## Reed — 2401

"Reed, are you sure?" Rush asked.

I shook my head. "I don't think there's any guarantee that this will do anything like what we're hoping. I think it may actually be quite rough. When I watched Jonas do this, he said it felt really weird, like a really old merge, but also from a vastly different angle, rather than the usual down-tree."

"He, uh..." Sedge said, then cleared her throat. "He actually quit pretty soon after, said it felt like Jonas Fa was living inside of his head before there was any reconciliation."

Rush furrowed vis brow. "Christ, what a trip."

We'd gathered in my home once more, all standing out in the back yard where the sun shone and everything was green, even the little, marshy pond in one corner, even the little impossible statues that Hanne had left scattered on hidden, moss-covered pedestals. It felt like home to me, a welcome change from having spent so much time in the headquarters of late, and the last two nights split between two bedrooms. Eight days after the crash, and a little bit of home sounded nice. A little bit of comfort felt necessary.

"Yeah." I sighed. "Tule and I tried, since I already had their memories anyway, but he wouldn't be able to merge down directly. It was only a few days worth of memories, anyway. It felt strange, but not intolerably so. All the same, I was thinking maybe we'd do it somewhere relaxing so that...whoever the result is can spend however long they want reconciling in peace without having to worry about the outside world or external stimulus. Maybe that foggy pasture sim with the pagoda, maybe somewhere with a bed."

Cress shrugged. "We have a spare bedroom, too, and Dry Grass can stick around in case we need any help."

Tule nodded. "She got back up to speed really quickly, but I guess that's how it goes when you're three hundred something years old."

"Alright. That's a good idea, too."

"You like that pagoda, don't you?" Rush asked, a sly grin on vis face.

I laughed. "It's a nice sim."

"It is! Don't get me wrong. Do you think Jonas being so old is what made it so painful for him?"

"Oh, almost certainly," Sedge said. "A founder who has been slowly going nuts. Jonas Ko forked during Secession and Fa forked a few decades later."

"So before systime 1 compared to Marsh uploading in 178," I added. "And forking dates of 1 and 25, while us oldest forks are less than a hundred. We were, what, systime 180?"

Lily, who had been silent and sullen up until that point, nodded. "Systime 180+11. Individuated, but not to the same extent." She looked away, mumbling, "Enough for some differences in opinion."

Cress sighed. "I get it, Lily. I really do." It stuffed its hands in its pockets, still staring at its cocladist. "But we can sort that out between us later. For now, we'll have to contend with the fact that this new instance is going to have the same argument within them, right? Marsh managed it, so I trust that they'll be able to, but still."

Her shoulders slumped. She nodded again, falling back into silence.

"How about this," I said gently. "We give this a go and just watch to see how it goes. If they quit, they quit. We don't need to push so hard that it becomes a problem. If they stick around, then we can all discuss it together to see how it feels. If they feel closer to Marsh, neat. If not, I guess that's fine, too, and they can decide whether or not to stick around."

"I mean, that sounds alright by me," Sedge said. "Tule?"

He nodded.

"Rush?"

Another nod.

Preempting Sedge, Cress said, "Me too."

"And Lily?"

She stood in silence, staring over at the pond, ringed by reeds and cattails.

"You can say no if you–"

"Yes," Lily interrupted. "Yeah. I'll do it. If nothing else, maybe they'll be able to reconcile all of this shit with the Odists, with you all and Dry Grass. Maybe they'll be able to teach me how to, too."

Cress, Tule, and I all smiled. "Thanks, Lily," Tule said. "Even if not, that you even said that feels good."

She crossed her arms, still looking away.

"So...when do we do this?" Rush asked.

Tearing my gaze away from Lily, I said, "I don't know. We could do it now, even. I imagine it's going to take a while for the reconciling, and it's not like we all need to be there the whole time. Everyone okay with Cress and Tule's spare room? I'll let go of the pagoda I *guess.*"

They laughed.

"They'll probably want a bed if they're going to be laid out with a merge," Lily murmured. "I'll swallow my pride if that helps."

"We can ask Dry Grass for some space," Tule offered.

"No, it's fine," Lily said, finally meeting our gaze again. "Weirdly, I don't have too much of a problem with her specifically, it's just...it's complicated. I don't know how I feel. I'm sorry about the funeral. I was emotional."

I reached out to pat her awkwardly on the shoulder. "Sorry I, uh...hit you."

Cress gave me an awkward look, somewhere between aghast and befuddled, then laughed. "Jesus, Reed."

"We were angry," I said, rubbing a hand over my face. "No excuse, I mean, but I got caught up in the heat of the moment."

Lily snorted. "I mean, so did I, but yeah, apology accepted. We'll work on it."

Cress grinned, shook its head. "Well, I guess come on. We'll set up the spare room and do the merge, and this new instance will be both slapper and victim."

We stepped away, me holding Rush's hand, Sedge holding Tule's, and Lily holding Cress's, to arrive on the stoop in front of the brownstone that was slowly becoming familiar, and yet which already lived in my memories.

The building was in a neighborhood in the New York sim that Dry Grass and I had gone to lunch a few days before. An actual neighborhood, too, with cladists grouped up in little knots, talking on the verge or on other stoops. The mood remained tense and anxious, but there were at least a few laughs to be heard. More than there had been before, at least.

Dry Grass, as it turned out, was already out of the house. Once we stepped inside, Lily looked around, frowning. "Weird taste in art, but okay."

"It's from a few of her cocladists," Tule explained. "Motes did the paintings, Warmth In Fire did the sculptures."

"Oh, hey!" Sedge leaned closer to one of the paintings. "I've met Motes through A Finger Pointing. Cute little skunk. Always looks like she's seven or eight or something. Always covered in paint."

I could see Lily's frown growing deeper, so I nudged everyone towards the stairs. "Come on, bedroom's up and straight ahead. I had an instance stay there last night."

We trooped up the stairs and into the bedroom. Here, despite the decor of the rest of the house, seemed to be a bedroom straight out of Marsh's home. I looked around, taken aback.

*"Lily looked uncomfortable,"* Cress sent. *"I sent an instance to clear out the paintings. They're in the closet."*

I nodded subtly to it. *"Probably a good idea. Besides, a little busy for someone who's probably going to be having a rough time."*

"So," Rush said as we shut the door. "What do we do next?"

"Fork, basically. Then all merge down into one of our instances." I forked as I continued. "I've done it before already, so I'll volunteer my fork. Doesn't matter in the end. It'll be a blithe merge, all memories, no one will have any sense of primary memories, really."

"Won't they wind up looking like you, though?"

I frowned. "I guess so. I can have them look like Marsh last time we met."

"How long ago was that?" Sedge asked.

I shrugged helplessly. "About a decade."

"More recent than me, at least."

"I can do it," Lily said quietly. "I saw them six months ago."

I frowned. "You did?"

"I didn't mean to. We ran into each other."

Sedge laughed. "There are two trillion people on the System. How on Earth did you just run into each other."

"We still have the same tastes, don't we? We still both like automats. We just both happened to go to that Horn & Hardart's."

I snorted. "I just went there, actually. Guess you're right."

Lily only shrugged. When she forked, a short, slight person appeared before her. They were dressed in something akin to sleepwear, though I recognized the soft and loose silk pants, the soft tunic, the thick, cotton shirt, and the shawl akin to what I'd last seen them in. They had changed in appearance, though, aside from that. Their hair was a tousled brown, their skin darker and unblemished, and their expression far more open than I remembered.

"Well, huh," Tule said. "Interesting to see the directions they went. Any idea why?"

"Not really," the new fork said. "I don't have any of their memories."

"Neither do any of us," I added. "That's something we should probably be aware of, too. This will be a lot of Marsh, all of them that comes from our lives, but none of their own that they lived in the years between."

There was silence around the room.

"I'm still in, to be clear," I said, voice sounding almost bashful to my ears. "Just a point to remember."

Sedge nodded, forked. She was followed by Tule and, after a pause, Rush and Cress.

"Well, just need to touch and intend to offer a merge. Lily– er, New Marsh?"

They shrugged. "Works for now. What do I do?"

"You'll be prompted to accept, sort of like how you can accept memories, just an additional step. Then the other one of us quits and you'll get the merge itself."

"Here," my up-tree, Reed#Merge said. "I'll go first."

"Can we do them one at a time, or can we get all of the merges lined up and incorporate in one go?"

"I...don't actually know. We can try."

They nodded, smiled faintly to Reed#Merge, and winked. "Well then...hit me."

Sedge and I laughed.

Reed#Merge took her hand and tilted his head thoughtfully. New Marsh furrowed their brow in a look of discomfort. When Reed#Merge quit, they screwed their eyes shut and let out a shuddering sigh. "Fuck, this feels weird."

Sedge#Merge stepped forward and took their hand. "Ready to try another, or do you want to try and incorporate first?"

"Go ahead," they said hoarsely.

Another thoughtful look, another quitting instance.

New Marsh let out a groan. "Okay okay okay! This'll work, but fuck, you guys, hurry!"

The rest of the clade's forks rushed forward to clasp hands with New Marsh, quitting one by one. By the time Rush got in place, they'd collapsed to their knees and were struggling to breathe.

"Bed!" they gasped. "Please...ugh, turning off...sensorium..."

We helped lift them up to get them into the bed, resting them atop the covers.

They lay there, their eyes still squinted shut and breathing coming in ragged gasps. "Cress first," they whispered hoarsely, then groaned, expression slackening as they let the merge progress.

We stood there for a few minutes, anxious. Cress eventually sat on the edge of the bed, burying its face in its hands to kneed the heels of its palms against its eyes.

"How long will this take?" Lily whispered.

I shrugged, ineloquent.

Nearly an hour and a half later, New Marsh whispered, "Now Reed..."

Two hours later, they said. "Rush...oh! And Sedge...and Tule!"

Tule frowned, leaning closer. "What happened?"

"Reed just merged you all down a few days ago. The memories were already there." They laughed. "He already took care of a lot of the conflicts for me. Thanks, I guess."

"Uh...you're welcome?" I said, then laughed. "Are you all done, then? That was faster than expected."

They shook their head, sitting up in the bed slowly. "Memories are in place, but conflicts are still there. Those will probably take a week or two to sort out, but I can at least function now. It feels...weird. I can see what Jonas meant about it feeling like you all live in my head now, but maybe that'll pass after the conflicts are merged. Hey, can I get a glass of water?"

While Cress ducked out of the room to fetch them water, we all did our best to relax. I was surprised to see just how much tension I bore in my shoulders, just how tightly my hands had been clenched throughout. "Think you'll stick around?" I asked.

They shrugged, then winced at their own apparent soreness, nodding to Cress as it handed over the glass. "I guess for now, yeah. It's not...uncomfortable, just weird. Like having a strange taste in your mouth or wearing a new shirt or something. The conflicts are kind of itchy, but I'm already working on them a little bit."

We talked for a while longer, though descriptions were slim, repetitions of what we'd already heard. It felt weird. It felt itchy. It felt weird. It felt strange. It felt weird. Even having experienced one such merge before, it didn't wholly make sense, and I was left intensely curious. My experience had been so mild, with only a week's worth of memories, rather than dozens of years from five different instances. I had no idea if five hours was good or bad for managing all of that, but we'd always been adept at merging.

"Hey," they said at last, once the line of questions had died down. "What do you say about inviting Vos and Pierre over? Maybe they'd like to meet me."

I winced. I'd been dreading this moment. I'd intentionally not brought up the subject of Marsh's partners, lest that dissuade my cocladists. Admonitions rang in my ears, Hanne's and Dry Grass's. *I'm a bit wary you won't get what you want,* Hanne had said. *The potential for pain,* Dry Grass had said. New Marsh had these memories, now, too, but I had no way of knowing just how close they were to the surface, whether they were even at the forefront of their mind.

There was a long silence that followed as we all seemed to digest the ramifications of this.

"Yeah, I guess," Sedge said warily. "I don't know how it'll go, but yeah."

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A few minutes later, we sat staggered on the stairs before the front door, New Marsh sitting up front, waiting. A knock, hesitant, sounded, and Cress called out from beside Tule, "Come in."

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Vos and Pierre stood frozen, both with their hands raised in a wave, their eyes locked on this new version of their partner, slowly pushing themself to their feet to stand front and center before them.

"Marsh?" Vos croaked?

Pierre only darted forward, nearly taking New Marsh down as he collided with them, arms cinched firmly around their middle with his face buried against their shoulder, sobbing.

Stunned, New Marsh patted awkwardly at his shoulder before slowly enveloping them in a hug.

"What...but they...what?"

"Vos," I said, standing as well and moving to stand beside the pair. "I want you to meet someone."

She swayed on her feet, eventually reaching out a hand to prop herself up against the door jamb.

"One of the changes made in the System during the downtime was to enable cross-tree merging. It hasn't been announced yet, but Sedge and I were at the meetings, so we, uh..."

"I'm all of us," New Marsh said, voice strained from the force of Pierre's hug. "I'm the entire clade. I'm as much of us as I could manage."

Pierre quickly unwound his arms from them, staggering backwards with such hurriedness that he nearly tripped were it not for Vos, there to catch him. "What the fuck..."

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"All of..." Vos, realizing she was all but out of air, gasped for breath. "All of you? *All* of you?"

New Marsh nodded.

"But...but Marsh..." Pierre whispered.

Vos's gaze bore into New Marsh. "You told me something on New Year's Eve, right before you headed up to the study. You looked me dead in the eye and smiled and said something."

They blanched.

"What did you say to me?"

Looking over to me nervously, they began to tremble.

"What did you say to me? Tell me," she said, voice growing louder, higher in pitch, until she was nearly screaming. Pierre quit unceremoniously, and she stomped forward a few paces. "What did you fucking say? What did you say? What did you say, whoever you are?! You said it every fucking year! *What did you fucking say?!*"

New Marsh quailed at her advance, ducking around to hide behind my arm. I could read the way that Cress moved in them, could see that warring with the need to be understood that I felt in myself, the need for my little bargain with grief to work.

Vos's gaze shifted to me. "*You,*" she growled. "This was *your* idea, wasn't it?"

I swallowed dryly and nodded.

She finished her advance in two long strides, hand already winding back, and struck me across the face hard enough to knock me to the side against the wall. I crumpled under the sudden rush of pain, winding up in a jumbled heap on the floor at the base of the stairs. New Marsh darted back as the rest of the clade cried out.

""I'll see you in a few, beautiful"," she spat, tears coursing down her cheeks. "That's what they said, you awful piece of shit. "I'll see you in a few.""

"Vos, I–"

I didn't get the chance to finish. She had already stepped away.

About ten seconds later, a sensorium message hit me with such force, with so much adrenaline, that I slumped over to the side. Regardless of the strength of the message, her words were eerily calm. *"No contact."*

It took nearly a minute of silence before the shock wore off enough for New Marsh to creep back into view, carefully helping me to my feet once more. My lip was split with blood trickling down my chin, and my nose felt broken, though it still looked straight. All the same, I forked as soon as I was calm enough to, letting my still bleeding down-tree quit.

Even hale once more, the memory of pain lingered.

"I need a fucking drink," Lily said. She sounded exhausted. "Come on, I know a place."

-----

The place turned out to be a coffee shop that seemed to specialize in coffee-inspired cocktails.

We stepped first to Infinite Café, an enormous sim that allowed any coffee shop on Lagrange to link an entrance. It took the form of an enormous ring looping up over us with what looked to be thousands of mismatched buildings lining its single avenue. A sign before us announced this to be the cocktails district.

I upped my estimate to tens of thousands.

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We numbly followed Lily as she led us through the incredibly crowded thoroughfare to an unassuming brick building with a glass door. Inside we found a sparklingly white interior, with the bar and tables made of looping and curving slabs of marble. Out front, the ice field of a glacier glinted in the sun. Whether sim echoed bar or the other way around was unclear.

Pausing just inside the door, shielding our eyes against the brightness of so much white, Rush laughed. "Goddamn, what a look."

We sat on the awkward and uncomfortable stools at one of the tall tables huddled in a corner, each nursing our espresso martinis or negronis or Irish coffees.

"Anubias."

We all looked to this new instance of us, this new member of our clade.

"Anubias. I was hunting for more marsh plants while we ordered, and I think I like that one best. Really don't want to be associated with Marsh themself, now."

"Anubias," I murmured, looking the plant up on the perisystem. "Like Anubis?"

They nodded. "God of the funeral rites."

Lily scoffed and shook her head. "Which one of you dumbasses is *that* morbid?"

We laughed.

"That was pretty fucked," Sedge said.

"Yeah." Anubias turned their martini by the stem of the glass between their fingers. "We probably should have asked."

I agreed quickly. "We really should have. I'm not sorry that we went through with the merge, but I *am* sorry that we brought them into it. Vos cut all contact with me. I'm sorry that we thought of this whole thing as rebuilding Marsh. I knew it wouldn't be that on some level, but..." I trailed off, shrugged.

Sedge nodded. "I kind of figured it wouldn't be, too, not after seeing the new Jonas stumbling like that."

"Yeah. I'm sorry, you all."

Lily shrugged. "We knew what we were getting into, at least mostly. We all agreed."

"You seem weirdly relaxed," I said. "Actually, you seem almost chipper."

"I got to watch you get punched in the face," she said smugly.

I rolled my eyes.

"Really, though, I feel a lot...I don't know. Lighter, maybe? Like I got a lot off my chest in the process. I'll want to talk with you, Anubias, at some point to keep thinking about this whole Odist thing. Maybe this can be a part of that reconciliation."

They nodded. "Sure."

"But yeah, even just going through with this felt like a step forward after however many steps backward. It feels like ages since that dinner at your place, Reed, all that time getting more and more upset."

"Yeah."

Silence fell again as we drank.

"So what do we do now?" Cress asked, downing the rest of their drink in one go.

We all looked around at each other, searching for answers in each other's faces. I let the moment linger. There was, as always, a pressure on me as the oldest to speak up, to be some sort of, if not leader, then at least wrangler-of-opinions.

"Start processing, I guess," I said at last. "Send letters to the LVs, catch up with friends, spend time with loved ones, and start processing whatever the world has become."
