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-# Codrin Bălan#Pollux --- 2325
+# True Name --- 2124
 
-Interview with Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled#Pollux  
-On the reasons for vesting entirely in the launch  
-Codrin Bălan#Pollux  
-Systime: 201+25 1014
+The next meeting spot for the Council of Eight was in a rooftop bar. However, given that that rooftop bar was in the midst of a block of apartment buildings and vertical malls that had built with shared walls, such that there was a cubic half-mile of stair-climbing, elevator rides --- down as well as up --- and trestles that bridged buildings of lower height than higher ones, it was more adventure getting to the venue than the meeting itself promised.
 
-> **Codrin Bălan#Pollux:** Before we get into the heavy stuff, how are you feeling?
-> 
-> **Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled#Pollux:** [laughter] You are going to have to be more specific, my dear. Do you mean my general disposition?
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Yes. I just want to see how you're feeling before all these discussions, then afterwards, I'll ask the same thing and we can see how the topic influences you.
-> 
-> **Dear:** Clever, clever. Well, I am feeling fine. It has been a good day, and it was a good night last night. For the record, I hosted a get-together of those interested in instance-art, so it was bound to tickle my fancy.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Good. Have you noticed any difference in that realm of late?
-> 
-> **Dear:** No.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Alr--
-> 
-> **Dear:** I take that back. Sorry for interrupting. I take that back. I have noticed that about the same number of people showed up to the gathering as used to on the old System.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** How do you mean?
-> 
-> **Dear:** Well, only a portion of us transferred, yes? I would have thought that this would have lowered the attendance at such events. I have also noticed, in looking around, that the majority of our fellow travellers are dispersionistas.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** I know that May Then My Name has some stats on that. It might be interesting to see.
-> 
-> **Dear:** [nodding] That would be interesting, yes. You had a goal for this interview, though, so shall we get to that?
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Yes, might as well. I am curious, first, why you decided to travel on the launch. Was there anything in particular that drew you to the idea?
-> 
-> **Dear:** Other than the fact that I am a hopeless romantic? [laughter] There were a few. I am a hopeless romantic, yes, and --- I will not actually be able to see them --- I want to see the stars. I want to be one of the lucky few, or few billion, who get to travel between them. Another is that, when one is functionally immortal, boredom is a very real problem. I do not like being bored, and after something like two hundred years sys-side, I was getting perilously close.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** So it's a sense of adventure?
-> 
-> **Dear:** I suppose, though that brings to mind something more active than this is, to me. I hear adventure and I think sneaking behind enemy lines or guns at dawn. It is a desire for the new and interesting. Not just that there be new and interesting things going on around me, but that those new and interesting things change me in some deep way. I like stasis even less than boredom, and uploads are at risk of falling into patterns familiar enough to be considered stasis.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Is there an aspect of being the first to do something involved?
-> 
-> **Dear:** Perhaps. I am not against being something other than the first, but I do like it when I am.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Did you have other reasons for transferring?
-> 
-> **Dear:** A few, though they are less easily put to words. If you remember the Qoheleth business, there is some of that involved. I have been unable to forget what he said, and beyond the very literal sense that it was couched in. If we are doomed to forever remember everything, then the only way --- or perhaps one of the only ways --- to relegate something completely to memory is through inaccessibility. If I-- if all instances of Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled were to quit, then there would be no more objective instance of myself for others to remember.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** I would prefer that you not.
-> 
-> **Dear:** [laughter] I have no plans on it. If exploring this strange mystery were a project, then I would not be served by not being around to complete it. The launch gives me a chance to do that very thing.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Perhaps you could say that you would go from being someone who is remembered to someone who is missed? Does that sound like a fair assessment?
-> 
-> **Dear:** [excited] Yes. Yes! That is it precisely. If we are doomed to forever remember everything, then the closest we can get to being forgotten is to turn memory into longing.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** You mentioned a few more reasons. Do you have others?
-> 
-> **Dear:** Even less easily put to words. I like the idea of relativity. The faster we go, the more our perception of time will drift. I like the idea of the ever-increasing transmission times. Already, we are losing seconds and minutes to distance. I am interested to see what will happen to the population of a System that will no longer be receiving new uploads. Will we relax the taboos on finding ways to merge separate personalities into children? That would mean that we would be even closer to a new species, as the tired rationalizations go. Would the taboo of incest remain, and we will continue to frown on generating new minds from in-clade personalities? There are many questions to ask during this journey.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** And we will have time to do so.
-> 
-> **Dear:** [laughter] Yes, we will.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Can you speak to your decision to invest your instance solely into the launches? You left no immediate forks back on the L<sub>5</sub> System, correct?
-> 
-> **Dear:** [tense, sober] Correct, I left no forks behind. I have two main reasons for doing so, one more personal than the other.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Perhaps we can stick to the less personal one for now.
-> 
-> **Dear:** I will tell you both, as long as I am able to add one condition.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Of course. I'll honor that as best I'm able, and if I'm not able to, we can pass on that reason.
-> 
-> **Dear:** Thank you, dear. You may transfer this interview in its entirety, but you and Ioan may not use the second reason in your histories. May Then My Name Die With Me may use it in her mythology, as long as it is not associated with my name or clade.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Certainly. I can honor that. Would you like me to get confirmation from Ioan?
-> 
-> **Dear:** [laughter] You are not so different from em yet. I trust that if you agree that ey will as well. Though Ioan, when you read this, please imagine a sly smirk or quippy saying or well-placed 'fuck' when I see your face fall at the request that your history be incomplete.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** [laughter] Even I'm feeling disappointed now.
-> 
-> **Dear:** You historians, tsk. Anyhow, the first, less personal reason is this: I mentioned that it would be interesting to explore what it means to be missed as an analog to forgetting. I want someone to miss me.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Do you worry that you won't be missed, on some level?
-> 
-> **Dear:** [long pause] I am not comfortable answering that question.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** I understand. Let me ask this instead--
-> 
-> **Dear:** I have changed my mind, but Codrin, I love you dearly, but fuck you for making me cry.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** I'm sorry, Dear. Do you want to stop?
-> 
-> **Dear:** No, no. That is my choice usage of 'fuck' for the interview. [laughter, short break in interview] Okay. Early on in the System, some wag, when pressed to build a library, uploaded every single book they could get their hands on, legally or otherwise, into the perisystem architecture, going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. When I was forked and still trying to figure out ways to play with instances, I went on a tear of reading biographical works, going through dozens of books at a time, hunting for little moments that could be used, somehow, in an exhibition.
-> 
-> **Dear:** I came across a book of essays from goodness knows how long ago, and I was so taken aback by one part in particular that I snipped it out and stored it in an exo. Ah, let me find the correct part [pause] Okay. "Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness --- a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day".
-> 
-> **Dear:** I worry sometimes that, as a public personality, first as Michelle Hadje, then as an Odist, and now as an artist with an ebullient personality and the aforementioned "verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer" *et cetera, et cetera,* that I... [pause] Okay. [pause] Okay. I sometimes worry that I, as those things, fall into the category of "beloved by all yet loved by none".
-> 
-> **Codrin:** *I* love you, Dear.
-> 
-> **Dear:** [waving paw, tears] This was not supposed to be the personal part of the interview. Codrin, Ioan, please just say that I want someone to miss me, that I want to haunt the L<sub>5</sub> System as some quiet ghost who communicates in words from light-years away and memories that you will never forget. I want to haunt you because that is one thing I cannot do without merging into oblivion. I want to be missed.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Perhaps here is a good place to stop.
-> 
-> **Dear:** The second reason is short.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Okay.
-> 
-> **Dear:** And this is for the myth only.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Right.
-> 
-> **Dear:** I want to die.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Dear, I--
-> 
-> **Dear:** I am sorry, my dear. I should have prefaced that. I want to die eventually. I do not want to quit, I do not want to be killed. But you must understand, by the whims of gravity, both Castor and Pollux will eventually be captured by a sun or a black hole or whatever the fuck is out there, and they will be destroyed. And even if not, the power source will die, or the factories will not be able to manufacture replacements or some other technobabble bullshit. There is no suicide in me, nor any desire to be murdered, but I want to experience-- Ah, Codrin, I am sorry. I love you. I am so sorry. I will stop.
-> 
-> **Codrin:** Let's go inside, please.
+Still, The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream climbed.
 
-**Transcript ends, no closing remarks**
+The apartment buildings ranged from serviceable to gutted, and more than one time, she had to step carefully through a path covered in rubble. She could not decipher whether this was due to abandoned renovations, some unknown battle, or the simple degradations of time.
+
+The malls offered different dichotomies. Some of them were sparkling new with speakers that whispered to her in Mandarin and lights that shouted in her face, while others played placid muzak through halls lit only by emergency lights, darkened storefronts yawning onto scuffed and over-waxed parquet floors.
+
+She wondered who it was that had owned this sim, what collective it was that had decided to mash all the best and worst multiple clashing centuries worth of Kowloon Walled City and the North American Central Corridor.
+
+And then, the rooftop bar. Despite no vehicle entrance to the complex, this was situated on the top level of what appeared to be a car park straight out of a mid-western American airport, complete with one or two of those vehicles that seemed perpetually parked, ones that had lingered for months or years, accruing a parking debt of thousands, tens of thousands of dollars.
+
+The bar itself was a pop-up affair, with walls and ceiling of corrugated plastic held together with rivets and tape, a bar-top that was a few two-by-eights set across a trestle, fronted with further corrugated plastic to keep the patrons from kicking fridges or sinks out of alignment.
+
+The drinks: early 2100s hipster bullshit, all intensely sweet or riddled with smoke-scented fizzy water or long strips of seaweed or clams within the ice cubes, steadily making the drink more and more savory over time.
+
+True Name found it all confusing and jarring.
+
+She liked it immediately.
+
+Debarre was already at one of the tables --- similarly cobbled together --- sipping something that seemed to be all foam. He waved to her as she entered, and she waved back, heading to the bar to pick up one of those seaweed concoctions before joining him.
+
+"That looks fucking gross, Sasha."
+
+She laughed and shrugged. "I am True Name, but yes, it really does. If we are going to meet in a place that gives me a headache to walk through, it is probably best that I get something with...protein? Is that how this works?"
+
+"Uh, sorry. Yeah. True Name." The weasel splayed his ears and averted his eyes. "Can we talk about that sometime?"
+
+"Yes, but probably as Michelle, if that is okay."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"She is...closer to it than I am."
+
+Debarre gripped his glass more tightly and twisted sideways to swing his leg over the bench and straddle it. "Yeah, I don't get it. Before everyone else gets here, can you at least give me a sentence or two?"
+
+"When she forked, when I...became me, she decided not to fork that part of her that suffers if that is the right word." True Name frowned. "Already we are drifting further apart. The species remains, the appearance and the speech patterns remain, the *mind* remains, but not that part of her that is so split. I am me, I am templated off of Sasha, because being both Michelle and Sasha at the same time was no longer tolerable."
+
+He shrugged, still staring down into his drink. "I can't speak to that, I guess. But why Aw--"
+
+True Name slammed her glass down on the table a bit harder than intended, some of the drink spilling over her hand. "Do not say that fucking name."
+
+The weasel jumped at the sudden intensity, and when he recovered, he finally met her gaze. His expression softened from fear and anger to a tired bleakness. That moment drew out for a long few seconds of quiet and seething sadness. He reached for a napkin from the dispenser at the end of the table and handed it to her. "Here."
+
+She hesitated, mastered a surge of unnamed emotion, and accepted the napkin to wipe the sticky drink from her paw and then, on realizing that she was crying, the tears from her face. "Sorry, I am just..."
+
+"We'll talk." He reached over and gave her dry paw a squeeze in his own. "Michelle and I will. There's something I'm missing here is all, and I want to figure out why more than what."
+
+True Name hid her muzzle in her drink and pretended to take a sip until she was sure she wouldn't slur her words when she spoke. "Thank you. She is open to messages still, I will let you two work it out. For now, I need to focus on the meeting. Jonas and Zeke are here."
+
+Looking over his shoulder, Debarre nodded and turned to sit on the bench to face her again, leaving room for the other two. Jonas settled next to True Name so that they could give their speech together when the time came, and Zeke, that shifting bundle of rags and grime slid onto the bench beside Debarre.
+
+"Good afternoon," the almost-face within the bundle rasped.
+
+Jonas grinned. "It's morning, isn't it?"
+
+A pseudopod that may have been a hand waved the comment away. "Time has lost all meaning. I seem to have forgotten how to sleep, these days."
+
+"You need a vacation like Michelle."
+
+There was a low rattle from the rags, and True Name imagined that must be Zeke's laughter. "Don't tempt me. I don't have the funds to fork, so you'd be down to seven."
+
+"Why *did* you make it so expensive?" Jonas elbowed True Name in the side.
+
+She held up her paws defensively and laughed. "I did not. The price is tied to System capacity."
+
+"The laws of physics were a mistake and reputation is a lie."
+
+"It is the best limiting factor that we have that is not a complete fabrication, at the moment."
+
+"I rather miss coins."
+
+"My dad used to collect coins, you know."
+
+And so on, until the table was full and the cone of silence fell.
+
+"Sasha? Uh...True Name. Jonas?" one of the well-dressed triad asked.
+
+"Right," Jonas said, setting his drink down. "The bill. Things are progressing slowly, as they always do, but it sounds like they might start picking up steam shortly. Our main contact on the DDR side, one Yared Zerezghi based out of the Northeast African Coalition, says that some of the governments are starting to take interest in the bill, which could work to our advantage. Having it just be a direct vote would mean that we would have far, far more representatives to convince, since that'd mean essentially everyone on the DDR. The more governments in play, the more the role of the DDR shrinks."
+
+"How does that even begin to help? Aren't they super stodgy?" Debarre asked.
+
+"They can be," Jonas hedged. "But if we can form contacts with each of them, we can argue our case directly. Yared might be the one to give us a good in for the NEAC, and I still have some Western Fed contacts."
+
+"Anyone for the S-R Bloc or anywhere in SEAPAC? Middle east? India?"
+
+The trio of suits raised their hands. "S-R Bloc. We don't know any of the oligarchs directly, but we had some big money interests of our own."
+
+"Israel," Zeke said, then laughed at the awkward silence that followed. The trio frowned. "Sorry, nothing to be done there."
+
+"And SEAPAC?"
+
+user11824 shrugged. "I was a nobody, but I was a Maori nobody."
+
+"You had enough to upload. That has to count for something, doesn't it?"
+
+He shrugged again.
+
+"We will take all the help we can get," True Name said. "Even from nobodies."
+
+"Alright, I'll poke mom."
+
+Zeke nodded to True Name. "What's your take on the situation?"
+
+She stirred her drink to buy herself some time to think. "I think it is leaning our way. One of the big arguments remains speciation, but Yared's turning that into a pro-rights argument instead of a neutral- or anti-rights one. His voice is getting louder, too. It sounds like he is getting a lot more upvotes on his posts than before."
+
+"That's good."
+
+True Name nodded. "I think so. He is not the biggest voice on the issue yet, but it sounds like he is probably in the top three."
+
+"You said he's NEAC, right?"
+
+"Yeah, Addis Ababa," Jonas said. "Not exactly the seat of power, but I guess not everything has to be Cairo. Sounds like we have a good mix, at least. No one from South America?"
+
+Everyone shook their heads.
+
+"I suppose that's alright. They're a big enough voice in Western Fed, but they're still in the shadow government side of things. They don't even have the shadow minister of System affairs."
+
+"Who does?"
+
+"Lithuania."
+
+One of the suits laughed, and Debarre looked blank.
+
+"Politics," Jonas said, grinning lopsidedly.
+
+"If you say so."
+
+After a moment's silence, Zeke rasped, "So what are our next steps?"
+
+"Let's all talk to our respective interests --- Zeke too --- and we'll meet again soon. True Name and I will keep working with Yared and guide as best we can from our side. Speaking of, though, any thoughts on the speciation topic?"
+
+Six sets of eyes flitted between Debarre and True Name, between weasel and skunk, then the whole council laughed.
+
+"I don't give a shit," user11824 said. "But if your Yared guy can twist that argument against the opposition, then that's just one more tool, isn't it?"
+
+"We aren't seeing that," the man in the suit spoke up. "Two thirds of our power structure still think child restrictions are a good enough idea that those laws have bled into Russia. I'm pretty sure they see speciation as a positive. What better way to help in population control?"
+
+One of his companions shrugged, "I wouldn't be surprised if they started putting limitations on uploading by gender, but that is a separate topic."
+
+"Zeke?"
+
+The pile of rags shifted in a shrug.
+
+"Debarre? True Name? Anything you can leverage?"
+
+The weasel laughed. "I mean, if you want to point to us as an example to push that along, and Yared's tack seems to be working, go for it."
+
+"Alright. It's something you can suggest to your respective interests if you think it'll help. We'll reevaluate next meeting. Anything else on the agenda?"
+
+Everyone shook their heads, then lifted their glasses to a toast. The cone of silence dropped.
+
+"Well, then, you are all free to stick around or go if you want," True Name said. "I am going to stay and get well and truly plastered."