Epigraph

content/read/024.md

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-# RJ Brewster --- 2112
+# Ioan Bălan --- 2305
 
-AwDae was unsurprised to find home unlocked.
+Ioan sat, startled, as Dear quit abruptly, leaving em sitting alone at the cafe table. There was a certain peculiarity to that fox's sense of humor, and while ey was slowly picking up on it, the occasional bafflement remained.
 
-Although the front door had always been locked when growing up, the fact that this whole sim seemed oriented around riddles meant of course ey'd be able to gain entry places ey knew. Clues, right?
+Ey took eir time finishing eir coffee, enjoying the view. A thoroughfare. Small crowds --- some doubtless generated for effect. Enjoyed a moment's downtime before getting back into the puzzle at hand, then stood and straightened eir slacks.
 
-Ey checked the other doors in the complex to test the hypothesis. All locked.
+Well, at least ey had more information to work with.
 
-There was no bracing for the surge of emotion and memory as AwDae stepped into the entryway of eir old home. Cool tile. Tattered rug. Coat hooks where they were supposed to be.
+"Welcome back," #tracker said when ey arrived at home. "You have some mail."
 
-No coats. The sense of desertion was overwhelming. And yet.
+Ey frowned, tugged the cream-colored envelope from the edge of the desk and turned it over in eir hands. Blank except eir signifier on the front, flap sealed on the back. Perhaps something about what ey'd been working on recently had piqued some interest on the reputation exchange. Another offer? And yet directly to this instance.
 
-And yet, ey felt as though eir mom could be just around the corner in the kitchen, prowling through the fridge, her boyfriend laid out flat on the couch, snoozing in front of the TV running old science fiction shows. And yet ey knew --- knew on some fundamental level --- that the house was empty.
+Making eir way out to the deck, ey popped the seal on the envelope, savoring the subtle tearing of the paper where the adhesive held fast. The paper was quite nice, the handwriting cramped and awkward, but legible in its green-tinged blue ink. Someone had put real effort into this.
 
-Perhaps it was that it was all too silent. Silent as school had been.
+> Ioan
+>
+> Dear has mentioned your aversion to sensorium messages, and I gather from your taste in clothing and our brief meeting that you have a certain aesthetic you enjoy. I hope that this scrap of note suits you well. The paper seemed up your alley, at least.
+>
+> You'll have to forgive Dear. It really is stretched quite thin with its gallery show, and with the increased intraclade communication, it is feeling the pressure to keep forks to a minimum, as apparently there are no further names available. (It hasn't told the rest of the clade how many illicit forks it has. I suspect they all do.)
+>
+> There is more to this that I think it is not sharing explicitly, but we've been together for a few years now, and I have my guesses. I think the intraclade attention is not precisely welcome. Having met some of its cocladists, I'm inclined to think that some more conservative types are being less than generous with their treatment of the subject at hand. Perhaps with their information as well.
+>
+> All this to say that there is a reason for the fox acting the way it is. I will not apologize on Dear's behalf, it knows me better than that, but I hope an increase in transparency as to what all is going on in the family politic will help.
+>
+> Visit soon.
 
-AwDae shrugged out of the rucksack and set it down in the entryway. It was precisely the space where rucksacks went. It was precisely the space where ey had set eirs countless times growing up. Ey did as ey had always done and Despite bracing emself for it, there was still padded into the common area, toenails clicking against the tile of the entryway, and then the hardwood floor. Floors which had never seen fox paws.
+Ioan smiled, re-folded the letter, and replaced it within its envelope. It joined the small pile ey kept.
 
-The sensation, that uncanny mix of *home* and *wrong*, quickly grew to overwhelming. The fox sat down on the rug in front of the coffee table. Eir spot. Eir spot, where ey had sat to eat dinner countless times. Eir spot, where ey watched TV, those old sci-fi movies, with eir mom's boyfriend.
+Dear's partner had a good heart, and it was indeed a relief to learn that some of the fox's erratic behavior was attributable to stress. None of eir family had uploaded, and, by eir very nature, ey did not create eir own as the Odists had.
 
-It was one thing for the house to be so painfully empty and another entirely to be here as AwDae and not RJ. Perhaps ey could have held each of those concepts in eir mind independently, were ey to only experience one at a time. The two combined were too much. Ey felt eir breath as short, shallow gasps. Ey felt eir vision constricting. Ey felt eir heart race no matter how still ey sat. Ey felt all these things happening to em with an increasing sense of detachment. Ey found it hard to concentrate on what ey was even supposed to be.
+Ey did not envy it now.
 
-*Is my pulse elevated offline, wherever that is?*
+-----
 
-Ey let out a strangled laugh. Perhaps there existed in that space some doctor's befuddled stare at the sudden signs of anxiety showing in their patient.
+The archive itself was a free-form database stored in the perisystem. It could hold essentially unlimited data in truly unlimited formats. Everything from text and structured data to full-sensorium recordings. Each blob of data was stored in a node, and nodes could be tagged and linked.
 
-The laugh turned to sob, stopped quickly.
+Unfashionable and difficult to work with, not to mention expensive to maintain, Ioan wasn't entirely clear why they had been added to the system. Exocortices had been around before the system itself. More personal, easier to interface with. Harder to share, granted.
 
-AwDae leaned forward, stretching eir legs out behind em. Ey laid flat on eir floor, on eir oh-so-familiar rug, bafflingly present in eir bafflingly present home. Laid flat, then rolled over onto eir side. Eir tail lay limp against the short pile of the rug behind em.
+Some remnant from its construction, perhaps?
 
-*How had this happened? What did I do? Why here? Why me? What did I do to deserve this?*
+Luckily, as an historian, ey had some experience working with them, even if that experience was decades old at this point. Ey pulled out a fresh sheet of foolscap and began to write, and by writing, interacted with the archive.
 
-Eir mind was awhirl with words. With questions, and only questions. Ey didn't have answers. No answers inside, none before em, none in the house. Answers were a thing that did not-- could not exist here. Answers a thing that happened to other people.
+If archives were difficult to work with, this one doubly so. Nodes that weren't tagged, listed publicly, or linked to from other nodes were essentially inaccessible unless one had access to the index. Ey did not. That was something usually kept within an exocortex.
 
-Ey did not have the mental bandwidth required to do anything other than watch questions swirl. Ey was at a loss for images in this end of days. Ey was an observer. Nothing more than a set of eyes with no will, no drive. No urge to move those eyes as ey watched all of the emotion that had been held at bay, held back with the sense of *doing something* over the last day and change. All that emotion surge.
+And here, few nodes were listed publicly, fewer still were linked to by others, and none were tagged. While traversing a well-pruned archive might still be akin to rifling through a card catalog to dig out books, this was no more than a file box stuffed full of loose papers.
 
-Eir actions had been all wrong. Ey had accepted getting lost with resignation. Ey had leapt at the chance to solve the 'puzzle' of the microphone with something akin to excitement. Ey had found a new set of clothes with a casualness befitting a trip to the thrift store. All this when ey should have been experiencing terror. Doing all these things when ey should have been breaking down into sobs at the fact that ey had been struck with some sort of incurable...what? Incurable disease? Ey was lost.
+Ioan's heart fell.
 
-AwDae noted with increasing dissociation that eir breath was coming in great, choking sobs. Eir perspective, that core of emself that spent life reviewing actions and reactions, watched with cool distance as eir body shook with gasps and tears streaked down over eir cheeks and muzzle, leaving tracks in the short fur. Whatever part of emself was in charge of releasing those pent up emotions had been divorced from the part of emself responsible for actually feeling them. *See? **This** is happening now.*
+Of the nodes that were publicly listed, at least four were encrypted by something stronger than the original AES block. Ioan set those aside to knock against later. Another was a simple text blob with twenty-three blocks of five letters each. Further encryption? A different type? Ey could not guess which. Dear had mentioned one involving playing cards.
 
-*It's the emptiness,* that part of em thought. *This place was home, and the knowledge of being permanently removed from such a thing, from anything home-shaped or any sense of belonging, has led to this. There's no one here, and no one at school.*
+That left only three public nodes, one of which was an error. The other two...
 
-"No ranks of angels will answer to dreamers."
+Ioan's muscles went rigid. The first appeared to be a deleted blob of audiovisual data which referred to the second. A transcript of the conversation Ioan had had with Dear earlier that day.
 
-Words unbidden were calming. The heaving gasps for air began to slow, and ey wiped eir tears away in a smooth, slicking motion that flattened eir tall ears against eir head.
+They were being watched. Followed.
 
-Struggling to bring those two parts of emself into alignment once more, AwDae levered emself up heavily. Ey leaned on one paw while the other straightened the fur of eir face, brushing the last aftershocks of that non-sadness away in a careful, calculated gesture. Intentional. A setting-aside of emotion.
+Ey read through the transcript once, then again, more thoroughly. There were a few notes made by this Qoheleth. They spoke of a familiarity that had only been hinted at with the previous letter. *Our Dear*. What did that mean?
 
-Perhaps eir initial reaction had been wrong on the emotional side, but correct on the intellectual. Ey would have to at least figure out why. There would be no sharing it, no telling others, no end game other than the knowledge of a task complete.
+Perhaps this individual was part of the clade itself?
 
-It was just the only thing left here in this null space that had any meaning.
+Ioan frowned. The vehemence with which Dear --- whom ey suspected was one of the more liberal of the Odists --- had reacted when ey had asked about the author of the ode itself seemed to rule that out. If Dear, willing to bring on an amanuensis, was that protective, ey found it dubious that one of its cocladists was Qoheleth.
+
+A friend, then? Mutual with the poet?
+
+That was something ey would have to ask Dear about. Ey could speculate all ey wanted, but there was little ey could divine about that aspect.
+
+The rest, then. Qoheleth seemed to be expecting that things were accelerating toward some sort of conclusion. *I may have less time than I had thought.*
+
+And Ioan was being guided, somehow.
+
+"How? Guide me how?" ey growled down at the paper. "It's all fucking encrypted."
+
+\#Tracker looked up, frowned.
+
+Ioan\#c1494bf shook eir head and apologized. Perhaps ey *should* take Dear up on the offer to stay with it and its partner.