## Reed — 2401

I was left that night with a sense of having taken a step forward. It wasn't completion by any stretch, I hadn't made any dramatic decisions, hadn't changed anything, really, except getting dinner with a polycule and talked about feelings.

I *had* made that small decision, though: the decision to continue to think about these feelings on Dry Grass lingering after the merge.

The immediate outcome of this was a hug and a conversation. The hug came from Dry Grass after dinner. She asked, I said yes, it was a mix of awkward and pleasant. The conversation came when I got home and spoke to Hanne.

"Wait, you kept the *whole merge?*" she said, laughing. "I mean, I guess I can't blame you with all that was happening, but still, why didn't you just discard it?"

I shrugged. "That was going to be my up-tree's role, remember? He discarded everything, I kept everything."

"Why didn't you quit, then?"

"I'm not totally sure. I don't remember that night very well. Not that I forgot, I mean, just that everything happened so quickly and was so scattered that all the memories are, too. I think part of me was worried that maybe I'd disappear, too, or that Tule would, or Sedge or Rush."

Hanne's expression fell, replaced by something far more serious. "Okay, *that* much I can definitely understand. Is this the only real fallout of the whole merge?"

"I guess. There's a bit of fussing about intraclade relationships in there, which, okay, another thing to consider, but I love all my cocladists at least as family, so it doesn't feel too bad to me. I definitely love all my up-trees."

"There's quite a jump between loving like family and loving like a partner, though."

I nodded. "Not denying that, just that I think Tule had...well, it's not that he didn't love the rest of us, he just didn't think of the rest of us all that often. Not as often as I do."

"Except for Cress?"

"Yeah, except for Cress. He thinks of it all the time. He really loves it. I'm old enough to remember the taboo around intraclade relationships, but it's also been a few decades since that fell apart --- I think close to six now --- and a few years since Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass formally made it a triad, so I'm used to it by now."

"Well, fair enough. Everything else was just boring, then?"

"Pretty much. Good food, dates with Dry Grass and Cress, playing around with music."

"And what's the practical fallout for you?" she asked.

"You mean in terms of Dry Grass?"

She nodded.

"I don't know yet. I'm still kind of split on my feelings. Having memories of her as an acquaintance clashing with memories of her as a partner is still too stark a difference." I snorted. "Not to mention this all feeling like a distraction from all of the other problems at hand. Worrying about what she means to me feels like energy not being spent on trying to figure out what happened."

"You're all such workaholics."

"Guilty."

She grinned, reached over to take up my hand and kiss the backs of my fingers, one by one. "Well, whatever. I trust you'll overthink things and then come to a conclusion after a lot of bitching, and we'll keep talking about it."

"Right," I said, laughing. "Of course we will."

I spent the rest of the evening at home, lounging on the couch while Hanne slouched over my lap and asked me to play with her hair. While I did so, we both focused on our own thoughts or internal work. I spent much of that time in idle sensorium conversations, trying to get a better picture of the state of things.

Sedge had gone to sleep for a bit, but as she woke up, she caught me up on news from when she'd been dozing. The politicians had drafted a letter explaining what had happened on a technological level to post on the largest of the perisystem feeds. Much of it was information that we'd gained from the AVEC session with the phys-side techs, explaining that nearly 1% of the System had been wiped out and deemed unrecoverable, that there had been a mass crashing event, that the world was assumed stable and the issue had been patched.

Conspicuously missing was any mention of CPV, any mention that everyone — all 2.3 trillion of us — had crashed, or that messages were being gated and censored. Sedge explained that the last had included some gentle untruths. Rather than this being a political effort, this had been phrased as "slowly bringing Lagrange up to full capacity". It wasn't wrong, *per se,* they really were working on bringing the feeds up to full capacity; it's just that the problem was political rather than technical.

Dry Grass, in our own conversations, explained that there were already rumors flying about, and that these were being subtly steered by Odists, Jonases, Selena, and, to a lesser extent, what she called 'the opposition party', a group of clades led by Debarre who had settled into an uneasy truce with the others some decades back. Rumors were being nudged away from "an attack by the Artemisians" and towards "solar flares or a power failure".

Rush, meanwhile, had latched onto Serene and talked her into letting ver follow along as she took a tally of all of her sims and those of her friends, seeing what remained and what had been marked as abandoned. While ve had always been one for exploring, seeing ver lock onto an interest this hard was new. Ve admitted quite quickly that it was something of a coping mechanism, something to do that wasn't fret about what had happened to our world.

The longest conversation I had that night was with Lily. I had initially been surprised by how chatty she was, but the surprise mellowed as she went on.

*"I just want to make sure that all of my grouchiness isn't getting in the way of me keeping up to date,"* she said. *"Dry Grass has...well, it's actually been really cool, all that she's doing, so I definitely respect her."*

*"You just don't want to be around her?"* I asked.

There was a shrug, felt rather than seen. *"I guess not. It's just hard for me to let go of, even if I'm committed to at least trying to do so."* She sighed. *"But yeah, I don't want me hiding away to mean I'm not kept in the loop."*

*"Well, Sedge–"*

*"I don't mean the logistics, Reed."* I could hear the smirk in her words. *"Or not* just *the logistics — Sedge has been keeping me up to date, yeah — but just keeping up with the rest of you. Cress and Tule are glued to her side, which, fair enough. Sedge has found her in with the rest of the politicians through her. You've been hanging out with her through Sedge. Rush is off gallivanting with some other Odist..."*

I sighed, steeled myself. *"Well, yeah, fair enough. I've also been spending time with her because I got pulled into being a bit of management for everyone else, and because I kept Tule's merge."*

*"You did? God, now* you're *going to wind up glued to her side, too,"* she replied after a moment of parsing out the ramifications. She laughed, though I couldn't judge just how earnest it was. *"But hey, it is what it is, right? This is why I want to keep up with you all. I'm out here trying to check in on friends, too, I don't want to wind up losing sight of the clade."*

*"Yeah, I get that. I really appreciate it, too."*

We chatted for a while longer before I noticed that Hanne had started to doze off, and I nudged us both to bed for the night.

My dreams were scattered, disorganized. In some of these scattered images, everyone who had gone missing suddenly returned, but changed. Sometimes they were mute. Sometimes they never smiled. Sometimes they were completely normal, but missing some integral memory, something that made them _them._

Other images throughout the night veered away from fear and into grief. Marsh was gone. They were _gone._ There was a hole in the world that would never be patched, and my dreams lingered on that lack. In my dreams, there was a literal hole in the world, a half-sensed maelstrom, and we could do nothing to avoid it. It was in the way of wherever we most needed to go.

The morning greeted me with a rising sun, another mug of coffee, and a queue of messages to work through.

These last fell into three camps. Several were messages from friends that were well-wishes for the work at hand, offers of condolences for the loss of Marsh, suggestions for things to try. These were all shelved for later. At some point, I'd have the spoons to respond to them, but certainly not now.

The second camp were ones surrounding the grief and loss of others. These were messages from friends that relayed stories of their own losses. Partners disappearing mid-conversation. Friends no longer sitting across from them at the bar. Games interrupted, now, apparently, never to be completed. These I mostly passed on to Sedge. My emotional bandwidth was running thin. Too many dreams. Too many strange floods of stranger emotions over the last few days.

The final camp I eventually tagged 'work'. These were a handful of messages, mostly from Sedge and Dry Grass, that pertained to plans for the rest of the day, items on various checklists that they wanted help ticking off.

I read these more slowly. Where there were questions, I answered as I could or, if not, delegated to the rest of the clade or other friends. Where my own attention was requested, I gave my opinions as I had them.

I'd apparently been tapped as one of the organizers, a sort of liaison between those involved, one who, as one of the messages hinted, had his shit together in a way that the rest of the clade did not. I counted myself flattered, though it also rankled that that had become my defining feature while I felt like I was only flailing, trying to pin down emotions while kicking myself for not doing more to directly address the clade's own problems. How could I be a manager when I couldn't even figure out my own problems?

I put a halt to that line of thinking by repeatedly telling myself that my problems were now almost universal, that the feelings around Marsh being missing were now feelings that were being felt by millions, if not billions, of people all over Lagrange.

After finishing my message triage, my coffee, and the making of the bed, I stepped out of the bedroom, only to find the rest of the house empty. A note on the table from Hanne explained that she was meeting up with yet more friends from her construct artistry group.

I sighed.

No distractions, no reason to stick around, nowhere I wanted to visit. Might as well head back to Marsh's study, one part of the *de facto* headquarters for much of the response to this mass crashing event, and catch up with those who had taken charge.

"Reed," Dry Grass said, bowing informally and immediately leading me gently by the elbow out of the room, explaining as she went. "We are preparing for a meeting coming up in about half an hour. Messages are being sent from the study. I would not wish to distract the senders. Please step to Workroom#22a239ec in the future."

"Oh? This representative sample meeting?"

She nodded. "Yes. I am pleased you are here; I would like the Marshans well represented, as well."

"Sure, if you say so," I said, shrugging. "I'm still not really clear on what exactly it is."

"It is intended to be a sample of clades from across the System that have been hit in various ways. You are here, with your root instance gone. We are here, to represent the founders who have been hit to a lesser extent, yet who have experience being without a root instance. Andréa C. Mason#Central of the CERES clade will be there. They lost nearly seventy thousand instances."

"Jesus," I murmured. "I remember you mentioning that on the first day, and I still can't quite get over that number."

"Neither can I," she said, gaze drifting down and to the side. "This corruptive event hit everyone differently, and with such numbers as we have here on Lagrange, some clades were bound to get hit far harder than others. Debarre will be there as well, both as a political figure as well as a member of a clade of about one hundred that lost zero instances."

"So it's just a bunch of clades getting together to talk about what happened?"

She shrugged. "What happened. What to do. What to ask for."

I frowned. "'Ask for'?"

Dry Grass guided the two of us through the workroom, picking up more instances as we went with a gentle tap to the shoulder. "I do not mean to speak of reparations, though that may at some point come into play. What we might ask for are reassurances. We might want fixes. We may want greater visibility into the day-to-day running of the System. Harvey from SERG may request–"

"SERG?"

"System Emergency Response Group, one of the many, *many* groups of systechs. He may request greater access to the lower levels of the System's functionalities." She smiled faintly, tapping one last person — Debarre, as it turned out — on the shoulder. "I am having to ramp up on all of this quite quickly. I stepped away from my role as systech a long, *long* time ago, with a long-lived up-tree taking over my role."

"They can't merge down?"

"They no longer exist, Reed."

"Oh," I said dumbly, averting my gaze.

She rested a hand on my shoulder. "It is okay," she said, smiling reassuringly. "Or, well, it is not okay, but I understand. You did not know. I am dealing with the loss by burying myself in work. On that note, let us join the others, yes? I have ACLs enough to set up the room better."

I watched as Dry Grass got the room ready for this smaller conference. Without so many Odists, Jonases, Selenas, Debarres, Marshans, and however many others, there was no need for the presentation setup, and so those tables that had been set up before the stage were instead joined together. Dry Grass released them from their stolidly stationary positions and pushed them together. Merging like drops of mercury, the dozen or so smaller tables became one large circle. This was then corralled with gentle tugs of her hands to a much smaller shape, remaining a perfect circle. Chairs trailed after the edge of the table like eager puppies, merging together in similar fashion whenever crowding grew too great.

The next change was to the square platform of the AVEC stage. The light-gray material that made it up was similarly shrunk down with nudges from her foot. The table was given a gentle push so that it settled just over the edge of the stage.

I'd had little to do with sim manipulation beyond simply expanding or reducing bounds, and almost nothing to do with object manipulation beyond pulling items off the exchange. That had always been Hanne's game, and while I'd watched her work plenty, it had never been so casually exhausted as Dry Grass's manipulation here. She worked with such surety, such tiredness on her face, that her age seemed all the more evident. Of course someone more than three centuries old, someone who had spent nearly all of that time here on the System, would be able to move through this world with such ease.

"Alright," she said, flumping down into one of the chairs across from the AVEC stage. "I think we are all here. While I would obviously prefer you stay, it is not a requirement. If you need to duck out, feel free to do so. We are just waiting on Günay and we can get going."

About twenty people had shown up. It didn't seem to be twenty clades — there were two Odists, after all, with Dry Grass and another from the eighth stanza, Why Ask Questions When The Answers Will Not Help — but the audience remained diverse. Only about half appeared to be human of some sort, with the Marshans, Odists, and Jonases accounting for most of those. I suppose it made sense, given the Odists' social circle, but that didn't quite tally with what I knew of Jonas's role in the leadership of the System. He didn't strike me as a furry.

When asked over a sensorium message, Dry Grass replied, *"The eighth stanza has been slowly tamping down on Jonas's role over the years. He has not been nearly as in control of things as he once was. Prime quit in grand fashion some years back, and the rest have long since recognized that."* She cast a slight smile in my direction, adding, *"Too singularly focused, perhaps. All work and no play makes Jonas lose his fucking marbles."*

I stifled a laugh. It probably shouldn't have been funny, but the absurdity of the comment clashed just right with the mirrored absurdity of the situation. Probably best not to laugh in front of everyone.

Just in time, too, as there was a polite chime from the AVEC stage, and Günay faded into being. She was clearly sitting at her own table far different from ours, but some trick of the AVEC software quickly scaled her to the point where it looked as though she was sitting there with us. The opacity was even turned all the way up so that she was just as present as the rest of the attendees.

"Hey friends," she said, waving. "Wasn't expecting an invitation for just me."

Answers Will Not Help gave a hint of a bow without standing. Her voice seemed to sit just shy of laughter, though whether that laughter was teasing or convivial was difficult to say. "What can we say? We like you." She waved around the table. "We have a group of representatives from a variety of clades. I think you met a good chunk of us yesterday, yes?"

Günay nodded. "Yep. At least, I remember Dry Grass and Jonas and Debarre and Selena." Her eyes darted around those seated at the table, likely reading through name tags. "Answers Will Not Help...I've heard your name, at least."

"Right, I bet you have," Answers Will Not Help said with a smirk. "We are a notorious group, yes? For those you have not met, we have selected a group of clades among friends who we believe to be both good people and representative of the various ways we have been affected."

The systech nodded again. "Alright."

"Reed, he/him, and Sedge, she/her, of the Marsh clade lost their root instance, a loss of 14%. We Odists have lost 2% of our number, including two lines of the Ode and a few long-lived up-tree instances. The Jonas clade has lost approximately 3% of their number. Andréa C. Mason, she/her, and Harvey, he/him, of the CERES clade have been hit particularly hard," she said, gesturing to an anthropomorphic coyote and goat across the table, "with Andréa's subclade losing 99.983% of their number, totalling about 70,000 instances destroyed."

There was a long moment of silence before Günay whispered, "What the fuck."

Answers Will Not Help continued smoothly. "Debarre, on the other hand, lost zero instances for a total of 0%. Obvious, yes, but I believe that will do well to illustrate the apparent random nature of this event from our end, yes?"

Günay nodded, expression lingering in shock even as the Odist continued around the table with introductions and percentages lost.

"Günay," Jonas Fa said once this had wrapped up. "Jakub and I had a pleasant little chat and, if you'll cheek, you'll see that NDAs have been lifted."

She frowned, blinked a few times, then said cautiously, "Okay."

"He also confirmed that this was an intentional attack on Lagrange. Some sort of deliberate widespread CPV event."

Silence fell around the table. Each of us processed this in our own way, whether that was the shock from the clades who had just been roped into the meeting to the exhaustion on Dry Grass's face, the wariness on Günay's features to the almost smug satisfaction in Jonas's. He looked to be almost purring, as though springing this information on everyone present was a joy in its own right.

"So, now that NDAs are out of the picture and we've torn Mr. Strzepek a new one," he continued after a moment. "Can you tell us what happened?"

"Uh...hold on. I'm catching up too," Günay said hoarsely. She reached out of view of the AVEC recorder to grab a bottle of water, taking a long drink. She seemed to be buying time, organizing her thoughts, consulting her HUD. "Promise you won't tear *me* a new one?"

I was caught off guard by the humor, but many of the others around the table chuckled. 

"I will promise no such thing," Answers Will Not Help said, giggling.

Dry Grass elbowed her in the side. "Do not listen to her, she is a snot. You are fine, my dear. No tearing, promise."

The systech chuckled nervously, nodding. "Well, alright. Then yeah, Jonas has it. As far as we can tell, there was a sort of CPV bomb set off right at midnight on New Year's Eve, 2399 which caused a full crash of all instances in less than a minute. It was particularly nasty, too, as it inhibited quitting, meaning that *everyone* crashed, I guess to cause the most damage. With the crash, there was a spike in resource usage and then a precipitous drop."

"I'm still confused about that," Debarre said. "I thought CPV had to be tailored to a single instance or any of their forks that hadn't individuated much. How is it someone was able to blast the whole System?"

"We didn't understand it either. Hell, we didn't really understand how CPV worked up until recently. It *shouldn't* work. It shouldn't even be possible in the first place." Günay made a few gestures, doubtless reorganizing some notes in her HUD. "But whatever. Someone figured it out well enough to generalize it and took out everyone on Lagrange."

"And who is this 'someone'?" Selena asked. "The phys-side feeds are being ungated, but it's a firehose of information to sort through to try and find anything of use."

"Yeah, I think they — the System Consortium — clamped down pretty tight. I'm just learning about this myself, since I just got access to the files a few hours ago and news from Earth's been censored. Let's see..." She frowned, continued in the tone of someone reading aloud, "Okay. The Our Brightest Lights Collective claimed responsibility for the attack exactly thirty seconds *before* it occurred via a message to every executive on the System Consortium board, as well as several major feeds, all of which were censored before being made public. The OBLC named the mechanism, provided a detailed timeline of events, and offered a list of names of individuals — or "individuals", I guess — and their roles in the execution of this plan. All one hundred members of the collective have been apprehended, though in the past year, two have managed to end their own lives."

Answers Will Not Help spoke up during a break in the recitation. "Is there more information on this collective? Are they conservatives? How tight is their integration? Do they mimic clades like the old-style collectives?"

"Oh, uh, one moment, I'll look that up once I'm finished," Günay said. "It goes on to say that, through investigation, members from some other collectives and several individuals besides were implicated and were also detained. During one of the System restarts between the Century Attack — as we've been calling it — and now, this information was confirmed by having an investigator sys-side fork rapidly to gather information and take action where needed. They were provided with emergency global ACLs and, once they found the perpetrator, they locked them in an unpopulated airlocked implementation of the System."

"The System was restarted more than once?" Debarre asked, taken aback.

She nodded. "About thirty times, I think. We had three shifts working on it for more than a year, remember. We just rolled memories back each time."

"But wouldn't the bomb or whatever just go off again every time?"

"It did the first two times, yeah," Günay said with a shrug. "Until we patched out the CPV vulnerability."

Dry Grass let out a surprised laugh. "Wait, you *patched out CPV?* Entirely?"

"Well, yeah, we kind of had to, otherwise we'd either have to reconstruct everyone with a memory of crashing, or the same thing would keep happening every time the perpetrator was reconstructed. It took us a good four months of total System downtime working all three shifts to get it done."

Jonas Fa, one of the two Jonases sitting at the table, had been steadily frowning more and more through the conversation, resting his chin on folded hands. Finally, he sat up straight and looked to Answers Will Not Help. "Hey."

The Odist let out a groan and kneaded the heels of her palms against her eyes for a moment before leaning back in her chair. "Fuck it. Why not? Might as fucking well."

Both forked, and the up-tree instances stepped around the table to face each other. Jonas Fa summoned up a small pocket knife. 

Answers Will Not Help stiffened where she stood, teeth clenched.

Explaining as he unfolded the knife with a snick, Jonas Fa gestured expansively around the room. "So, if you've read any of the scandalous works about us, you can probably guess that we all have CPV mixed up for each other. It's nothing as grand as the stories make it sound like, though; just a way for us to keep each other in check and occasionally...play around."

Before anyone had a chance to ask any further questions, he swiped out with the knife, catching Answers Will Not Help in the cheek, leaving a gash that quickly welled up with blood. There was no noise from the Odist for a few moments before she finally let out a shaky sigh.

There was, notably, no crashing. She simply dabbed at her cheek, inspected the blood on her fingertips, grinned wildly to Jonas, and said, "Oh, we are *so* fucked," and then quit, followed shortly by the second Jonas.

Günay, like many of the rest of us, had pushed herself away from whatever table she had been sitting at, looking horrified at the casual violence before her. "What the fuck?" she whispered for the second time that day.

"There is still an outstanding conversation about this collective, Günay," the remaining instance of Answers Will Not Help said breezily. "Can you tell us more about them?"

The systech stared, mouth open, for a moment, then slowly pulled herself back to her desk. "Uh...right," she mumbled, hiding some complex emotion by taking another long drink of water. "The OBLC describe themselves as fundamentalists, in the sense of returning humanity to its fundamentals, and pride themselves on very tight integration."

"'Integration'?" Debarre asked, tilting his head, a particularly animalistic gesture on his musteline features. "I haven't kept up on collectives at all. They don't make any sense to me."

"Groups of people who aim to live as a hive-mind of sorts," Selena explained. "They use tech from their implants to force alignment in ideals, or even just nudge complete thoughts into place for everyone. It's almost a religious thing for them."

"It *is* a religion thing for many," Answers Will Not Help added. "The ideals they try to live into tend to be high-minded conceptualizations of God or life or the way things 'should' be. It used to be that they would try to mimic clades in terms of structure, but their idea of what a clade is was batshit insane."

Selena nodded, picking up once more. "The clade analogy was far more common before AVEC. Answers Will Not Help asking that is a way of asking "are they old and batty or young and insane?""

Günay, who had been watching the explanation with something akin to amusement, said, "A lot of that is borne out of just not having a clue how things work, sys-side. I'm a systech, and you don't make sense to me at all."

"Goes both ways, trust me," Debarre said, laughing. "None of this makes sense to me, either, but then I'm the second oldest person in the room."

She grinned, nodding. "Well, even if you don't make any sense, I still like you all."

"We like you, too, Günay," Dry Grass said, stretching her arms over her head. "It is nice to have someone to talk to who is not just trying to keep the bureaucratic definition of peace. Those conversations are for Jonas and Debarre and so on."

"Unfortunately," Debarre grumbled.

"I would like to return to the topic of us still being alive people," she continued, smirking at the weasel. "So the System was restarted thirty or so times in the year-and-change we do not remember. CPV was patched out entirely. A collective tried to kill 2.3 trillion people. We are only just now getting access to extrasystem communications. What have Castor and Pollux been told about this?"

"Right," Günay said, sitting up straighter. "We told them at first that there was a communications issue, and then expanded on that later, once the scale became evident. We said that there had been a massive outage at the Lagrange station, that there were no deaths or anything, but–"

An uncomfortable murmur interrupted her.

"But...uh, well, we mostly said that Lagrange itself was down."

"And what did they say?"

"Well, it's hard to have a conversation with people almost four months away," she hedged. "So I guess we drip-fed information over time. I don't know the specifics; I really am just a systech."

Dry Grass smiled kindly. "Of course, Günay. What did they say in return?"

"To us? A lot of panicked messages requesting as many updates we could give them. Of course, by then, the messages were eight months out of date, and we'd been sending them hourly updates on the status of Lagrange for quite a while. They were broken down into buckets based on content: personal, political, technical, and vague threats." She smiled wryly. "I only really know all of that because I was privy to the technical bucket. Systechs on both of the LVs teamed up and started throwing ideas at us as fast as they could. They were mostly not any help, given the delay, but some of them were useful — especially the Artemisians. They brought casualties down from 15%."

I started to do the math in my head, but Harvey blurted out, "345 *billion!* Holy shit! You've gotta be fucking kidding me."

Günay shrugged helplessly. "We were doing the best we could from phys-side. They had the benefit of being sys-side, and also working without phys-side intervention for like...seventy-five years, you know?"

Shaking his head, Harvey said, "Still, that's fucking wild."

"Were there any other changes that were made?" Dry Grass asked. "You patched out CPV, learned plenty more about instance recovery, managed to turn back memories for trillions of people..."

"Yeah, uh...there's a whole laundry list, one second."

We waited as patiently as we could while the systech tallied up various changes.

*"I cannot believe it has taken them this long to patch out CPV,"* Dry Grass sent Sedge and I.

*"That's the one that got a bunch of your cocladists, right?"* I asked.

*"Well, 'got' is perhaps not a great word for it. Qoheleth was assassinated using CPV loaded into a syringe and a hundred or so instances of Sasha, back when she was True Name, were murdered by Jonas Prime,"* she sent. *"But also it is something that some of us have used intentionally for various reasons. Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled, our very weird instance artist, included it quite often in its exhibitions, and What Gifts We Give We Give In Death tried using it in some games they were designing, but it was seen as too transgressive and was roundly shut down. Answers Will Not Help seemed...not* too *put out by that little display"*

Sedge stifled a giggle beside me. *"You guys are* all *weird."*

Dry Grass smiled proudly over at us. *"Our finest trait, my–"*

She cut off as Günay cleared her throat. "Alright, I have a list of changes", she said, and began reading off a list that appeared in translucent letters against the front of the AVEC stage area. "CPV was patched out; ACL permissions were hardened for sim isolation, allowing for locking cladists *in* sims as well as out of them; storage was optimized; some physical components were replaced, no clue which; AVEC improvements; Ansible improvements; merging improvements; and systech tools refined. There's a slew of others we're waiting on confirmation from you all before implementing: improvements to perisystem clade listing that would provide better statistics on who all is extant, which I guess has privacy ramifications; a solution for splitting the physical components of the System hardware was successfully tested, but that will mean production and deployment time, as well as downtime; limited per-sim Artemis-style skew; and some political tools to reduce anarchy."

"'*Reduce* anarchy?'" Jonas Fa said, snorting. "Fuck off with that."

She held up her hands defensively. "Hey, like I said, it's just a change, and I'm just a tech."

"I am sorry, Günay," Dry Grass said. "You are right that that is a conversation for another time. Tell us about these ACL improvements and merging improvements. Those are likely to be the most relevant to everyone here."

"Right," she said, frowning. "Well, the ACL improvements allow locking cladists within sims. We needed this to contain the perpetrator as quickly as possible, but left it in place. We came up with a suggested protocol with the ethics committee, though, that would mean a two step approval process — phys-side and sys-side — as well as a mandatory waiting period. It's disabled for now, but we can re-enable it whenever.

"The merge improvements involve finer-grained conflict management, which is more just an efficiency thing; we're told nothing changed subjectively. We also enabled cross-tree merging."

A stunned silence followed.

"Holy shit," Selena murmured. "Cross-tree merging?"

"It seemed like it wouldn't be that big of a deal."

"It really fucking is," Answers Will Not Help said, and despite the hint of joviality that seemed permanently lodged in her tone, her expression was frighteningly serious. "Especially if there is no limit on how far diverged the cross-tree instances are."

"There isn't, no," Günay said cautiously. "Why's it a big deal?"

"Shitloads of reasons," Jonas Ko said. "It changes the nature of a clade a way from a strict tree to a cloud, a gestalt. Have you published this anywhere yet?"

She shook her head.

"Good. Don't."

"Uh...alright," Günay said. "I'll bump that up to admin, though. I don't have control over that."

"Alright. I'll tear Jakub another one, then," Jonas Ko said, smirking.

Günay winced. "Glad I'm not on admin," she said under her breath. "Is there anything else, though? I gotta get back to work. Shame, I like you all more than work."

"We like you too," Dry Grass said, smiling. "If you ever want to upload, you have a place up here set for you."

"I may have to before long. I like you guys, but you've made my life hell with admin," she said, laughing. "They'll either fire me or promote me within the year, just you watch."

"Well, you'll have a place on SERG," Harvey said, grinning lopsidedly. "If you're not sick of dealing with this shit, that is."

Once we'd made our goodbyes and the AVEC call had ended, we sat in silence for nearly a minute. Finally, Sedge said, "Well, holy shit."

Laughter around the table.

"Holy shit, indeed, my dear," Dry Grass said, scooting her chair closer to rest her head on Sedge's shoulder. "I need a fucking nap."

Sedge laughed and patted her shoulder amiably. "You and me both."

-----
