the turbines turn laconically in the breeze.
+
+When ey slept, and ey did, ey would bring about sunset. Had the day been clear, clouds would move in. Not many, but enough to pick up a riot of colors as the light dipped from white down through yellow, orange, salmon, red, purple\ldots{} And then the sun would be down and ey would sit on the threshold of the two worlds, of the two times and two universes, and enjoy the scents and sounds that night brought em. Dream senses. Heightened senses as a fox might have.
+
+And then ey would bring back into being the wall between the worlds and sleep. Ey would find eir room the perfect temperature. It would be cold enough that ey would need blankets, but not so cold as to be uncomfortable. And Prisca would come curl up next to em. And ey would pet her while she dozed. And ey would sleep without dreaming.
+
+Ey would wake again however longer later and walk the world. Who knew how long ey slept. Who cared? What meaning had time? Had ey been lost for days? For years? Ey did not count. Did not keep track in some tally carved in stone, for ey was not trapped. Ey lived for hundreds of days in there, for dozens, or mere hours. Ey was completely free. \emph{We are the motes in the stage lights,} ey promised emself. \emph{Beholden to the heat of the lamps.}
+
+Ey would wake and walk the world. Ey would walk the valley in that prairie. Ey would fall to all fours and dig eir fingers into the soil. Ey would poke eir snout into the tickling stalks of grass and breathe the scent of life. Dear the wheat and rye under the stars.
+
+And the sun would rise.
+
+Ey would dream emself into a new shape. Ey would dream emself beyond this amalgam of human and fox, and there would be no rising from all fours. Ey would be a fox, then, and eir name was unspeakable by those who walked on two legs. A fennec out of place and time. Displaced to here, in the middle of North America, displaced to now, this meaningless moment. Ey would be a fox and scamper between the tussocks. Ey would come across a stream and drink of cool water. Ey would lift eir gaze to find an old-growth forest of oak and maple. Old-growth! Imagine. Ey would scamper between the trunks and through the humus and moss, for those were things that must be in a forest.
+
+And then ey would break through the forest and come upon a pebble-strewn beach. A beach! Here! In the middle of the continent. What wonders dreams held.
+
+And then ey would rise to two feet once more. Ey would be AwDae once more. Short, lithe, a memory stronger in so many ways than that of RJ. Who was RJ? A vehicle for AwDae? AwDae, a slim two-legged fox clad in a cornflower blue skirt trimmed with embroidered dandelions. And why not? Why not be clothed in something comfortable and soothing?
+
+And ey would walk the beach in the summer heat, teasing the tide line with eir steps. The water, cool, would lap against eir feet playfully, leaving the fur damp and clinging to eir skin. What was missing, hmm? Ah yes, gulls. There, above em, gulls dreamed along with a breeze tinged with the salt-tang of the sea. Cry, gulls, cry.
+
+And perhaps the sun would grow too hot, for was that not what the sun did on beaches? But look! There in the distance, pebbles faded to sand and, towering above that sand, shady palms. Ey would sit and look out over the ocean, and there, dreaming above the waters, a squall line crossed.
+
+And maybe ey would go home. Maybe not. There were no obligations. What mattered time, after all? ``If I walk backward, time moves forward,'' ey reasoned aloud. ``If I walk forward, time rushes on. If I stand still, the world moves around me, and the only constant is change.''
+
+And perhaps the world was moving around em. What cared ey? Had ey been able to influence that world, to enact any sort of change, perhaps ey would have. Had ey been able to share this knowledge of viruses and routines, of stolen votes and stolen lives, perhaps ey would have.
+
+But ey could not. All ey could do was dream.
+
+Dream spires of color rising from the sea in graceful arcs. Dream the rattle of dry grass. Dream the scent of new rain. Dream the sand beneath eir feet. Dream the names of all things. Dream a slow descent into fractal madness.

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/017.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,146 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2114}{%
+\chapter*{RJ Brewster — 2114}\label{rj-brewster-2114}}
+
+Sasha,
+
+I am, in a way, leaving you with a burden. I know this, and I apologize for doing so. I do not ask for nor deserve forgiveness. The only thing I can ask for is that you remember me.
+
+The world within was a nightmare. I am sure that you know some of what I mean. It was a nightmare and I would not wish it on anyone, and yet now, to be without it is to be incomplete. I was changed in there. We were all changed in there. You do not deny that you were not, after all. Cicero certainly was not. None of the lost came away unscathed, even if we awoke hale and hardy.
+
+We lost Cicero, and then we \emph{truly} lost him. The nothing that he experienced in there, the void which contained all his power transmuted into weakness, the way his anger coiled about and turned back around on himself did him in in the end.
+
+And I will not deny that the same has crossed my mind. There was a scent of the void in there, and it was alluring. I have been tempted to follow in his footsteps and seek that void out in some coarser, purer form. I decided against it. Truly decided: I made a conscious decision to stick around.
+
+I did it for STT at first, but integrating with the theater was too stark a reminder. Then I did it for you and Priscilla, but then she passed. Then I did it for you and\ldots{}well, here is where I do not deserve forgiveness. I welcome your anger, should it come, as that is perhaps what I deserve. It is not that you are not in some way worth sticking around for, as you certainly are. You have always been my champion and friend.
+
+It is just that the call is too strong.
+
+I have volunteered for an early procedure. A way back. Or, rather, a way to a new place. A way to be embedded within a system, rather than simply within a hall of mirrors. I cannot say where, other than it is not in the Western Fed. All I can tell you is that the world should expect big things when it comes to what we have learned from the lost.
+
+I will not say that there is no chance that we may some day meet again. My body will die, I'm told, but should my mind and my sense of self miraculously survive, then I will be on my own once more. This time, however, it will be my choice.
+
+There will be those who come after. Perhaps \emph{you} will come after. Perhaps you will yearn for that return to the eternal dream where memory does not die. And maybe those who come after will do so for other reasons, but they will come.
+
+Should I survive and then others come after, perhaps I will meet them. But it is best to assume that I will not. Maybe it is best to think of it as a sort of suicide, in the end. Here I am, going off to find a better place, and doing so through death. A place that is inaccessible to you or anyone, except perhaps some anonymous scientist in a lab, typing at a terminal.
+
+If I see you again, I will greet you with open arms. If I do not, know that I loved you to the last, in my own way.
+
+I have little else to offer but the imperfect words that plagued me while I was lost.
+
+\begin{verse}
+I am at a loss for images in this end of days:\\
+I have sight but cannot see.\\
+I build castles out of words;\\
+I cannot stop myself from speaking.\\
+I still have will and goals to attain,\\
+I still have wants and needs.\\
+And if I dream, is that not so?\\
+If I dream, am I no longer myself?\\
+If I dream, am I still buried beneath words?\\
+And I still dream even while awake.
+
+Life breeds life, but death must now be chosen\\
+for memory ends at the teeth of death.\\
+The living know that they will die,\\
+but the dead know nothing.\\
+Hold my name beneath your tongue and know:\\
+when you die, thus dies the name.\\
+To deny the end is to deny all beginnings,\\
+and to deny beginnings is to become immortal,\\
+and to become immortal is to repeat the past,\\
+which cannot itself, in the end, be denied.
+
+Oh, but to whom do I speak these words?\\
+To whom do I plead my case?\\
+From whence do I call out?\\
+What right have I?\\
+No ranks of angels will answer to dreamers,\\
+No unknowable spaces echo my words.\\
+Before whom do I kneel, contrite?\\
+Behind whom do I await my judgment?\\
+Beside whom do I face death?\\
+And why wait I for an answer?
+
+Among those who create are those who forge:\\
+Moving ceaselessly from creation to creation.\\
+And those who remain are those who hone,\\
+Perfecting singular arts to a cruel point.\\
+To forge is to end, and to own beginnings.\\
+To hone is to trade ends for perpetual perfection.\\
+In this end of days, I must begin anew.\\
+In this end of days, I seek an end.\\
+In this end of days, I reach for new beginnings\\
+that I may find the middle path.
+
+Time is a finger pointing at itself\\
+that it might give the world orders.\\
+The world is an audience before a stage\\
+where it watches the slow hours progress.\\
+And we are the motes in the stage-lights,\\
+Beholden to the heat of the lamps.\\
+If I walk backward, time moves forward.\\
+If I walk forward, time rushes on.\\
+If I stand still, the world moves around me,\\
+and the only constant is change.
+
+Memory is a mirror of hammered silver:\\
+a weapon against the waking world.\\
+Dreams are the plate-glass atop memory:\\
+a clarifying agent that reflects the sun.\\
+The waking world fogs the view,\\
+and time makes prey of remembering.\\
+I remember sands beneath my feet.\\
+I remember the rattle of dry grass.\\
+I remember the names of all things,\\
+and forget them only when I wake.
+
+If I am to bathe in dreams,\\
+then I must be willing to submerge myself.\\
+If I am to submerge myself in memory,\\
+then I must be true to myself.\\
+If I am to always be true to myself,\\
+then I must in all ways be earnest.\\
+I must keep no veil between me and my words.\\
+I must set no stones between me and my actions.\\
+I must show no hesitation when speaking my name,\\
+for that is my only possession.
+
+The only time I know my true name is when I dream.\\
+The only time I dream is when need an answer.\\
+Why ask questions, here at the end of all things?\\
+Why ask questions when the answers will not help?\\
+To know one's true name is to know god.\\
+To know god is to answer unasked questions.\\
+Do I know god after the end waking?\\
+Do I know god when I do not remember myself?\\
+Do I know god when I dream?\\
+May then my name die with me.
+
+That which lives is forever praiseworthy,\\
+for they, knowing not, provide life in death.\\
+Dear the wheat and rye under the stars:\\
+serene; sustained and sustaining.\\
+Dear, also, the tree that was felled\\
+which offers heat and warmth in fire.\\
+What praise we give we give by consuming,\\
+what gifts we give we give in death,\\
+what lives we lead we lead in memory,\\
+and the end of memory lies beneath the roots.
+
+May one day death itself not die?\\
+Should we rejoice in the end of endings?\\
+What is the correct thing to hope for?\\
+I do not know, I do not know.\\
+To pray for the end of endings\\
+is to pray for the end of memory.\\
+Should we forget the lives we lead?\\
+Should we forget the names of the dead?\\
+Should we forget the wheat, the rye, the tree?\\
+Perhaps this, too, is meaningless.
+\end{verse}
+
+May this be the end of death. Failing that, may the memory of me die and be food for the growth of those who come after.
+
+Yours always,
+
+AwDae

qoheleth/content/old/RJ/018.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+\hypertarget{rj-brewster-2112}{%
+\chapter*{RJ Brewster — 2112}\label{rj-brewster-2112}}
+
+(Rescued)