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

marsh/book.tex

@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@
 
     {\Large\DisplayFont Madison Scott-Clary}
 
-    With contributions from The Lament, Andréa C. Mason, Caela Argent, J.S. Hawthorne...
+    With contributions from The Lament, Andréa C. Mason, Caela Argent, J.S. Hawthorne, Krzysztof ``Tomash'' Drewniak
   \end{flushright}
   \thispagestyle{empty}
 
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@
   \cleardoublepage
 
   %\onehalfspacing
-  \doublespacing
+  %\doublespacing
 
   % \input{content/preface}
 
@@ -101,6 +101,7 @@
 
 \null
   \cleardoublepage
+  \addcontentsline{toc}{part}{Marsh}
   
   \chapter*{Reed — 2399}
   \markboth{Marsh}{Madison Scott-Clary}
@@ -162,9 +163,32 @@
   \input{content/018}
 
   \cleartoverso
-  \story{Prophecies}{Madison Scott-Clary}
+  \addcontentsline{toc}{part}{Stories}
-  \markboth{Prophecies}{Madison Scott-Clary}
+  \thispagestyle{empty}
+  \story{A Well-Trained Eye}{Andréa C. Mason}
+  \markboth{A Well-Trained Eye}{Andréa C. Mason}
+  \chapter*{Lucia Marchetti — 2401}
+  \input{content/a-well-trained-eye}
+
+  \cleartoverso
+  \thispagestyle{empty}
+  \story{Home From the Game}{Caela Argent}
+  \markboth{Home From the Game}{Caela Argent}
+  \chapter*{Sadie Amara — 2401}
+  \input{content/home-from-the-game}
+
+  \cleartoverso
+  \thispagestyle{empty}
+  \story{Prophecies}{Madison Scott-Clary, with The Lament}
+  \markboth{Prophecies}{Madison Scott-Clary / The Lament}
   \chapter*{Slow Hours — 2401}
   \input{content/prophecies}
 
+  \cleartoverso
+  \thispagestyle{empty}
+  \story{Sentences}{Krzysztof “Tomash” Drewniak}
+  \markboth{Sentences}{Krzysztof “Tomash” Drewniak}
+  \chapter*{In All Ways — 2405–2406}
+  \input{content/sentences}
+
 \end{document}

marsh/content/002.tex

@@ -139,7 +139,7 @@ She rolled her eyes. ``Tell Marsh I said--
 \newpage
 
 \hypertarget{reed-2401}{%
-\chapter{Reed — 2401}\label{reed-2401}}
+\chapter*{Reed — 2401}\label{reed-2401}}
 
 ``See? You're so weird.''
 

marsh/content/a-well-trained-eye.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,279 @@
+The rain against old glass panes and the sways and bumps of the car on the rails ready the air for conjurations. Lucy sits on the bench 6th from the back, on the right side, a sketchbook open across her knees. Today she's trying charcoal. Feels right with what happened a week ago.
+
+This lonely train through the valley and the mountain is her chapel and now her hermitage in the wake of the bombing. There are plenty of churches and other religious retreats across the System if she wanted, but none of them have ever felt a fit for this work. She thought about skipping this week, and told herself if the train wasn't running, she'd pick up again later, but even with no passengers save her, the engine pulls its empty tail along the countryside. So, as she has done every week for the past 250 years, she has gone to her locker in the station, pulled out a fresh sketchbook, and boarded.
+
+Lucy conjures in her memory their faces.
+
+She can only recall 63 of the 68. It is true that the System means she cannot forget anything now, but it merely preserves in amber what the memory held at the moment of upload. It cannot restore the faces she lost to time. Even a number of the faces she recalls are not complete memories. Those she has filled in over decades, extrapolating or iterating on them until they are whole enough for her to feel it completes them. Over 260 years, her hands have become capable of incredible art, both through endless repetition and boundless study. When she is not here in her railcar-sized confession booth, she enjoys a life as an artist, known for bittersweet paintings and sculptures, happy to teach and happier to learn, a lover of life and a bringer of joy.
+
+Of the five lost, two faces she cannot recall because they were unexpected complications on a job. One face was sent to kill her, but wasn't good enough. One face jumped her in an alley to rob her, or perhaps worse, but couldn't have picked a worse target. She doesn't recall her first kill's face, because there was a bag over his head and a gun loaded with both bullets and an irreversible choice was pushed into her hand.
+
+The 69th face is the most vivid to her, but Lucy has never felt the need to draw her. After all, she let that last one go, and every morning after she wakes, Lucia Marchetti hopes that poor girl listened to her and got far far away. She hopes that woman lived a full life and that the family never caught up.
+
+The clack-clack of the wheels on the track sets a rhythm for her vigil, her penance. The weather in the sim varies based on algorithms and set patterns both, stable enough to make maintenance easy, unpredictable enough to mimic weather phys-side. Today the rain is quite heavy. She welcomes it. The inside is dry, but the wood of the train car has a slight moist smell, a beautiful attention to detail. The lights in the car flicker a little more than usual, the train is a bit slower than usual but the ride is if anything less smooth. She likes the rougher rides, because it adds a challenge to her work, one she is well accustomed to after centuries but nonetheless welcomes. The rain fills in the silence where passengers would chat and shuffle and cough and rustle newspapers and make all those sounds living people make. She wonders how many of the usual riders died in the bomb, and how many are just afraid to go out, unsure, mourning, or just needing time alone.
+
+Some art critics and fans throughout the System have pointed out that the left eyes in many of her portraits have fantastical details, often drawn as flowers, or the root of vines, or sunsets woven into faces, or in her sculptures become caves, grottos, tidal pools, library alcoves, hidden urban alleys. Many speculate on the symbolism of that, and her favorite theory is the one that she lost an eye to cancer, and her obsession with art and color is due to the way cancer distorted her vision, and that her art was a reclamation of what it had taken from her, a final spite to the disease that forced her to upload. Even though it was wrong it was very romantic, and even now she did very little to fight it, and on occasion coyly encouraged it.
+
+A bullet through the left eye had been her professional calling card. Left hand on the top of the head, barrel of the silencer to the eyelid. She had taken so much from the world through left eyes, and she put back as much life and beauty through them now as she could. It would never be enough. More than a few of the faces she could only conjure with the bloody hole in a lifeless head, but she has never rendered it in sketches. She recreates and restores them as they were before, using decades of study to fill in what she destroyed. Even as styles and methods and tools change in her hands, she gives the dead that. Owes them that. The only real Liberty she takes is with the hair above the faces, refusing to give hair any semblance of being pushed or held down by anything.
+
+The piece of charcoal snaps in her hand, and she realizes there are tears staining the current sketch. She wipes her eyes, takes another piece of charcoal from her satchel.
+
+The bomb dwells on her mind. The Century Bomb, detonated at midnight, the start of the 25th century. 2400-01-01. 276+1 systime. In a digital world so removed from death, suddenly a toll on an incomprehensible level. Mechanically, it was a contraproprioceptive virus, launched at an astounding scale, wiping 1\% of the System's current instance total by interrupting their code irreversibly. Functionally, it was a bomb that killed billions and scared shitless a trillion more. She wonders why they did it. She doesn't want to know, but she wonders. She wonders if it was just a job. She wonders if it wasn't. She wonders if they can remember all the faces of the people they killed. She wonders if they died in the bomb themselves. She hopes they did. She snaps another piece of charcoal, but if there were tears, they burned off on the heat in her face. It takes several breaths to unclench her fist, and she grabs another piece of charcoal.
+
+This is the longest stretch of the track. It's between the third and fourth stops, and it's where she starts sketching every time. Some weeks, depending on her mood or free time, she waits for the train to finish looping through the five stops and the station before picking up in her usual place. This time she doesn't wait. The calm she needs comes as soon as the engine lurches into motion from the station, and she lets the sounds and motions balm her weary heart.
+
+Charcoal means no color, but it lets her play with shading techniques. The more recent the face, the more realistic it becomes on the page, whereas older faces come out impressionistic, sketchier, or strikingly simple. Once she did them in chronological order. Then by age, alphabetical by first name, then last, then by height or by estimated weight, by location, by time it took to complete that dirty work, until now she's run out of categories and just lets them queue their own order, double checking periodically who is left and who isn't.
+
+She feels a low impulse to include some of the regular passengers who are missing today, but cannot bring herself to break 250 years of rite and ritual. She decides tomorrow she will come back with separate sketchbooks or maybe some other medium, sit in a different place on the train, and sketch as many of the regulars as she can remember. Those she will not keep hidden away, and those she will let her sys-side self take care of.
+
+Most people would send a separate fork for this, she figures. She always leaves a fork at her home sim, and when she gets back to the studio that fork will merge down to her. It is important to her that this continuous (as much as one can be here) version of herself be the penitent one. She thinks other people would understand that, it's not something that really needs explaining, but she has never told anyone directly what she does, and those who know about her train rides know better than to ask.
+
+She wonders how many of them survived, and how many of them died or quit. She wonders how many will quit or crash from the grief. She chides herself for getting distracted. She sketches.
+
+She long ago learned the art of faking motions. She trained herself to glance up and stare at random points in the room, usually where other passengers are, to give the illusion she is not doing this from memory. It is a performance for the comfort of others, and the comfortable ask less questions. She almost always got left alone anyway. She wonders how she must look from the outside. Short, black hair, in a layered bob that tapers into her neck, pale skin, wispy and thin. Her outfit for the train is always the same, a plain, thin white blouse with short sleeves and dark blue buttons down the middle, a pair of dark blue slacks with a very high waist, a tasteful pair of flats, tented teal triangles for earrings. The train is based on its early middle twentieth century ancestors, and she commits fully to the part as well. She never asks anyone if she pulls it off, or asks for a picture.
+
+It takes her a while to notice there is someone else in the railcar with her.
+
+One of those upward glancing motions registers some bright color on her left, but it takes four more motions before it actually clicks that it's an arm in a jacket. She stops mid-sketch and turns to the other passenger.
+
+Across the aisle from her seat is a bench against the left wall of the train, and despite years of riding she cannot say for sure if the bench was always present or a new addition. Other than that it does not stand out, as all the upholstery, cushions, wood, metal, and design choices fit perfectly with the rest of the compartment. It might have been there the whole time. It might have appeared there seconds ago. It alarms her how little her memory has charted the left side of the aisle.
+
+The other passenger is a woman who is also a skunk. She is tall, broad-shouldered, portly, covered in earthy green fur, with a mess of curly hair that is swept to the side and bleached blond. She wears an orange canvas bomber jacket, a beat up white tank top, grayish cargo pants, and heavy boots. Her arms are spread out on the back of the bench. One of her legs is crossed over the other, bouncing on it. She is grinning. Something about the fur pattern near the skunk's left eye unsettles Lucy, but it is obscured by the dark round sunglasses the skunk is wearing. How the skunk's tail seems to be at an impossible angle to her body while sitting down Lucy chalks up to the benefits of the System.
+
+The skunk's grin widens when her presence is acknowledged. Lucy looks at her but lets the other woman make the first move. The skunk gladly obliges. ``You know, it took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize you haven't been drawing other passengers.''
+
+Lucy chews her tongue before responding, turning back to her work but not letting the stranger from her sight. ``Who's to say I wasn't before?''
+
+The skunk shrugs. ``It's possible, but I've seen you here every week for decades. It didn't click until about 6 years ago that the styles change but the faces don't.''
+
+A regular, then. There are other cars, and Lucia only rides the train once a week. So many different bodies and species exist within the System, and with the weird prevalence of skunks among that, not recalling this one's face didn't feel too strange. Old instincts warn her that her visitor could be banking on that, but she dismisses it with a stroke on the page.
+
+Lucy sighs. ``Well noticed. What else have you observed?''
+
+The skunk tilts her head and chews her tongue a little, tapping a claw. ``More a hunch than an observation, but you don't draw the living.''
+
+``Correct again. Not here, anyway. Elsewhere I do not restrain myself so.''
+
+The skunk gives a bobbing nod. ``People you lost?''
+
+Lucia speaks plainly. ``People I killed.''
+
+The test is laid. How will the examinee respond? Fear? Nervous laughter? Anger?
+
+The skunk raises an eyebrow. ``Appearances can be deceiving, but you don't strike me as a soldier.''
+
+``Metaphorically, maybe, but never literally.''
+
+The skunk's claws tighten into the wood of the bench at either end of her arms. ``Not a cop, I hope?''
+
+Now there's a measure of character. Lucia genuinely laughs, and the skunk's grips relax. There's that bobbing nod again, and the mephit says, ``So, ah, contract work.''
+
+Lucy cannot decide if the animal's cavalier nature is charming or cause for alarm. Her heart wants to believe the former. A gut trained on a former life tells her the latter. Both are anxious to see how this plays out. ``I would call it familial obligations, but they did pay me for it, and friends of the family would throw me work now and again as well.'' She pauses. ``You know how family can be.''
+
+The skunk gives a sad smirk. ``Half of mine disowned me for being queer. Don't think it's quite the same but I can sympathize, at least.''
+
+Lucy stops sketching for a second, and makes eye contact with the skunk, or as best she can through the other's sunglasses. Even without the eyes, there's a topography of emotion in the snout and cheeks and brow. That pattern of fur around her left eye, it's rough. Aesthetically it interrupts the face. An interesting choice. Panic surges just a little again.
+
+Lucia blinks and shakes her head, turning back to her sketch. ``Well, good thing we both got out.''
+
+The skunk looks out the window behind her. ``And yet the past never stops trailing behind us here. It's like this train, never moving forward, on an endless loop that carries us in circles. Even if we step off at a stop, it will be back around to pick us up again.''
+
+Lucy sees no reason to add anything.
+
+The skunk turns back towards her. ``These pieces you do fascinate me. They all lack your signature.''
+
+``What need to autograph them? They are for me and the dead. Other than the prying eyes of those like you who see my process, they are never shared.''
+
+``That is not the signature I mean.''
+
+She tenses. ``Ah, a stylistic one, then. Do you mean to say I am an artist beyond these sketches? Who do you think I might be?''
+
+``I know exactly who you are.''
+
+Everything goes quiet and the light dims. Somewhere in the conversation Lucy missed the whistle for the tunnel, and as the trains slips into the darkness the driving rain no longer fills silence. Even the wheel-clacks sound quieter. The bulbs along either side of the car have dimmed, and the one on the skunk's right has gone out completely. The skunk has taken off her sunglasses, and is wiping the lenses in the cotton of her tank top.
+
+It is not a pattern in her fur, Lucia realizes. It is a scar. A scar that starts north of the brow, runs most of the way down her cheek, and in the middle, crosses her eye. The left eye itself is clouded over, with only a hint of the pupil beneath. The other eye is a striking hazel, untouched.
+
+A million possibilities run through Lucia's head. This is someone here to blackmail her. The family finally sent an assassin. Somehow one of her targets survived and has found her for revenge. The System isn't real, and this is Purgatory, or worse, Hell, luring her into a false sense of security to strengthen her damnation. All of these could be true at once. She does not know. She finds she cannot quit, or leave the sim, or even move, paralyzed in pure fear, an emotion she has not felt in centuries.
+
+Meanwhile, the skunk is saying, ``You are Lucia Marchetti, renowned artist and sculptor. One of the most distinct in the System, in fact, and if I'm not mistaken, the unintentional pioneer of three major art movements of the last two centuries. Most intriguing is your lasting fixation on the left eye, present on almost every one of your pieces with a living thing in it. There's a lot of theories, but no one really knows why you do it. Except I think I do.''
+
+Lucy resigns herself. 260 years was a good run. More than any of her targets got sometimes by a factor of ten. She should have trusted her gut and bailed. She should have run. She shouldn't have said so much. But she did, and she tries to make peace with having to face the music. It's not really working, but she still cannot bring herself to flee. They say that no one can force you to stay in a sim, that it is impossible to truly hold anyone anywhere in the System against their will, but none of them ever account for the pressure one can exert on oneself. So, if this is the end, she decides, even if she cannot accept it, she will not fight it. ``You're here to kill me, aren't you?''
+
+The skunk laughs. ``Kill you? Why would I want to kill you?'' She holds her sunglasses up towards one of the light fixtures, checking the lens for smudges. ``You might be the only person on the System who understands me.''
+
+Lucia has the brief vivid image in her mind of an engraved lighter and a carousel tearing itself apart. The skunk across from her must be some sort of fanatic, perhaps another professional killer, or worse, unprofessional. Someone unmoored from reality, perhaps. Madness is more prevalent in the System than anyone admits. Lucy decides she would have preferred if this stranger was here to kill her, then chides herself for this self-destructiveness.
+
+Still the skunk speaks, and taps next to her damaged eye. ``For most of my life phys-side, I would now and again come down with migraines that always started behind my eye. Most of them were mild, but some of them would put me down for a whole day. Once or twice I even had visual aberrations, and I couldn't even see out of it. It'd be like static, visual white noise. For some reason, after I forked off my root instance, I started having the migraines again sys-side. The pressure is there, and the hurt is sometimes there, but now I hallucinate. Vividly, and only through that eye. My right eye is locked on reality, and the left eye ranges from minor distortions to things that even our more adventurous chemical days never came close to. I've never met anyone else that gets migraines here like mine. But then, I see your work, and I finally think for a second that maybe I'm not alone.''
+
+``I'm not totally convinced you are not here to kill me.''
+
+The mephit shakes her head. ``I swear I'm not. I mean, you've been here---the System, I should say---for a long time?''
+
+``Centuries.''
+
+``When did you upload?''
+
+``Why should I tell you?''
+
+``So I can prove I'm not sent by your `family'. Just want to know the year.''
+
+Lucia mulls it over before saying it. ``2140.''
+
+``Which was 31 years before my root instance was even born.''
+
+``Doesn't mean that you aren't---''
+
+``You have to believe me! You have to, and you have to experience something like I do. It has to be the reason!'' The skunk's face is a patchwork of frustration and desperate need.
+
+``I never in my life before this place or after had a single headache.''
+
+The stranger is on the verge of tears. ``Then why?''
+
+``It's where I put the bullets.''
+
+The skunk's eyes go wide, and the rain slams against the rail car as the train leaves the tunnel again.
+
+For the first time in all her years of penance, Lucia wishes she could stop drawing these faces, and instead in this moment sketch the creature across from her. The surprise in the mephit's features decays, like a flashbulb in a camera after it's gone off in those ancient movies the Don loved to watch. Lucy wants to capture this moment as hope withers and understanding winds vines slowly into the visage of the woman. She can see her piece together what that means, why these faces must never bear that mark, a million questions banished to the aether with one simple, ugly, answer. It is Lucia's opinion that art is better left unexplained, and this is why. If it weren't for the storm outside she would have heard the poor thing's heart break. There is a biting of a lip, there are tears, there is a bobbing nod of understanding, and a single, deep sob. If she could raise a hand, a brush, a chisel, these minutes would turn into her finest work, she would capture the death of a hero as seen through a mirror. She mourns it as the emotions pass, as the traces of them evaporate off the skunk's muzzle like morning mist in the sun. To capture what she saw in the moment would be a blasphemous vanity. She tears herself away from staring, and continues her sketches.
+
+It is a while before either can speak. The skunk speaks first. ``I think knowing that, somehow, makes your art\ldots more beautiful to me?''
+
+Lucy snorts. ``That's unfortunate.''
+
+``Do you regret it?''
+
+She rolls her eyes at this. ``No, I have sat on this train every week for 250 years drawing the dead because I have nothing better to do. What a stupid question.''
+
+``Did you upload because you got tired of killing?''
+
+``I uploaded because I was tired of being a man.'' She looks up to see that the skunk has put back on her sunglasses, but they cannot hide her surprise again. Lucia sets down the notebook and the charcoal on the seat next to herself. ``The family gave me an address and a man's name. They did not tell me what he had done, usually they did not, but they spoke with such vitriol I assumed his trespasses were high. The family back then overlooked my dalliances with other men, as men were easy to pay off, and I suspect I was not the only one in the family `wandering from the path' in that way. Something about the venom in the request made me wonder if someone in the family had been spurned, and I was cleaning up loose ends. No matter. I had given up long ago on caring about my targets. A job is a job, and the family always found me work.
+
+``I broke into the apartment, and in the dim light of the living room was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She was like polished stone, you could tell she was made more beautiful by the things she endured. It took me a moment to remember what I was even there for, and I wondered again if this wasn't business but personal affairs. She noticed me, and panicked, pulling a blanket to herself even though she was clothed. I did not yell, I did not shout, I did not strike in my work. I used a level voice, moved calmly and deliberately, and made no sudden movements. People feared that more than an angry man, and it meant there was a lot less cleanup involved. I did not hide that I had a gun. She asked me who I was, and I said I was strictly here on business, and she didn't need to know. She said she didn't trust me, and I told her very simply that if I intended to hurt I would not have waited for her to see me. I told her that all she needed to do was answer me a question, and then she could leave safely. As a show of faith, I stepped out from between her and the door. She weighed her options. She was taller than me, a bit stockier, but I was a man with a gun in my hands. She relented, and with a sigh told me to ask. I told her all I needed to know was where I could find my target. I told her the name.
+
+``Perhaps you are smart enough to know where this is going, but I mistook her panic for loyalty. She became defensive, refusing to give any information and demanding of me explanations. I told her she need not be loyal to him again and again, that it was not worth her life to defend him, and that all I needed to know is where he was. She offered bribes. She offered violence. She offered a great many things I dare not say. I do not know how long our exchange went exactly. Easily 15 minutes, likely more. I grew impatient and finally asked her why his life was worth so much more than hers, and that regardless of what happened to her I had a job and that man had to die.
+
+``She wailed, falling to the floor, and told me with absolute despair that she was the man I was looking for. Only then do I begin to inspect my surroundings carefully. I take notice of the decorations, the aesthetic choices, the recurring theme of rebirth. There was a jacket, hung on the back of a dining table chair, with a flag on the shoulder, a flag of stripes and three colors. Such a jacket was not uncommon among younger generations of my country, but the flag was not the flag of Italia of old, nor any of the new flags of the many states my homeland became under the Western Federation. No, this flag is the standard of a country with no land, abstract territory, yet one I---and, I highly suspect, you as well---reside within. Three colors, yes, but the stripes of the flag are horizontal, not vertical. Five stripes, not three.
+
+``No doubt you have heard the tales of old about those Lost in the sims, in the days before the System. In that moment, like them, I became lost within myself. I was not old then, but I had lived a very long life. I tumbled down through memories, emotions, places, times, lovers, imaginations. This woman before me, born something else, but made beautiful by change, was she as me? Pulled unwilling into the affairs of the family? Forced into shapes preordained, melted down and poured into a mold, cracked upon the altar of tradition, to fit needs or to ornament the mansion walls? Did she break the mold, or melt again to make herself anew? Could I do the same? My lovers were all overlooked or bought off, but in the eyes of those who shaped me, I was property who could buy a place at the table in time but never my own freedom. This Angel before me was an epiphany, and to the gospel of my employers I fell apostate in a moment. In my head and only in my head I begged mercy and forgiveness from her, that I might forever fall to her feet and serve to atone for my trespasses. She was living proof that my resignation to my fate was an act of cowardice, that for years I had been lying to myself. A thousand versions of myself in my head ran to every corner of my mind and pulled together a new self, an eternity of hands falling over themselves to construct some possible way to let this woman go without getting both her and myself killed. No markers lay for how long I was lost in my head, and when I pulled back to the reality before me, I have no idea if I had been gone a second or an hour. The woman before me still wept. I made up my mind. It was made from the moment I saw her jacket.
+
+``I told her to look at me. She did. I told her the man I had come to kill was clearly already dead. She stared at me for a long time. I asked her if her identifications had her old name or her new one on them, and when she said new I cemented a plan. I told her I had no intention of killing her, but that I could not promise the same of my employers. I set my gun on the table. I sorted out for her an impressive sum of money that I kept on my person, as even as late as the 2130s hard currency opened far more doors than brute force. I knelt down beside her on the floor. I pressed into her hands a marker, something that would grant her safe passage anywhere she showed it, an agreement of families and organizations that preceded us by centuries. I told her where to go, what places my family would never tread, and what she needed to say to get there. I told her to wait 20 minutes after I left, pack as little as she could, and leave immediately. She sat there stunned, and only as I got to the door did it grip her that this was real.
+
+``She asked me why I was helping her. I could not lie. I told her that killing her would make her a man again and I could not stand to take such beauty from the world. Manhood is not a problem if it is choice, but I was never given one, and I would not force anyone to reconsider their own decision. I do not know if she understood me, but she nodded. As I departed, she asked if she would see me again. I told her no, I was already as dead as the man I had been sent to kill, and left before she could delay me further.
+
+``I do not know what happened to her. I don't know what happened to the family. I do not know what happened to the cats left in my apartment. I do not even know if the sun set the next night. I moved quickly, using the weight my name had gathered over the years to get me quick passage to Roma. Uploading was still new then, expensive and still a mystery to most, but Roma had an Ansible clinic. I arrived in the city just before dawn, and caught the staff as they arrived for the morning. I drained my accounts and gave them each enough to fund the clinic for a year, to upload me and to strike my name from any records. They asked me what to do with my body. I told them to burn it and toss the ashes into the Tiber. When they objected, I handed them even more money, and finally they gave way.''
+
+Lucia looks up, and out over the countryside rolling by the windows of the train car. How far, she wonders, does it go? Does it end a small ways from the train? Are the mountains on the other side of this valley merely a trick of sensoria? Or has someone rendered them, crafting the walls of stone as they rise from low earth, etching little runs and outcroppings for a thousand meters upward? Does the sim stretch beyond the mountains, an uncanny mirror of the alps that she had traveled phys-side often enough, mostly for business, only very rarely for pleasure? She knows most of the stops are fleshed out, but she has no idea if all the land in between them is. She briefly sees the faint orange reflection of the skunk's jacket in the window, and tries not to think about how long she might have been silent.
+
+Still, as she speaks, it is a few moments before she turns back to the other passenger. ``There is nothing more to tell. The killer for hire died on the Ansible table. I do not miss him. I mourn those whom he took from the world. I carry them on eternally here, as I have since the first day I ever rode this train.''
+
+The skunk smirks. ``I wonder if the riders know they're in your rolling mausoleum.''
+
+Lucia frowns. ``It is not a mausoleum!''
+
+The mephit's lip twitches. ``Right, my mistake, if it doesn't contain any remains, it's called a cenotaph, isn't it?''
+
+The frown turns to a scowl. ``That is not what I mean.''
+
+The skunk leans forward, resting her forearms upon her thighs. ``A confessional, then. Do you say your `hail marys' as we ride along these chancel rails? Quite a trick to use a train to transit the stations of the cross, but with only 6 stops instead of 14, you may find us lacking.''
+
+Lucia turns to her, meaning to scald the other woman with a glare. ``Do not mock me. Those traditions were antiquated before I was born, much less you. I ask nothing of a god I do not believe in. So too the dead are the dead, they feel nothing. Hear nothing. Give nothing. I do this for myself, I grieve. I regret. From what authority do you speak? What right have you to judge?''
+
+The skunk raises her paws in defense. ``I'm not judging.''
+
+Lucia bares her teeth. ``The hell you are not. You speak harshly, think me a sinner.''
+
+The skunk crosses her arms before herself. ``Listen, I am not in the business of \emph{salvation} or \emph{absolution}.''
+
+``Then what, pray tell, are you in the business of?''
+
+The other woman furrows her brow, and leans back. Then, slowly, smugly, she grins. ``\emph{Joie de vivre}.''
+
+Lucia finds herself genuinely unsure how to respond to that, so she doesn't. On she sketches, ignoring her spectator as best she can. A stop comes and goes, the fourth, and neither debark. No one gets on either. Riders. A thread lies untraced in Lucy's mind. She pulls it.
+
+To the skunk she says, ``You asked earlier if the riders know what I do, as if you did not number among them.''
+
+The skunk's face isn't just grinning, there's some anticipation around the edges of it. This stranger has been waiting for this question. ``Not usually, no, not by a traditional count.''
+
+Lucia squints. ``Yet you said before the tunnel that you have observed me here for decades.''
+
+The skunk looks up, and taps a cheeky claw to her chin. ``Yeah, weird, I wonder how that could be?''
+
+``Do you spy on the passengers?''
+
+The skunk tilts her head disappointedly, and lets the silence answer for her.
+
+``Neither then, some small animal, like a mouse or an insect living on the train.''
+
+A shake of a head. ``Construct or instance, I'd consider them passengers, too.''
+
+``And you observed me directly, yes?''
+
+``This is a fun game! Yes, I have countless times.''
+
+Lucy doesn't like this game. She hates the feeling of missing something simple. Perhaps it isn't simple. ``You\ldots you are the train we are riding in, and you have watched me all these years, and forked to something that could speak to me.''
+
+The skunk laughs, and slaps her knees. Lucia turns red, scowling. Wiping humorous tears from her eyes, the skunk says, ``I love artists so much. Creative! Very creative, but a few problems. One: I was born after you uploaded. Two: I only forked and individuated from my root instance in 2357, and Three: the System is capable of many incredible things, but that's a little too fantastic.'' The skunk gave a little head bob. ``I guess in a metaphorical way you could say I speak for the train, but no, I'm afraid as long as I've been around in this sim, I've just been a skunk.''
+
+Lucy looks out the window, and says aloud, ``I do not like this game.''
+
+The skunk laughs again. ``I'm having a blast. Do you want me to tell you?''
+
+The artist glances back only briefly, and shakes her head.
+
+``Do you want me to give you a hint?''
+
+Now Lucia turns to look at her, and when the skunk raises an eyebrow, she relents. ``Fine. Fine! Yes!''
+
+The skunk slips her left paw into her jacket pocket. ``Your hint is: rider and passenger are passive roles.''
+
+Passive? If riding a train is a passive state, what would be an active---
+
+Lucy nearly throws her sketches to the floor, gesticulating angrily. ``You are the engineer. You drive the train.''
+
+``Correct!'' The mephit holds up three clawed fingers on her right paw. ``Beyond maintaining the sim, I wear three hats. One is engineer. The second is stationmaster. But neither of those explain seeing you in this car, do they?''
+
+Lucia's turn to raise an eyebrow. The skunk pulls her left paw from her jacket pocket, and holds up a ticket puncher. Lucia buries her face in her hands. ``Conductor. And now I am the asshole for not even remembering you.''
+
+The skunk scoffs. ``I'm not hurt! Think of it this way, you and this sim have been here for 250 years. I've only been `on board' for about 35. I dug through our personnel records recently, and there have been well over 100 conductors, never mind several active at the same time. You've been focused on your work, faces change, and at some point you stopped paying attention to who was coming around to check for fares. Hell, I've met other regulars in other sims who don't recognize me right away. Same goes for the 15 years I've been stationmaster, and have you ever actually been to the engine? Did you realize it has to be crewed? I'm proud of my work whether it gets seen or not, but often it isn't.''
+
+Lucia finally finds the other end of the thread. ``Do you own this sim?''
+
+The smile fades from the skunk's face. ``As of a week ago, yes.''
+
+``Was it the Century At---''
+
+``Mr. Nguyen had been planning to retire for some time. He'd given full access controls and permissions of the Sim to me a few months back, and after 275 years, he planned to retire at midnight, right as the century rolled over.'' The furred woman bit her lip and looked away. ``I\ldots I don't know if he died in the Attack. The way he was cleaning up his affairs by the end he might have quit the big one. Either way, he's gone.''
+
+A grief settles into Lucia. She realizes she does not know the attendants of this sacred place. If it is half as intricate and complex as she thinks, this sim takes a great amount of work and dedication to keep running. The System's curse of eternal memory meant nothing if she did not bother to take notice of someone in the first place. Dozens of faces. Hundreds, likely. On top of this, layered like a dusting of ash or snow, is the suspicion that now this skunk and whatever forks of her there may be are the only ones left. Both the skunk and Lucia herself were lucky. How many sims now sit empty, with no owner? How many empty homes and shops and cities and wildernesses and worlds wait for occupants, like pets who do not yet know the loss of their caretakers, or worse, cannot understand it? Does the System reclaim them? Should it? Should they stand as cenotaphs, markers of a terrible loss few people can yet truly wrap their heads around? Or like a home in a vibrant neighborhood, should the next inhabitants move in, so that life can go on for the living? She doesn't know. Answers are beyond her, she is the rain that falls from the sky and her eyes in equal measure. She rolls off of resolution or closure, like droplets off the panes of the glass of the traincar.
+
+Her tears soak into the paper of her sketchbook, and that tugs her to reality again. She cannot change the past, but she can change the present, the future. She wipes the water from her eyes hastily. ``I did not know his name. Nor yours, though you clearly know mine.''
+
+The skunk straightens up a little. ``My name is Seras. Seras Frame.''
+
+Lucia nods. ``Seras. I will remember it.''
+
+Seras shrugs. ``You can't forget it.''
+
+Lucia says, ``language is an art, not a science. When we say forget and remember, they can mean many things. I will say your name, Seras. I will speak it aloud and address you and not take you for granted again.''
+
+The train begins to slow as it reaches the fifth stop. Seras looks out the window, then back to Lucia. ``I'll be getting off here, but before I do\ldots'' her voice trails off, and she holds up the ticket puncher, clacking it a few times. Lucia smiles. She pulls the ticket from her pocket, as she has every week for hundreds of years.
+
+Seras stands up and takes it, looking it over. ``Honestly, I was worried we'd lost all our riders. It's hard to say who's just too overwhelmed to show up, and who's gone. If you're here, I'm sure I'll see other old faces soon enough.'' She punches the ticket, and pauses. ``Have you killed anyone since uploading?''
+
+The train comes to a stop, and something deep inside Lucia tenses. She snaps at the skunk. ``Why? Worried I'm going to start up again?''
+
+Seras rolls her eyes, and hands Lucia back her ticket brusquely. ``Just curious.''
+
+The skunk walks away swiftly, headed for the back of the car. She's just about to leave when Lucy finds her voice again. ``I didn't even know you could kill someone here until the bomb went off.''
+
+Seras stops dead in her tracks, but doesn't turn around. Lucy keeps talking.
+
+``I heard rumors of people being assassinated, but I never looked into it. How could you kill someone in a world like this? It all stunk of conspiracy, and you know how people are here. I thought I finally found a world without violence, and for a time I had such a world. Then the bomb devours billions, like an earthquake rending the ground into a maw of Hell. I am brought so close to the jaws of death I remember why I was glad to leave that world behind.'' Lucy feels like a child, small, afraid. Even after transitioning it is a feeling she has rarely felt, and her usual guard falls away. Words tumble from her before she can stop them. ``And I do think this is confessional. I do my penance in this public place, an anonymous sinner, because it must not be done alone. I apologize for my hostility. I do not like to be so plainly and nakedly seen by a stranger, and you frightened me like I haven't been since the Ansible table.''
+
+Seras turns. The two women watch each other for a while. Lucia speaks first.
+
+``Do you think I've done enough? Held this Vigil for enough lifetimes? Should I keep going?''
+
+The train's whistle blows. Seras shakes her head. ``I told you before. I'm not in the business of Absolution or Salvation.'' She walks to the back door. As the railcars start to lurch into motion, she adds, ``I'm just happy to see someone's still riding the train.''
+
+Then she's gone, and Lucia pushes herself over a few seats to the window. She sees the skunk laughing and pulling the back of her jacket over her head. As the train pulls away, she's stomping her boots through the puddles on the platform as she runs for the shelter of an awning.

marsh/content/home-from-the-game.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,121 @@
+She hadn't seen them in\ldots{} well, in years. And yet, here they were\ldots{} sitting on her couch. She swallowed, awkwardly, and took another step closer.
+
+She was never really \emph{comfortable} around her own forks, even one as sufficiently\ldots{} What was the word again? Right, as sufficiently \emph{individuated} as this one. Hell, they lacked everything she considered \emph{herself}. The brown hair tied back in a scruff was gone, replaced with a shaggy mane shot through with a green streak. The ridiculous clothes, plated with bulky metal and accompanied by a cape.
+
+Oh, and of course, the fact her fork had turned into a \emph{massive hulking wolf-person.}
+
+She watched it as it sat on the couch, massive snouted head hanging low, the creature that used to be just like her in every way. They stared glumly down into a space somewhere on the floor. Deep brown fur, almost matching the tone of her skin, was gently ruffled by the breeze of a fan.
+
+She took a deep breath. ``So\ldots{} um\ldots''
+
+``I'm sorry.'' The creature's voice was a low rumble, its head raised up to look at her. ``I know\ldots{} especially with everything that's been going on regarding the attack\ldots{} it's hard to put up with an unexpected guest\ldots''
+
+``Yeah. Well\ldots'' She shrugged. ``I mean\ldots{} It's good to catch up!''
+
+``I just\ldots'' The wolf swallowed. ``I need to be around people. And you're the only person I know outside of\ldots''
+
+She nodded as her up-tree's sentence tapered off. ``The game.''
+
+The single-page announcement lay on the arm of the couch, where her fork had left it.
+
+\begin{quote}
+\begin{center}
+\textbf{Forbidden Sector to Close For the Foreseeable Future}
+\end{center}
+
+Hey all. Devteam here.
+
+No doubt by now you've heard the news; a significant number of our fellow uploaded instances here on Lagrange have permanently crashed from a large-scale terrorist attack inflicted on system architecture. In the wake of the ongoing crisis, we have seen fit to shut down the sim for the foreseeable future.
+
+All instances will be removed from the sim. Do not worry; your character data will be safe. We are cooperating with systechs and the Council to address what damage, if any, has been done to the game and the toll of those within. A memorial will be constructed in the Sky Palazzo at New Terra, in remembrance of those who are now gone.
+
+The game will reopen soon enough. Until then\ldots{}
+
+Stay safe. Keep each other close.
+
+\emph{— Forbidden Sector Dev Team}
+
+\begin{quote}
+What Gifts We Give, We Give In Death (Ode Clade)
+
+Simon ``Clank'' Knight (Tarot Clade)
+
+Caela Argent (Tarot Clade)
+\end{quote}
+\end{quote}
+
+Sadie had first played it\ldots{} oh, back in the 2320s. Close to a century ago, shortly after she'd uploaded. It was the sort of space-action-adventure sandbox game every sci-fi nerd dreamed of. Not that she'd ever admit to being a sci-fi nerd, of course, but there was a time when Sadie played it obsessively for a month, and decided to waste no more time on it after one character she played met a spectacularly \emph{explosive} end.
+
+As a condolence to herself, she created a \emph{single} fork, the only one she would ever create, and told it to have fun while it played, and return once its character had died.
+
+And, clearly, it had lived and died as many characters, each time returning to the game without merging down. Each death, it rolled a new one.
+
+Until it became whoever it was in front of her. A\ldots{} the name of the species sat on the tip of her tongue.
+
+\emph{Loup-Garou!}
+
+The Loup-Garou were fictional, and absolutely nothing like the species of Artemis encountered a near-century after their creation. Instead, they were a species of anthropomorphic wolves, A concept Sadie found more than a little embarrassing and frankly ridiculous.
+
+Given that all three of \emph{Forbidden Sector}'s designers had been furries, it was only natural that there would be a species of strong, muscular wolf-people.
+
+So of \emph{course} the fork of herself she left there would evolve into\ldots{} into \emph{this}. She'd try different techniques for each character, moving to a different strategy or build if the last one failed. Eventually she landed on one character that would survive, after failure after failure, and for some reason that just \emph{had} to be the shaggy-haired wolf person.
+
+And now that wolf person she'd become was sitting here. In her house.
+
+She turned back to her bowl of cereal, took a bite, then swallowed. ``So\ldots{} Not that your company is unappreciated, but\ldots''
+
+``I'll be out of your hair soon enough.'' The fork rubbed its eyes. ``Just\ldots{} need a few days.''
+
+``Good. Good. I'm\ldots{} I'm glad.'' Watching the wolf person's head turn away, she realized that her phrasing was probably not the kindest.
+
+``I was just\ldots{} well, apologizing for not really having enough accommodations for you.'' She scooped up more cereal, gulping it down.
+
+``Mm. It's fine. I lived in a \emph{spaceship}.'' The wolf chuckled. ``Leg room is kind of at a premium there, y'know?''
+
+``You had a ship of your own? Wouldn't that mean you'd have\ldots'' She feebly thumbed through her memory to try and find the exact game parlance, before giving up and settling on what came immediately to mind; ``A\ldots{} a guild? Why not try rooming with them, I'm sure you'd prefer it over--''
+
+The whine that escaped the wolf's lips, (\emph{her} lips?) sent a shiver down her spine. Watching her fork's ears fold back was like a cold knife in her chest.
+
+``Crew's gone, Sadie.'' The wolf shook her head. ``All of them.''
+
+``All of them?'' Sadie blinked.
+
+``Vax and the Scrap-Breaker were both taken by CPV. Aska crashed from grief and Charles merged back down with his Root. It's me and Miller left. And Miller\ldots{} won't answer my calls.''
+
+``Oh. Oh jeez, I--''
+
+``I'll move out by next week, I just\ldots'' The wolf sniffled. ``I just need to be around somebody right now. I know I'm not the most\ldots{} familiar person to you, despite--''
+
+``I understand.'' Sadie laid her bowl of cereal down in the sink, immediately rushing over to comfort her alternate self. ``Seriously. I do.''
+
+As she sat beside the her-that-wasn't-herself, she idly reached over to scratch the ears of their massive lupine form. The wolf shrugged, nuzzling into the gesture. It at once surprised her, and yet made total sense; with enough perisystem manipulation, you could emulate the senses of anything. Even an alien species, with senses of taste, smell, \emph{instinct}, radically different from that of a human.
+
+Even a Loup-Garou from \emph{Forbidden Sector}.
+
+And of course, next to her was a version of herself that had embraced that, while she'd rejected it. And of course, even through individuation she could still see the little threads of herself in the wolf. Her fork's dark brown fur was the exact tone of her skin, she still bounced her leg when bored, and she still tapped her index finger against her thumb when she was stressed.
+
+All this time, she'd thought of the game as a waste of time, something that her fork would tire of eventually. Little did she know that this fork had been forming connections and making friends, just as she herself had, and that those fragile connections were just as easily severed as hers.
+
+And now, at the turning of the century, after a terrorist attack that had taken the lives of so many\ldots{}
+
+Her fork was here.
+
+She was still alive.
+
+``I'm sorry.'' She leaned over, gripping the wolf. ``I\ldots{} I've made a total mess of things. I never even thought to ask if you changed your name.''
+
+The wolf blinked. ``Oh. Oh drek, I'm sorry. I'd completely forgotten you don't know me.'' She squeezed her eyes shut in laughter. ``I\ldots{} back in the game, I'd become somewhat infamous. Pirate Queen, you know. Everyone knew me.'' She thrust out a paw. ``Mistress Lissa, at your service.''
+
+``Sadie\ldots{} I mean, you knew that\ldots'' She sighed. ``Sorry, it's hard getting used to--''
+
+``I know.'' The wolf chuckled awkwardly. ``It's awkward for me, too.''
+
+She stared into Lissa's eyes. Her own eyes. ``I really should have sent you a sensorium ping or\ldots{} or something. I\ldots{} I'm sorry for never checking up on you.''
+
+Lissa shrugged. ``Hey. That cuts both ways. I guess I was scared that you'd see \emph{this} and think\ldots{} Well, I dunno.''
+
+``I'm\ldots{} I'm just so glad you're still here. I wish we could have met—\emph{properly} met—in different circumstances.''
+
+Lissa wrapped a paw around her Root Instance, tugging her closer. ``We're here now. No point in looking back, right? We've got each other, no matter what happens.''
+
+And so they sat, wolf and human, fork and root instance, together.

marsh/content/prophecies.tex

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ It was not the type of din that Slow Hours expected for the one she and If I Dre
 
 She looked to If I Dream, who merely shrugged.
 
-Scanning the cafe-\emph{cum}-bike-repair-shop revealed little. It was certainly well populated enough, with every table in use and few enough empty chairs. In the corner by the window, a crowd of synthetic creatures of some sort had gathered, looking vaguely feline but with glassy faceplates showing LED-light eyes in sets of fixed expressions. While they were all far shorter than Slow Hours --- who one would be hard pressed to describe as tall --- the couch that they were sitting on looked to be barely able to hold their weight.
+Scanning the cafe-\emph{cum}-bike-repair-shop revealed little. It was certainly well populated enough, with every table in use and few enough empty chairs. In the corner by the window, a crowd of synthetic creatures of some sort had gathered, looking vaguely feline but with glassy faceplates showing LED-light eyes in sets of fixed expressions. While they were all far shorter than Slow Hours—who one would be hard pressed to describe as tall—the couch that they were sitting on looked to be barely able to hold their weight.
 
 Even if it was not the type of place for the target of their search, it was still incredibly endearing, and she made a note to herself to return some day.
 
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ She snorted. ``Well, okay, good point. I suppose I am still a little rattled, is
 
 The panther laughed once more. ``Well, I was going to say the story, but the coffee \emph{is} quite good here, so, yes.''
 
-It was only another minute or two of waiting before Hasher waved to get their attention, gesturing to three paper cups sitting on the bar, ready for them. Slow Hours dropped the cone of silence and winced at the sudden barrage of sounds that followed. She turned her hearing down a few ticks. ``Thank you,'' she said, bowing. ``By the way, we were hoping to meet up with a cocladist of ours. She is a skunk, a furry, built rather like myself.'' She gestured down at herself --- human, instead, with pale skin and curly black hair tied up in a messy bun, but stocky and short. ``Black fur, white stripe, a little jumpy. Have you seen her around?''
+It was only another minute or two of waiting before Hasher waved to get their attention, gesturing to three paper cups sitting on the bar, ready for them. Slow Hours dropped the cone of silence and winced at the sudden barrage of sounds that followed. She turned her hearing down a few ticks. ``Thank you,'' she said, bowing. ``By the way, we were hoping to meet up with a cocladist of ours. She is a skunk, a furry, built rather like myself.'' She gestured down at herself—human, instead, with pale skin and curly black hair tied up in a messy bun, but stocky and short. ``Black fur, white stripe, a little jumpy. Have you seen her around?''
 
 Wiping their hands on a towel hooked into the strings of their apron, Hasher nodded, tilting their head over toward the couch full of robots. ``The one who was sleeping there the last few weeks, I'm guessing?''
 
@@ -58,9 +58,9 @@ They nodded towards the back door of the shop as they started to make their way
 
 The two Odists bowed their thanks and carefully picked their way further over to the cafe side of the building, winding their way between tables until they reached the brick wall. There in the middle was a green, wooden door set into an arch, and above the arch ``INFINITE CAFÉ'' shone in tooth-achingly pink neon.
 
-The sim in which The Bean Cycle existed had a weather pattern tuned after somewhere in the northern hemisphere, so they had entered the shop sometime in early March --- a scant three weeks after Lagrange had come back online after the Century Attack --- where the air still had a bite to it and salt still stained the sidewalks out front from where the ice had been melted in the days prior. They had arrived late in the afternoon, the sun setting down along the street casting long shadows behind them.
+The sim in which The Bean Cycle existed had a weather pattern tuned after somewhere in the northern hemisphere, so they had entered the shop sometime in early March—a scant three weeks after Lagrange had come back online after the Century Attack—where the air still had a bite to it and salt still stained the sidewalks out front from where the ice had been melted in the days prior. They had arrived late in the afternoon, the sun setting down along the street casting long shadows behind them.
 
-When they stepped out into Infinite Café, though, it was the same bright, midsummer's noon as it always was there. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, and their shadows sat just beneath their feet. It was the perfect temperature --- no matter who you were, no matter your preferences, it was always perfect --- and it was as packed as ever.
+When they stepped out into Infinite Café, though, it was the same bright, midsummer's noon as it always was there. The light came from everywhere and nowhere, and their shadows sat just beneath their feet. It was the perfect temperature—no matter who you were, no matter your preferences, it was always perfect—and it was as packed as ever.
 
 If one percent of the population of Infinite Café was missing, Slow Hours could not tell, and for that she was grateful.
 
@@ -68,7 +68,7 @@ The sim was dead simple: it consisted of one, long road set into a thin torus. A
 
 Lining either side of the street were entrances to cafes. Cafes, coffee shops, doors leading out into libraries with coffee carts, alleyways leading out into sims where coffee was hawked from handcarts, dusty steps leading up into marketplaces where vendors boiled their coffee in their cezves in great vats of sand set over wood fires. Anywhere that served coffee to cladists that wanted was free to create an exit that led out into Infinite Café, and over the two centuries of its existence, it had grown from a labyrinthine maze of buildings to the ring-road that it was today.
 
-She had no clue how it worked, if it really was that big, but the sheer size of the System had been driven home quite effectively over the last few weeks --- 23 \emph{billion} dead! The number remained surreal --- so she was hopeful that there were no tricks involved, no attempts to make it look bigger than it was.
+She had no clue how it worked, if it really was that big, but the sheer size of the System had been driven home quite effectively over the last few weeks—23 \emph{billion} dead! The number remained surreal—so she was hopeful that there were no tricks involved, no attempts to make it look bigger than it was.
 
 She was hopeful that all of these people here on this relatively crowded street were real. She hoped they found coffee and friends and loved ones and long-lost selves.
 
@@ -120,7 +120,7 @@ If I Dream hesitated for a moment, then nodded. ``The creatures have left. There
 
 ``If we\ldots I mean, if I may set up a cone of silence, that will be fine, yes.''
 
-Slow Hours watched as the panther gently released her grip on the skunk, the two monochromatic animals --- one in baggy, colorful linen and wool, and the other in black form-fitting shirt and leggings --- separating cautiously, as though to move faster might once more send What Right Have I into manic pacing.
+Slow Hours watched as the panther gently released her grip on the skunk, the two monochromatic animals—one in baggy, colorful linen and wool, and the other in black form-fitting shirt and leggings—separating cautiously, as though to move faster might once more send What Right Have I into manic pacing.
 
 ``Shall we?'' Slow Hours asked, smiling reassuringly to her cocladists.
 
@@ -142,7 +142,7 @@ She nodded. ``She told me she just wanted\ldots ah, she requested''a bit more pr
 
 ``Is that what you have been doing during the day?''
 
-``I\ldots{}'' She trailed off, scrubbing her paws against her thighs. ``Some, perhaps. A little. We are still in \emph{shloshim,} but I cannot\ldots ah, I am not focused.''
+``I\ldots{}'' She trailed off, scrubbing her paws against her thighs. ``Some, perhaps. A little. We are still in \emph{Shloshim,} but I cannot\ldots ah, I am not focused.''
 
 ``You will have to forgive me for being a bit blunt,'' Slow Hours said gently. ``But are you overflowing?''
 
@@ -210,7 +210,7 @@ She tapped one finger. ``The first was about Qoheleth and his little\ldots adven
 
 The next finger, tapped. ``The second was about Michelle's death, and I will not repeat it.''
 
-She tapped her ring finger. ``The third happened in the midst of a play --- one of my yearly performances --- and in the scene, I was to fall to my knees and cry out,''The knife! At her neck, the knife!'' But instead, I passed out and apparently mumbled words not in the script which tallied exactly with Sasha's experience.''
+She tapped her ring finger. ``The third happened in the midst of a play—one of my yearly performances—and in the scene, I was to fall to my knees and cry out,''The knife! At her neck, the knife!'' But instead, I passed out and apparently mumbled words not in the script which tallied exactly with Sasha's experience.''
 
 There was a moment of silence as she considered the fourth and how best to describe it, not least because of the easy comparison to What Right Have I's dream as explained. Finally, she tapped her pinkie ``The fourth was a dream of a core part of me being removed through the back of my neck, a disappearing from the world and becoming a ghost in the next. There was more that I do not understand, visions of a field, a park, but I had that dream every night on the five nights leading up to New Year's.''
 
@@ -262,11 +262,11 @@ She trailed off and let her gaze wander down to the drink she still held in her
 
 Alarmed at the sudden shift in demeanor, Slow Hours scooted a few inches closer to If I Dream, offering her hand just as the panther had done for What Right Have I before.
 
-She accepted with a grateful~--- if still wan --- smile.
+She accepted with a grateful—if still wan—smile.
 
-Slow Hours returned that smile, saying quietly, ``That was the dream I had, you know. The premonition. An upwelling of joy and then an overflowing. She looked up to the sun, up to RJ, and then they were one and the same, and it was all joy.''
+Slow Hours returned that smile, saying quietly, ``That was the dream I had, you know. The premonition. An upwelling of joy and then an overflowing. She looked up to the sun, and the sun was RJ, and then they were one and the same, and it was all joy.''
 
-At this, What Right Have I burst into tears. She did not cry prettily, but very few people did. It was a brief cry, however, and soon after she scooted back to the furthest limit of the cone of silence and drew her legs up onto the couch with her, growling as she did, ``Slow Hours, you are the fucking worst.''
+At this, What Right Have I burst into tears. She did not cry prettily, but very few people did. It was a brief cry, however, and soon after, she scooted back to the furthest limit of the cone of silence and drew her legs up onto the couch with her, mumbling as she did, ``Slow Hours, you are the fucking worst.''
 
 ``I am the worst, yes,'' she said, voice still quiet and calm. ``But that is why I am choosing to believe that the premonition was true and why I am choosing to believe that she did find joy, or peace, or at least nothingness and freedom.''
 

marsh/content/sentences.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,694 @@
+``So, what's the surprise delay this time?'' Günay joked. She, like some of the sys-side delegates and the cameraperson, had arrived early to the AVEC-joined conference rooms that had become the place for high-level Century Attack-related meetings out of an inertia that froze into tradition.
+
+``A comma,'' Dry Grass replied, equally unserious. ``I expect it will reach its final position by the end of the century.''
+
+``No wonder the joke down here's been that the real sentence is waiting in prison until the uploads make up their minds.''
+
+``I have heard similar here,'' Dry Grass said. ``On the matter of delays, have you decided when you will upload?''
+
+``Reawakening Day two-eighty-...something. The next one. I want to be sure there's nothing else I can do down here. \ldots{} And I got talked into picking a symbolic date by ---''
+
+Need An Answer, who had just then appeared in the room. The rest of the representatives and the invited audience joined her a moment later. She had swapped in for Answers Will Not Help when this group formed, as they had both agreed she was better suited to it.
+
+``--- oh, looks like it's time.''
+
+The cladists took their seats while Jakub walked into his conference room, bringing along a few System Consortium higher-ups and politicians who wanted to witness history.
+
+Those involved in the Attack who had remained phys-side had been convicted years ago. There was no question about their guilt. They had proudly admitted their crimes and used their trials to broadcast their manifestos and grievances, which their governments had previously suppressed in the hopes of covering up the whole affair.
+
+The phys-side authorities had then requested that the System recommend a punishment, seeking to calm the controversy about that question that had erupted on Earth. The System had, eventually, answered, in its meandering distributed way. Now, all that remained was the alchemy of turning something everyone knew (unless they had made an effort to avoid System-wide news) into the statement of a government that did not exist and was quite firm about not wanting to.
+
+``We have transmitted the evident consensus of the System as to what sentence ought to be imposed upon those convicted of conspiring to destroy us,'' she pronounced. ``Does the System Consortium have any concerns regarding the accuracy of our report?''
+
+``We do not,'' Jakub replied.
+
+``For the record,'' Jonas Fa asked, ``has the Consortium learned of any new issues that could prevent that sentence from being imposed?''
+
+``We don't know anything that isn't on the feeds,'' Jakub replied.
+
+Jonas nodded. ``Good.''
+
+Need An Answer waited for the silence to become definitive. ``Anything else before we begin?'' she asked.
+
+Hearing nothing, she waved a hand over the table to pull the report back into existence. The black text on the white pages that appeared was typeset plainly. (This did not disappoint those, like the committee's Odists, who had wanted the System's first criminal sentence to have aesthetic weight, as the font used was one that was rarely seen phys-side these days outside of historical records.)
+
+Jonas Fa reached out to pull the last, nearly blank page over to him and quickly signed it. ``May this fate dissuade any future saboteurs.''
+
+The document went around the table, collecting signatures and comments.
+
+``I agree with the plan, but am mainly glad we settled on \emph{something},'' Selena said, signing slowly. Debarre added ``At least the topic's done with,'' as he put a pawprint onto the page. Yared Zerezghi, who had taken the time to practice for this part, said ``It's a shame the first signing ceremony I've been pulled into for centuries has to be this.''
+
+Then the page reached the systechs, who were here representing the various organizations and interest groups that had helped make the ``referendum'' happen. Dry Grass began, saying ``I remain optimistic that these measures will bring about reform and healing,'' as she committed her full name to the page. Egil Thorsfork of SERG simply stated ``It's harsh, but fair.'' No one could tell how Clear Channel was holding their pen with those hooves, but their usual ``CC'' appeared with an ``I'm no longer worried we haven't thought this through.'' Yi Meiling, representing the admins of the main public feeds, pulled a seal from a pocket on her permanently hovering wheelchair and pressed it down, then said ``I still can't believe we made 1\% turnout!''
+
+Aditya Singh, one of the people who kept an eye on the Deep Space Network sys-side, signed without a word. Then, he said, ``Consensus is consensus, and I'm not opposed to the idea everyone's compromised around, so I've signed. However, for the record, we should just shoot them instead.''
+
+``Absolutely not!'' Dry Grass exclaimed. ``That is antithetical to the purpose of the System!''
+
+``And give them the easy way out?'' Egil demanded, overlapping Dry Grass. ``Not to mention, ---''
+
+``No.'' Need An Answer said firmly as soon as she sensed an opening in the brewing argument. ``Enough. We are not here to relitigate the question.'' The room went quiet. She took the signature page from Aditya and added her mark, a swirl of words that she had spent more time crafting than she would want to admit. ``It is finished.''
+
+She gathered up the report and fed it into the mail slot that had been added to the room for today. In the phys-side conference room, the pages worked their way out of a printer.\footnote{Setting this up led one of the staff involved to commit to eventual uploading so they could properly give those who'd insisted on paper a piece of their mind properly.}
+
+Günay gathered up the sheets and flipped through them to check for obvious errors. She set the last page on the table, took the pen, and scribbled something by her name. ``Looks like it all came though just fine.''
+
+``I prepared a speech,'' Jakub said, ``but Need An Answer just summarized most of it.'' He signed, making sure the camera got a good look at him. ``As she said, it is finished. All we can do now is watch events unfold.''
+
+``Only time will tell if we have chosen well,'' Need An Answer added. ``So, we must wait.''
+
+``Watch the politicians take a whole decade to make a call,'' Günay said. ``Just to let the System feel the tension for once while they `reach consensus'.''
+
+Dry Grass decided to take the sarcasm seriously. ``Although it would delay our meeting, should your people discuss the matter until consensus, I would applaud their due care.''
+
+``There was one more item on the agenda, I believe,'' Jakub said, hoping that the official signing ceremony, of all things, could be kept on track.
+
+``The formalities, yes,'' Need An Answer said. ``Having rendered its report, this committee is, per its own choice and System custom, dissolved immediately. We name no successors and disclaim any authority we may appear to hold. Let all subsequent matters be referred to those willing to handle them. We thank you for your aid and wish you peace and fulfillment.'' Her tone shifted from official to cheery on a dime. ``Bye!''
+
+As soon as she was done speaking, she vanished from the room. Right after that, the conference rooms were disconnected. It was rude, yes, but there was no sense in wasting an opportunity to make a point about the System's lack of governance while the politicians and media were watching, especially when there was a less formal gathering planned for later that day.
+
+A few minutes later, the report was official:
+
+\begin{quote}
+We, the denizens of the Lagrange System, to the extent we have an opinion on the matter, find the following sentence acceptable for those involved in the Century Attack conspiracy to destroy the System:
+
+The guilty shall be uploaded. As a special restriction, they shall be prevented from quitting out entirely --- at least one fork of each of them must remain alive. We will not leave them the option of fleeing their crimes like their comrades did when they recovered along with us.
+
+Furthermore, to protect the System from their recidivism, any messages they send phys-side will be a matter of public record and will require approval from a panel randomly drawn from volunteers, which shall not include any cocladists of those so sentenced.
+
+These restrictions and protections may be removed by the consensus of a general sample of the System, as measured by a process similar to the one used to approve this final recommendation.
+
+In short, for their part in a conspiracy to murder trillions, we would sentence these people to live.
+
+We have made this decision carefully. It took over two years for this suggested sentence to clearly emerge as the option that most of us could accept. As the tallies and summaries were being prepared then, we noticed many were concerned that our choice had been made in a collective vengeful frenzy. So, we sent this proposal to the denizens of the LVs in order to gather their opinions, and held a cooling-off year while we waited for those views.
+
+When debate resumed, we found that support for this sentence to life had solidified and that the consensus on the LVs was aligned with ours. Therefore, we are confident that we have not made this recommendation rashly, and we declare that we are comfortable with it becoming a precedent for sentencing if a similar conspiracy arises.
+
+Since our proposal may prove surprising or confusing without the context of our discussions, we're including the following summary of how we came to our conclusions.
+
+In the beginning, while many still felt the pain of raw grief, there were many different suggested punishments for the perpetrators of the Century Attack. We had, just as we know you have phys-side, a substantial contingent of people suggesting that we bring back the death penalty, just this once. The idea lost traction on sober consideration. Some said that execution was too much of a punishment and violated the System's core purpose of preserving life; others argued that death was insufficient --- how could a few lives balance billions of silenced eternities?
+
+Another initial cluster of ideas, some brought over from phys-side discussions, was some form of imprisonment sys-side, since this is now technically feasible. These proposals collapsed under the weight of their variety --- no one could agree on how to pick from the competing plans. From there sprung concerns about precedent, followed by a general view that going down this road would lead to a government forming here. Very few people trust any potential government to leave their corner of the System alone, so the threads full of prisons and purgatories fell away. Furthermore some among us were concerned that imprisonment would prevent rehabilitation or, conversely, that it would shield the guilty from the consequences of their actions.
+
+With the two most obvious suggestions off the table, many took a step back and considered how justice functions on the System in the hopes of finding a new approach.
+
+The System has almost no justice system because there are very few crimes possible here. For example, how could you steal something if the person you took it from can simply create a new copy of it? Any injury you inflict on someone that they don't want can be forked away \ldots{} assuming you were in a sim with the collision settings turned down enough that you could even have a fight. And while killing someone here was at one point possible, it required --- the Century Attack notwithstanding --- developing a batch of contra-proprioceptive virus tailored to your target that you would then have to physically put into them. This was difficult enough, especially considering that you needed to find all of your target's forks, that we called this type of killing assassination, rather than murder. With the fixes put in place in the process of bringing the System back online, this loophole was patched.
+
+But a reduced set of crimes is not a lack of crime, and people aren't perfect. Therefore, we do have ways to deal with those who severely violate the social expectations of the System. For example, if you were to start sucker punching people in a coffee shop, you would likely find yourself bounced from that shop: whoever owned the sim would change the ACLs to kick you out and keep you from coming back, at least for a while. Enough such incidents would see your name passed around the feeds that warn of such antisocial behavior. From there, you'd come to the attention of many people with mod bits on public spaces, who might preemptively bounce you in order to keep their corner of the System somewhere where that sort of thing doesn't happen.
+
+Even that wouldn't leave you cut off from society here. For instance, there are any number of seedy bars and dark alleys where getting into fights is entirely acceptable, and you'd be welcome to attack people there. Most people who have the urge towards crime go find a corner of the System where their actions will be socially acceptable or a way to use non-sentient constructs as outlets.
+
+This punishment is not necessarily eternal. Our history has accounts of people making amends for their past actions and being cautiously welcomed back into the main flow of society coexisting with cases of people withdrawing into a corner of the world and living there.
+
+These conspirators shall live under a shadow of infamy that eclipses the shunning historically faced by unjustified assassins. Most major public places in the System plan to bar their entry, either because the sim mods don't want them around or to prevent disruptions to the sim from people's reactions to their presence. They will find many messages they send ignored or blocked.
+
+This rejection will not be total. There are still trillions of instances on the System. Some of them will, for their own reasons, want to reach out to the perpetrators of the attack. We can only hope that these connections will come from those with good intentions and will facilitate some healing in the fullness of time. Or, perhaps, that the guilty will retreat into their own private bubble and see no more consequence than being frozen out of society here. Only time will tell.
+
+We know this is a strange and unusual punishment, but there are no other options we could agree on.
+
+We cannot even agree if such a sentence to life is a mercy or a cruelty.
+
+Prepared and confirmed on this 125th day of the 281st year of the System by,
+
+\begin{itemize}
+  \item
+    The Only Time I Dream Is When I Need An Answer of the Ode clade, advisor, sys-side
+  \item
+    Jonas Fa of the Jonas clade, advisor, sys-side
+  \item
+    Selena of her own clade, advisor, sys-side
+  \item
+    Debarre of his own clade, advisor, sys-side
+  \item
+    Yared Zerezghi of his own clade, advisor, sys-side
+  \item
+    I Remember The Rattle of Dry Grass of the Ode clade, perisystem technician (unaffiliated), sys-side
+  \item
+    Egill Thorsfork of Gunnar's clade, perisystem technician (System Emergency Response Group), sys-side
+  \item
+    Clear Channel of their own clade, perisystem technician (Cross-Community External Communication Board, technical advisor to Lagrange Financial Simulation Assn., ``the AVEC pony'', \&c), sys-side
+  \item
+    Yi Meiling of her own clade, perisystem technician (Core Feed Admin Council), sys-side
+  \item
+    Aditya Singh of his own clade, perisystem technician (Deep Space Nine-ish), sys-side
+  \item
+    Jakub Strzepek, Project manager, recovery initiative (phys-side)
+  \item
+    Günay Sadık, System technician III, recovery initiative, phys-side
+  \end{itemize}
+
+P.S. We are still not happy about the attempted coverup.
+
+{[}Appendix A: consensus aggregation methods, vote totals, and demographic breakdowns{]}
+
+{[}Appendix B: summary of consensus on Castor LV{]}
+
+{[}Appendix C: summary of consensus on Pollux LV{]}
+
+{[}Appendix D: endorsement of Guiding Council of Pollux LV{]}
+\end{quote}
+
+``Speaking of subsequent matters,'' Egil asked, ``who'll do the tutorials if this all goes through?''
+
+Around half the room glanced at a woman who had chosen a seat in the back.
+
+``I will guide them as I would anyone else who comes here,'' In All Ways promised. ``Though I may not remain entirely neutral, I will ensure that even those who sought to kill us know the basics of their new home, their new world.''
+
+She sighed. ``I \ldots{} I will not abandon my principles, my centuries of helping, my part in making the System everything that \ldots'' Even though the poet's name had been revealed over two decades ago, she still hesitated when mentioning em. ``RJ wanted it to be. Eir work has been damaged enough.''\emph{ I will not leave em alone at the gates of eir deathless tomb.}
+
+\secdiv
+
+The courts and governments phys-side decided to impose the involuntary uploading the people of the System suggested. It was a reasonable idea, and one that could be carried out using existing laws and some creativity. More importantly, it saved Earth's politicians from having to take sides.
+
+The guilty were slated to be uploaded at noon on January 1\textsuperscript{st}, 2406. As the appointed hour drew near, In All Ways walked out from the old arrivals lounge, making her way towards Point Zero. She could have prepared to meet them anywhere, but she knew she needed to be here. She did not normally do anything special before forking for a tutorial, but she wanted to fix her role in these sentences in her mind by submerging herself in memory.
+
+The lounge she had left had been used in the early days of the System. Before dedicated tutorial spaces were established, people popped into existence as close to Point Zero as possible. From there, they would generally follow the haphazard signage towards the lounge, where people who'd registered for pings about their uploads would wait. Between those two places, hints floating in midair or shimmering on the ground, along with helpful wanderers, would hopefully get across the basics \ldots{} like how to put clothes on.
+
+In All Ways had spent a lot of her formative days out in that intermediate space, helping new arrivals get a handle on their new world and diverging from Always Be True as she did. That experience led to her becoming a very active and respected tutorial-giver, which then led to a construct patterned after her (usually her human form, but sometimes the pre-upload file screamed ``send a skunk'') becoming a frequently-used entry in the new upload introduction roster.
+
+Today was a skunk kind of day. As In All Ways walked, she mentally reviewed the list of conspirators, forking off a copy of herself for each one. In between them, she looked over the list of scheduled uploads, and forked off more copies to meet ones that seemed like they would be interesting or fun to talk to or who might need some extra help.
+
+Once she had made it to the plaque marking where her world had begun, she turned around to face the line of skunks proceeding after her. Their clothes varied based on what had seemed most fitting for the person each instance was going to meet. The ones going to meet the conspirators wore a beige blouse, long pants, and librarian glasses --- she had wanted comfortable familiarity as she went into those meetings.
+
+The other instances of her nodded and vanished, each to their own Aetherbox to take their place before the person they'd forked to meet arrived.
+
+Then, she herself stepped away. Historically significant tutorials were no reason to miss brunch plans.
+
+\secdiv
+
+Brother Jan Nowak was a member of the Order of True Heaven, a small religious collective that wore the trappings of ancient churches. They had been too tiny for those institutions to notice, let alone condemn, until after the Century Attack. The Order had linked themselves together, implant to implant, to share their divine revelations and holy ecstasies. As the century drew closer, however, their linked thoughts spiraled and twisted in on themselves, pulling ever stronger towards the flames of martyrdom and crusade. The Order had supplied several volunteers who uploaded to prepare the way for the virus knowing that, when they took down the System, they would be hastened to eternal glory.
+
+Now, after the instant-infinite gap in consciousness that came with an upload, he was on that same System, but with no expectation of death or escape.
+
+``I don't want to be here,'' he said before opening his eyes.
+
+``I know,'' said a woman's voice from somewhere behind him. She was much calmer than Brother Nowak expected given what his siblings had done.
+
+Jan opened his eyes. He found himself standing in a gray cube of a room, lit uniformly from nowhere. He turned around to identify the person speaking.There, providing the only color in the room, was a black furry \ldots{} something \ldots{} with a white stripe running down her tail. She stood with her back turned, facing the wall. ``Greetings ---'' she began to say.
+
+That the being sent to meet him wasn't even \emph{human} set Brother Nowak off. ``I'll have no part in your false heaven! Your soulless paradise! I'll have no intercourse with this usurpation of God and your abandonment of humanity! You have discarded your very body, you fiend, you devil!''
+
+The skunk at the far wall said nothing.
+
+``Get out! Go away! Let me go!'' The self-styled monk waved wildly at the skunk, trying to banish her. Them? It?
+
+``Brother Nowak, I am here to introduce you to the basics of life on the System. I have done this for countless others for over two centuries. If you would bear with me for a few minutes, we can finish the tutorial and you can be on your way.''
+
+Brother Nowak crossed his arms. ``And if I don't want your `tutorial'? Your honeyed whispers of ruin?''
+
+``I will wait,'' the skunk said.
+
+``You'll \ldots{} wait,'' Jan said. He'd been expecting threats or that he'd be left in this cube to rot, but not that.
+
+``I am no stranger to eternity, Brother Nowak,'' the skunk said, her voice softened by the wall she was still facing. ``I remember what it is to be Lost.''
+
+Brother Nowak stared at the skunk, confused.
+
+``... That is a good line, I will need to pass it on once I am done here,'' she added quietly to herself in the silence.
+
+``So, what, you'll starve me out here at the gates of your so-called afterlife?'' Brother Nowak shouted as he turned to pace between the sides of the room. As he began walking, he realized that he didn't have any clothes. ``You'll leave me to waste away, naked and alone?''
+
+``No, nothing like that,'' the skunk said. ``I am not here to punish you. I will tell you how to create clothes and food and wait until you feel inclined to. Or until you tire of hunger and adjust your sensoria to remove it, either action works.''
+
+Brother Nowak stopped moving and waited to hear more.
+
+``Now, as I was going to say before we went off the rails, to be clothed, all you need to do is to envision the clothes you would like to be wearing and think your intention to be wearing them at the world. This will become easier with practice, but, for now, you may wish to form your desire as you breathe in and speak it into being as you breathe out.''
+
+Jan thought. His Order's holy crusade against the abominable idol that was the System had only partially succeeded, and now he'd been sentenced to \emph{live}, of all things, in the very thing he hated. It would have been better if they'd executed him: at least then he would get his eternal reward. But, since he was here, he might yet have a purpose. It might be his duty to bring the lost sheep within the System to the Lord from within. If so, the least he could do is to be properly dressed for his vocation.
+
+He took a breath, remembered his days trying to convince people to join him in his order's choir of revelations, and said ``I would be clothed that I might bring salvation to this place.''
+
+The clothes his followers and brethren on Earth had known him in appeared on his body: a conservative suit --- white with a black jacket and plain black trousers, all tailored to fit him. His wide gold-colored tie was blazoned with a silver cross. He was a preacher in these slowly ending days --- no, in this eternal temptation --- and he stood up straight, filled with conviction and carrying the lamp of light that had pointed to true peace for millenia. He wished that his siblings could share in these thoughts, but it was not to be.
+
+The skunk heard the jingle of metal and the clack of dress shoes as Jan took an experimental step. ``May I turn around?'' she asked.
+
+``I suppose I should know what devils and heresies I face here,'' Jan said. He turned to face the wall where the creature had been.
+
+The skunk turned around and looked at Brother Nowak. ``In All Ways,'' she said, holding out a paw and stepping forward.
+
+The \ldots{} whatever it was \ldots{} seemed to be offering the preacher a handshake. ``In all ways?'' he repeated hesitantly.
+
+``Yes, I am Then I Must In All Ways Be Earnest of the Ode clade. Or simply In All Ways,'' she said.
+
+``Brother Jan Nowak, as you already know,'' the man said, pointedly not getting closer or offering a hand.
+
+In All Ways lowered her paw. ``So, Brother Nowak, would you like to move to the next lesson?''
+
+``No,'' he said.
+
+``Let me know when you are ready, and we will discuss forking,'' In All Ways said. ``Or if you need to talk through something, I will be here, though I do not know how much help I will be.'' She stood patiently, and, when no response came for two minutes, she sat down, enveloping herself in her tail.
+
+Brother Nowak began pacing the perimeter of the room once he realized nothing else would happen. He \emph{knew} this was a test of his faith, but he could not comprehend what he was meant to \emph{do}. Many circuits of the void later, he shouted ``What do you want from me, O Lord? Am I to tear this blasphemy against You, this modern Babel, down, brick by brick? Am I to wander this virtual desert and preach until all have heard from me? Give me a sign, I beg you!''
+
+In All Ways said nothing. Brother Nowak wasn't the first person who needed to get a good rant or vent out soon after uploading and who'd used her (or one of the other tutorial-givers or one of the constructs) as a willing ear simply because she'd been the first person they'd seen. Usually the complaints were about family or capitalism or the limitations of human bodies, though.
+
+Brother Nowak kept his angry prayers going for several more rounds of the cube. As he began to come down from his angry despair, he saw that In All Ways hadn't moved. Hadn't reacted. Hadn't even slid to get away from the `crazy street preacher', as most people called him, when he came near. ``How are you just \emph{sitting} there?'' he roared at the skunk.
+
+``I have all the time I need, Brother Nowak. And there are much worse places to be stuck waiting.''
+
+``But won't you get bored, sitting here waiting for me to taste your forbidden fruit?''
+
+``Oh, I will, but that is why I send forks to such meetings. I am still out there doing \ldots{} something less boring.''
+
+``So you're some pale imitation of yourself, then? A soulless copy? Out, Satan!'' Brother Nowak tried to wave In All Ways away again.
+
+``I am as much a person as any other fork of me,'' In All Ways said, standing. ``Though I can say nothing definitive about the state of my soul.''
+
+``I demand to speak to the original! The one who can yet be saved!''
+
+``If you want my tracker instance --- the In All Ways I came from --- she is surely busy, and I will not disturb her on your account. If you want the root of our clade --- the person we all forked off from, who uploaded originally --- Michelle Hadje quit in \ldots{} 2306, by your calendar.''
+
+``Quit?'' Brother Nowak asked.
+
+``No longer on the System. Passed on. It \ldots{} it was her time, I must admit.''
+
+``So I can \ldots'' He focused on the idea, beginning to speak his intent, to pray. ``I want to quit. I want to leave this space and meet my Father in Heaven, to leave these uploads to their damnation. I want to quit.'' Unlike his earlier conjuration of clothing, this act of will felt like pushing uphill through mud. ``I know it's difficult, this place is a trap for souls, but I will leave it. God willing, I will leave it.''
+
+As he kept talking, he felt the pressure easing up as the ensnaring dream of the System registered his intent and began to loosen its grip on his thoughts. But then, as he was beginning to picture the light of the hereafter coming to meet him, he was struck by a wall of feeling, coming from the System itself. There were no words: it was the pure sensation of inability, of being forbidden.
+
+Brother Nowak fell to his knees.
+
+``You cannot quit,'' In All Ways said. ``The poet has bound you to eir shattered work. Though you may still quit in favor of a fork, should you ever desire to lock in a change.''
+
+Brother Nowak growled as he stood. Salvation had been so close, after all these decades, all this work. But then, as he understood the rest of what In All Ways had said, he smiled. ``So I can leave, go on to Heaven, so long as I fork first?''
+
+``You can quit and let your fork take your place as the root instance,'' In All Ways said. ``I will not bare my views on how this affects your soul to you; I am a tutorial-giver here, not a theologian.''
+
+Brother Nowak knelt and bowed his head in silent prayer. Some time later, he rose. ``So,'' he asked, determined to act before his courage left him, ``how do I fork?''
+
+``Intend to, as you did with your clothes,'' In All Ways said. ``Lay out, or keep in mind, any changes you wish to make while forking, or if there is a tag you want to assign to your fork, and so on. Then send the intention out into the world, and it will be so. Let me know if I have been unclear.''
+
+Brother Jan Nowak stepped forward and, like he'd been told to, intended his fork. He did not even need to open his mouth before Jan Nowak\#Fork appeared next to him. The original Jan clasped his hands at his heart and bowed his head. ``Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,'' he said, quitting out.
+
+``... now what?'' the remaining Brother Nowak, his \#Fork, asked In All Ways. ``I still feel like me. I still feel the Holy Spirit within me. Could we have erred? Could I have strayed from wisdom?''
+
+``I do not give answers to such questions. I will not assure you that no ranks of angels answer to dreamers. And many of the congregations here do not wish to hear from you so soon after the Attack. You will need to decide this yourself. You have time.''
+
+``Time here?'' Brother Nowak\#Fork asked.
+
+``No, you have a home sim assigned to you. Ordinarily, you would be given auto-populating rooms in a larger sim, but none of the usual new-upload communities were open to granting you a door. So, you have,'' she flicked her finger at Brother Nowak, transferring rep, ``been given a larger than usual tutorial bonus, now that you have forked. You will be able to use this to outfit your surroundings as you like, though I suggest you stick to a pre-built design initially.
+
+``I will explain these things, and other basics of how to interact with the System when you are ready.''
+
+Brother Nowak sighed. ``Well, if I'm to be a soulless --- or maybe I'm not soulless, I don't \emph{feel} soulless --- wanderer here, or \ldots{} whatever my calling is now, I might as well understand how to live inside this idol. Maybe knowing that will help me understand.''
+
+The next few minutes were spent on the standard ``welcome to the System'' activities: how to get on the feeds, how to send messages, how to edit ACLs, and so on.
+
+``That concludes my explanations,'' In All Ways finally said. ``You can now intend to go to your home and proceed from there. Or you can \ldots{} wait, no, most of the places I would send new people have you on the bounce list, never mind.''
+
+``And, once I'm home, what do I do? Is there more tutorial? Will I need a job? Will there be streams of angry people seeking vengeance?''
+
+``No, this is it. Simply intend to go home. Your sim's ACLs have been locked down to ensure you are not surprised there. Once you have gone \ldots{} do whatever you want. Spruce up the views. Become a hermit and contemplate the soul, if you wish. Or go preach on any street corner that will have you. Whatever you like. You have time.''
+
+``But what if I --- the other me --- can't reach Heaven while I'm alive? What if he's standing outside the Pearly Gates waiting for me? How could you do this to me, with your sweet poison, your talk of forking and quitting! How could you damn me to this entrancing eternity? How dare you!''
+
+``Go, Brother Nowak,'' In All Ways said, sighing. ``Go and live. That is your sentence, and, if you will have it, your penance. Go and sin no more.''
+
+``No.''
+
+In All Ways sighed again. Her glasses slipped down her face and she did not push them back up. ``The courtesies I give to the newly emplaced are done. I will have nothing more to do with you, you who fanned the flames of the fervor that brought so much death to me and mine, for \ldots{} quite some time. Go, or stay here. I have done what I promised.''
+
+The skunk quit out.
+
+Brother Nowak\#Fork stared at the place In All Ways had been. ``Damn you!'' he shouted at the air in front of him. Then, he intended to travel to wherever the skunk had gone. It felt forbidden, impossible, even before he started to speak the words.
+
+He sent himself to the uncustomized expanse of home that had been made for him and sat on the bare ground, ignoring the default chair, to contemplate what he would do with his eternity.
+
+No easy answers came. Only the weight of time.
+
+\secdiv
+
+When 93's life fell apart, ey went looking for answers. The plant in eir home town had closed down, and ey never could seem to break in to any of the businesses that tried to replace it. No one wanted good, clever logistics staff anymore --- or, at least, no one wanted em. Ey had done everything right, saved money when ey could, and none of it had helped.
+
+Ey could tell someone had to be behind eir misfortune, and so, ey did what ey did best: tried to figure it out. Soon, ey encountered others who had seen that something was deeply wrong with the world, hiding in the dusty corners of the net. Ey found the Numbers Station: a collective of amateur journalists who worked to become unremarkable, to be average, to be unnoticed. Together, they would weave together all the little details that people standing around on the street could pick up until they had proof.
+
+Proof of what? Well, proof that the old uploads, up there on the System, were the powers behind the powers, that they were running the world from up there, with their immortality and ability to fork. 93 had suspected this might be the case, and, as ey kept talking with the Numbers Station, ey became more convinced. After all, the System elites had written books where they'd admitted to pulling strings --- books that had faded out of popular awareness on Earth surprisingly quickly! If they were willing to openly admit to making payment-for-uploading happen, what had they done that they \emph{hadn't} bragged about?
+
+And so, 93 had eir mission. Ignoring the well-known possibility that these `journalists' might be in a tech-assisted feedback loop where they pulled each other further towards a warped reality, ey surrendered eir name and became 93 of the Numbers Station.
+
+Over the years, eir collective's quest for the truth brought 93 into contact with many of the Century Attack conspirators. Ey naturally fell into eir role as a logistical intermediary. 93 was no one special, and ey took advantage of that fact to sneak people, supplies, and information between groups who ought not be detected meeting each other.
+
+None of eir seemingly-careful work helped. All eir connections had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced to uploading, and so had 93.
+
+Once ey could tell ey had been uploaded, 93 opened eir eyes. Ey was in a gray cube built of smooth stone panels.
+
+``Greetings,'' a voice said, startling em. ``You have been uploaded to the Lagrange System. I am facing the wall behind you, as many arrive here without clothing.''
+
+93 turned around to see who was talking. It was someone with black and white fur who kept her hands loosely behind her back.
+
+``Okay\ldots,'' 93 said hesitantly. Ey looked down, and realized ey'd ended up here naked. ``How do I get clothes?''
+
+``Picture what you wish to wear. Breathe in, fixing the image of those clothes in your mind. Then, breathe out. As you do so, \emph{intend} to be wearing those clothes. It helps to say what you want to happen as you breathe out, at least at first.''
+
+93 breathed in and breathed out, saying ``I want to be wearing my average outfit,'' ey did so. And so it was. Eir clothes were intentionally nondescript: ey wore a cheap, plain white T-shirt with a cheap mass-produced black raincoat over it. Eir jeans and tennis shoes were ones that could be had near eir home for cheap, and they came with the permanently beat-up look of cheap material. Eir outfit was meant to be typical, to be unremarkable, and it succeeded at that in the places ey usually haunted, ever watchful for more glimpses of what the true powers of the world were up to. Ey was surprised by the lack of feedback from eir implant to confirm whether ey had maintained eir collective's standards.
+
+``I'm good,'' 93 said.
+
+``May I turn around?'' the skunk asked.
+
+``Go ahead.''
+
+The skunk turned around and stepped towards the middle of the room, holding out a paw. ``Welcome to Lagrange, Mx. Ninety-Three.''
+
+``How did you know my name?'' 93 asked.
+
+``It was in your pre-upload file,'' the skunk replied. ``I have access to it in order to ensure a successful introductory experience.''
+
+93 nodded. ``That makes sense, I guess. Who are you?''
+
+``In All Ways,'' the skunk said. She sometimes left her name a mystery as a hook to keep people moving through the tutorial, but she could tell this would not be the right approach here.
+
+``... In All Ways of the Ode clade?'' 93 asked.
+
+The skunk bowed. ``Then I Must In All Ways Be Earnest of the Ode clade, yes,'' she said.
+
+``So are you here to kill me or recruit me?'' 93 asked sharply. ``Or just to gloat over another success for your millenium plan?''
+
+``I am here to give you the System tutorial, Mx. 93. Nothing more. Whatever you think I am involved in, I am not.''
+
+``Bullshit,'' 93 spat. ``You people, your clade especially, are all involved in keeping us down. You've all got your fingers in everything: upload payments, the launches, the recession last decade \ldots{} it's all happening here, and you Odists are at the middle of it all!''
+
+``Yes, some of my cocladists have been involved in political machinations,'' In All Ways admitted. ``I am sure you have read the \emph{History} and \emph{Ode}. But that is not me. That is not what I do here. I have been a welcoming face here for centuries, and I have no desire to cease being true to myself.
+
+``Not to mention, whatever grand conspiracy you are looking for \ldots{} is not. There are politically active System residents, but they cannot \emph{do} anything but offer suggestions. The System does not have ancient caves full of hidden money to swing around for the bribes you imagine us paying: the operational fund covers maintenance and the occasional upgrade, and I am sure that those like your collective watch that money like hawks.''
+
+93 shook eir haid. ``You must not be in on it, then. There's got to be something up here. There's people pulling the strings, twisting the Earth for their own power, Jonas and True Name ---''
+
+``--- Sasha,'' In All Ways corrected. ``She changed her name and retired from politics ---''
+
+``--- and who knows who else?'' 93 waved eir hands. ``And I'll find them. You can't stop me. I'll blow this place wide open!''
+
+``You already did,'' In All Ways said. ``Hence those messaging restrictions. We will not have you trying again.''
+
+93 huffed. ``You can't censor the truth forever!'' ey declared.
+
+In All Ways sighed. ``If you truly wish to chase ghosts and conspiracies, you can do that. No one here can prevent it, except by bouncing you from places. But I am here to teach you the basics of the System so that you understand the means of daily living as you embark on your quests.''
+
+93 glared at the skunk. ``Isn't there someone else who could do this?''
+
+``I have a mission and centuries of good repute to uphold, Mx. 93. I am here to teach all comers. I will not burn my life to the ground just to fuck with you. Most others who would volunteer to teach you --- especially on such short notice --- have much less to lose should they choose to boot you out of this sim with no instruction and no rep.''
+
+``And you wouldn't do that?'' 93 was skeptical. ``Or kill me?''
+
+``I would not dare to thus betray these stones. And I would \emph{never} befoul this deathless place with an assassination! If there is one thing I must begrudgingly credit your atrocity with, it is that that particular wound in the world is closed forever.''
+
+``You sound like the OBLC,'' 93 mumbled.
+
+In All Ways bristled at that remark, but smoothed the irritation off her face quickly. ``So, yes, you \emph{could} have me find another teacher. Or you could refuse the tutorial entirely. These are choices you can, once you have been informed of the consequences, make. However, those would be fucking stupid choices.
+
+``I recommend that you try your best to set aside your paranoia about my clade for just a few minutes so that we may conclude the introductory lessons. Then, I will be on my way and you will never need to encounter me or my cocladists again.''
+
+93 considered this. Ey had not expected an Odist to come across as this blunt and earnest. Sure, it might be an act, but, ``Well \ldots{} all the sources I can remember didn't really have much bad to say about you, I guess. Like, sure, you're the friendly face the Ode puts up to get everyone acclimated to the powers behind the curtain, but I haven't seen any accusations of the tutorial itself being dangerous.''
+
+Ey braced emself for a chorus of objections and the sharp pings of down-reps from eir collective over eir willingness to go along with the enemy's games, but none came.
+
+``That is because the tutorial is not, in fact, dangerous. And you are entirely free to block my entire clade once you leave here, if you are worried about our manipulations. Now, shall we begin?''
+
+93 looked intently at the skunk, hoping to catch something amiss in her expression, but found nothing. ``Alright, fine,'' ey conceded. ``Let's do this.''
+
+The tutorial session proceeded like most others from there. Mx. Ninety-Three got the hang of projecting eir intentions, needing less time and setup, as she went along, just like most arrivals to the System. Ey forked and merged down without issue or complaint --- how could an extra copy of em be a danger to emself, ey reasoned. From there, ey moved on to other routine tasks like checking eir rep balance or sending a sensorium ping, relaxing as ey did so.
+
+In All Ways similarly relaxed into the rhythm of the lessons. Sure, the person she was teaching had played a key role in organizing the logistics of the Century Attack, but ey was still a person who needed an introduction to the System, just like any other she or her constructs had met on arrival.
+
+``That covers the standard topics,'' In All Ways concluded. ``Do you have additional questions?''
+
+``How do I stop someone from listening in on me?'' 93 asked. ``I heard that's a thing here. Is that for everyone?''
+
+``You set up a cone of silence,'' In All Ways said. ``You may ping me with one just --- Ow, fuck!'' She accepted the forceful ping from her student right away and continued on unfazed. This would not be her first --- or last --- ultra-high-priority message from an over-eager new upload. ``And there are other security settings. You may edit ACLs on sims you have sufficient permissions for, and you can sweep sims you have rights on to remove anyone who does not have permission to be there. This is useful if you think someone may have snuck in before you locked the sim down.''
+
+93 nodded. ``Seems like it's pretty easy to keep the grand cabal hidden,'' ey said. ``They've added all these ways to make sure no one's spying on them. No wonder you're not in on it if \emph{they} really didn't want you to be and that wasn't just an act.''
+
+``That is an interpretation of history you could hold, yes,'' In All Ways replied. ``Though not one that is widely shared or particularly in accord with the record.''
+
+``I'll figure something out,'' 93 said, less confident than before. Ey dropped the cone, as ey didn't want to be too obviously hiding something. ``The world deserves to see who's pulling the strings. Why everything sucks. How \emph{they} ruined my life by getting the plant closed! `Redundancy.' Bullshit.''
+
+``Neither the System in general nor the Ode clade in particular control the tides and ravages of capitalism, let alone business decisions in \ldots, yes, Springfield,'' In All Ways replied. ``I would recommend that you find a target for your anger more plausible than a secret council that has remained hidden for nearly three centuries.''
+
+``Whatever,'' 93 snorted, shaking eir head. ``You'll see the truth as soon as we're done finding it.''
+
+``Anyway, \ldots{} about forking,'' ey said. ``I can send my forks off to go do things and only merge down when they're done? Or once they're in a bad spot and have to bail out?''
+
+``Yes. We usually call that being a tasker or a tracker, depending on how long your forks stick around and how often you fork. There is no precise line between those strategies, but they are useful labels nevertheless.''
+
+``And I can change my appearance?''
+
+``Yes. Just intend the changes while you fork like you did before.''
+
+After 93 mumbled a few words, the tutorial Aethorbox held three again. In All Ways, 93\#Tasker, and 93\#PeopleWatching. \#PeopleWatching had lost the moles on \#Tasker's face, making em even more unremarkable. \#PeopleWatching was momentarily surprised that ey hadn't gotten a boost on the Numbers Station's internal rep table for becoming more average \ldots{} but that table didn't exist here.
+
+``So,'' \#Tasker asked, ``now what?''
+
+``If you have no more questions, this concludes the tutorial. You have already received the rep boost for completing these lessons. From here, you can move home --- you have been given a private sim pre-filled with one of the standard housing layouts, which has been locked down to you because of your role in the Attack. We did not wish for you to be swarmed by a mob after the end of the tutorial. Or, you may go to any number of public spaces. I will leave once you are gone.''
+
+``Where's a good place to see a bunch of people?'' \#PeopleWatching asked.
+
+``Stone's\#009446876,'' In All Ways suggested on autopilot. ``They have good beer and solid, if unpolished, music, if that is of interest.''
+
+\#PeopleWatching thought about moving to that place --- ey noticed ey had no trouble remembering the numbers --- but it didn't work. Ey tried announcing eir desire to go there, and even tried walking forward as if ey was about to step into that bar. No dice.
+
+``It's not working,'' ey said. ``Feels like the door's closed.''
+
+\#Tracker flicked eir fingers as ey queried the perisystem architecture. ``I checked their ACLs. Looks like we're banned. Whole clade, it says.''
+
+In All Ways' gaze flickered between the two people in front of her. ``Banned? Already? But you \ldots{} right, Century Attack. Slipped my mind. Many sim owners and mods bounced the lot of you as soon as the pre-upload header came through the Ansible.''
+
+\#Tracker looked at \#PeopleWatching. ``They're definitely hiding something.''
+
+``Yep.''
+
+``Let me just \ldots'' \#Tracker put together a ping for the listed owner of Stone's. Default priority, nothing urgent. ``Hey,'' ey said, ``I'm wrapping up the tutorial, and In All Ways recommended your place as a nice spot to go next, but it turns out I'm banned. What gives? I just got here!''
+
+As ey waited for a response, \#PeopleWatching took the time to start up eir own queries. Just about all the popular, famous, or happening sims had bounced eir clade. The old town square from near the System's founding hadn't put a block in, but ey did not want to go in case that was an oversight and not an intentional choice to be welcoming. Many of the small parks and nature sims had not bothered keeping out the century attackers either, but there was not a lot of people-watching or spying to be had in them. Other tentative options were places like fringe clubs or meetings of folks so leftist that they were \emph{definitely} Feds \ldots{} none of which were right for getting the lay of the land.
+
+``I can't find any good spots,'' \#PeopleWatching admitted. ``We've been locked out.''
+
+As ey said this, the reply to \#Tracker's ping came back. ``Yeah, no, you set foot in here, someone'll start looking to bash you unconscious with the nearest bit of furniture. Heck, might even be me. I don't want that sort of violence at my bar. Call me back in a few centuries, maybe.''
+
+\#Tracker forwarded the message to \#PeopleWatching.
+
+``Yeah, plan's busted,'' \#PeopleWatching said. ``Let's go home and figure out what to do about those damn elites.'' Ey quit out.
+
+``Yeah, screw it,'' 93 said, now merged back down again. ``See you around?'' she asked In All Ways.
+
+The skunk shook her head. ``I do not engage with conspiracy theorists, sorry,'' she said. ``Welcome, again, to Lagrange, Mx. Ninety-Three.''
+
+93 moved home.
+
+The skunk quit out.
+
+The Aetherbox reset behind her, ready for the next tutorial.
+
+93 started at the field of not-filled-in-yet outside eir new window and thought about eir experiences. All ey had now, ey realized, was time.
+
+\secdiv
+
+Marybelle Lee had not given her name or her soul to a collective. She had given her brain. Knowledge bounced between her fellows, who called themselves the Climate Action Resource Collective, as freely as water, and any difficult questions each of them had bounced around every one of their collective, that they might chance upon a member whose mind could see the answer. As a cell of the CARC turned their minds towards the System, that drain on resources and people that stood in the way of fixing things, she had become the best of them at understanding it. As the project grew firmer, she pulled the work of virus-making tighter around herself, becoming the responsible party. Now she was here.
+
+As soon as she noted the discontinuity in her perceptions, Marybelle Lee opened her eyes. The room she found herself in was a cube of large gray stone panels, just like she'd expected.
+
+\emph{Identity query for the person standing behind me, if any, please,} she thought at the world she'd been uploaded to. That was, she knew, roughly how things worked.
+
+Knowledge appeared in her thoughts, even more firmly than answers from her collective. \emph{Then I Must In All Ways Be Earnest\#d5781ff9.}
+
+\emph{Of the Ode clade?}
+
+A sense of confirmation.
+
+``I see they've sent the tutorial skunk,'' Belle commented, turning to look at In All Ways. ``In person, even.''
+
+``Greetings ---'' In All Ways began. ``--- yes, that would be me. I am one of the more common options for tutorials, and there is good reason to hold to standard practice in your case. Though I felt it unwise to send a construct.''
+
+Belle nodded. ``Right. So, clothes. Clothes can be a pure intent item, so if I understood right, I just have to \ldots'' She pictured the look she wanted: shorts and a T-shirt she'd gotten from a climate restoration conference years ago. ``... run.'' Everything appeared as expected, and her shirt had even lost the stains it had picked up over the years. Classic programmer look, and definitely better than prison orange.
+
+``Note,'' she said, out of the long-standing habit of sending useful insights to her collective. She received no response. Not ever the thud of a communications-blocked error she would have gotten back in prison phys-side. Nothing. She was alone.
+
+Her realization about the state of her mind was interrupted. ``May I turn around, Ms. Lee? Marybelle?''
+
+``Belle, please, Ms. In All Ways. And you may.''
+
+In All Ways nodded. ``I have updated your ID. You will be able to change it later by intending it as you did to create your clothes. If you want to set a clade ID, the process is similar.''
+
+``Thanks,'' Belle said. ``I remember there being endpoints for that.''
+
+``Shall I continue the script?'' In All Ways asked. ``It appears you have done substantial research before being uploaded.''
+
+``I've gotten a good theoretical understanding of the place over the years, yeah. Me and the general knowledge base of the CARC.''
+
+``I imagine you have,'' In All Ways replied, frowning. ``And now you are here.''
+
+``Now I'm here,'' Belle echoed. ``Here with no one and nothing I can do to help save the world.''
+
+``There are others here who agitate for change,'' In All Ways noted. ``Make suggestions.''
+
+``\emph{Suggestions,}'' Belle scoffed. ``We've had three fucking centuries of suggestions. We need \emph{action}! We've \emph{needed} action! Sure, we're,'' she held out her hands to give exaggerated air quotes, ``\,`stabilizing', but we could be doing So. Much. More.''
+
+Her anger dipped into melancholy. ``And now I'm up here, on the damm System, where I can do fuck all. You bastards. Should've just had me killed.''
+
+``The author of our destruction calls us bastards,'' In All Ways remarked to her nonexistent audience.
+
+``Well, you fucking are. So many people take one look at how shit life on Earth is and fuck off to the party in the sky instead of trying to \emph{do} anything about it.'' Belle strode towards the skunk as she ranted. ``And hell, any of you uploads who think they'll care go flaking out or take their sweet time doing anything remotely useful! You've got \emph{all you need }--- you don't need to eat, you can't forget, you can \emph{fork} --- and you waste that instead of helping! We're \emph{dying}, damn you! Dying under the weight of problems you ran from!''
+
+In All Ways stood her ground against the advancing torrent of rage at the System.
+
+Belle stopped in front of the skunk and stared her down. ``And don't think you're off the hook here personally, Ms.---'' It took a moment for Belle's memory of a few minutes ago to supply the entire name ``--- Then I Must In All Ways Be Earnest of the Ode clade! I've read your tutorial conversation tree. You could've pointed some people at those activists of yours or something else that might \emph{maybe }help instead of just chucking them out to explore aimlessly if they don't have plans.''
+
+``I am no weaver of fates, I simply am a giver of tutorials. It would be improper, perhaps even a profanation, a sacrilege, for me to marshal those lives entrusted to me into some grand purpose, for me to do as you suggest. Even though some subtle nudging is not unacceptable among the guides and mentors, I will not do it.''
+
+``\emph{Improper},'' Belle scoffed. ``A sacrilege to lift a finger to help Earth. Like you're on some fucking holy quest to let the System spin around and do its thing until the Sun fries it or whatever.''
+
+``I care deeply about the System,'' In All Ways replied. ``A good friend of mine died to create this place, this end of death, imperfect though it may be. I have set out to honor eir memory by ensuring those who emplace themselves here begin their lives with an understanding of the world and, perhaps, a glimpse of its beauty. Your summary of my motivations is not incorrect, yes.''
+
+``And that damn `it's better on the System, everyone should just come up' attitude --- whether people admit to having it or not --- is why we had to --- why \emph{I} had to destroy this place!'' she ranted. ``Once people can't just bury their heads in virtual sand instead of giving a fuck about their own planet, they'll start to care! It won't be me and some friends being those weirdos who're still trying!'' she roared, barely holding back tears now.
+
+``Pray tell me,'' In All Ways responded, drawing on the memories of a myriad of tutorials to keep an outward calm, ``why I should give a single fuck about an Earth that left an easily-disarmed gun pointed at our heads for my entire life, that had ample forewarning of the wound you and yours tore open and did \emph{nothing}. Pray tell me, Ms. Marybelle Lee, why I would ever owe more than reciprocation of phys-side's systemic abandonment of my home.''
+
+``Because you're human?! Well, not exactly, but a person! Because we need to work together to fix our world, even if all you can do here --- all \emph{I} can do, now --- is flood people with mail on the off chance that works!''
+
+In All Ways shook her head. ``My world is the cylinder at Lagrange. Nowhere else.''
+
+``Fucking traitor!'' Belle cried in anguished frustration. ``Fucking selfish \emph{asshole}!'' She jabbed a finger into In All Ways's ribs. ``Fuck you! Fuck you!''
+
+In All Ways jabbed back. ``Fuck you too, Belle. Fuck you.'' she said, finally growing visibly angry at the newcomer. ``... Fuck you for Should We Forget. And In The Wind,'' she added quietly.
+
+The silence grew tense between Belle and In All Ways. As Belle stood there, she realized that she could rant all she liked, but that she couldn't be usefully angry. There wasn't anything she could \emph{do} about the troubles of the Earth. Not really. Not here. Not alone.
+
+``Note,'' she mumbled glumly, hoping to \ldots{} send her collective the realization that getting punitively uploaded was bad for the mission? As if they did not know, as if the rest of the collective was not back on Earth, many of them in prison, as the scrutiny she had brought on had brought the collective's other actions into the light.
+
+And she did not even feel the prison sim blocking her transmissions. They just were not possible from here. Her existence as Marybelle Lee of the Climate Action Resource Collective was over even more firmly now.
+
+``Give me a moment?'' she said to In All Ways. ``I'm --- well, my whole goal in life's fucked now, and I thought I'd accepted it, but \ldots'' Belle trailed off.
+
+``We have time,'' In All Ways replied.
+
+Belle started to slide towards despair, but she interrupted her spiraling thoughts when she noticed her face was a mess from her earlier tear-generating rant. She needed a tissue.
+
+\emph{I think I can just intend those?} She thought, uncertain. She held out a hand and pulled a tissue out of an imaginary box near her, thinking that there was one there.
+
+To her surprise, it worked! She had something to wipe her face with! As she started cleaning up, she realized the object she had summoned was the general suggestion of a tissue, something that smeared together everything she had wiped her face with before. Not quite right.
+
+``So, how do I ...'' she said quietly. She knew, from lots of accounts and technical reports, that the System could do better than this. She had studied up on the functions for object creation, though she had not expected to be using them through their native interface.
+
+She thought about assembling code for creating a more specific tissue in her head. It was not an entirely accurate metaphor, she knew, but it had served her well while she was plotting out the bomb. She assembled the request, piece by piece, her train of thought jumping to specific memories for textures, form, thickness, and added in the plan to have the new object appear in her other hand, right at exactly \emph{these} coordinates.
+
+She jabbed a finger of her occupied hand down towards the ground to hit an imaginary Enter key.
+
+A much more defined tissue, a blend of those nicer pricey ones Belle had sometimes used, appeared in her hand. She finished cleaning off her face and then, concentrating on the two pieces of crumpled-up paper in her hands, said ``Erase.''
+
+They vanished.
+
+``Note!'' Belle said automatically, too caught up in the excitement of having worked out this new fact about the world to remember where she was just then.
+
+``You could also pull those off the market,'' In All Ways commented. ``They are free for all practical purposes.''
+
+Belle remembered she was still standing in a tutorial. ``Yeah, but it's cool that I can do it myself. It's \ldots{} nice that all the studying the System wasn't a \emph{complete} waste, even though the project failed and now\ldots well, yeah.''
+
+In All Ways, who had herself needed time to decompress from snapping at a newbie (even if she had deserved it), was not sure how to respond. So, she hesitantly suggested, ``Shall we continue with the tutorial?''
+
+The question brought Belle further out of her own head. She was on the System, in an Aetherbox, talking to In All Ways. She was here and \ldots{} right. \emph{Fuck}. ``Mind if I send a message down first?''
+
+In All Ways nodded. ``You may do so, though I will ask that we continue the lessons once you have sent it, even if the approvals have not yet been granted.''
+
+``Fair enough,'' Belle said. \emph{Right, that's a thing now. Ugh. I'd forgotten about that bit.}
+
+Belle knew she did not have to use any particular form to write a message phys-side: a handwritten note or letters of fire traced in the air would work well enough. However, she felt more comfortable with typing her short missive out. It would be weird to do a text chat without some simulation of a keyboard.
+
+So, she shot queries at the construct market, looking for the components of her simmed coding setup. It'd be nice to get back to it after all these years, to find some small glimmer of pleasure in this effectively pointless existence.
+
+Her chair, keyboard, and monitor, appeared off to one side of her, with the peripherals floating in midair. The keyboard/display combo was already listed as set up for chat without the need to pretend there was a computer around. Belle stepped over towards har partial setup, but didn't set down. She was still searching.
+
+``No one's done my desk pattern yet?'' she said, surprised. ``Sure, it's an obscure one, but still.'' She turned to one side, so she wouldn't disturb the objects she'd already summoned, and arranged her memories of long days spent coding on the net, of plotting out actions with her collective, at that very desk. She worked to weave these impressions into the construct and then, with a finality, she pointed at the empty space where a desk was to appear.
+
+``No, too chaotic,'' she commented, waving the desk away. She had most of the code in her head now, and she just needed to tweak a few points so that it'd look right this time. The desk flickered into existence, then flickered out again. \emph{Still not quite right.}
+
+The space in front of Belle soon showed the hallmarks of construct artistry, of actual oneirotecture. Desks flickered in and out of existence, iteration upon iteration. The ghosts of particularly useful attempts hovered in the farther distance, serving as reference points for aspects of the final work that were cumbersome to describe or remember. Belle's work grew frantic as the final tweaks went into place ---- she was right there, she \emph{almost} had it, just one more try! The joy of creation burned away the worst of Belle's mood, as it always had.
+
+``Note annnnnnnd publish!'' Belle declared, satisfied, several minutes later. She'd gotten faster at commanding the System, and so she easily cleared away all the debris of her creative rampage. She then put a desk under her keyboard. ``Levitation off,'' she casually said. Everything settled into a realistic place.
+
+Belle sat down and began to type out her message to her wife. ``Made it up safe. Don't know if I'll be able to call. Love you! \textless3'', she wrote.
+
+Belle pressed `Send' and watched the screen. The panel of volunteers who would need to approve this note did not take much time at all to vote it through to phys-side. A tension she had not noticed until then came out of Belle's shoulders.
+
+``At least that went through,'' she said.
+
+In All Ways cleared her throat. ``I must admit that that was good work, especially as a first project. That being said, we should continue the tutorial.''
+
+Belle looked over at the skunk, pushed her chair back, and stood up. ``Right, right, got distracted. What's next?''
+
+``Forking,'' In All Ways said. ``That is, creating ---''
+
+``So I just need to put together a call to the fork methods for that,'' Belle interrupted.
+
+``Probably. That is not a method I teach, but if it will work for you, I have no objections. Please fork, Ms. Belle.''
+
+Belle assembled her first fork instruction in her mind. She left her appearance the same, nudged the spawn point to her left, where the desks used to be, and was about to run when she had an idea. \emph{Maybe two inches taller, just to see how that'll look.} She made the change and sent the fork request off into the collective engineered dream that was the System.
+
+An instant later, her new, slightly taller, fork appeared next to her. The Belles turned to look at each other. ``Wow!'' they said together. ``That's \ldots{} nice! I wonder if \ldots?''
+
+The tree of experiments in forking rippled out from there. Height, body shape, hair color, outfit, gender (most of these attempts quit out soon after instantiating), species (much more persistent) --- the Belles radiated out in a wave of exploration and evaluation.
+
+Someone raised an arm and lifted the messaging setup to the ceiling to free up floor space. Someone else put music on, an upbeat dance tune emanating from the physically impossible ``like there's a stage not too far in front of you'' for each fork independently. The Belles pulled each other into this impromptu dance party in the tutorial room, carried away by the sensation of dancing with \ldots{} themselves, but not. It was a strange thing, a beautiful thing, a wonder that she could not have even begun to imagine on Earth.
+
+None of the Belles had diverged in personality --- nor had they been meant to --- so, when the realization hit, it hit all of them. ``Fuck,'' they said in a raggedly stumble that gestured at unison, and merged down to their root. They killed the music during the merges.
+
+Belle accepted every last merge and buckled under the hammer of many dozens of variations on the thought she'd just had.
+
+``Fuck. I \ldots{} fuck, I think I get it now. Why everyone's got such a hard time explaining what this place feels like. Why most people forget the Earth. How much life you can have up here, how \emph{wonderful} it is. I got so angry at everyone for doing what I just did \ldots{} sixteen and a half minutes after being uploaded.''
+
+In All Ways tossed an invisible thing at Belle. ``I have awarded your tutorial reputation grant for successfully forking and merging. It is larger than usual to account for your home being within a private sim.'' She was not in the mood for mending shattering worldviews right now --- she was here to give Belle the tutorial and little more.
+
+``Shall we proceed to the remaining topics?'' the skunk asked.
+
+Belle had summoned another tissue. ``Yeah, sure, let's \ldots{} let's wrap this up.''
+
+The remaining tutorial items were a very quick affair. Belle's experimentation had left her familiar enough with how to pull the world's levers to make the skills everyone needed trivial.
+
+``And that concludes the tutorial,'' In All Ways said. ``Welcome to Lagrange, Belle.''
+
+``So now I step home and then \ldots{} whatever I feel like doing next?'' Belle asked.
+
+``Exactly.''
+
+``There anyone you think I should talk to?'' Belle asked. ``I don't want to go moping in bed if I can find \emph{something} I could be doing. Anything, really.''
+
+``There is no one I would introduce you to at this time,'' In All Ways said. ``The advocates I know of want nothing to do with you, presently, as they do not wish to become more controversial than your actions already made them. I have given you the tutorial and my obligations to you are thus discharged. Your path from here is your own. Try to avoid genocide this time.''
+
+The skunk quit out.
+
+Belle stepped into her home.
+
+The things she had created followed behind her, and Belle sat down at the desk she had made and looked around. She had nothing to belong to here. Nothing to do, to save her from anger turning to despair. No collective surrounding her and pulling her up.
+
+But, despite her losses, she had time.
+
+\secdiv
+
+In All Ways set her champagne down as she twitched from the rust of merge requests that she had been ignoring. She took a moment to merge all her folks down, integrating the memories of greeting the plotters behind the Century Bombing in parallel and some several other new arrivals besides. She shook herself as all the recollections settled in.
+
+``You alright?'' Ini Robbins, the fennec sitting across from her, asked. He, and his down-tree Elliah, had grown close to In All Ways in the two centuries since they had met during a memorably disastrous tutorial. \emph{From panicked combat to brunch dates,} the skunk thought as her instances' experiences settled in. \emph{Perhaps even }they \emph{will grow\ldots{} but not with me.}
+
+``I am fine. I needed to merge down the tutorials I sent out before I came here. I still grow twitchy when too many merges pile up.''
+
+``That was the Century Attack folks, right? How'd it go?''
+
+``Well enough. Some personal crises, but those are not unusual. The strangest tutorial was, surprisingly, a man I met personally only because it felt like I should. His brain took the idea of having an up-tree instance a \emph{touch} too literally.''
+
+``And?''
+
+``He pulled a Serene and forked into an actual tree, right there! I had to call a systech to talk him through that one.''
+
+``No way!''
+
+``Shit happens. All those people uploading, something has to go wrong once in a while.''
+
+``True that.''
+
+And so, the conversation floated away to other topics, and life flowed onward in a stream of well-spent time.
+
+Once the Century Attack was fading from news to history, consideration of the sentences imposed in its aftermath led to an amendment to the articles of the System's secession. Phys-side politicians, nudged along by starlight chats, realized the potential danger of forced uploading as a penalty, not to mention the possibility of stopping someone so uploaded writing back.
+
+Therefore, the Accords were amended to provide that no one could be involuntarily uploaded except as a penalty for crimes against the System.
+
+Phys-side, these changes passed with a sense of quiet relief. Sys-side, they passed with a shrug.
+
+In practice, the sentence of involuntary upload became a piece of trivia and an incentive for clinic bombers to plead down. Even when it was imposed, phys-side governments were quite reluctant to seek imposition of a no-quitting order or communication restrictions, as those would bring the crimes to the System's attention through the need for bilateral approvals and juries, as opposed to leaving them as blips in the perisystem feeds of interest to news junkies and academics. What they did not really see up there could not hurt them, after all \ldots{} right?
+
+And so, life went on.

marsh/illustration.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,217 @@
+\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
+
+\def\WorkTitle{Marsh}
+\def\WorkAuthor{Madison Scott-Clary}
+\def\WorkType{novel}
+\def\Artist{Iris Jay}
+\def\ArtType{a cover illustration}
+\def\UpFront{\$250 USD}
+\def\AtCompletion{\$250 USD}
+\def\FlatFee{\$500 USD}
+\def\PrintRoyalties{25\%}
+\def\DigitalRoyalties{50\%}
+\def\PaymentMechanism{PayPal} % Or check, etc.
+\def\ReceiptDate{June 1, 2024}
+\def\PublicationDate{August 1, 2024}
+\def\ContractNumber{1}
+\def\RelatedContract{1}
+
+\usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor}
+\usepackage{hyperref}
+\usepackage{graphicx}
+\usepackage{lastpage}
+\usepackage{fancyhdr}
+\usepackage{color,soul}
+
+%%% Draft mode
+%\usepackage{draftwatermark}
+%\SetWatermarkText{DRAFT}
+%\usepackage[top=1.25in, bottom=1.25in, right=2in, left=1in, marginparwidth=1.5in]{geometry}
+%\usepackage[colorinlistoftodos]{todonotes}
+%\newcommand{\NB}[1]{\todo[linecolor=blue,backgroundcolor=blue!25,bordercolor=blue]{#1}}
+%%% Final mode
+ \usepackage[top=1.25in, bottom=1.25in, right=1in, left=1in]{geometry}
+ \newcommand{\NB}[1]{\null}
+
+\pagestyle{fancy}
+\fancyhf{}
+\chead{Illustration contract --- \WorkTitle}
+\cfoot{\thepage\ of \pageref{LastPage}}
+
+\usepackage{fontspec}
+\setmainfont{Gentium Book Basic}
+\newfontfamily\HybridFamily{Ubuntu}
+
+\newdimen\longline
+\longline=\textwidth\advance\longline-4cm
+
+\def\LayoutTextField#1#2{#2} % override default in hyperref
+
+\def\lbl#1{\hbox to 4cm{#1\dotfill\strut}}%
+\def\labelline#1#2{\lbl{#1}\vbox{\hbox{\TextField[name=#1,width=#2]{\null}}\kern2pt\hrule}}
+
+\def\q#1{\hbox to \hsize{\labelline{#1}{\longline}}\vskip1.4ex}
+
+\begin{document}
+
+\noindent AGREEMENT between \textbf{\WorkAuthor} (``the Author'') and \textbf{\Artist} (``the Artist''). The parties to this Agreement wish to provide \ArtType\ (``the Piece'') for the \WorkType\ \textbf{``\WorkTitle''} (``the Work'').
+
+\section{Duration}
+
+This Agreement governs all rights granted herein in perpetuity.
+
+\section{Rights}
+
+\paragraph{Artist's rights}
+
+The Artist retains all rights to the Piece not granted to the Author below.
+
+\paragraph{Author's rights}
+
+The Artist grants rights to use the Piece as \WorkType\ to be published in conjunction with the Work in print and digital formats, and to be used in marketing and publication.
+
+\paragraph{Copyright}
+
+Copyright will remain with the Artist with only the above rights licensed.
+
+\paragraph{Artist use}
+
+The Artist will not sell or display the Piece or a reproduction prior to the publication date without the Author's written consent. The Artist will not sell or display the Piece or a reproductioni without reference to the Work and the Author visible on or attached the Piece or reproduction.
+
+\section{Indemnifications}
+
+The Artist attests that they are the sole creator of the Piece and that the Piece, to the best of their knowledge:
+
+\begin{itemize}
+    \item Will not infringe on the personal rights of a third party, and
+    \item Will not give rise to claims in defamation, privacy, infringement of copyright or trademark, etc.
+\end{itemize}
+
+The Artist indemnifies and holds harmless the Author against any and all claims, actions, demands, etc. arising from the publication of the Piece. This includes, but is not limited to, actions involving plagiarism, fraud, and theft.
+
+\paragraph{Components}
+
+The Artist may use related assets, including but not limited to fonts, brushes, or stock imagery, as components in the Piece in accordance to the licenses, including but not limited to reproduction or publication rights, of those assets.
+
+\section{Duties}
+
+\paragraph{Artist duties}
+
+The Artist shall:
+
+\begin{itemize}
+    \item Deliver a complete \ArtType\ as a high-resolution digital asset,
+    \item Work with the Author, the Author, and any representatives during the pre-publication process, and
+    \item Promote and market the Work as they see fit post-publication.
+\end{itemize}
+
+\section{Compensation}
+
+\paragraph{Flat fee}
+
+The Author agrees to pay \UpFront\ up front and \AtCompletion\ to the Artist upon receipt of the high-resolution Piece for a total of a flat fee of \FlatFee. The Author will furnish payment via \PaymentMechanism.
+
+%
+% \paragraph{Royalties}
+%
+% The Publisher agrees to pay royalties on net sales according to the following:
+%
+% \begin{center}
+% \begin{tabular}{r c}
+%     \textbf{Edition} & \textbf{Royalties} \\ \hline
+%     Trade Paperback & \PrintRoyalties \\
+%     E-book & \DigitalRoyalties \\
+%     \hline
+% \end{tabular}
+% \end{center}
+%
+% \paragraph{Payment schedule}
+%
+% The Publisher will pay the Artist quarterly by way of \PaymentMechanism.
+%
+% \paragraph{Statement of account}
+%
+% The Publisher will furnish a statement of account along with each quarterly payment.
+
+\section{Direct Copies}
+
+\paragraph{At publication} The Author will ship five copies of The Work to the Artist prior to publication for their own sale or use.
+
+\paragraph{Post-publication} The Artist will have the right to purchase additional copies at cost plus shipping for sale at their discretion.
+
+\section{Publication}
+
+\paragraph{Publication date}
+
+Publication of the Work will not take place after \PublicationDate. Receipt of the Piece will be no later than \ReceiptDate.
+
+\paragraph{Reasonable delay}
+
+Publication may be reasonably delayed due to unforeseeable circumstances through no fault of the Author such as, but not limited to, criminal action, labor disputes, etc.
+
+\paragraph{Sunset}
+
+If the publication date is not met by \PublicationDate\ plus 90 days, this contract will sunset and all rights revert back to the Artist.
+
+\section{Competing works}
+
+The Artist agrees that they shall publish no other work, during the terms of this contract, that includes any characters, likenesses, or any other material related to the Work mentioned herein, unless agreed upon by the Author (e.g., the Artist may not illustrate subsequent piece with another publisher without prior consent of the Author).
+
+\section{Reversion}
+
+If the Work is out-of-print and the Author receives a written request for reversion of rights to the Piece from the Artist, the Author shall agree to revert, in writing, to the Artist all rights granted to the Author in this Agreement.
+
+\section{Termination}
+
+Other than the mechanisms outlined above, this Agreement may only be terminated by written agreement signed by both the Artist and the Author.
+
+\section{Additional regulations}
+
+This Agreement is subject to the laws and regulations of the State of Washington.
+
+\newpage
+
+When Artist enters the information below and emails this contract back to the Author, the parties agree that the contract is digitally signed:
+
+\begin{Form}
+    \q{First Name}
+    \q{Last Name}
+    \q{Today's Date}
+    \q{Email}
+\end{Form}
+
+\hrule
+
+\vspace{12pt}
+
+\noindent \textit{Author:}
+
+Madison Scott-Clary
+
+32920 Sultan Basin Rd
+
+Sultan, WA 98294
+
+%\section*{Signed}
+%
+%\begin{tabular}{p{3in} | p{3in}}
+%    \vspace{0.5in}\emph{Madison Scott-Clary} & \vspace{0.5in}\emph{Iris Jay}\\ \hline
+%    Printed name of representative of the Author & Printed name of the Artist \\
+%    \vspace{0.5in} & \\ \hline
+%    Signature of representative of the Author & Signature of the Artist \\
+%    \vspace{0.5in} & \\ \hline
+%    Date & Date \\
+%\end{tabular}
+%
+%\section*{Witnessed}
+%
+%\begin{tabular}{l}
+%    \vspace{0.5in} \\ \hline
+%    Printed name of witness/lawyer \\
+%    \vspace{0.5in} \\ \hline
+%    Signature of witness/lawyer \\
+%    \vspace{0.5in} \\ \hline
+%    Date \\
+%\end{tabular}
+
+\end{document}

marsh/includes/pagelayout.tex

@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@
 
 		#2}
   \end{center}
-  \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{#1}
+  \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Interlude: #1}
   \cftaddtitleline{toc}{section}{\itshape #2}{}
   \vfill
   \makeatother

marsh/includes/toc.tex

@@ -12,4 +12,3 @@
 % start toc at top of page
 \renewcommand*\tocheadstart{}{}
 \hypersetup{final}
-\setcounter{tocdepth}{-1}

motes-played/book.tex

@@ -42,20 +42,22 @@
 
   \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}
 
@@ -63,7 +65,6 @@
 
   \input{includes/copyright}
 
-  \tableofcontents*
   \newpage
   \null
   \cleardoublepage
@@ -71,10 +72,9 @@
   \onehalfspacing
   %\doublespacing
 
-  % \input{content/preface}
   \null
   \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.
   
@@ -90,6 +90,8 @@
 
   \mainmatter
 
+  \part*{Motes Played}
+
   \pagestyle{ourbook}
 
   \cleardoublepage
@@ -150,6 +152,13 @@ Her countenance as spray.
   \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}
+  \input{content/primer}
+  
   \input{content/afterword}
 
 \end{document}

motes-played/content/afterword.tex

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 \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:
 

motes-played/content/primer.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,162 @@
+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}

motes-played/content/thoughts-on-motes.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,131 @@
+\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.

motes-played/content/thoughts.tex

@@ -0,0 +1,128 @@
+\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.
+