TODO: rewrite in Rye's voice.

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{Idumea} (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 told within \emph{Idumea} is in many ways standalone. However, there are some references and names scattered throughout taken from other books in the setting, and, should you not already know them, learning will deepen understanding.. Here follows some basics leading up to this.

% * Sasha and AwDae
% * The Ode
% * Forking
% * Castor, Pollux, Artemis
% * Death Itself and I Do Not Know
% * The Century Attack

\subsection*{Michelle who was Sasha and her superlative friend}

\subsection*{Life on Lagrange}

\subsection*{Castor, Pollux, Artemis}

\subsection*{The Century Attack}

\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}