Epigraph

content/read/027.md

@@ -1,111 +1,87 @@
-# RJ Brewster --- 2112
+# Ioan Bălan --- 2305
 
-*"You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways."*
+The grin and sense of pride with which Dear had greeted em with did not last.
 
-Sasha's words, that night in The Crown Pub, pressed in against AwDae. Pushed thoughts out of the way. Blanketed eir mind.
+"Thanks again for the offer of space," Ioan repeated. "I know I was driving \#tracker nuts. I guess I talk to myself."
 
-Ey lingered around the house for a few hours, laying on the floor, poking around in various rooms. All as empty and static as school had been. Eventually, ey paced back outside and across the road to the countless acres of federation-managed open space that abutted the foothills. Ey paced along a few of the trails and deer tracks, mind spinning helplessly through numb hopelessness.
+Silence. Awkward.
 
-There was no birdsong, and while ey occasionally heard the buzz and chirp of insects, ey never saw any.
+"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."
 
-Ey gave up and returned home. Ey wasn't tired by the time the sun went down, but for lack of volition, bundled up all the same in what had been eir old bed and slept.
+"I'll try not to, all the same."
 
-Having gone to bed so early, AwDae awoke before sunrise. Eir alarm clock, still familiar after so long away from this house, told them it was just past four in the morning. *I made it past the witching hour,* the fox thought, then laughed. Something about the idea of time in such a timeless space tickled and upset em all at once. Time! What a concept.
+Dear's partner grinned. Dear merely nodded.
 
-Despite the dark, ey decided on another attempt at exploration. Fog be damned.
+"Hey fox, I'm going to get some writing done. Why don't you show Ioan the gallery?"
 
-Ey slipped out of the house and paced around the neighborhood. Curling streets. Cul-de-sacs. Rows of townhouses. Familiar, all. Ey even made it back down to the school on the hill, searching for unexpected lights left on in the middle of night.
+*"Right, yes, of course!"* Dear straightened up, invigorated at having something to do. Something to declaim about. *"How much art history do you know?"*
 
-The results were negative, unless one counted streetlights in this empty world. All the houses' and the school's windows were dark.
+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."
 
-Ey trudged back up the hill toward home and shut out the darkness. The kitchen light brought little warmth, so ey turned it back off and waited for sunrise.
+*"Let me guess: documentaries?"*
 
-With the fog limiting render distance, sunrise took the form of a slow brightening, almost imperceptible at first. The world around home lifted through greyscale into brilliant color, settling on a teeth-aching azure.
+"Of course."
 
-During eir teens, ey frequently messed up eir sleep schedule enough to see the sun rise. Some days, ey would go down to the school for a run around the track before heading back up to the house again, sweating and invigorated. Or at least tired in a different way.
+*"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?"*
 
-This whole sim seemed designed to, as Sasha had put it, keep em frozen in the past. The act of watching the world brighten and...well, not come to life, but at least gain color tugged at memories of countless days. Of waiting for eir mom to wake and make coffee.
+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."
 
-Coffee.
+*"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."*
 
-AwDae padded back to the kitchen, claws clicking on the hardwood beneath eir feet.
+Ioan jumped at the sudden duplication. Both foxes grinned. The original Dear quit. "Who is the audience for this story, then?"
 
-Prowling through the cabinets revealed startlingly little. The fridge was bare, as well. No food. No dishes, either. On testing, the faucet didn't produce any water.
+The fox laughed. *"Fuck if I know. The universe? That is not my job."*
 
-"What the hell..."
+"I mean, you've got your exhibitions. Don't you have an audience there?"
 
-It didn't make any sense. The whole world was rendered in such loving detail. Why not include things one would expect to be in a house? Lesser sims had running water. Perhaps it was due to the limitations of the sim being run from eir implants? Though ey still doubted that the implants would be able to run something so complex in the first place. Scent, taste, and texture were all available to em --- notoriously expensive to implement --- so why no food? Why no coffee?
+*"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?"*
 
-"All I want is something real," AwDae growled. Fists parked on the counter in front of the sink, ey pressed firmly against the Formica. Tears stung eir eyes and, sagging, ey slowly sunk down to the cool hardwood floor. "That's all I want."
+Ioan shrugged. "I suppose so. It seems a bit like a distinction without a difference."
 
-The sulk lasted a good half hour, with the fox crying off and on. It brought less catharsis than ey hoped. By the time ey levered emself back up onto eir feet, eir backside was numb and tail struck by pins and needles.
+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."*
 
-No coffee. No water. No catharsis.
+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.
 
-Tail hanging limp beneath eir stolen skirt, ey slouched back upstairs to eir room and climbed back onto the bed, laying on eir front, muzzle facing away from the windows and the taunting of the morning. In toward the closet, toward stasis and familiarity.
+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.
 
-Ey ticked off the list of people in eir life who would be thinking of em. Some hopeful connection.
+Ioan found emself wondering what this cyclonic force was reaching towards. What it was destroying.
 
-Johansson was almost certainly stressing out, doubtless stressing the rest of the Troupe in turn. His response to unknown situations was to try and make them into known situations. Put all that nervous energy to work, get things into a state where he could understand them again. Even with another tech handling sound, even if that had gone well, the boss would be jumpy and on edge.
+It was Ioan who broke the silence. "Why are you upset, Dear?"
 
-Caitlin and Sarai would be missing em on a more personal level. AwDae was friendly with the entire company, of course, but it was those two ey had gotten closest to. Sharing that back-channel communication, that private space of the theater sim. Sharing conversation that went beyond the Troupe, beyond theater. If anyone had able to reach eir friends outside of STT, it would be them.
+The fox wilted. *"That obvious?"*
 
-And of eir friends, Sasha was always at the front of the fox's mind. She was the one person, excepting eir parents, who had been in eir life the longest. She was the one who understood em best, even surpassing eir parents. Sasha had to be worried, even with em having been gone for so short a time. She had to be looking for em. The skunk was even listed as eir emergency contact. 
+Ey nodded.
 
-*Or perhaps,* ey thought wryly. *I simply want that to be the case.*
+*"Right. It is the clade."*
 
-Eir parents, always loving but always distant, would be concerned. Ey knew their tendency to freeze up when confronted with the unknown, though. Mom was the type who might sit by eir hospital bed and hold eir hand, as mothers do, but not necessarily the type of person to take action, to do any digging into 'what's and 'why's. Dad would simply be glued in place, unable to deal with any emotions surrounding the event.
+"A disagreement?"
 
-Ey turned eir face to rub it against the pillow, leaving the pillowcase damp from tears. Then grumbled and sat up once again. Scrubbed at eir cheeks. Bristled eir whiskers. Reengaged with physicality.
+*"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."*
 
-Eyes settled on eir bookshelf. Ey pulled down the most weathered book ey could find. Some bit of sci-fi ey had read countless times.
+"And others don't?"
 
-The fox flopped back onto the bed and flipped open to a random page, then frowned. Ey blinked several times, squinted over to the window and back to the page, trying to focus.
+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 words swam across the page. Would not stay pinned in place. Would not form sentences, nor even phrases.
+Stepping over to the next picture, Ioan formulated their response, but was preempted by the fox.
 
-Ey flipped to the first page. The swimming effect slowed, coalesced into legibility.
+*"It is not that I am not. I am, in my own way. But these puzzles..."* It trailed off.
 
-The effect was unnerving. As ey read, words would slip slowly into order, into focus --- though the world around em remained static and sharp --- and with every flipped page, it would take a moment before ey could move on.
+"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."
 
-And this wasn't the book ey remembered.
+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?"*
 
-Eir frown deepened. The story was there, familiar, but the text read more like a retelling. An admittedly quite detailed one, but a retelling all the same. An imperfect memory. It used words AwDae would've used, rather than those the author might have chosen.
+The painting: a landscape, perhaps the prairie just outside. A cloud-dotted sky, nigh photorealistic. And in the middle, a black square.
 
-Setting that book aside, ey pulled another down. The effect repeated itself. Stronger, this time. Ey had a hard time getting the words to settle on the pages, even starting from the beginning. Brow furrowed, ey tried with a few more books.
+Not just black paint, but a black that seemed to eat light. A black the hurt to look at. It made Ioan uncomfortable.
 
-One ey hadn't read yet --- tsundoku, perhaps. Books one always means to read but never gets around to --- was an unintelligible jumble of letters. No, not just letters, but marks that hinted at the idea of what it meant to be a letter. Mere shapes.
+"I think I see why you approached me," ey said. "You are interested in the story, and want someone who lives and breathes stories."
 
-"Well, huh."
+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."*
 
-Still frowning, the fox sat on the edge of eir bed and picked up the original book, thumbing through pages and watching the effect distractedly. Words jumped out. Occasionally a phrase would form, but nothing exact. It was as though the book was deciding what to become from moment to moment based on where ey inserted their claw when flipping through it.
+"The amount that you seem to differ from the rest of your clade is surprising. Are there no other artists?"
 
-Ey hopped to eir feet, skittered back down the stairs to the pack ey had brought from the school, and fished out the scraps of notes. The scrap, the piece of paper with Cicero's DDR votes on it. No swirling, disjointed effect affected this text.
+*"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."*
 
-An hour's exploration later, ey had puzzled out what might be going on.
+Ioan nodded.
 
-Of course AwDae's exocortex wouldn't have the complete text of the dozens of books on eir shelf. How could it? Ey had only ever read them as hard copies, never through any software mediated by the implants. Never on a screen of any kind. So of course ey wouldn't be able to read the books here in the sim, if that sim was confined to eir implants.
-
-And ey was increasingly starting to doubt that the sim *was* bound to eir exo, or any of eir implants.
-
-A midday walk through the open space netted em a hypothesis. A shaky one, but something more plausible than what information ey had been working with.
-
-There likely was some information stored in eir implants. Some few dozen terabytes, maybe. Enough to store a good chunk of data, but not necessarily an entire sim. Certainly not one this big.
-
-Maybe it was that the implants themselves didn't store the sim, or not all of it, but acted as a framework? Maybe AwDae's brain provided all of the information needed to show em a sim, and all the implants did was turn it into an experience. Maybe the implants were a mirror, reflecting memories, recollections, hints and dreams.
-
-That would be why the text of the books was jumbled, and when it wasn't jumbled, it was wrong. It was just eir recollection of the book being mirrored back at em in a way that was tangible. Tangible as much as anything was in this place.
-
-That would explain why ey had been able to smell the seats of the auditorium, too. It was a scent that must've been permanently ingrained in eir memories.
-
-And yet, this was an imperfect sim, based as it was on memories. The school with its countless hours of memory invested in it, had plenty of detail, as did eir home. Yet AwDae was willing to bet that, were ey to go into another house on the block, ey wouldn't find anything. Or perhaps ey wouldn't be allowed in at all. All those locked doors on that first day's explorations. Ey would have no memory of the inside, so why would the minimal system of implants-mirroring-memories be willing to show em anything?
-
-Strange ramifications, here. This meant that eir implants were still acting as implants, but rather than taking signals from eir rig, the 'net, and eir mind, they were only taking in information from eir mind. That meant that everything was still up and running as though ey was delved into the 'net.
-
-Which was absurd, of course. There was no way for the interferites to run without power, without data coming from the NFC pads on eir forehead or the contacts on eir fingers. Ey had been pulled back. Ey had felt that rending, that spike of pain. There was no possible sequence of events that led to this conclusion.
-
-Was there?
-
-Perhaps getting lost was as simple as layer after layer of redundant fail-safes failing in turn, implants remaining on even after contact was lost with the rig.
-
-AwDae sat on the fence bordering the open space, watching the color of the light duck down through golden and into salmon. Ey realized ey would need to be more deliberate in eir search. If ey was limited to places ey had memories of, ey would have to remember just which places those were.
+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."*