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marsh/content/013.tex

@@ -1,12 +1,12 @@
 I followed Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass back home.
 
-The three of them lived in a narrow brownstone of sorts, full of the dark wood and plush carpets that I knew well from Marsh's house, though the walls were lined --- in some places all but completely covered --- with paintings. The vast majority were of landscapes skillfully done in watercolor or acrylics, but each of which was interrupted with a shape of black so deep that it seemed to eat any and all light around it. Beyond just reflecting zero light, it pulled greedily at light that even got close.
+The three of them lived in a narrow brownstone of sorts, full of the dark wood and plush carpets that I knew well from Marsh's house, though the walls were lined — in some places all but completely covered — with paintings. The vast majority were of landscapes skillfully done in watercolor or acrylics, but each of which was interrupted with a shape of black so deep that it seemed to eat any and all light around it. Beyond just reflecting zero light, it pulled greedily at light that even got close.
 
 Also spaced out through the house were various \emph{objets d'art} I recognized from Hanne's work. Dry Grass explained that both paintings and art were from her cocladists Motes and Warmth In Fire. ``My little ones,'' she called them, which fit well, given what I knew of Warmth In Fire.
 
-She sounded proud of them, as a mother would of her children, which took me a minute to piece together. There were no shortage of family dynamics within the System --- after all, old and young alike upload, and upload dates can be decades or centuries apart --- though it was relatively rare that they were so strong within a clade where everyone was by necessity the same age. What guardianship we Marshans felt over Cress, the smallest among us, only barely seemed to scratch the surface of the depth of Dry Grasses feelings over And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights and Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire. We were protective of Cress, she was hanging artwork on her fridge door and walls.
+She sounded proud of them, as a mother would of her children, which took me a minute to piece together. There were no shortage of family dynamics within the System — after all, old and young alike upload, and upload dates can be decades or centuries apart — though it was relatively rare that they were so strong within a clade where everyone was by necessity the same age. What guardianship we Marshans felt over Cress, the smallest among us, only barely seemed to scratch the surface of the depth of Dry Grasses feelings over And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights and Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire. We were protective of Cress, she was hanging artwork on her fridge door and walls.
 
-Proud, yes, but the overriding exhaustion --- physical and emotional --- kept her expression muted and heavy, and she soon requested that we lay down as we had planned.
+Proud, yes, but the overriding exhaustion — physical and emotional — kept her expression muted and heavy, and she soon requested that we lay down as we had planned.
 
 The bed up in the second-storey bedroom was already wide, but Cress and Tule pulled on either edge to stretch it out by another half meter or so while Dry Grass all put faceplanted onto the mattress. She elbow-crawled her way up until her head was at least resting on a pillow before letting out a muffled groan.
 
@@ -14,17 +14,17 @@ Cress and Tule followed after, moving as though they knew the parts they were to
 
 I stood awkwardly by until Cress chuckled and gestured at the open space beside Tule up near the head of the bed. ``Just relax, Reed.''
 
-``Yes,'' Dry Grass mumbled. ``You do not need to do anything, there is no pressure. We are all just here to unwind, yes? Among friends, yes? I would like to think that this includes you, my dear.''
+``Yes,'' Dry Grass mumbled. ``You do not need to do anything, there is no pressure. I want to be around those who enjoy my presence rather than resent it. We are all just here to unwind, yes? Among friends, yes? After these last few days, after so many tears, I would like to think that this includes you, my dear.''
 
 ``Right,'' I said, forcing a chuckle of my own as I awkwardly clambered up onto the bed, leaning against the headboard and hugging my knees against my chest.
 
-We sat --- or lay --- in silence for a while other than the occasional small noise of contentment from Dry Grass.
+We sat — or lay — in silence for a while other than the occasional small noise of contentment from Dry Grass.
 
 Even as we stayed in silence, and Cress and Tule doted on their partner, this woman I had such strong feelings about foisted upon me out of nowhere only a few days prior, I struggled to disentangle my thoughts on the events of the day.
 
 The longer I thought about it, the more surreal the act of having a funeral in the midst of such a disaster felt. Our gathering of nine people standing around an all-but-featureless black orb somewhere in a grid of yet more featureless black orbs was small. Nine people had stood around that core dump: six cocladists, two partners, and a systech who also happened to be a partner of two of those cocladists.
 
-It was so small, and yet even if there had been a hundred people there, a thousand, it would have felt vanishingly tiny in that vast, open space. 23 billion orbs set into a grid, and this one was ours, our double handful of grief.
+It was so small, and yet even if there had been a hundred people there, a thousand, it would have felt vanishingly tiny in that vast, open space. 23 billion orbs set into a grid, and this one was ours, our double handful of grief. After all, hadn't dry grass also sobbed openly and freely before the marker of her own loss?
 
 It was so small, and that vast, open space remained silent, empty. The settings on the sim were such that we would only ever see or hear ourselves in there. There might well be billions of others struggling with their own double handfuls of grief, and yet it would only ever be us.
 
@@ -32,13 +32,13 @@ There was more grief to be felt there, layered beneath the exhaustion, confusion
 
 And so we stayed in silence.
 
-Dry Grass was the first to break the silence, mumbling. ``In The Wind.''
+Dry Grass was the first to break the silence, mumbling into her pillow. ``In The Wind.''
 
 ``What was that, love?'' Tule asked, brushing fingers through her hair.
 
-``That was my up-tree instance. In The Wind.'' She laughed, choked and hoarse. ``I remember the rattle of dry grass in the wind. I picked that up from Louie. Eir clade, os Riãos, did much the same. I thought I was \emph{so clever.}''
+``That was my up-tree instance, yes? In The Wind?'' She turned her head and laughed, choked and hoarse. ``I remember the rattle of dry grass in the wind. A full sentence snuck into a poem. I picked that up from Louie. Eir clade, os Riãos, did much the same. I thought I was \emph{so clever.} I thought I had gotten all of my grief out that second day. I thought I could move on, limping, until I heard of the work she'd done, that she made it so far and still did not make it to the end. Until I saw her core.''
 
-Tule, more flexible than I, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Cress gave her own kiss after. Both of them glanced briefly at me, looking a little sheepish. I couldn't quite piece together the reason for their looks until I pieced together their confusion --- our confusion, since I shared in it --- of how I must feel about her.
+Tule, more flexible than I, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Cress gave her own kiss after. Both of them glanced briefly at me, looking a little sheepish. I couldn't quite piece together the reason for their looks until I pieced together their confusion — our confusion, since I shared in it — of how I must feel about her.
 
 The compulsion to echo that gesture was certainly there, too. I knew from countless memories the softness of her skin against my lips, I knew what even the briefest touch would mean to her as she worked to process her own loss.
 
@@ -52,11 +52,11 @@ After a long moment's pause, she nodded. ``She was the part of me who remained a
 
 Both Cress and Tule nodded, though the statement largely went over my head.
 
-Perhaps guessing at such, Dry Grass continued, ``Each of our stanzas focused on something different. I am sure that much is in the stories you have doubtless read, if Lily's reaction is anything to go by. She fusses at the eighth and their politics, perhaps the first with their habit of spying, but mine, the sixth, wound up with all of Michelle's --- our root instance --- all of her dreams of and desire for motherhood. Motherliness. Caring and cherishing. That is why I have all of that art on the walls: it is all cherished, all lovely creations from Warmth and Motes, the clade's little ones.''
+Perhaps guessing at such, Dry Grass continued, ``Each of our stanzas focused on something different. I am sure that much is in the stories you have doubtless read, if Lily's reaction is anything to go by. She fusses at the eighth and their politics, perhaps the first with their habit of spying, but mine, the sixth, wound up with all of Michelle's — our root instance — all of her dreams of and desire for motherhood. Motherliness. Caring and cherishing. That is why I have all of that art on the walls: it is all cherished, all lovely creations from Warmth and Motes, the clade's little ones.''
 
 ``So In The Wind was the one who stuck with that moderation?'' I asked.
 
-She nodded. ``To an extent. She often explained how she would push the moderation duties off onto other systechs. She really was just as focused as I was on the tech side.'' She rolled over onto her back so that she could look up to us, transferring my hand in hers from one to the other. ``All I wanted to do was take a vacation. I should have known it would wind up far longer than the two weeks I had intended. Michelle had already tried that, and she got an entire clade out of it, after all.
+She nodded. ``To an extent. She often explained how she would push the moderation duties off onto other systechs. She really was just as focused as I was on the tech side.'' She rolled over onto her back so that she could look up to us, transferring my hand in hers from one to the other. ``All I wanted to do was take a vacation. I should have known it would wind up far longer than the two weeks I had intended. Michelle had already tried that all the way back in 2124, systime 0, and she got an entire clade out of it, after all.
 
 ``She usually got what she want, too. She worked the tech side, disentangling crashes and hunting for problematic objects. She is the one who kept me up to date on the tech side, usually over lunch.'' I could hear the smile in her voice as she continued, ``Those lunches were something lovely, sandwiches sitting unfinished as we talked and talked and talked about this whole confusing mess we lived in. The politics remained infuriating to me, which I suppose they also did for her, given the way she would rant. Even so, it kept the pilot light lit for me, that I might hear about this System I loved so much.''
 
@@ -76,7 +76,7 @@ She rubbed the back of her free hand against her eyes. ``I will mourn the loss o
 
 He nodded, working on a careful extraction from his role as pillow, replacing his lap with another pillow from the bed as he slid from beneath her. He stretched his arms up over his head, winced at a quiet pop from his neck, and then shifted to lay down beside her instead, arm draped over her front. Cress followed suit, laying down beside Tule and hugging around them both.
 
-I chose to remain sitting for a while, idle gaze settling on the triad beside me, while I thought of the ways in which Dry Grass talked about In The Wind. I tried mapping that onto my own clade. Thinking of Lily like a sister, of Cress like a sibling, felt right in a way that I didn't expect. While it was difficult to think of Tule as in any way younger than me, despite being my second degree up-tree instance, but perhaps that was due to his lingering similarities to me. After all, Sedge had forked him off shortly after I had forked into her. It was part of the package deal: Sedge went back to exploring femininity while Tule returned to cis-masculinity. Both of them remained siblings, perhaps because I was their progenitor.
+I chose to remain sitting for a while, idle gaze settling on the triad beside me, while I thought of the ways in which Dry Grass talked about In The Wind. I tried mapping that onto my own clade. Thinking of Lily like a sister, of Cress like our clade's own little one, felt right in a way that I didn't expect. While it was difficult to think of Tule as in any way that much younger than me, despite being my second degree up-tree instance, but perhaps that was due to his lingering similarities to me. After all, Sedge had forked him off shortly after I had forked into her. It was part of the package deal: Sedge went back to exploring femininity while Tule returned to cis-masculinity; ditto Rush and a further queering of gender. Both of them remained siblings — younger siblings, perhaps, because I was their progenitor.
 
 But Marsh? Were they a parent? Were they also a sibling? Some great-grandparent, perhaps? Or were they simply my root instance? All fit to greater or lesser extent.
 
@@ -86,7 +86,7 @@ The polite distance lasted for less than a minute before Dry Grass rolled onto h
 
 Tense, I nodded. \emph{``It's\ldots different. Not bad, just going to take some getting used to.''}
 
-\emph{``Should your boundaries change, then, let me know and I will adapt with them.''}
+\emph{``Should your boundaries change, then, let me know and I will adapt with them. I am simply craving touch. It is grounding for me.''}
 
 I nodded once more, patting the back of her hand where it rested on my side.
 
@@ -110,7 +110,7 @@ I did my best to keep my laughter to myself. Dry Grass's breathing had grown ste
 
 \emph{``Cross-tree merging? Like you and I merging?''}
 
-\emph{``I guess so. Answers Will Not Help and Jonas got pretty mad about the whole thing, actually, saying it changed clades into `gestalts' or something. I guess I can see it, too. We still fork like a tree, branching out and everything, but if we can merge from one branch to another instead of just down, then the metaphor falls apart.''}
+\emph{``I guess so. Answers Will Not Help and Jonas got pretty weird about the whole thing, actually, saying it changed clades into `gestalts' or something. I guess I can see it, too. We still fork like a tree, branching out and everything, but if we can merge from one branch to another instead of just down, then the metaphor falls apart.''}
 
 Tule chimed in with a scoff. \emph{``What about that would make them angry? It just sounds like a minor improvement and a change in terminology.''}