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-# Douglas Hadje --- 2325
+# True Name --- 2124
 
-Douglas doffed his suit and packed into its carry bag, which had previously held his clothes.
+The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream met with Jonas at a sim of her choosing. They had tacitly agreed that they would switch sims every time they met, if possible, and alternate who chose which. It followed the general outline of how the council met, but, being just the two of them and learning where they would meet only minutes prior meant even less of a chance of being found out.
 
-*Why did I do that?*
+Found out from what or by whom, True Name had not yet divined. Perhaps it was just a good habit.
 
-He finished straightening his jumpsuit and began the slow walk back to his apartment. He ignored the colored strips on the wall that would guide him back the quick way, and instead walked anti-spinward, the long way around. This would take him through the manufacturing sector, but that was alright. It would be loud and there would be the quietly efficient drones carrying out all their little tasks, but it would give him more time to walk, more time to think.
+She felt constantly aware of who was around her. Not in the sense that she was being watched, though she certainly entertained that idea. It wasn't that she and Jonas might be discovered as members of the council and accosted. Nor was it that they were doing anything untoward. They were just getting together to do their jobs and do them to their full abilities.
 
-*Why the hell did I do that?*
+Perhaps it had something to do with lingering anxiety left over from Michelle. Perhaps it was due to the tenuousness of her position on the council --- not that they doubted her as a fork of Michelle, but she did sense some hesitancy surrounding allowing forked instances to sit while the root instance did not.
 
-He wound his way through a few of the factories, from the glass furnace to the thick cylinder that housed the strut-works, a complex of sturdy supports and extrusion machinery that had grown the launch arm out of this side of the station. He brushed his hand along the smooth wall of the cylinder, before continuing to wind his way through the manufacturing wing.
+*Maybe I have drifted too far,* she often found herself thinking. *Maybe I am no longer Michelle enough to see things in the same way.*
 
-The reasons eluded him. He didn't know why he did that. Why he kept doing that. Why would he run himself through this exercise time and again? Why would he grab his suit, dream up some small errand that warranted an EVA, and go out to touch the side of the System?
+So, she remained vigilant, regardless of whether or not she knew why, and kept as much as she could above-board with the council. Always at the forefront of her mind, she held her goal of ensuring the continuity of existence and continuity of growth of the system. That's what this all boiled down to, right?
 
-Why would he keep doing that to himself.
+Today, they met at a place of her choosing, and she had chosen the closest thing that she could find to the Crown Pub of old: a well-aged, British-style pub, complete with a few high-topped tables and the types of small beer that she had never quite grown to love, yet drank all the same.
 
-She was dead. Dead, or close enough to it. *Nowhere on the System.* That's what May Then My Name had said. This woman he had essentially no ties to other than a family name, this woman he'd never met, one who owed him nothing and to whom he only owed dreams.
+Jonas blinked into the sim outside, so she was first alerted to his presence by a quiet ding from the bell above the door. She watched him step inside and look around with an appraising glance before spotting her and joining her at the two-top.
 
-She was dead and there was nothing he could do about it. No funeral, no memorial that he could reach. He wanted so badly to mourn this woman he'd never met and felt as though there were no possible way to do so without something to do. Something to say. Some cold stone to stand before or unfeeling metal plaque where grieving fingers could trace the letters of her name.
+"Nice place. How's the beer?"
 
-She was dead, and that shouldn't even matter to him.
+"Flat. Weak." She took a sip and shrugged. "Perfect for the setting, as far as I can tell."
 
-That was the worst part, he'd decided: that his grief felt unwarranted. There was no connection between them other than the name, they'd never talked, and she likely didn't even know that her family had continued on after her through her brother, so what did he do to earn the right to mourn her? Doubtless she left loved ones behind on the System, too, people she'd known for more than two hundred years, lovers, enemies, colleagues and friends who respected her. *They* had the right to mourn.
+"Better than clams frozen in ice cubes?"
 
-He was just that weird guy who would take EVA walks from the narrow gap of the station to the System, press his hands and forehead to the glassy exterior, and dream that he was dreaming along with the billions who lived inside. No one inside knew of him other than the sys-side launch team, and no one actually knew him personally aside from May Then My Name and perhaps Ioan.
+She laughed. "Much. Want to get a drink and find a booth?"
 
-The manufacturing sector ran out beneath his feet, and he stepped from there to the spotless, black control center for the machinery. It had hardly been used since the development and construction of the strut-works. It had only really existed for the pleasure of the tourists who had made the station possible in the first place, for the walls of the control center were glass, letting tourists gawk at all of the machinery that went into running a station.
+"Sure. You find the booth, I'll get the drink, then we can talk."
 
-No tourists anymore. No gawking. The glass walls offered little to those who worked on the station other than a place to lounge and zone out, watching robots scurry to and fro.
+The booth in the corner is where the sim diverged from the one she had known so well back on the net. Where those at the Crown had been high-walled, wood dividers reaching up to the ceiling even after the cushioned backs ended, these were low-backed and reminded her more of the types of padded benches one might find on the bus or train.
 
-He swiped his way out of the sector and passed from there to what had previously been a strip mall running most of the length of the ship. Shops had long ago been decommissioned and transitioned into various offices. This had been divvied up into threes, with one third being dedicated to running the station itself, one third to running the System, and one third to science and research, for those who were still able to make the long, expensive trip out to the moon and from the moon to the station, where they might do their concrete astrophysics or space-bound astronomy.
+*Ah well, they cannot all be perfect.*
 
-The mall opened up onto a promenade and park. The grass and gardens there remained meticulously well kept, doing their part along with the atmospheric regulation system to keep the air inside clean.
+She waited until Jonas sat and she ribbed him good-naturedly about his choice of a fruity vodka drink before setting up the cone of silence.
 
-Gardens faded into low trees and greenhouses where most of the food for the station was grown. Potatoes, yams, soybeans, apples, millet, and the precious rotating crop of grains that blessed the station with the occasional bit of bread.
+"So," he said, offering her the neon-pink cherry out of his drink.
 
-All was tended by automated systems, along with the help of a few botanist-nutritionists.
+"So." She bit the cherry off the stem and chewed thoughtfully, the fruit sweet enough to make her sinuses burn. "Have you read Yared's recent post?"
 
-He walked through the sectors of the station and thought. He walked along the promenade tailward, then further anti-spinward to the greenhouses, and back sunward again. He walked and he thought, slowly going through the mental list of things he'd always wanted to say to Michelle and erasing them, line by line. Why keep them around, now? Why bother?
+He nodded.
 
-Having walked back to the sunward hub, he finished the trip to his room in the hotel. His room where he would remain as precisely as alone as he had been before.
+"Thoughts?"
 
-His implants buzzed as he walked into his room, and a glance at the corner of his HUD showed a message-received icon. He'd turned off his HUD for the non-errand and the walk through the station, but now that he saw it, saw that it originated sys-side, he tossed his suit bag onto the bed and dashed over to his rig.
+"It's written well enough. He's good at picking three points and tackling them. He's been focusing more on questions of government."
 
-> **May Then My Name Die With Me:** Douglas! Ioan and I are available today. If you have some time, we would like to talk with you.
+"And have you read between the lines?"
 
-This, at least, was something pleasant to distract himself from his unearned grief.
+His face split into a grin. "I believe so."
 
-> **Douglas Hadje:** I'm available for the next few hours before I should probably go to bed. Let me know when you're around.
-> 
+"And?"
 
-The reply was almost immediate.
+"No, no. I want to hear you say the words first."
 
-> 
-> **Ioan Bălan:** Douglas, nice to meet you! May Then My Name is forking, she'll be here in a moment.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I am here! Glad you could make it. How are you out there? Enjoying the cold vacuum of space?
+She laughed and tossed the cherry stem at him. "Alright. Do you think that he is suggesting that we somehow become our own country?"
 
-He frowned, quelling the suspicion that they had known of his EVA.
+"I most definitely do." He sipped at his drink and leaned back against the back of the booth. "Secession isn't something that I'd considered with any seriousness before. Then again, it didn't really feel like it'd be necessary until all of this talk about rights, and even then, it didn't even feel worth considering from a feasibility standpoint until the L<sub>5</sub> team offered to bring the System with."
 
-> 
-> **Douglas:** The station is a perfectly comfortable 20C at all times. If ever it gets cold, I'm probably in trouble.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Boring.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Don't listen to her. Are you doing well?
-> 
-> **Douglas:** As well as I can. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my time. I've gone on a few not-super-necessary EVAs to just look at the stars or the System or whatever. I really should take up knitting. Oh! And nice to meet you as well.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** How are you two?
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Fine, here. Very busy. We're conducting interviews all across the System, as well as coordinating with those who are doing the same on the LVs.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Ioan is doing the interviews and coordination, I am eating all of his food and leaving the dishes out.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** She's been working, too. She's probably got the larger project ahead of her than I do.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** You sound like you're having fun, so I'll take that as a good sign. What did you want to talk about?
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Your questions. I thought that it would be more comfortable to do so as a conversation rather than over mail. Certainly more organic.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** Alright, where do you want to start?
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Perhaps it would be easiest for Ioan and I to answer a whole bunch of your questions at once. They are mostly biographical, and I think that a few paragraphs from each of us will cover most of them.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** We have flipped a coin, and it was decided that I will go first.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I uploaded back in the early 2100s, back when the System was small and full of dreamers, weirdos, and people like you and Ioan who spend all of their time thinking. Before that, I was a teacher, though towards the end of my phys-side tenure and for some time after, I became involved in politics. I grew up in the central corridor of North America, in the Western Federation. As with everyone, I do not think that I have an accent, though after some trouble with my implants before I uploaded, I found that some speech and thought patterns had changed, and since then, language and I have had a complicated relationship. We could have worked to change it, my cocladists and I, but why bother?
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** You ask about dissolution strategies (tasker, tracker, dispersionista): you are correct that they apply to the ways in which an individual forks. They are not hard and fast categories, but rather a set of patterns that we have noticed over the years and applied names and numbers to. Taskers will fork only very rarely, and then for a specific task, merging back into the root instance immediately afterward. Trackers fork more frequently, and may maintain forks over a longer period of time. The reasons for forking may vary --- Ioan is a tracker, ey will explain more --- but the forks almost always follow a single line of thought or relationship or what have you to its logical end before merging back. Dispersionistas are those who fork for fun, spinning off new personalities and maybe merging them back, maybe not. My clade, the Ode clade, falls somewhere between tracker and dispersionista: we fork frequently for many temporary purposes, but maintain a relatively small permanent clade of around 100 instances.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Is that clear? I can answer questions about this until the cows upload.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** I think so. It made sense when you called them 'dissolution strategies', which makes me think of dissolving into a solution.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Basically. We all enjoy dissolution (or not) in different ways. Those are lazy categories to bucketize vague trends. They are similar in some ways to political divisions: one may identify with a political label, even if one's actual political inclinations may be more complicated than that label implies.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** And all dispersionistas are all bleeding heart liberals or weirdo artists.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** To a one, yes.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** I fall more into the tracker camp. I pick up projects such as this one or researching a book or something, and let a fork work on those. I --- my #Tracker instance, as it's called --- or my forks may create extra instances for smaller tasks along the way, but it gets to be too much for me to deal with after a certain point, and the slow divergence of personalities feels uncomfortable. I have three forks out there now, one for collating data from each LV, and one for conducting interviews here while I write. That number goes up and down as needed.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** Makes sense to me.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Do you have a sense of how you will approach this when you upload?
-> 
-> **Douglas:** Good question. I'm only just now learning about it, so it's hard for me to say for sure, but I think I'm with Ioan on this. It sounds like it'd get confusing after a while.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Oh, it does. When there are ten different Mays running around, I'd be hard pressed to tell them apart.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I need to keep you on your toes somehow.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Or step on them.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** Is that a common thing? That many May Then My Names?
-> 
-> **Douglas:** Would it be too personal of me to just call you May, by the way?
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** 'May' is a pet name reserved those with whom I am closest. I ask that you please stick with May Then My Name.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** Alright. Apologies if I overstepped.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Accepted! Thank you for asking. But yes, it is common that I will spin off a bunch of instances for this or that. I have a tendency to fork when I get excited. That is not terribly relevant, though.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** You asked about what it's like being a historian on the System. It's not quite the information haven that I think you're imagining. All of that vast wealth of data is technically there, but it exists in the perisystem architecture, and finding one's way around there can be something of a pain. Our role becomes one of researcher and librarian as much as historian. Besides, the goal of a historian isn't always to dig up long lost artifacts or writing or whatever, but rather to make sense of what is there. Take all that info and make a story out of it.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Do keep in mind that I'm not strictly a historian. I'm mostly a writer, and my role can vary from historical research to something more akin to anthropology like this current situation, to something almost like a journalist, where I watch something happen and build a coherent story out of it.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** That is how ey came to work with our clade and thus the Launch project. Ey had done some observing with one of my cocladists, and it recommended em to us for this task.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** As for my biography, before I lose the thread, I uploaded in the 2230s after growing up in south-central Europe. I uploaded after a short stint in university where, yes, I studied history. My parents died, and I am not built for a life with death in it, so I headed sys-side to allow my siblings to attend school.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Oh, Ioan. That is the first I have heard of this.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** It's been almost a century, I've come to terms with it. We can talk about it another time, though, if you're interested.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** You ask about universities here. There are quite a few organizations that fill that role, most of which are hyper-focused on specific fields. I worked with a history and anthropology institute for a while, and actually missed one of May's cocladists while working with an institute for art and design.
+"Agreed, yes. I am happy to see that our friend has some subtlety."
 
-Douglas frowned at his terminal. That was the second time Ioan had referred to May Then My Name as that pet name 'May', but he couldn't think of a polite way to ask what that meant about how close they were.
+"It wasn't *that* subtle."
 
-> **Douglas:** That makes sense. I imagine there has to be some structure in place. I know that you can't upload before you turn 18, but I imagine a lot of people still want to learn things that interest them after.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Very much so. We have to make our own fun.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** 'Fun', ey says.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Douglas, Ioan could have fun organizing eir pen collection.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Can and do.
->
-> **Ioan:** You'll have to forgive the silliness, Douglas. It's been a long day for us.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** It's okay. I'm glad that there's still fun to be had sys-side.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Oh, plenty!
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Now, you also asked after Michelle.
+"Well, no, but he at least refrained from mentioning secession or making any direct suggestions as to our independence from the S-R Bloc or dual citizenship. That must count for something."
 
-His stomach sank. He considered what to type back, but decided instead on waiting for May Then My Name to continue, lest he get too emotional again.
+"Of course. Though it does have me wondering. Do you think he's acting on his own volition?"
 
-> **May Then My Name:** First of all, you asked if I ever met her. I had the chance to meet her a handful of times. I would not call her famous, *per se*, but many do remember her as one of the founders. She was
->
-> **May Then My Name:** Well.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I want to say that she was old. I am only a little bit younger than she was, in the grand scheme of things, but some of her experiences prior to uploading left a mark on her, and time was not kind to her in that regard. Though aging is not really something that we need to worry about, sys-side, she seemed to have aged every one of those two centuries.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** What did she look like, at that age?
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** You misunderstand, or I misspeak. She looked much as she did when she uploaded, but that pre-upload trauma meant that she felt all two hundred of those years. If you go through an event that makes 80% of your days bad days, then that means that you wind up with 58400 bad days through the years. That will wear on one.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** I don't know what to say.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** I'm sorry to hear that about her.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** Is that a common experience sys-side?
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Not that common, no, and hers was unique.
->
-> **May Then My Name:** Every now and then, one of us will get tired of functional immortality and decide to just quit their instance --- that is what she did --- and disappear off the System. I do not begrudge her that.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** I'm sorry for your loss, Douglas.
+True Name tilted her head. "Are you suggesting that he is a front for some larger player?"
 
-He had to blink away tears in order to reply, and then did so quickly, hitting send before his courage failed him.
+Jonas shrugged, finishing off his drink in one smooth swallow before setting the glass back down on the table. "Nothing so grand. I'm just wondering if he's being influenced by someone."
 
-> **Douglas:** I'm really torn up about this. I don't even know why. I never met her, know basically nothing about her, and have apparently been thinking about someone as though they were alive, when in reality, they've been dead for two decades. How can I possibly miss her? But I do! I miss her and feel like I'm in mourning, and then I feel guilty over the fact that I'm grieving this person who never knew me.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** I'm sorry.
-> 
-> **Douglas:** That just all came at once, sorry.
->
-> **Douglas:** I'm sorry.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Douglas, let me tell you a story.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** One of the times I had the chance to meet Michelle, I visited her sim with her. She had not built herself a house or anything, like most do, but instead built for herself an endless green field of rolling hills. Except, that, rather than letting that field be perfect, it was absolutely covered with dandelions. Weeds, basically. It was not that it was some weeded lot, but that it was a field of very obviously well-kept grass, dotted every few feet with these clusters of perfectly imperfect flowers, little suns peeking up out of their spray of leaves.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** From what you say of Earth, a field of well-kept grass would be incredibly rare, and so I imagine that you understand what it would mean for something so pristine to become filled with these flowers that everyone considered a nuisance.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** But Michelle was obsessed with them. She loved their smell, and loved how bright they stood out against the grass. There it was, this amazing field of the richest grass that invited one to roll in it, and it was dotted with these intensely yellow flowers.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Her sim was intentional in its imperfections. It was a dialectic. It was a koan, a contradiction in which sat a kernel of universal truth, understood only when one realized that both sides of that contradiction could be true at the same time.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I did not know why she invited me over to her sim to meet with me, rather than meet up at some cafe or park or office, but when I arrived, I saw that she seemed to be having a bad day, as so many of hers were. When she had a bad day, it was visible in her very body. She would flicker between two different forms, like one might flicker between two different avatars on the 'net. I am still not sure how that worked, as it was generally a violation of the norms, but no one ever called her on it, no System process ever made her stop.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I asked her about the field as we sat down on the side of a low hill, and she picked one of those dandelions. It was perfect. They have hollow stems, and the walls ooze a sticky, white latex when the stem is broken, and even that was perfect in the sim. She picked the flower and smelled it, then handed it to me. "When I was in school," she told me. "My friends and I would go sit in the grass above the football field and talk, and at least once a year when we did that, I would pick a dandelion and tell them that I always thought they smelled like muffins. They would always laugh."
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** And then she got real quiet and we sat there for what must have been an hour before she spoke again, "How silly, that that is the one thing that I remember most clearly. Sitting in the grass, smelling flowers with my friends."
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Scent, I have been told, bears the strongest ties to memory, and this defined her in some undefinable way. We got to our business after that, but I remember smelling that flower and thinking, "Well, what do you know, it does smell like muffins." 
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I do not know if Michelle would have liked you or if you would have liked her. I do not know if you would have felt any connection for each other, or felt like family. What I do know is that she was every bit the person you imagine her to be. Fully realized and with every bit of story that you must have imagined for her over the years. She was real. She was complex. She thought about her friends, two hundred years gone, and how they laughed.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** You may not have had the chance to meet her, to talk to her, but you very much knew her, in your own way.
+"What makes you say that?"
 
-It was a long time before Douglas was able to respond, and both Ioan and May Then My Name kept quiet. He didn't feel like they were expecting him to reply or that he was keeping them waiting while he let all that pent-up emotion out at once. They were simply holding space for him.
+"The way the topics of his posts are drifting. It's not that one doesn't follow another, so much as there seems to be a trajectory in mind, with each getting closer to a specific goal."
 
-> **Douglas:** Thank you for that. I don't know if we would've felt like family, either, but I am incredibly happy that I got the chance to hear you talk about her.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** You do not need to justify your grief, Douglas. You are allowed to feel it. Give yourself permission. You have my permission, as well.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** How about we call it here for now? There will be plenty of time for questions coming up, and I'm sure we'll all have our lists to bring to the next time we can chat.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Take care of yourself, Douglas. May's right. You're allowed to mourn. It's the healthy thing to do.
-> 
-> **Ioan:** Besides, May made herself cry and I don't think she's going to be good for much more tonight.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** Ioan I swear to god.
-> 
-> **May Then My Name:** I am going to eat crackers in your bed and put sand in your shoes.
+She frowned. "Are you saying you have seen this coming?"
 
-Douglas laughed in spite of himself.
- 
-> **Douglas:** Thank you both, then. I really mean it. Ping me whenever, and I'll get to it as soon as I can.
+"No, no," he laughed, holding up his hands. "Just that, taking this new info into account, when I look back at the recent posts, I'm seeing a small pattern."
 
-After they said their goodbyes and he put his terminal to sleep, he turned out the lights, stripped out of his clothes, and climbed into bed. He was prepared to let emotions overtake him, but where that knot of feelings had formed within him was now only calm. He wasn't through it, he suspected, but at least he was able to untangle some of that grief tonight.
+She drank in silence as she digested this. Yared seemed like an honest and earnest supporter, though certainly from the standpoint of a DDR junkie. He also seemed like a nobody. A nobody who was a reasonably good writer and loud on the 'net.
 
-He embraced that calm, rolled onto his side, and slept.
+That combination probably made him a fairly attractive target to influence.
+
+"Had you known this was coming," she began, lifting Jonas out of his own reverie. "What would you have thought? What would you have done?"
+
+He raised his empty glass to her. "An astute question! I'll make a politician out of you yet."
+
+She kicked his shin beneath the table, and he laughed.
+
+"You're a bit late to be whining about that. You've been on the council longer than I have." Twirling his glass between his fingers, he said slowly, pacing his words with his thoughts. "What would I have thought? I would've thought much as I mentioned above. I would've considered it unnecessary, then infeasible. What would I have done, though? I think I would have used him in turn. Gently steering him away from the idea while trying to find out who was behind this shift, if anyone, and try to dig up dirt on them."
+
+"I see. He does seem rather pliant. He would be a useful tool for us to wield, too."
+
+"First the astute questions, now the cynicism! You're well on--ow!" He laughed, reaching beneath the table to rub at his shin. "It's a good idea, though. No matter what we decide, we can always push him a little this way or that to help us out. I still want to figure out who's behind him, though."
+
+"I do too, since you brought it up. Do you have any hunches on who it might be?"
+
+"He's NEAC, right? Probably one of his own council-members. No one too high up, but someone high enough that they can read the situation better. Likely someone from the ruling coalition, but not the head of the council. Probably a more senior position, too. The grandfatherly type, or at least avuncular."
+
+True Name laughed. "Really?"
+
+"Really. They're always the sly types you need to watch out for. Nothing they say is not a coldly calculated maneuver to get you to agree with them." He shook his head. "Even their wives --- and they're almost always men --- are probably married to them only because they told them that they loved them in *just* the right tone of voice to get them to say yes."
+
+"Manipulative shitheads."
+
+Jonas laughed. "Very. Probably Demma, or maybe Bahrey. Both fit the bill. They'll have all the plausible deniability in the world, too. Some underling did the actual work, while they sit back and get whatever it is that they want."
+
+"So, tell me, O great political teacher, how do we find out which without asking?"
+
+"Bring up something about the bill and pretend to be disheartened by it or like we don't understand it, ask him who would be the one to address it, now that it's reached their ears."
+
+"Right. I was thinking we would ask him what government types are thinking about the launch, if anyone has been pushing against it or for it, who seems neutral, and then ask for names under the guise of doing research, see who he names first."
+
+"There you go," Jonas said. "You'll run the risk of maybe getting more names than you were hoping for, but chances are, the first one that'll come to his mind is whoever's driving him."
+
+True Name smiled, sipping the last of her warm, flat beer. She was pleased at just how much trust she was building with Jonas. Ask the questions you already know the answers to, look like you're thinking, then suggest something that's almost but not quite right.
+
+She was nothing if not an actor.
+
+"This secession angle, though. Do you think that would be worth pushing towards?" she asked.
+
+"I'd like to steer a little closer to it, first, just to see what that'd look like. It'll require the launch amendment to pass, as I don't think System hardware can remain on Earth without someone getting upset at whoever's land it sits on. Once that's sorted out, though, and we have a better idea of what an independent System will look like, I say we push hard."
+
+True Name nodded. "It sounds like there is no reason not to. If the System is to remain beholden to existing government influences, it will always be at risk of reinterpretation of those laws. We are uniquely positioned to be almost entirely impossible to invade as a sovereign kingdom, and we have enough support that there is low risk that we will be simply turned off. Too many people want to join. Too many still see utility for us. Too many dreamers."
+
+"Listen to you, my dear!" Jonas laughed. "You sound like a dreamer, yourself."
+
+"Perhaps." She grinned. "But also someone willing to devote myself --- several of me --- to getting what I want."
+
+"Speaking of, what are the rest of you doing?"
+
+"End Of Days says is working on remaining sensoria stuff, talking with the S-R trio to round out the proposal for sensorium messages. Praiseworthy is reading up on propaganda. Life Breeds Life is keeping an eye on how tasks are divided. Most everyone else is out and about, keeping a feel for the place, or making things."
+
+"You and your names. What sorts of things are you making?"
+
+"Writing. Performances. Friends."
+
+"Hobbies?"
+
+She nodded, tapping absentmindedly at the rim of her glass with a claw. "Minus the friends part, yes. I was a theatre teacher, phys-side. Need to have fun somehow." She could feel the conversation drifting into small-talk territory, and she wasn't yet ready to lose Jonas's attention. "You have your forks already, do you not? What are they working on?"
+
+Jonas sat up, then slid out of the booth. "Come on, I'll show you."
+
+True Name set her empty glass aside and slid out to follow him.
+
+The next sim they traveled to was an apartment. Something high up, somewhere over a city she didn't recognize. It was well furnished and quite spacious, but could hardly be called upscale.
+
+As soon as they arrived, two other members of the Jonas clade appeared from a door that appeared to lead to an office. There was no doubt about their identity as Jonases: they were identical.
+
+"Skillfully done," she said, laughing. "Who was I speaking to today? Not Jonas Prime, I imagine."
+
+The one who had brought her here laughed, shaking his head. "No, I'm Ar Jonas. What tipped you off?"
+
+"If I had several identical copies of myself with the same common name, all forked from the same root instance, I would not send the root instance out to a meeting not at a place of my choosing."
+
+One of the other Jonases nodded appreciatively. "Well spotted."
+
+Ar Jonas disappeared from beside her and, with a blink, reappeared. "Merged with Prime," he explained. "I'll leave you two to talk."
+
+He and the other Jonas left to go pick up where the work had been left off in the office, leaving Jonas Prime to guide her to the sofa.
+
+"How often do you show up at council as Prime?" she asked, once they were seated.
+
+"Used to be every time," he said. "Then one day, I nearly missed it as I was in the middle of a...discussion, so I sent Ar. I was nervous that someone would see through it, but no one did. I tried to keep going myself for a while, but after there were no repercussions, I gave up on it, and alternate between the other six."
+
+"Six?"
+
+"Of course. Ar, Ku, and Re, as I mentioned, and now Ir, who forked from Ar and looks nothing like me, so he's got more latitude."
+
+"And the other two?"
+
+"Why would I tell you everything?" He laughed. "They're my instances, doing the things that I do, which should be enough."
+
+"As they must. You have already told me more than you probably should have."
+
+"I trust you'll keep quiet about it."
+
+True Name grinned, putting her finger to her snout in the universal hush sign. "It is a neat enough trick. I think that the Ode clade already differs too much to send one of them in my place, so perhaps not for me."
+
+"It's up to you, yeah." Jonas sat back against the couch, one arm draped casually along the back. "I honestly was surprised when no one noticed my reputation drop, but then I figured out that most people just look at the clade's reputation, rather than the instances. I have a feeling that'll change eventually, but for now, no one seems to pay all that much attention."
+
+The skunk frowned, browsed the markets --- something that felt more akin to remembering what the stats were, rather than looking anything up --- and saw that, while she had less reputation than Michelle had before she forked, the clade had a good bit more, likely from what each of them were doing to build reputation. Jonas naming his clade after himself was a fairly savvy move, in the end. 'Ode' having no direct ties to Michelle it seems like something unrelated.
+
+*Ah well. I am still happy to have done it,* she thought. *And perhaps we will find our own way to build reputation that does not involve a constant game of make believe.*
+
+"Thank you again for your trust, Jonas," she said, standing. Neither the booth nor the couch had been all that kind on her tail. "I am going to go do some digging in the recent news from the NEAC and wait for our dear Yared to get in touch with us again."
+
+He nodded up to her. "Alright. I'll be in touch, I'm sure."
+
+"And, Jonas?" A grin twisted the corner of her mouth. "Do not call me a fucking politician. I have an image to maintain."
+
+He laughed and waved her away.