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# Ioan Bălan --- 2305
# Dr. Carter Ramirez --- 2112
The grin and sense of pride with which Dear had greeted em with did not last.
Carter dreamed of shadows.
"Thanks again for the offer of space," Ioan repeated. "I know I was driving \#tracker nuts. I guess I talk to myself."
And through it all, there was the river: the muddy, sometimes stinking river. The Thames which only seemed to engender affection that one might call 'grudging'. When she had first moved to London, it had been her guide. The Thames was always vaguely downhill, the slope her Y-axis. And on the X-axis, the bridges. Tower, London, Southwark, Millenium II, Blackfriars Rail, Blackfriars Memorial. Tick marks along a waterline.
Silence. Awkward.
And in her dream, she walked aimlessly along the south bank. The constant renovation of the area had led not to one great revival, but countless smaller ones. Buildings were torn down and raised back up, plots of land chopped into ever smaller portions. Those same buildings growing higher, never quite managing to match.
"Of course." Dear's partner picked up when the fox did not reply. "You can stay as long as you'd like. It's no trouble. You could probably scream bloody murder over there and we wouldn't hear."
Strode past towers, squat pubs. Some old, some new. Mostly new.
"I'll try not to, all the same."
Strode past people and crowds, buskers and food carts.
Dear's partner grinned. Dear merely nodded.
Strode beneath bridges, along railings, past tour boats gliding silently along the surface of the water.
"Hey fox, I'm going to get some writing done. Why don't you show Ioan the gallery?"
And she passed shadows.
*"Right, yes, of course!"* Dear straightened up, invigorated at having something to do. Something to declaim about. *"How much art history do you know?"*
And the shadows were like the people of the crowds. A little taller perhaps, but still just like the people. It was as though someone had cut a person-shaped hole out of space, blurred the edges, vignetted, pinched the light.
Ioan stood to follow Dear as it padded from the living room back to the front of the house where the gallery was situated. "I studied photography and imaging quite a bit before uploading. Film, too."
And it wasn't through prolonged observation, she was just suddenly aware of the fact that the shadows were all behaving in the same way. Always following one of the people. Same pace. Same gait. Somehow more sinister for that exactitude. Always following just one person, never changing, never looking around at anyone else.
*"Let me guess: documentaries?"*
And no one else seemed to see or notice these shadows except her.
"Of course."
And she started tailing one of the shadows. Quietly. Unobtrusively. Followed it following a young black woman pushing a pram. Another young child walking at her side. His hand curled loosely in the fabric of her pants. Constantly in touch.
*"You seem like the type, yes. An historian searches for stories in the past."* True to eir guess, Dear was now smiling more easily. It gestured to a painting on the wall. *"All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?"*
And Carter struggled to keep up. The harder she tried to keep pace, the slower she seemed to go.
The speech felt rehearsed, all those questions. A lecture? It hooked Ioan all the same. "I suppose that is what an instance artist is, then? Finding the stories inherent in forking."
And she tried to call out.
*"Yes. Forking is instantaneous, or might as well be, and yet in that instant, a story is told. There is a question implied to which the answer is 'I must create a copy of myself'. Is it to accomplish a task, like you have done? Is it to sequester some emotion unable to be contained by one mind?"* Dear forked, another instance of it standing to the other side of Ioan. *"Perhaps it is to prove a point."*
And her voice came out only as a whisper.
Ioan jumped at the sudden duplication. Both foxes grinned. The original Dear quit. "Who is the audience for this story, then?"
And the shadow reached out it's hand.
The fox laughed. *"Fuck if I know. The universe? That is not my job."*
And the shadow's fingers slid through the woman's hair reaching for the base of her scalp.
"I mean, you've got your exhibitions. Don't you have an audience there?"
And Carter screamed, inaudible.
*"Those who attend the exhibitions do get to watch and participate, yes. But are they truly the audience? If they are reacting to my work, and I am immediately reacting in turn, does that not make them part of the story, instead?"*
-----
Ioan shrugged. "I suppose so. It seems a bit like a distinction without a difference."
The dream dogged Carter through her morning routine and into her commute. She kept thinking, if she'd just been able to keep quiet, maybe she could have seen what would've happened when that young mother was touched by the shadow. Some sort of metaphor for getting lost? Or was her sleeping mind just carrying too much work-burden into the night?
Dear made a graceful setting-aside gesture, as though the statement was in some way irrelevant. *"All this to say that, for all of my fancy shenanigans, I still see the stories in the art around me. This painting --- a replica from way back when --- tells a story with the image it shows, yes, but also with its construction. The paint is applied with a palette knife in thick globs, see? It looks haphazard, but it is not. It is very carefully done. The story is the artist's choice in tools, in technique, as well as in the subject of the painting."*
She was only able to dispel the lingering sense of too much meaning when she got into work and checked her email for news. No additional cases added to the research load. She realized she half expected a new one. Young, female, black, mother.
The painting itself showed a riot of colors. Abstract, and yet hinting at some cyclonic force. Blue on green. Splotches of purple, of red. The paint shone under the lights.
Just a dream, then.
Ioan and Dear stood in front of the painting a minute longer, each thinking their thoughts. The fox, with its paws clasped behind its back, looked to be trying to puzzle out the order in which the gobs of paint had been applied to canvas.
After checking her mail on the rig's screen, Carter stood and stretched, making her way blearily to the coffee corner. She was one of the first in that morning. Just Avery and a few other early risers. Thankfully, Avery was the type to leave the coffee pot full rather than empty.
Ioan found emself wondering what this cyclonic force was reaching towards. What it was destroying.
She doctored her coffee to her specifications and ambled back to her desk, setting the mug down on the smooth surface. She spent a few minutes scrolling aimlessly through her mail list. She didn't dive in just yet, despite the workload that she knew waited. The fog of the dream had been burned away, but there were still too many thoughts that needed organizing. Couldn't yet go through the process of setting up her workspace and ordering stacks of cards.
It was Ioan who broke the silence. "Why are you upset, Dear?"
*No,* she corrected herself. She was *wary* of diving in.
The fox wilted. *"That obvious?"*
She had things she needed to do in the sim. She had things that the sim would help her do quickly. She wanted to start a stack for this Sasha that Johansson had brought up. Wanted to find a way to start making and notating all of those connections.
Ey nodded.
Working in sim was part of her job, as it was for so many others. She had gone into this research project knowing that it was only in sims that people got lost. It had never bothered her before.
*"Right. It is the clade."*
And yet here she was, waffling about whether or not she felt safe delving in to do her work.
"A disagreement?"
She sighed, sipped her coffee, shook her head. Then set her hands in the cradles and rested her head against the headrest. Nothing for it.
*"Of sorts. A silent one, or one on a very base level. I believe there is a story here. There is something going on that is worth researching and learning about and getting to the bottom of."*
Within her spare, black space, Carter prowled through the stacks she had started on this little side project. Invisible to others, she created a private stack within the string-delineated area, next to the pendant "Possible acquaintances" card. Private cards showed up with a subtle blue tinge to her, and would only appear on her view of the workspace.
"And others don't?"
On the first card in the stack, she transferred over the notes she had taken with Johansson. Then she started another card labeled "Sasha?" and added it to the stack.
Dear shrugged. *"I am perhaps in a minority, on this subject. I think that there is a story, and there are a few others who see it my way. Most of my branch does. But much of the clade is concerned only about the Name."*
The whole stack was looped up to RJ's card with a piece of cotton string. Others would be able to see that she had created the stack with the string trailing off to a faint outline of a deck, or a grayed out pack of cards, or however their view of the sim chose to represent the data.
Stepping over to the next picture, Ioan formulated their response, but was preempted by the fox.
Strictly speaking, she shouldn't be doing this. Such cards were intended to be for short notes to oneself about what one was working on, not for actual investigative work. This was something new. She wasn't supposed to have this information.
*"It is not that I am not. I am, in my own way. But these puzzles..."* It trailed off.
Carter stepped back to look at the whole cordoned off section of data. She frowned. Never mind the information, was she even supposed to be doing investigative work? She was supposed to be utilizing the data that the hospitals and the university provided her with, not running out into the field and talking with acquaintances of the lost over pints after a show.
"Are they the story?" Ioan frowned, backtracked. "You think there's a reason you're being led down the path. The puzzles are part of the story, but they are, as you put it, the answer to the question that necessitated their creation."
Sanders would have a fit if he knew what she was up to.
Ears perked, grin returned. *"Yes. Puzzles are puzzles and sometimes worth solving in their own right. I want to know **why**, though. Why say the Name, yes, but why build up tension like this?"*
Even so, she wasn't quite sure it was only that which drove her to make the stack private. Some hunch. Some shadow lurking behind her.
The painting: a landscape, perhaps the prairie just outside. A cloud-dotted sky, nigh photorealistic. And in the middle, a black square.
Not just black paint, but a black that seemed to eat light. A black the hurt to look at. It made Ioan uncomfortable.
"I think I see why you approached me," ey said. "You are interested in the story, and want someone who lives and breathes stories."
That grin widened, and was joined by a swish of a tail. *"Precisely that. There is art to be had here. It is stressful and, if my suspicions are correct, it bears a message beyond just...what, a jape? A jab at the clade? There is a point to be made here."*
"The amount that you seem to differ from the rest of your clade is surprising. Are there no other artists?"
*"Oh, we're all artists of a sort. Actors, mostly. A few sim designers. One of the other stanzas' lines painted this,"* it said, nodding to that unnerving black square. *"But yes, we are all quite different. Perhaps you will see some day."*
Ioan nodded.
Dear's grin had faded to some expression more thoughtful. Thankfully, not as glum. When it spoke, its voice came from some place remote. From some emotion happening elsewhere, to someone else. *"Artists, yes, but increasingly few storytellers."*
She needed to be more subtle about this than she had been.