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Marsh stories, contract; Motes Played thoughts, primer; Ask cover

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\doublespacing
\begin{flushright}
\begin{flushright}\DisplayFont
\null
\vfill
{\Huge\DisplayFont Motes Played}
{\Huge Motes Played}
\vspace{1ex}
{\DisplayFont A Post-Self story}
A Post-Self story
\vspace{2em}
\includegraphics[width=3in]{littlebook.png}
\vfill
{\Large\DisplayFont Madison Scott-Clary}
{\Large Madison Scott-Clary}
with contributions from {\large The Lament}
\end{flushright}
\thispagestyle{empty}
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\input{includes/copyright}
\tableofcontents*
\newpage
\null
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\onehalfspacing
%\doublespacing
% \input{content/preface}
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\vfill
\noindent\textbf{Note:} this book relies on the plots of The Post-Self Cycle, particularly \emph{Mitzvot}. It is strongly recommended that you read those works first. They may all be found \emph{post-self.ink/cycle} as paperbacks, ebooks, and free to read in the browser.
\noindent\textbf{Note:} this book relies on the plots of The Post-Self Cycle, particularly \emph{Mitzvot}. It is strongly recommended that you read those works first. They may all be found \emph{post-self.ink/cycle} as paperbacks, ebooks, and free to read in the browser. If you would prefer to jump right in, spoilers be damned, you can find a primer in the appendices on page \pageref{primer} to get you started.
The tilde (\textasciitilde) is the punctuation mark of whimsy and on this I will not be swayed.
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\mainmatter
\part*{Motes Played}
\pagestyle{ourbook}
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\input{content/010}
\backmatter
\part*{\normalfont\textbf{Afterword}}
\chapter*{Appendix I — Thoughts on Motes}
\input{content/thoughts-on-motes}
\chapter*{Appendix II — Primer}
\label{primer}
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\chapter*{Acknowledgements}
\thispagestyle{empty}
Thanks, as always, to the polycule, who have been endlessly supportive, as well as to Tomash, Ellen, Andréa, and all the rest of the Post-Self community, who have helped build this lovely world.
Thanks, as always, to the polycule, who have been endlessly supportive, but most especially to The Lament, so many of whose words appear within this book. Thanks as well as to Tomash, Ellen, Andréa, and all the rest of the Post-Self community, who have helped build this lovely world, and to Lilium who made me think most about the impact of my work.
Thanks also to my patrons:

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Post-Self is a science fiction setting involving uploaded consciousnesses and all of the daily dramas that go into their everlasting lives.
This primer is broken into two parts:
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item Information on the setting (below), much of which was taken from the Post-Self Wiki.
\item Information on the story leading up to \emph{Motes Played} (page \pageref{backstory}).
\end{itemize}
\section*{The setting}
Starting in 2115, advances in technology allowed individuals to be uploaded. This is a one-way, destructive procedure. That is, once you are uploaded, there is no going back, and your body dies in the process. Given the ongoing deterioration of the climate on Earth and the fact that, in most countries, uploading is subsidized (one's beneficiaries are provided with a payout after one uploads), this is often seen as a very attractive solution. Other reasons that one might upload is to enjoy the anarchic society on the (deliberately opaquely named) System, the functional immortality offered to uploaded individuals, or some of the mechanics enjoyed by cladists. These cladists live embedded in a giant computer at the center of a space station at the Earth-Moon L\textsubscript{5} point known as Lagrange. There are two smaller versions of the System, Castor and Pollux, which were launched in opposite directions traveling out of the Solar System in 2325.
\subsection*{Cladists}
Individuals on the System are known as cladists. This stems from the fact that individuals can create copies of themselves, and those copies can go on to create copies of themselves, and so on. This leads to a branching tree of individuals, or a clade.
`Cladist' refers to both the original upload and any of their numerous copies, and debates about whether or not cladists are still human are a perennial activity.
\subsection*{Forking, quitting, and merging}
The act of a cladist creating a copy of themself is called `forking', as in a fork in the road or forking a source code repository. This new copy is a complete person. They have their own will and drive to continue living and everything. This is not a hive mind thing: both the original and the copy are true individuals.
That said, this new copy (often called a `fork' or an `instance') is, at the moment of forking, the same as the original cladist (called the down-tree instance, because they are closer to the root). After all, that cladist was one person, right? They are just now two! That means that they are created thinking the same sorts of things and sharing the same ideals. Over time, however, they all start to individuate, learning to appreciate their own things based on the separate experiences that they have.
These new instances of our example cladist also have the ability to quit. This means that they all simply stop existing. But wait! Why would they do that?
One reason is that one might simply want to accomplish a task. Perhaps you are cooking a lovely meal and the pasta needs stirring while you are cutting up the garlic bread. Why, simply fork and now you have two pairs of hands, one to go stir the pasta, one to cut the bread. The pasta thus stirred, the new instance may as well just quit. No reason to stick around.
Another reason is to go and experience other things in the world and then bring back those memories. Quite literally, too! When a fork quits, the cladist who forked them receives all of their memories to incorporate with their own. A cladist may wish to cook their delicious meal, but they are also entertaining guests: they can fork off an instance to go cook the meal while they entertain and, when they are done, quit. The down-tree instance will receive all of the memories of having cooked and all of the feelings about the process so that they know to warn their guests, ``Hey, uh...the pasta is a liiiittle spicy...''
One can only ever merge down to the one from whom one was forked up until 277+42, and after that point, one can merge to any of one's cocladists, but only within a clade.
``But what about the transporter paradox?'' you ask. Post-Self's answer to that is a shrug. The memories live on. All of the experiences live on. One simply lived two lives at once for that time.
\subsection*{A note on those memories...}
One unforeseen consequence of living in a giant computer is the inability to forget. This can start to cause problems as one gets older. And older and older and older...because one is functionally immortal. Even though those memories can be organized, or even storied away in imaginary bins called exocortices to be remembered on demand, the fact that they keep piling up is both a boon and a bane. It is a boon because now, suddenly, you can remember everything! No more forgetting names, no more losing track of items. It is a bane, though, because that can get kind of maddening for your average 300 year old.
\subsection*{Creating}
For instance, they can create just about anything they can dream up. This is not as easy as it sounds, of course; it takes skill to get good at dreaming up very specific things such as strawberries or cars or a pencil.
They can also create sims. These are the locations where they live out their lives. These can be everything from a studio apartment to an entire city. They can be private or public. They can be ornate and finely detailed natural settings or they can be plain gray cubes of space.
\subsection*{Crashing and CPV}
Occasionally, something will happen and a cladist will crash. This is usually not too big of a deal, as it can be sorted out by a systech and the cladist brought back to life.
Contraproprioceptive virus is the only way to kill a cladist. It disrupts their sense of their body and induces a crash, from which one cannot recover. This was patched out in 2401 — alas, that is still a few decades off from this story.
\subsection*{Sensoria}
Cladists engage with the world with all of the same senses that we have. These are lumped together into a sensorium. One of the benefits they have is the ability to share some or all of these senses with another cladist as a form of co-experiencing via a sensorium linkage, or as a tool in the form of a sensorium message. If you want to show your friend what you are looking at, send them a sensorium message to share your vision. Some sims even mess with your sensoria (consensually, of course) to change the way that you see things or how things feel.
\subsection*{The perisystem architecture}
There are some tools included in the System itself in what is called the perisystem architecture.
All of those creations listed above, and even some of these experiences, can be shared publicly on the exchange. This was originally a marketplace where one bought and sold such things with Reputation, a currency put in place in the early days when System capacity needed closer management, though this has since become almost a non-issue.
There are also feeds which one can use to share information, news, stories, all sorts of things! Think of these (loosely) like subreddits.
The perisystem also contains the clade listing. Privacy was an important consideration from the founding of the System, so one cannot simply look up any old cladist and find out everything about them without being granted permission.
Finally, it just plain stores information. Things like libraries are essentially locations to go engage with, access, manipulate, or otherwise play with the information that is always available.
\section*{The characters}
People upload for lots of reasons! Once they are sys-side, though, they settle into society as they will.
\subsection*{It is an anarchy}
There is no way to truly govern such a system beyond the mechanics provided by its very existence, and so it is simply left ungoverned. The forces behind the scenes have largely sought only to guide the System in vague directions, often towards yet more freedom. Rules are per-sim, engagement is optional, and cultures are fractured and finely tuned around shared interests or heritage.
\subsection*{It is queer-normative}
The System allows for endless freedom and endless expression. In such a setting, boundaries such as strict gender binaries, hetero- and mono-normative relationship structures, and even species have been broken down. Trans folks may upload and live as they will as cis folks of their chosen gender, or they may remain visibly and proudly trans. Furries may upload and become their fursoñas (this is a metafurry setting, after all; everyone on Earth is a human, and thus every cladist began life as a human). Plural and median systems may upload and split into component selves, or they may remain plural sys-side. Even names and identity have been queered, and you will often see clades adopting naming schemes such as taking lines of a poem for their forks' names.
\subsection*{Why are there so many skunks?}
If you have seen cladists out and about on the web, the chances are good that you have seen some skunks among their number, usually with long, poetic names. This is due largely to the canon works in the Post-Self cycle which feature anthropomorphic skunks heavily. Several folks have adopted these skunks as headmates or characters for roleplaying.
\secdiv
\section*{The story so far}
\label{backstory}
The story leading up to \emph{Motes Played} is told in the four books of the Post-Self Cycle: \emph{Qoheleth}, \emph{Toledot}, \emph{Nevi'im}, and \emph{Mitzvot}. Here, let me spoil them all for you:
\subsection*{\emph{Qoheleth}}
In 2112, RJ Brewster (known to eir friends as AwDae), an audio technician for the Soho Theatre Troupe gets ``lost'': a virus trips a safeguard in the implants ey uses to connect to the immersive 'net, which locks em within eir own dreams, leaving em in an apparent state of catatonia. In the months leading up to this, several people in the Western Federation have gotten lost, and Dr. Carter Ramirez is tasked with figuring out just how to help them, but she has been encountering more friction than expected in the course of doing her job.
She is joined on her search by Michelle Hadje — who goes by the moniker Sasha in furry spaces — though as they start to realize that the origin of the Lost is not a virus but a way for the government of the Western Fed to disappear undesirables, Sasha, too, is lost. Once Dr. Ramirez manages to break the case wide open and all of the Lost are resuscitated, it is found that none of them remain the same, each having suffered some deep neurological trauma.
In the end, AwDae defects to the Sino-Russian Bloc — the other major world power — to volunteer to be one of the first to upload to a new world.
Nearly two hundred years in the future in 2305, Ioan Bălan is contacted by an enigmatic fennec fox named Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled of the Ode clade who needs eir help finding someone and solving a mystery. Someone has revealed a secret — the name of a loved one — which puts its clade at risk. After a journey down several strangely-shaped rabbit holes, they discover that one of the Odists was at the heart of this mystery. Now going by Qoheleth and clearly struggling with delusions of grandeur, he has sent Ioan and the Odists on a wild chase to get them invested in his discovery: memory on the System is eternal, and all of the oldest uploads are at risk of slowly losing touch with reality.
In the midst of explaining this to all of the Ode clade, he is assassinated in grand fashion by one of the other guests — someone who Dear assumes is one of the more conservative Odists.
In the end, it is revealed that the Odists are all descended from Michelle/Sasha, who uploaded in 2117, and that the name they keep secret is that of AwDae, who Dear explains killed emself. In eir final note, ey left Sasha/Michelle with a poem containing the lines from which they take their names.
The version of Ioan who agreed to this adventure, having found emself changed far beyond eir root instance, decides to become eir own cladist, adopting the name Codrin Bălan.
\subsection*{\emph{Toledot}}
In 2325, two smaller versions of the System named Castor and Pollux are launched in opposite directions on a long journey out of the Solar System, leaving the original System, now called Lagrange, behind in orbit around Earth. The date, Ioan realizes, is important due to it being the 200th anniversary of the secession of the System from the governments of Earth, and the correspondences start to pile up from there. Working with another Odist, May Then My Name Die With Me, on Lagrange and Codrin Bălan over on Castor and Pollux ey starts to compile a history of the System from its foundation.
After the trauma of getting lost, Michelle/Sasha uploads as soon as she can afford to. With her experience in campaigning for the Lost, she joins the Council of Eight, a guiding body for the early System, but quickly finds herself overwhelmed, as she struggles to maintain a single identity — either Sasha or Michelle — as well as a single form — either skunk or human. Promising herself a two week vacation, she forks the first ten members of the Ode clade, each taking the first line from the ten stanzas of AwDae's poem. The vacation turns out to be permanent, and shortly after the events of \emph{Qoheleth}, she summons the rest of the clade to merge down so that she can experience their joys and sorrows, and then quits forever.
The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream — or just True Name — remains on the Council as the political member of the clade while the other skunks/women/skunkwomen wander off to work on other projects. She is tasked by Jonas, another councilmember, with aiding in the campaign for secession. She finds it surprisingly easy and surprisingly fulfilling, quickly leaning into the role of the politician, using her skills as an actress and theatre teacher to help sway those around her, as well as their phys-side friend, Yared Zerezghi, to accomplish her goal.
After Launch, much of this information comes to light, along with the fact that, despite the Council of Eight being disbanded in the 2150s, Jonas and True Name (along with the rest of the eighth stanza) continue to steer the politics of not just the System but the governments of Earth from behind the scenes — or so they say. So dramatic are their stories, that the Bălans' book, \emph{An Expanded History of Our World}, comes off more as sensationalist schlock than anything serious.
This, it seems, is by design.
In an epilogue in 2346, astronomer Tycho Brahe on the launch vehicle Castor receives a transmission from an outside source: someone has picked up their signal and would like to meet.
\subsection*{\emph{Nevi'im}}
With the signal from the Artemisians, as the aliens are dubbed, True Name and Jonas leap into action to prepare not just for the arrival of the Artemisian emissaries but also to shape the reception of this news for the remainder of Castor — and the other Systems beyond.
Codrin is, of course, tapped to help document and take part in this project along with Tycho Brahe, True Name, Why Ask Questions Here At The End Of All Things, and Sarah Genet, a psychologist. Given the effects that the Bălans' \emph{History} has had, few people seem to trust that True Name's heart is in the right place, despite her assurances otherwise and apparent earnestness.
The Artemisians — actually four different alien races traveling on a single ship, also taking the form of an uploaded-consciousness system — agree to send a delegation of five to Castor to meet with humanity's delegation, while our five intrepid heroes prepare to transfer to Artemis to accomplish two meetings in parallel. Artemis, however, does not have forking. Instead, they have malleable control over time. This is so close to what the Odists experienced while lost that both True Name and Why Ask Questions immediately begin to struggle just as Michelle/Sasha did so many years ago.
Did I say Why Ask Questions? I meant Answers Will Not Help: those sneaky politicians decide to test their luck by sending a subtly different delegation to Artemis than the one on Castor.
Things are not quite so easy back on Lagrange. True Name is struggling, and when she meets up with Ioan and May Then My Name — now disgustingly cute partners — things do not go well. May falls into `overflow', a sort of rapid mood swing that all Odists seem to experience, and in the process, two of her cocladists quit, leaving the Ode clade now numbering ninety-seven.
While Ioan tries to pick apart what is going on with True Name, ey winds up befriending her, seeing that, no, really, she is just as earnest and vulnerable as eir own partner, and the act that she put on during the writing of the \emph{History} has left her overworked and lonely.
The meetings go about as well as can be expected. That is to say, on Castor, they go fine, and on Artemis, Answers Will Not Help loses her mind and somehow manages to quit, despite such not being possible. At the end of three days and having had their ruse brought to light, the delegates learn that the end goal of this convergence is to establish whether or not humanity will be able to join Artemis on its ongoing travels around the galaxy.
The final step is simply to want to, and when Tycho admits this in a meeting, they are formally welcomed aboard as the fifth race.
The prologue and epilogue detail the story of AwDae leaving behind eir life in London to travel to the S-R Bloc to be a part of an experiment, searching for a way to upload a mind to a computer. All previous attempts have failed, but they have hope that, with the information gained from em getting lost, eirs will be a success. In the end, although ey emself does not wind up within the System, eir mind becomes a part of the foundation, leading to all future successful uploads, which explains while all of the Odists say that they can feel em within.
\subsection*{\emph{Mitzvot}}
Four years after convergence, Ioan is still meeting with True Name on a monthly basis. Nominally meetings to maintain friendly relations between True Name and May Then My Name, these meetings show real friendship between the two. They also show that True Name is struggling more and more over time. On Secession day, 2350, Jonas attempts to assassinate True Name, killing 106 of her forks and leaving the instance who was visiting Ioan the sole living instance of her. Jonas, when confronted by Ioan, demands that True Name meet with em before the end of the year to discuss his plan B — it is that or hide away forever. He requests that Ioan write a book about this to help shape this outcome as he would like.
Forced together as she goes into hiding, True Name and May Then My Name struggle to get along, with mixed results. While they find it easy enough to remain polite, some of the information that True Name shares sets May off; it turns out that, in order to gain leverage over her, Jonas set True Name up with a snarky and dapper fox named Zacharias, a long, \emph{long} diverged fork of May Then My Name's, using the taboo against intraclade relationships as a means of control.
A few days later, in the heat of the moment, May talks one of True Name's other up-tree instances, End Waking, into merging down with her. Given how much End Waking hates her guts, this does not go well for True Name, leaving her feeling torn in two. While May feels quite bad for having hurt her, True Name at least understands her stated goal of helping her become more — or at least other — than what she was.
In an attempt to reconcile, May herself merges down, leaving True Name feeling a more comfortable plurality, though it also leaves her with May's love for Ioan. Her identity is now that of True Name, that of End Waking, and that of May Then My Name.
Jonas calls on her to appear before him in one final meeting, where she seeks a way to remain alive. All of her experience in theatre and politics pays off and she changes both her shape and her name, going now by Sasha. Given the empathetic view that many have of the Sasha/Michelle of old, this means that Jonas cannot do anything to her without putting himself at risk, and she is free (with some restrictions; no going back into politics) to live on.
In an extended epilogue, the book, \emph{Individuation and Reconciliation}, is published and Ioan enters a sometimes-relationship with Sasha, whenever she is feeling up to being around people, given that she now has three different types of overflow, two of which lead to her requesting space from others. She — along with the rest of the eighth stanza, the Bălan clade, and Dear — have been cut off from the sixth and seventh stanzas (those of Hammered Silver and In Dreams) for her actions.
\subsection*{And so now\ldots}
By the time of the story of \emph{Motes Played}, Sasha has started working with Au Lieu Du Rêve (when she is able, at least) as a stage manager. She — along with May and Ioan — have been welcomed into the arms of the fifth stanza (that of A Finger Pointing) with love and kindness. The taboo around intraclade relationships has quickly loosened, and the System has entered once more into a sort of long peace.
\secdiv
\noindent Post-Self an open setting, meaning that anyone can create content within it, though the canon is loosely managed in order to keep it consistent. If you enjoyed this story and any of the many others within this universe, it is open for you to write, draw — or paint! — or otherwise create within. For more creative Post-Self endeavors, look no further than \emph{post-self.ink}, and for more information than you could ever want, check out the Post-Self Wiki over at \emph{wiki.post-self.ink}

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\emph{Motes Played} was written in a few short weeks at the end of December, 2023 and the beginning of January, 2024 in a burst of creativity. The origin for the story actually stems from a conversation that I had with my partner on a drive from visiting eir parents down in Vancouver back home to northern Washington. In the span of about four hours, we made our way down through the stanzas of the Ode clade and spoke about what make them tick.
There are some known quantities. True Name is the politician, A Finger Pointing is the theatrician, Praiseworthy is the propagandist turned arts administrator, and so on. All of the stanzas have been labeled with their basic ideas, of course, and one of those was Hammered Silver being the center of all of Michelle's feelings on motherhood.
What exactly does that mean, though? How does that play out in her head and her heart?
Our initial take on it was actually fairly negative. We decided that she had some very prescriptive ways of thinking about motherhood. There is caring, yes, but there are also Ways in Which the World Works. After all, Hammered Silver is one of the two who cut her entire stanza off from the eighth and part of the ninth stanzas, as well the Bălan clade, when Sasha worked to reclaim a more fulfilling sense of identity. Later on, this also included the first and then, once they took on Sasha as a stage manager, the fifth stanza.
However, we wanted to toy with those feelings of motherhood more directly. How does she deal with the lack of children on the System? How does she deal with her own feelings on motherhood? We decided on coming up with a good side and a bad side:
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{Good side:} Hammered Silver is keenly focused on family dynamics as a whole and ensuring that these remain supportive in a place where they might otherwise be neglected. This was expanded after the advent of AVEC, where she campaigned to help keep families united after a member uploaded.
\item
\textbf{Bad side:} This problem was expanded vertically to include a very prescriptive definition of family, as she bought thoroughly into the taboo on intraclade relationships. This led her to view \emph{all} family dynamics within clades with distrust and anger.
\end{itemize}
Well, we already know that there are intraclade relationships sys-side. There always have been, of course, though not always out in public. There have even been intraclade relationships within the Ode clade (and beyond just the stated examples in the Cycle), such as between Beholden and A Finger Pointing.
Not only that, but there were already family dynamics in the clade, with Motes treating A Finger Pointing and Beholden as her parents, Slow Hours as her sister, A Finger Curled and Beholden To The Music Of The Spheres (two long-lived up-trees of A Finger Pointing and Beholden) as her weird gay aunts, and Dry Grass as Ma 2.0.
Boom, automatic conflict.
I wrote in a flurry, finishing a chapter a day most days over a two week span, working at a similar speed to how \emph{Toledot} came into being. Hypomania be like\textasciitilde{}\footnote{Okay, but having sciatica for two months probably helped.}
Editing took a bit longer, mind, but was still a nice process, thanks to my partner who read each chapter aloud to me. Given how much the story means to em as well, it was a joy for both of us. I also got a few beta reads from within \href{https://wiki.post-self.ink/wiki/The_Post-Self_community}{the Post-Self community} which were, for the most part, really kind and understanding.
The last step on my end is typesetting and final editing pass (which I usually do on the typeset book), getting ready for publication, and getting a cover. I am already chatting with \href{https://furaffinity.net/user/astolpho}{Astolpho} about that last bit, and he sounds interested.
\section*{The story}
I knew that the response to \emph{Motes Played} would be complicated from before its inception. Its inception was bound up in that very complication. That complication is part and parcel of the book, after all: Motes is an adult --- as everyone is, sys-side --- and many around her would prefer that she look and act like it.
I knew that the response would be complicated, that it would make readers uncomfortable, would make friends or loved ones have some big feelings. I had those big feelings, too. Even after writing the book, after typesetting it and building the ebook (admittedly a mostly automated process), I struggled with the fact that I had written this thing and was thinking about putting it in front of others. There are no works of mine that are not expressions of vulnerability, but each is vulnerable in its own way. \emph{I} was uncomfortable! Funding it with the \emph{Marsh} Kickstarter was a way to force the issue for myself, to pit my pride in what I had accomplished against my fears.
So anyway, I hit publish.
\section*{Okay, but why a kid?}
There are a few reasons why I wrote this book. First and foremost is simply that it was fun. I love the approach that a lot of children's books take with language. All of that repetition lends an almost hypnotic air. You keep reading the same idea over and over being stated in different ways with different antecedents and each one adds a little bit more color to the situation. They slowly change the mood of whatever they are building toward. It is alluring as a writer.
It was also fun to play around with all of the differences that spring up through cladistics. We know Dear is the best worst fox and May Then My Name is a cuddlebug and True Name is a politician and E.W. is a Sad Boi, but if we start prowling through the other stanzas, what do we find?
Well, we know that A Finger Pointing is a theatrician. She is one of the administrators of Au Lieu Du Rêve, the little troupe she started in the early days of the System, but which has grown to a group several hundred strong. This speaks to all sorts of roles that one might pick up, some of them informed by their names and some not. Beholden gets to deal with all of the sound and music, If I Stand Still deals with lights, and Motes gets sets and props
It goes beyond interests or chosen profession (or, well, ``profession''; this \emph{is} the System, after all). Years bring with them individuation, and each of these cladists begin to shift as well. Just as May Then My Name is not True Name, neither is Motes A Finger Pointing. A lot can change over time.
This includes all sorts of different aspects of personality. A Finger Pointing remains her flamboyant, dramatic self just as Motes leans hard into these feelings of childhood. I wanted to explore something like this in more detail.
Finally, I have been fascinated with the idea of childhood for years. It is not the supposed purity\footnote{I find `the purity of childhood' personally unnerving. It strikes me as an aspect of the oft-maligned purity culture. Kids can be mean. They can be \emph{cruel.} They are creatures who act upon their base desires, for better or worse. I think this, in combination with its laws-for-thee-none-for-me attitude, has led to the ``corruption'' of children becoming a talking point of the right, those bastions of that very same purity culture.} of it, nor is it necessarily that my own was bad. What it \emph{was,} though, is less than ideal. It feels like my childhood is something that happened to someone else. It is a thing that happened to Matthew, not to Madison. I never got to live a childhood as Madison, good \emph{or} bad.
Honestly, I have little desire to do so now. It is not out of a desire to be a literal kid, myself, that I wrote \emph{Motes Played.} I wrote it because that idea in particular --- that someone would wish to just\ldots go be a kid because they can and because it felt good --- is fascinating to me. Motes decided that her role was to be the kid, the One Who Plays, and so she leaned hard into that.
I wanted to play with the whole idea, too: I wanted to play with the sorts of uncomfortable feelings that many experience when confronted with adults engaging with the world as children. I wanted to talk about how someone who spends so much time in little space deals with the fact that others hate her guts for it.
\section*{Now, about those big feelings\ldots{}}
I do not need to wonder whether the reaction to \emph{Motes Played} will involve big feelings from others. I have already run into such, both within the Post-Self community spaces and among my broader friends group. At the risk of coming off as defensive, I would like to speak to those feelings.
First, one must consider the role of art. There are three general ways of interpreting art:
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{Escapist} --- art is simply there to entertain. In the case of something like fiction, it is there to provide a glimpse of some world other than ours (no matter how distant) so that we can experience something other than our wretched, wretched lives.
\item
\textbf{Representative} --- art exists to represent the world as it is. Even things such as science fiction and fantasy represent the tropes that exist within our world, and are used to represent them out of their more complicated context that they might be observed.
\item
\textbf{Instructive} --- art should be used to instruct the audience how to interact with the world. This goes beyond simply teaching them how to do this or that, too: it can be that a piece of art is intended to be an example that one should follow.
\end{itemize}
These are not hard and fast categories, of course, and a work of art need not fill only one of them. I think it is this last one that a lot of folks get hung up on, in cases like this. It is, of course, only a gesture that I provide my intentions in an artist's statement, but there is very little about the book that is intended to be instructive: it starts as children's books do because Motes presents as a kid, and it ends as children's books do because, hey presto, Motes presents as a kid.
Instead, I provide a piece of writing which I intend to be escapist --- I have mentioned the joys above --- as well as representative. There are littles in the world. It is just a fact! People of all sorts engage with ageplay in all sorts of different ways. If Post-Self is to be a complete take on a future world, then I do not see why it should not include (thoughtful, sensitive, appropriate) takes on complete aspects of the world.
But even if it were instructive, what are the lessons to be taken away from the story?
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{Do not trust strangers not to be gross to kids.} Motes is wary of forming friendships with adults unless she already knows and trusts them. Even when she does go out as an adult and engages with sexuality, she will not even give her name.
\item
\textbf{Have a support network to help with the first point.} She relies on others not herself to help spot the things that she misses. Those she keeps close --- A Finger Pointing, Beholden, Slow Hours, and so on --- all strive to protect her, and she trusts in that.
\item
\textbf{Live joyfully but live intentionally.} Motes does not simply throw herself with abandon into ``oh, I am going to be a kid now!'' but instead approaches her goal with intentionality, setting and respecting boundaries, and choosing spaces where such is expected and welcomed.
\end{itemize}
And here, of course, are the lessons that it does \textbf{\emph{not}} teach:
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{It is somehow, in some bizarro universe, okay to groom children, even if those children are adults.} Motes explicitly avoids this and trusts others to help spot the instances she cannot see.
\end{itemize}
Usually, I am stuck on the number three being used to prove points --- hendiatris, bay-\emph{bee} --- but I am not going to bother including two more points, because I suspect this will be the only one raised as a concern, even at the expense of any other characterizations presented within the book. After all, Motes also has a death kink that one of her caregivers loathes. She drinks even when presenting as a child. Beholden is an alcoholic and has destructive tantrums, lashing out at those around her. Hammered Silver is a PTA-mom-lookin', HOA-president-ass bitch\footnote{I am contractually obligated to make fun of her. It is part of being an author.} who abuses her not-husband, Waking World, and Waking World enables a lot of her bullshit.
I do not like the thought that this one sticking point will doubtless lead to strife. I do not like that it will get in the way of people's enjoyment of the work. It is not my responsibility to somehow force readers to enjoy my writing. My responsibility as an author is to present the story.
It is my \emph{desire,} however, to explain where I am coming from.
\section*{Where these feelings come from}
If I am coming across as anxious, defensive, or even bitter, I guess it is because, to an extent, I am. I am trying to get better at not apologizing for everything, despite my people-pleasing tendencies. I will tamp down that urge in favor of explaining the roots of these feelings.
I began this essay by talking about my initial wariness at the idea of publishing this thing that I wrote. Since then, I have been struck with the occasional flash of such discomfort, but more and more often, I have been struck with a sense of pride. I \emph{like} what I have accomplished. I like that I wrote in this vaguely children's book style. I like that we get Odists interacting with Odists, and that even the narration is written in (admittedly somewhat gentled) Odespeak. I like that I had the chance to lean into not only \href{https://makyo.is/plural}{my own plurality} but \href{https://cohost.org/hamratza}{my partner's}. I like that I got to explore the more populous areas of the System through someone other than the relatively shut-in Bălans. I like that I had the chance to lean into this topic, even! It is fulfilling to write something emotional and difficult.
I remain anxious, I still struggle against defensiveness, and yes, I suppose I do feel a little bitter even still. These are a class of feelings that I try to keep to myself as I work through them. That bitterness, especially, is a reactionary feeling that speaks to complicated thoughts in need of processing, and this contrast between pride in my work and all those big feelings is, yes, plenty complicated.
If I sound at all bitter, then, it is because I have made something that I am proud of and yet also feel compelled to defend, and I resent that.
I resent that I need to be rightfully anxious. I resent that, by creating something in this idea-space, I run the very real risk of, at worst, having my personhood negated when I am declared problematic, a groomer, a pedophile, \emph{persona non grata.} I resent that I do not need to consider whether I will be labeled these things; I am all but sure I will. I mentioned above that I have already had a conversation that touched on this. It led to someone reducing their engagement with the Post-Self community.\footnote{Which is valid! Curate your engagement. Stay healthy with your media consumption. The Post-Self community explicitly welcomes a come-and-go, curation-friendly approach in all our spaces.} I resent that I risk losing readers, friends, loved ones. I resent that the oft-misused ``death of the author'' is only applied to the works one enjoys and derided otherwise, and so in this case, I will be reduced to my roughest edges and discarded by those who do not enjoy works such as these. The work that I put into it will be ignored in the face of this one fact regardless of my feelings on what I have accomplished.
I resent that one way I could avoid such readings are to make Motes miserable, to deny her happiness in her identity, do take from her her pride in herself and her growth. I resent that I might well be lauded for changing the ending of the book to have Motes give up, have her follow Hammered Silver's suggestion to put away childish things\footnote{The Odists are famously Jews; why is she quoting 1 Corinthians? But then, I suppose Paul was famously a Jew, too\ldots} and become other than she had been. I resent that a `solution' in my straw-reader's mind would be to replace joy with shame.
I resent that, if I claim that \href{https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReallySevenHundredYearsOld}{Motes is nearly 300 years old} at the time of this story, I will be accused of trying to weasel my way out of grooming accusations, regardless of the fact that dealing with grooming is part of her character and the plot. I resent that if I claim that the headmate upon which Motes is based is actually 38 at time of writing, just like this wretched body,\footnote{Remember that mention of sciatica? Yeeeah\ldots} and has simply leaned into feelings of kidcore, a portion of my identity will be declared wicked and manipulative. I resent that, no matter how loudly I say that I am aware of the broader context of CSA in the wider world, how abhorrent I think that is, none of that will matter in the face of that same imagined wicked and manipulative aspect. I resent that, no matter how nuanced my arguments on consent are\footnote{Many of those who \emph{do} engage with interests and kinks often considered problematic think about consent and those potentially problematic aspects \emph{far} more than most, even those who dislike them, I guarantee you.} --- even within this very work! --- the work itself will be declared, yes, wicked and manipulative.
It is, as Motes puts it, annihilation. It is the opposite of reclamation. Rather than taking the bad and finding a way to reclaim the good in it, it is taking a thing that is good and making it not just bad, but reprehensible. It is taking things that one enjoys and not making them less enjoyable, but making them shameful.
I resent that.
If I sound bitter, it is because I am proud of what I have made, and I want to share it.
\section*{That aside\ldots{}}
I remain very proud of \emph{Motes Played.} The story was fun to write, the characters were fun to write (and super meaningful besides; thanks plurality!), the responses were fun to hear, and I really hope that the book itself is received well.
It is my hope that this work is enjoyed as a work of escapism. I hope that a work that interrogates little-space and its role in the lives of those who engage with, all plopped into a sci-fi setting, it leads to readers interrogating the world around them. I hope that, if it is at all instructive, it is instructive on the joys of identity, the hedonism of ever becoming more accurately oneself.
I have come to love Motes, and I hope you do too.

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\emph{Motes Played} was written in a few short weeks at the end of December, 2023 and the beginning of January, 2024 in a burst of creativity. The origin for the story actually stems from a conversation that I had with my partner on a drive from visiting eir parents down in Vancouver back home to northern Washington. In the span of about four hours, we made our way down through the stanzas of the Ode clade and spoke about what make them tick.
There are some known quantities. True Name is the politician, A Finger Pointing is the theatrician, Praiseworthy is the propagandist turned arts administrator, and so on. All of the stanzas have been labeled with their basic ideas, of course, and one of those was Hammered Silver being the center of all of Michelle's feelings on motherhood.
What exactly does that mean, though? How does that play out in her head and her heart?
Our initial take on it was actually fairly negative. We decided that she had some very prescriptive ways of thinking about motherhood. There is caring, yes, but there are also Ways in Which the World Works. After all, Hammered Silver is one of the two who cut her entire stanza off from the eighth and part of the ninth stanzas, as well the Bălan clade. Later on, this also included the first and then, once they took on Sasha as a stage manager, the fifth stanza.
However, we wanted to toy with those feelings of motherhood more directly. How does she deal with the lack of children on the System? How does she deal with her own feelings on motherhood? We decided on coming up with a good side and a bad side:
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{Good side:} Hammered Silver is keenly focused on family dynamics as a whole and ensuring that these remain supportive in a place where they might otherwise be neglected. This was expanded after the advent of AVEC, where she campaigned to help keep families united after a member uploaded.
\item
\textbf{Bad side:} This problem was expanded vertically to include a very prescriptive definition of family, as she bought thoroughly into the taboo on intraclade relationships. This led her to view \emph{all} family dynamics within clades with distrust and anger.
\end{itemize}
Well, we already know that there are intraclade relationships sys-side. There always have been, of course, though not always out in public. There have even been intraclade relationships within the Ode clade (and beyond just the stated examples in the Cycle), such as between Beholden and A Finger Pointing.
Not only that, but there were already family dynamics in the clade, with Motes treating A Finger Pointing and Beholden as her parents, Slow Hours as her sister, A Finger Curled and Beholden To The Music Of The Spheres (two long-lived up-trees of A Finger Pointing and Beholden) as her weird gay aunts, and Dry Grass as Ma 2.0.
Boom, automatic conflict.
I wrote in a flurry, finishing a chapter a day most days over a two week span, working at a similar speed to how \emph{Toledot} came into being. Hypomania be like\textasciitilde{}\footnote{Okay, but having sciatica for two months probably helped.}
Editing took a bit longer, mind, but was still a nice process, thanks to my partner who read each chapter aloud to me. Given how much the story means to em as well, it was a joy for both of us. I also got a few beta reads from within \href{https://wiki.post-self.ink/wiki/The_Post-Self_community}{the Post-Self community} which were, for the most part, really kind and understanding.
The last step on my end is typesetting and final editing pass (which I usually do on the typeset book), getting ready for publication, and getting a cover. I am already chatting with \href{https://furaffinity.net/user/astolpho}{Astolpho} about that last bit, and he sounds interested.
\section*{The story}
I knew that the response to \emph{Motes Played} would be complicated from before its inception. Its inception was bound up in that very complication. That complication is part and parcel of the book, after all: Motes is an adult --- as everyone is, sys-side --- and many around her would prefer that she look and act like it.
I knew that the response would be complicated, that it would make readers uncomfortable, would make friends or loved ones have some big feelings. I had those big feelings, too. Even after writing the book, after typesetting it and building the ebook (admittedly a mostly automated process), I struggled with the fact that I had written this thing and was thinking about putting it in front of others. There are no works of mine that are not expressions of vulnerability, but each is vulnerable in its own way. \emph{I} was uncomfortable! Funding it with the \emph{Marsh} Kickstarter was a way to force the issue for myself, to pit my pride in what I had accomplished against my fears.
So anyway, I hit publish.
\section*{Okay, but why a kid?}
There are a few reasons why I wrote this book. First and foremost is simply that it was fun. I love the approach that a lot of children's books take with language. All of that repetition lends an almost hypnotic air. You keep reading the same idea over and over being stated in different ways with different antecedents and each one adds a little bit more color to the situation. They slowly change the mood of whatever they are building toward. It is alluring as a writer.
It was also fun to play around with all of the differences that spring up through cladistics. We know Dear is the best worst fox and May Then My Name is a cuddlebug and True Name is a politician and E.W. is a Sad Boi, but if we start prowling through the other stanzas, what do we find?
Well, we know that A Finger Pointing is a theatrician. She is one of the administrators of Au Lieu Du Rêve, the little troupe she started in the early days of the System, but which has grown to a group several hundred strong. This speaks to all sorts of roles that one might pick up, some of them informed by their names and some not. Beholden gets to deal with all of the sound and music, If I Stand Still deals with lights, and Motes gets sets and props
It goes beyond interests or chosen profession (or, well, ``profession''; this \emph{is} the System, after all). Years bring with them individuation, and each of these cladists begin to shift as well. Just as May Then My Name is not True Name, neither is Motes A Finger Pointing. A lot can change over time.
This includes all sorts of different aspects of personality. A Finger Pointing remains her flamboyant, dramatic self just as Motes leans hard into these feelings of childhood. I wanted to explore something like this in more detail.
Finally, I have been fascinated with the idea of childhood for years. It is not the supposed purity\footnote{Why we do not think of `the purity of childhood' as an aspect of the oft-maligned purity culture is beyond me. Kids can be mean. They can be \emph{cruel.} They are creatures who act upon their base desires, for better or worse. The ``corruption'' of children, thus, is a talking point of the right, those bastions of purity culture, and to watch my own far-left cohort slip into that as a part of the ways in which they perform leftism, even if only on instinct, is disheartening, but then, in a personal essay on media literacy, I repeat myself.} of it, nor is it necessarily that my own was bad. What it \emph{was,} though, is less than ideal. It feels like my childhood is something that happened to someone else. It is a thing that happened to Matthew, not to Madison. I never got to live a childhood as Madison, good \emph{or} bad.
Honestly, I have little desire to do so now. It is not out of a desire to be a literal kid, myself, that I wrote \emph{Motes Played.} I wrote it because that idea in particular --- that someone would wish to just\ldots go be a kid because they can and because it felt good --- is fascinating to me. Motes decided that her role was to be the kid, the One Who Plays, and so she leaned hard into that.
I wanted to play with the whole idea, too: I wanted to play with the sorts of uncomfortable feelings that many experience when confronted with adults engaging with the world as children. I wanted to talk about how someone who spends so much time in little space deals with the fact that others hate her guts for it.
\section*{Now, about those big feelings\ldots{}}
I do not need to wonder whether the reaction to \emph{Motes Played} will involve big feelings from others. Such has already been proven to me before it was even published.
So, at the risk of coming off as defensive, let me offer some preemptive responses to those feelings.
First, one must consider the role of art. There are three general ways of interpreting art:
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{Escapist} --- art is simply there to entertain. In the case of something like fiction, it is there to provide a glimpse of some world other than ours (no matter how distant) so that we can experience something other than our wretched, wretched lives.
\item
\textbf{Representative} --- art exists to represent the world as it is. Even things such as science fiction and fantasy represent the tropes that exist within our world, and are used to represent them out of their more complicated context that they might be observed.
\item
\textbf{Instructive} --- art should be used to instruct the audience how to interact with the world. This goes beyond simply teaching them how to do this or that, too: it can be that a piece of art is intended to be an example that one should follow.
\end{itemize}
These are not hard and fast categories, of course, and a work of art need not fill only one of them. I think it is this last one that a lot of folks get hung up on, though. It is, of course, an exercise in futility that I provide my intentions in an artist's statement, but there is very little about the book that is intended to be instructive: it starts as children's books do because Motes presents as a kid, and it ends as children's books do because, hey presto, Motes presents as a kid.
Instead, I provide a piece of writing which I intend to be escapist --- I have mentioned the joys above --- as well as representative. There are littles in the world. It is just a fact! People of all sorts engage with ageplay in all sorts of different ways. If Post-Self is to be a complete take on a future world, then I do not see why it should not include (thoughtful, sensitive, appropriate) takes on complete aspects of the world.
But even if it were instructive, what are the lessons to be taken away from the story?
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{Do not trust strangers not to be gross to kids.} Motes is wary of forming friendships with adults unless she already knows and trusts them. Even when she does go out as an adult or engages with sexuality, she will not even give her name.
\item
\textbf{Have a support network to help with the first point.} She relies on others not herself to help spot the things that she misses. Those she keeps close --- A Finger Pointing, Beholden, Slow Hours, and so on --- all strive to protect her, and she trusts in that.
\item
\textbf{Live joyfully but live intentionally.} Motes does not simply throw herself with abandon into ``oh, I am going to be a kid now!'' but instead approaches her goal with intentionality, setting and respecting boundaries, and choosing spaces where such is expected and welcomed.
\end{itemize}
And here are the lessons that it does \textbf{\emph{not}} teach:
\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
\textbf{It is somehow, in some bizarro universe, okay to groom children, even if those children are adults.} Motes explicitly avoids this and trusts others to help find the ones she cannot see.
\end{itemize}
Usually, I am stuck on the number three being used to prove points --- hendiatris, bay-\emph{bee} --- but I am not even going to bother including two more points, because this is the only one that has been (and I suspect will be) raised as a concern, even at the expense of any other issues presented within the book. Motes also has a death kink that one of her not-parents loathes. She drinks even when presenting as a child. Beholden is an alcoholic and has destructive tantrums, lashing out at those around her. Hammered Silver is a PTA-mom-lookin', HOA-president-ass bitch\footnote{I am contractually obligated to make fun of her. It is part of being an author.} who abuses her not-husband, Waking World, and Waking World enables a lot of her bullshit.
I do not like the thought that this one sticking point will doubtless lead to strife. I do not like that it will get in the way of people's enjoyment of the work. It is not my responsibility to somehow force readers to enjoy my writing. My responsibility as an author is to present the story.
It is my \emph{right,} however, to defend myself and my work.
\section*{Heading off tone arguments}
If I sound a bit bitter, it is because I am, and it is something I will not apologize for, despite my people-pleasing tendencies.
I began this pile of thoughts by talking about my initial discomfort with the idea of publishing this thing that I wrote. Since then, I have been struck with the occasional flash of such discomfort, but more and more often, I have been struck with a sense of pride. I \emph{like} what I have accomplished. I like that I wrote in this vaguely children's book style. I like that we get Odists interacting with Odists, and that even the narration is written in (admittedly somewhat gentled) Odespeak. I like that I had the chance to lean into not only \href{https://makyo.is/plural}{my own plurality} (Motes, Beholden, Slow Hours, and Dry Grass being headmates at time of writing) but \href{https://cohost.org/hamratza}{my partner's} (A Finger Pointing and Warmth). I like that I got to explore the more populous areas of the System through someone other than the relatively shut-in Bălans. I like that I had the chance to lean into this topic, even! It is fulfilling to write something emotional and difficult.
If I sound bitter, it is because I have made something that I enjoy and yet also feel compelled to defend.
I resent that I will have my personhood negated when I am declared problematic, a groomer, a pedophile, \emph{persona non grata.} I resent that I do not need to consider whether I will be labeled these things; I know I will. I mentioned above that I have already had that conversation. It led to someone reducing their engagement with the Post-Self community.\footnote{Which is valid! Curate your engagement. Stay healthy with your media consumption. The Post-Self community explicitly welcomes a come-and-go, curation-friendly approach in all our spaces.}
I resent that the oft-misused ``death of the author'' is only applied to the works one enjoys, and so in this case, I will be reduced to my roughest edges and discarded. The work that I put into it will be ignored in the face of this one fact regardless of my feelings of what I have accomplished.
I resent that, if I claim that \href{https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReallySevenHundredYearsOld}{Motes the character is nearly 300 years old} at the time of telling, I will be accused of trying to weasel my way out of grooming accusations, regardless of the fact that dealing with those is part of her character and the plot. I resent that if I claim Motes the headmate is actually 38 at time of writing, just like this body, and has simply leaned into feelings of kidcore, a portion of my identity will be declared wicked and manipulative. I resent that, no matter how loudly I say that I am aware of the broader context of CSA in the wider world, how abhorrent I think that is, none of that will matter in the face of that same imagined wicked and manipulative aspect. I resent that, no matter how nuanced my arguments on consent are\footnote{Those who \emph{do} engage with interests and kinks often considered problematic think about them and their potentially problematic aspects \emph{far} more than most, even those who dislike them, I guarantee you.} --- even within this very work! --- the work itself will be declared, yes, wicked and manipulative. I resent that I risk losing readers, friends, loved ones.
It is, as Motes puts it, annihilation. It is the opposite of reclamation. Rather than taking the bad and finding a way to reclaim the good in it, it is taking all that is good and making it not just bad, but reprehensible. It is taking things that one enjoys and not making them less enjoyable, but making them shameful.
I resent that.
If I sound bitter, it is because I am proud of what I have made, and I want to share it.
\section*{That aside\ldots{}}
I remain very proud of \emph{Motes Played.} The story was fun to write, the characters were fun to write (and super meaningful besides; thanks plurality!), the responses were fun to hear, and I really hope that the book itself is received well.