Epigraph

content/read/004.md

@@ -1,85 +1,47 @@
-# RJ Brewster --- 2112
+# Ioan Bălan --- 2305
 
-RJ slid eir hands from the cradles and leaned back from the headrest, letting out a full-fledged yawn, pent up from the interferites preventing it. The sound and motion startled Priscilla from across the room. Ey levered emself up out of eir seat and trudged over toward the still-purring cat, stroking over her ears when she bunted her head up against eir hand.
+Ioan Bălan awoke to an urgent message.
 
-Eir mind foundered in a slurry of work, of Cicero's disappearance, of school with Sasha, of honing and forging.
+Ey didn't really like these, the sensorium messages. Much better to received paper messages. Letters. Notes. Missives. Scrawled signatures and careful handwriting.
 
-"I'm wiped, Prisca," ey informed the cat.
+Ey mostly just liked paper, if ey was honest. Always accruing more paper, more pens. Paper messages, rich messages attached to paper that played on its surface, ones that messed with the reader's sensorium; ey sent them all. Eir friends found it perhaps a little disturbing. Antiques from a world more physical than this.
 
-She purred louder.
+But to have one that just barged in on eir vision and endocrine system like this made em anxious. This one included a tiny jolt of adrenaline as an alert. Waking up to a zap of panic to have a partial sensory takeover felt rude.
 
-Smiling, ey peeled eir shirt off over eir head and slipped out of eir jeans. Tomorrow's rehearsal would mean full dress for everyone and makeup for the actors. Ey'd have to make sure eir tux was clean. Should ey iron it? Maybe ey should iron it. Later.
+At least ey didn't have to get out of bed to deal with it.
 
-For now, as it neared two, ey focused on making sure the door was locked and the lights were out before stumbling over to bed.
+The opacity on the message was turned up high so that even in eir dark room with eir eyes closed (and heart still pounding), ey could see the fox. Bipedal, dressed sharply. It was sitting on a plain wooden chair situated in an empty room. The room had wood floors the same color as the chair. Something light: maple or pine. The walls were concrete where they weren't glass. Outside the glass was a sere shortgrass prairie, a cloudy day.
 
-Ey flipped the screen down on eir rig to send it to sleep and wandered over to the bed. There seemed to be no shaking Sasha and all of her talk of high school, gone this last decade now, out of eir head. Even as ey climbed into eir narrow mattress and burrowed beneath the covers against the chill of the night, ey was replaying memories from school. Scenes from the Americas. A worn out film, dim and scattershot.
+The combination of the fox's white fur, glistening and iridescent, combined with the room and landscape was all so painfully postmodern. Ey didn't think emself much of a pomophobe, but this was...intense, to say the least.
 
-Honing and forging, honing and forging.
+*"Hi Mx Bălan,"* the fox was saying. It seemed to speak in italics, though how, Ioan could not say. A sense. A sensation. *"I have a proposition for you."*
 
-Ey and Sasha had tried dating early on. After a few weeks of it not going anywhere, they had both admitted that they had felt pressured into having a relationship rather than actually wanting one. Good boys and girls fell in love with other good boys and girls, right? Went out to the movies. Kissed beneath the bleachers or something. Pretended they didn't have sex.
+Ioan grunted. The message was simplex, thank goodness. One way. No interaction required.
 
-The relationship petered out, rather than ending in some climactic fashion. They had continued the trend of going to movies, and later to live performances. They had never lost touch, at least.
+*"My name is Dear, Also, The Tree Was Felled --- or just Dear --- and I am a member of the Ode clade. I am an artist--"* The word seemed to come with a tone of distaste. *"--and...performer. I am not just telling you this to, ah, toot my own horn, I believe the phrase is, but to underline the fact that I am woefully unprepared for the situation at hand."*
 
-Sasha had gone on to have a string of other relationships, some earnest and some not, some more intense than others --- a string that remained unbroken, if tonight's conversation was any clue --- but RJ had stopped there.
+The fox smiled, looking tired, and continued. *"I need some help finding someone. Someone that does not want to be found. It is personally important, but also potentially damaging to the image of our entire clade."*
 
-The intensity of the social pressure to date throughout high school was equaled only by RJ's complete apathy toward the whole scene. Apathy or, often, antipathy. Ey'd felt the occasional twinge of romantic attraction, perhaps, but the expectation of sex that went along with the process so put em off that ey had instead buried emself in work.
+Ioan furrowed eir brow.
 
-Ey did well in some courses and not in others, as any kid might, but in the subjects ey enjoyed, ey dumped all of eir effort. Huge gusts of energy that drove em forward.
+*"This person has information, a name, that they have supposedly shared. We --- the other members of my clade and myself --- do not precisely know if they actually did, unfortunately, we just have word from some perisystem notification that someone said the Name."* Ioan could hear the capital letter.
 
-Ey had started early on in working the school's old sound board in the theater Ey ran plays. Ey ran concerts. Ey ran assemblies and lectures and conferences, quickly earning the trust of the other tech crew, as well as the staff.
+*"I am sorry, I am getting sidetracked by details."* The fox shook it's head, ears flopping from side to side. *"I try to be prepared for conversations and messages like this, but I am a little worked up. Excited, I guess. Can we meet?"* It listed an address. *"Even if only to talk. Even if you are not interested, I would still like to meet you. You seem neat."*
 
-And then ey gained leadership. Prestige.
+The message ended.
 
-The various computer classes had captivated em as well, and for eir sixteenth birthday, eir parents had surprised em with the implants needed for full interfacing with a rig. Or, well, "surprised": eir father was an engineer and eir mother a fairly forward-thinking person, and they had promised em the procedure before university.
+Ioan lay in bed, thinking. It was still an hour before ey had to get up, and ey was loath to start the day before ey had to. Ey tried eir best to sleep for another ten minutes, at least, but eir mind kept slipping back to Dear's request.
 
-Honing and forging, honing and forging.
+*Why me?* ey asked the backs of eir closed eyelids. *Why hire a writer who fancies emself a historian as...what, a private investigator?*
 
-It was a straightforward procedure in an outpatient office, self-guided implants largely installing themselves. The worst had been the itching. It was bearable on eir hands and along eir spine, where the implants and exocortex breached the surface of eir skin, because at least ey could scratch, though ey had been cautioned not to. The NFC tags in eir forehead and the interferites embedded deeper --- far, far deeper --- led to an itch that no scratching would ever reach.
+Ey spent a few minutes researching the public basics on Dear. Pronouns (it/its), species (fennec fox), age (old --- the Ode clade was an early adopter), some of its art. Really out there stuff. No further hints as to why it would need em in particular. Something on the markets piqued its interest, perhaps?
 
-From there, sound and the rig had taken up all of eir energy, leaving little time to worry about any social stigma that went along with aversion to romance. Ey was simply the nerdy sound kid who knew more about computers than the teachers.
+With still a half hour before eir alarm, Ioan stretched out of bed. The least ey could do was get a shower and some coffee. If there were any reason that the founders of the system had included full sensoria in the works it must have been for those.
 
-It hadn't always been fun, of course, but by then ey quickly learned that the more ey put into the task, the more ey got out of it. The more ey honed, the further ey went.
+Those done and clothes donned --- ey knew ey could never out-natty the fox, so the usual faux-academia garb it was --- ey penned Dear a short note with a time. If it was day in that sim, or even late afternoon, it should get the note before dinner or bed.
 
-That ey had found furry in high school seemed almost a natural progression. Working and improving at the art of interfacing in a way that felt natural to em, it seemed, came just as natural to others on the 'net. Ey moved effortlessly through the Crown Pub and a few other choice spaces, slowly crafting the primary persona that ey used when interacting with others.
+*Besides,* ey thought. *Maybe it will get the fox to stop using sensorium messages.*
 
-A fennec. AwDae, a corruption of eir chosen name. A corruption borne of the intricacies of a thoroughly vulpine muzzle. A persona honed to a fine point.
+No luck. Less than thirty seconds later, Ioan received a sensorium ping of acknowledgment, a shiver up eir spine for eir trouble.
 
-It was then that ey and Sasha had really started connecting, for it was her that introduced em to the community. They started hanging out more, talking more, building a network of friends together. Where dating hadn't worked out, friendship grew in both depth and breadth.
-
-Honing and forging, honing and forging.
-
-The forging of the virtual theater environment had culminated in a scholarship at a big name university out on the east coast. Immersive interactive theater technology, they called it. Forging into honing.
-
-It meant leaving Sasha and a few other close friends behind along with eir family, but it also meant that ey would be at the forefront of a new tech. Something used in production. Films and live work both.
-
-The field had been so new that eir own studies at the university helped fuel the change in theater tech work. Eir dissertation, what was meant to be a simple capstone project, was published and distributed, and theaters around the world were suddenly using immersive tech.
-
-Ey had continued to work at the university for a while. It was one of the few places around with both a theater and the hardware to back it up. Ey had considered continuing eir studies, but the draw of the theater was too heady, too alluring. Academia spelled a life of forging, work one of honing. Why deny one's base nature?
-
-Honing and forging, honing and forging.
-
-The call from London came less than a year after ey graduated. Would ey like to help start a tech-savvy theater group in town? The pay would be slow to start, but the troupe had a loose collection of apartments on the East End. Ey would have full run of the sound department. Yes? When could ey start?
-
-Eir parents had needed convincing. They were pleased, to be sure, but London, so far away! Still in the Western Federation, but so far.
-
-Ey made eir promises that ey'd come and visit every year, and packed eir bags.
-
-Burying emself deeper into the covers and the mattress, leaving enough room for Priscilla to join em later, RJ's thoughts alighted finally on Cicero, on the lost.
-
-Losing Cicero had been a shock. A disappearance, at first. Last seen two days ago. Three. And then it went on. Debarre hollering one night after getting in touch with Cice's family. Lost, lost, he was lost.
-
-And getting lost was rare. Vanishingly so, with perhaps a hundred cases at the time. Still, among those who were counted among the lost, all were heavy interfacers. It was a risk, everyone had assumed, just as was travel. Call it occupational hazard. Something could always happen. Something could always go wrong.
-
-To lose someone so close, though. That hit hard.
-
-It was a sharp reminder of just how much ey relied on the integration tech, not only for work, but for the lion's share of eir social life. Ey enjoyed the company of the troupe just fine. Troupe pub trips were a weekly affair. But eir heart lay among eir friends on the 'net. Eir friends being on the 'net meant more interfacing, and more interfacing meant, it seemed, more risk.
-
-Perhaps more for em than any of eir friends. Eir tech was truly immersive, after all. It was a dissolution of the body. Disembodied in the truest sense.
-
-It was *becoming* the room. It was a new sensory experience. No limbs, no torso, no face or eyes or ears. Or maybe all ears: ey became the room, feeling the way sound echoed or didn't, knowing the limits of the speakers in a deeply physical way. Mics peppering the walls a new sensory input. The wires nerves. The speakers muscles to flex. Instincts, reactions, and actions responding to whole systems of stimuli.
-
-Perhaps that was why ey felt so at risk. They all were, of course, but to dissolve one's concept of a body at work, and then come home to warp the very same concept into that of a fox --- no, a finely wrought amalgam of fox and self --- felt perilously close to being lost, sometimes.
-
-Honing and forging, honing and forging. Risk and reward.
-
-Ey slept.
+Ey forked and sent the copy of emself, \#c1494bf, out to the meeting. Meanwhile, ey'd get some food, perhaps work on eir current project.