Edits for hardcover

content/read/042.md

@@ -48,11 +48,17 @@ A memory: RJ waking a few days? Weeks? RJ waking some time ago, years and years
 
 The tea was cool enough to drink, now, and so AwDae did.
 
-And when ey had half-finished the tea, the fox slid from eir perch on the counter and padded over to eir rig. Frowned. Why bother with such a thing? Instead, in its place should be a small, white room extending past the boundaries of eir flat. And there was.
+And when ey had half-finished the tea, the fox slid from eir perch on the counter and padded over to eir rig. Frowned. Why bother with such a thing? Instead, in its place should be a small, white room extending past the boundaries of eir flat.
 
-And when ey would step into that room, ey would cease to be a fox, but instead become fully immersed in memory, manipulating it with the same ease with which ey manipulated the acoustic space of the theater. And ey did.
+And there was.
 
-And when ey might think about what memories ey had, ey would find there, whole and uncorrupted, all of the information ey had been prowling through on Cicero's disappearance. No riddles to solve, no tricks, no mics, no paper. Ey would be able to expand across that sense that passed for sight in a fully immersive sim the entirety of the data. And ey could.
+And when ey would step into that room, ey would cease to be a fox, but instead become fully immersed in memory, manipulating it with the same ease with which ey manipulated the acoustic space of the theater.
+
+And ey did.
+
+And when ey might think about what memories ey had, ey would find there, whole and uncorrupted, all of the information ey had been prowling through on Cicero's disappearance. No riddles to solve, no tricks, no mics, no paper. Ey would be able to expand across that sense that passed for sight in a fully immersive sim the entirety of the data.
+
+And ey could.
 
 AwDae dreamt. Dreamt of work. Dreamt the table of Cicero's DDR votes, dreamt that it rotated in beautiful precision along any axis ey wished. Dreamt of the other cards in the deck, of recorded conversations and notes and last-connected times. Ey dreamt eir way through all of the data packed into the deck of vcards Sasha had given em so very, very long ago.
 
@@ -76,14 +82,14 @@ And ey dreamt of Sasha. Ey dreamt of everything about her. The subtle scent of d
 
 She was all there. All of her avatar. What ey remembered of their final conversation could be played out from start to finish between skunk and fox in perfect detail. Detail that could not be anything other than perfect. Detail that had to be perfect because eir exo had cached the skunk's av, just as it had cached eir flat and the Crown Pub.
 
-But she was not all there.
+But she was *not* all there.
 
 She was not there at all. Her avatar was a hollow shell that AwDae could make parrot her lines. It was a puppet. It was a sensory representation without context. A sign without an object, signifier without the signified.
 
 AwDae was in a hall of mirrors that allowed no one else but emself. She was not there and she could not be there because AwDae was lost, and when one is lost, one is alone in ways more fundamental than could be dreamt of in any solipsist's philosophy.
 
-What lives we lead we lead in memory, and the end of memory lies beneath the roots.
+*What lives we lead we lead in memory, and the end of memory lies beneath the roots.*
 
-Ey could not forget, for memory ends at the teeth of death and is wholly inaccessible to the living, because the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.
+Ey could not forget, for *memory ends at the teeth of death and is wholly inaccessible to the living, because the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing.*
 
 And ey could not cry thus immersed.