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# Codrin Bălan#Castor --- 2325
It was difficult for Codrin Bălan to reengage with the project at hand after what seemed to be an ever-mounting pile of oddities.
It was not simply that ey had been finding piece after piece of new-to-em information about those that ey loved --- though it was also that --- nor was it that eir entire clade seemed to be entangled far deeper into something going further back than expected --- though it was that as well --- but that, by virtue of the twin launches and the L<sub>5</sub> System remaining back around Earth, ey was limited to reading much of this over plain text. Text that had flowed over sheets of paper in a comfortable font, bound itself up in books, and begged to be pored over, stood itself before em and said, "Read me, understand me." It all added one layer of remove that, despite eir attraction to the written word and fine paper and comfortable fonts and nice books, left em feeling caught up in some dreamlike state of almost-understanding.
As an example, there was this seemingly universal agreement among the Odists that no one of them should be the one to tell the entirety of the tale, and each for their own reasons. There seemed to be shame bound up in all of them, in some way, but beyond that, both instances of Dear had diverged to the point where the foxes were starting to come up with their own explanations for not providing that info to their respective Codrins Bălan.
Why was it, for instance, that Codrin#Pollux had decided to simply interview Dear, where ey had not? And what was ey, Codrin#Castor, to do with the information that Dear had shared with eir cocladist? Hell, was cocladist even the right word, at this point? That seemed to imply a down-tree instance that one could still access.
*I want to die,* the fox had said. How had Codrin#Pollux even begun to deal with that bit of information? When ey read those words, in eir comfortable font on eir fine paper in eir nice books, ey had cried. Ey had cried much as it sounded like Codrin#Pollux had.
Ey had cried and closed the book and paced eir way out into the prairie outside the house, where ey had cried some more. Ey had not walked any new paths that day, simply walked to the outermost cairn that ey could find, sat down next to it, and watered the thirsty grass with a grief ey could not name.
And that ey could not name it only added to that unnerving sense of remove. It wasn't just sadness or grief. It wasn't the type of feeling that one might experience at the actual loss of a loved one. It wasn't the type of feeling that one experienced on learning that a loved one bore within its heart thoughts of suicide. Neither of those were true. Ey knew that, had ey been the one to conduct the interview, ey would have had much the same reaction as the other Codrin had (ey suspected, for all ey had was the transcript, incomplete as it was). But instead, ey had a cottony shield of time and distance that meant that ey could process it at eir own pace. Ey could go sit out in the prairie and cry and then come to an understanding of Dear's desire that ey couldn't have any hope of doing, were the fox sitting before em.
With this distance, both from the interview and from Dear itself, ey could remember its words: *"I just think we need death, or something like it, as part of the System. Death. Fear of death. Needs and reasons to survive in the face of an inevitable end. We need a way for an individual to end. We need a way to release those memories."* Ey could remember those words and understand the sudden too-full feeling of discomfort that had come with them. Immortality came with its own costs, and it was not simply that one might grow bored, but that one might go mad.
But ey hadn't interviewed Dear, had ey? Codrin#Pollux had. Codrin#Pollux had that trauma in a way that ey did not.
And Ioan! The wondrous hints that eir down-tree fork had been receiving! That their dream worlds worked in far subtler ways than imagined. That May Then My Name had told em, "I am worried that you will be unhappy with me."
So much bound up in that statement. By virtue of having lived with Dear and its partner for more than two decades, by having fallen into a steadily less-eccentric orbit around the fox, accepted mounting feelings of love, and having found emself in a relationship with an Odist, ey could read perhaps more clearly than Ioan the signs that ey was well on the path to doing the same. The Odists loved hard and they loved deep and they loved fast, and it was hard not to become intoxicated beneath all that love. *She seems to have wormed her way into my life and made herself comfortable, all while making it feel like it was my idea,* Ioan had written in a clade-eyes-only message. *She says that it's her role to feel, though, and I believe her in this.*
Ah, but Ioan, it is much more complex than that. With an Odist, it is always much more complex.
And that, of course, was not even the main implication of the message. "I am worried that you will be unhappy", even without the "with me" at the end suggested more of that guilt, shame, or distaste for the past that ey had picked up from Dear. From *both* Dears.
Eir Dear: *I am...ashamed. Many of the first lines...well, no. I will not elaborate now.*
The Dear on Pollux: *You could interview any one of us about the entirety of our story, even me, and we would tell you, but we would also resent you for that.*
Eir Dear had said, *"You will doubtless tease it out of me, bit by bit, you tenacious fuck."* But given what both May Then My Name and Dear#Pollux had said, ey no longer wished to try.
And so here ey was, sitting in a dark field, looking up at the stars. Very dark. Well and truly dark, beyond almost anything Ioan had experienced phys-side, or even after uploading. There was a purity to that blackness, just as there was a purity to the red-filtered flashlight that Tycho Brahe (not his real name, but he had requested the pseudonym) used to guide them both to the top of a --- yes, pure --- grassy hill.
"I come out here on nights when I am depressed," the old astronomer had grumbled. "And that has been most nights, of late."
"It's a beautiful place."
"Isn't it? It reminds me of a trip to the west coast that I took long, long before I uploaded. This grassy hill in the middle of a wide ring of firs. You can't see it, but the grass is not actually grass, but a sort of moss. When it's freshly dried out after a rain, it's delightfully soft, isn't it?"
Codrin nodded, then, realizing that ey could barely see Brahe next to em, murmured, "Almost cushy."
They sat on that hill in silence, leaning back on their hands and watching the stars overhead.
It had taken a few moments for Ioan to get eir bearings when they had first started watching. The stars overhead were stationary, but in a way that ey was not used to. There was the barest hint at a bare hint of movement, a dream of parallax, and the constellations didn't feel right. One star, brighter than the rest, was visible low over the horizon. There was no moon. It was quite unnerving in some indescribable way.
"What is this?"
"It is a view from outside the LV."
Ioan frowned up at the sky. "I didn't think that pictures could make it into the System. Systems."
Brahe sighed quietly. "They can't. This is just a projection. A description based on what I know the stars to look like combined with information based on where they are relative to the fisheye lens on the side of the Dreamer Module."
"And so you project that combination into a sim?"
"Yes. It's here for anyone to see, but I have been too tired to tell many people." A long pause, and then, "Yes, too tired."
There was a quiet lie in that admission, but Codrin let it slip by. "Can you tell me some more about what I'm seeing?"
"Of course, Mx. Bălan," Brahe said, audibly brightening.
He pointed first to the brightest star, low on the horizon. "There, see? That is the sun. The launch arms let us go at such a point that we are traveling along the ecliptic in order to use some of the existing orbital velocity we were already on. We have a disadvantage from Pollux, as we were released counter to that orbit."
He pointed at another star, one that almost seemed to be creeping slowly across the field of view, the source of that parallax sliding. "That is Jupiter, there. You can see it moving only by virtue of the fact that we used it as a slingshot several days into the journey. We are millions of kilometers away from it by now, but it's still one of the things that we are closest to. That's how you know that we're on Castor. Pollux will be using Saturn as a slingshot planet, a fortuitous trade-off given the orbital advantage I mentioned. There was a touch of maneuvering after launch to get the trajectories to work out."
He pointed over to the fir trees opposite where the star that was the sun shone. "Beyond those trees --- really, the reason that they exist --- is the solar sail, which blocks the lens. It was only recently deployed, you know. We could have deployed it on our way to Jupiter, but, as you know, we have all the time in the world, and there was no sense in risking it during the gravity assist."
He pointed at something else, and it took Codrin a moment to discern in the dark that he was pointing at himself. "And here I am, some nobody, some shithead who loved everything about this idea, but who can only view it in a very approximate way, like this."
"You don't seem particularly happy about your situation."
Brahe's laugh was bitter. "Of course I'm not happy. I mean...I *am* happy, but that happiness is tempered by the whims of reality more than I had expected."
"What would your dream experience be?" Codrin asked, enjoying a secret smile at the phrase couched within the ultimate dream experience that was the System.
"To see it all," he said, and ey noticed that the bitter edge was slowly leaving his voice. "I have all the perisystem processing that I can ask for to give me a simulacrum like this. You must know that this naked-eye astronomy is all but useless in the grand scheme of things, other than to give us a sense of where we came from and where we might be going in a way that allows us to tell ourselves a coherent story. The rest of astronomy is all math."
"I suppose that's why this place feels so much more romantic to me," Codrin mused. "I'm a storyteller, not an astronomer. Still, I imagine that that need for stories runs deep, and I can see the allure to possibly being able to actually look out a window at stars whizzing by."
"Yes." Brahe sighed, then lay down on his back, with his arms crossed behind his head. "Yes, to see it all."
There were a few minutes of silence as astronomer and historian looked out into the night sky, there in the simulated pacific northwest, there on the simulated moss surrounded by the simulated trees while simulated stars shone still above them.
*They don't twinkle,* Codrin thought to emself. *That's what it is. They don't twinkle, and the last time I saw them was from Earth, and all those who uploaded and made sims with star-filled nights, never left that aspect out.*
Ey mentioned this to Brahe, who laughed good-naturedly. "Of course. You're right. If they twinkled, it might feel more natural, but there is no reason for it, here. This place is a dream. My dream. The stars are there, and they don't twinkle."
"You said this view is constructed with data from the Dreamer Module," Codrin said, gently directing the conversation to topics that might please the astronomer more.
"Yeah. The module is mostly a big disk on the ass-end of each of the LVs. Most of that is various instruments that feed data to me and other astronomers here, as well as back to the core System and scientists on Earth. This particular lens is on a long strut that points out from that disk in such a way as to let as little of the solar sail obstruct its views as possible. There are other telescopes with much narrower fields of view in there. It can introduce a bit of vertigo, but would you like to see?"
"Sure."
"Alright, close your eyes."
Ey did so, and when Brahe instructed em to open them again, the sudden change in the sky was, indeed, a little dizzy-making. The entire field of stars had changed, and where there had been warped but familiar constellations, there was now a deeper blackness, brighter stars, and far more of them. Far, far more. "What is this?"
"A different view. A more powerful telescope looking at a patch of sky that we've never had a chance to see from this angle. One compounded from hours of exposure. I have no idea how exact it is, though, as it's all interpreted through the perisystem infrastructure, but it's still doing a slow sweep of the sky at a high enough magnification that the star field is completely different from what we're used to."
"I wouldn't have thought that that would've had such an impact on me," ey murmured. "I felt like I was falling for a moment."
Brahe sighed. "I did, too, the first time, and even now I'm not sure why. I think it's the mix of contexts. Here we are, looking out to space from the westernmost edge of the Western Fed, and yet all of the stars are different. They progress in such strange ways as the telescope searches on its automatic pattern."
"It's uncanny."
"A good word, yeah. It's like looking out on an alien sky, but even that misses the strangeness of so many stars. An alien sky, but as seen from the context of Earth. Firs, moss, a light breeze, dampness soaking into your trousers, and an alien sky. Did you have the chance to visit the L<sub>5</sub> station before you uploaded?"
"Goodness, no." Ey laughed. "We were too poor for that."
Brahe laughed along with em. "As was I. I do wonder, though, if I would have felt the same way I do now if I'd just had the chance to see the stars in such a new context before doing so here."
Codrin nodded, and a few more minutes of silence enveloped them as they took in that alien sky.
"You asked about the Dreamer Module, though." Brahe's voice had regained some of its strength. "And you're the one who works with stories. I'm sure you had your own questions, but there's a story there, that you might find interesting."
"Of course. I'd love to hear."
"I worked with a team of scientists, a few of whom were station-side and the rest of whom were planet-side. All lovely folks, of course. They tried to come up with some pithy acronym for the module, but some bit of news called them 'hopeless dreamers', and the name stuck from there.
"We basically nailed down the instrumentation that would go into the module, then built up its structure from there. Only some of it is telescopes, you understand. There are also various packages for measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation, ones for measuring ambient temperature variations, all the normal stuff. There's also a secondary generator in there, I suppose to ensure that neither the module nor the station impact each other.
"Anyhow, that's not the story part. The story part is that we got halfway done with the planning of the module and were just starting to spin up all the work to build the components, and we suddenly ran into a bunch of pushback. A lot of it was the usual grumbling about costs, even though most of it was to be manufactured at the station. Some of it was tied in with the voices that wanted to keep the launch from happening in the first place. If ever there was such a thing as an anti-dreamer, it was them. They felt that to make a dream a reality was somehow wrong. I never understood their arguments.
"The last bit of friction, and the most interesting bit, I suppose, came from sys-side. Their arguments were plainly insincere, though I never could figure out their true concerns. They said that the added complexity to the LVs put the integrity of the Systems within at risk beyond some imagined tolerance. It didn't bear up to even the slightest scrutiny, but they seemed to have loud voices."
Codrin frowned. "Most everyone I talked to was as ambivalent about the launch as they were about most phys-side projects, though I fully acknowledge that we run in different circles. There was an initial flush of excitement as it was announced, and most everyone I've talked to here said they'd made up their minds to go along on the launches even then, two decades back. It calmed down after as many forgot, but then ramped up before launch."
"Yeah, I felt much of the same in my circle, though you must understand that we were working on the launches for all of those two decades, so our excitement was bound to how well the project was going. We were spending so much time talking with phys-side, hearing all their gossip about the sentiment out there, and both sides were surprised when we started to have serious conversations about the sentiment sys-side when those arguments started to get louder.
"At first, it was just the occasional opinion column in the feeds, but the actual news started to pick up on it soon after, and then there were a few debates. I don't think it ever got to the point where the module was at risk, but people are still talking about whether it was a good idea, I hear."
"And you said you don't know what their real arguments are?"
"Correct."
"What about who was having those arguments?"
"That's the thing, there were relatively few voices from those who had uploaded recently. Most of those who started the arguments were from the first few decades of the System's creation. I suspect that at least part of their concern is that they still feel somewhat upset at having to pay to join, some of them dearly so, but even that doesn't feel like the whole reason. It was just all these super old uploads, both individuals and clades, who seemed less than thrilled at the prospect. Founder types, you understand."
Eir frown grew. "Do you remember any names?"
"The Jonas clade was pretty vocally against it. I think they even had compunctions about the launch, for that matter. There were some of the Odists, though I never took much interest in who. Their names are always so impenetrable. Let's see...there was Àsgeir Hrafnson, who has always seemed like he's against everything. Such a sour man..."
Brahe continued to list off a few names, and Codrin continued to nod dutifully, but eir mind was elsewhere. The Odists' opinion on the launch seemed to range from, at best, utterly ecstatic, as Dear's had been, to, at worst, simply uninterested, to go by what Dear and May Then My Name had said.
Was this another lie from Dear, or had the fox simply not gone looking for names in the debate?
"Obviously, the launch went forward anyway, and both LVs contain Dreamer Modules, so they weren't successful," the astronomer was saying. "They didn't seem interested in paring down the scope to the modules, nor even adding any risk mitigation factors beyond the extra RTG and a set of explosive bolts that could jettison the module if necessary. I think that's what made me the most suspicious of their initial arguments. If there was risk, why not try to mitigate it further?"
"I'm not sure," Codrin said, mouth dry. "Perhaps it was more of an image thing? As in, adding the module might damage how others viewed the launch."
"Perhaps." Ey heard Brahe shrug against the moss-grass before he continued. "Anyway, that's the story. I don't know if it'll be of any use to you in your project."
"It might. It already answered most of my other questions, too. The last one I have is that you invested entirely in the LVs. Why?"
The astronomer was silent for a long time. "As upset as I get that I'm not actually able to see all the stars, even I am not immune to the romance of the idea. Imagine sitting at home, knowing that you could have flung yourself off into space, out among the dangers and excitement, and choosing instead that boring safety? The only benefit would be the combined knowledge of Castor and Pollux arriving at the station at the same time we'll get it on either one of our LVs, but, well."
Brahe gestured up to the shifting night sky, leaving his words at that.
Eventually, even Codrin lay back in the grass. Lay there with Tycho Brahe in all his sadness and happiness and wisdom and romanticism. Lay there and looked up at the stars ey knew not for how long.
# Yared Zerezghi --- 2124
> **Yared Zerezghi:** I'm going to come clean right up front: I shouldn't be telling you this.
>
> **Jonas Prime:** Okay hold up.
>
> **Jonas:** Before you actually tell us, I want to know why.
>
> **The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream:** As do I.
>
> **True Name:** I am sure you have your reasons, but if you need us to talk you out of it, we can do that, too.
>
> **Yared:** Uh. Well, I wasn't *specifically* told not to tell you, but I was left under the impression that I shouldn't be talking to you about this sort of stuff. Still, I've done my reading, and the line to the System is about as secure as it gets, and after all this time, I trust you well enough that you won't do anything crazy with the information, and that it'll probably help you in the end, as you work through all this sys-side.
>
> **Jonas:** What, that you've been working with a government official who is making you steer the DDR towards considering secession?
>
> **Yared:** ...
>
> **Yared:** What the hell?
>
> **Yared:** Yes, but how the hell did you know that?
>
> **True Name:** Jonas has been waiting to drop that on you for some time now. He is currently laughing his ass off. You will have to forgive him.
>
> **True Name:** I mean, I am also laughing my ass off.
>
> **Yared:** I'm just more shocked than anything.
>
> **Jonas:** I promise it's not out of cruelty, we just made a lucky guess, and I've been wanting it confirmed. Your tone at the start said it all.
>
> **Yared:** I guess I'm relieved.
>
> **Yared:** But also a little scared that everyone else has figured it out, too.
>
> **Jonas:** I wouldn't count on it. Maybe some have, but few enough that they'll likely be laughed down as crackpot conspiracy theorists. Very few people pay as much attention to you as we do.
>
> **True Name:** Thank you for confirming this with us, though. It will help us work together more consistently between sys- and phys-side.
>
> **Yared:** That was my thought, as well.
>
> **Jonas:** Was that all you were going to tell us?
>
> **Yared:** Most of it. I was just going to ask your help for the next step, afterwards. I'm *definitely* not supposed to be doing that.
>
> **Jonas:** Well, alright. How does this all work, anyway?
>
> **Yared:** I meet up with my handler, of sorts, on a regular basis, and we talk through the current sentiments, and then someone on his team will slip me a note specifying how I should steer my next post. Sometimes I'll write two or three posts on the subject, just so they can keep an eye on the response, then I'll get the next note.
>
> **Jonas:** And this handler, are his initials YD?
>
> **Yared:** Okay, now you hold up.
>
> **Yared:** I *need* to know how you guys figured that one out.
>
> **Jonas:** Politician, remember?
>
> **True Name:** We noticed the contents of your posts starting to shift, then started considering possible sources that might be guiding you. That led us to council members, and from there, we were able to sift through who is on the council and come up with a short list of names. Yosef Demma just happened to be at the top.
>
> **Yared:** You still have me worried that others have this all figured out. Jonas, convince me not to worry. You're the politician, I'm the scared DDR junkie trying not to get stoned to death. Or worse, have my DDR account suspended.
>
> **Jonas:** Alright, I'll try. I promise, no stoning. The number one advantage that we have is an entire team of instances working with you and on essentially no other projects. That means we have the resources to send a few of them chasing after this hunch that someone was steering you, do some textual analysis, find the patterns, then do some digging into NEAC politics, looking for people with both the resources, the motive, and the personality to pull it off.
>
> **Jonas:** Remember, most of this team were phys-side politicians, too, so we have that head-start. The worst you have to worry about is the WF or S-R Bloc doing the same with their own people after they find out. We haven't seen evidence of that yet.
>
> **Yared:** Multiple phys-side politicians?
>
> **True Name:** Multiple Jonases.
>
> **Yared:** Oh! There are multiple forks working on this?
>
> **Jonas:** Of course.
>
> **Jonas:** That's what I mean when I said few people pay as much attention to you as we do.
>
> **Jonas:** Does that soothe your fears?
>
> **Yared:** I think so, yeah. Do you agree with Jonas on this, True Name?
>
> **True Name:** Having spent a considerable time with him and some of his forks, I trust him on this, yes.
>
> **True Name:** Now, can you tell us as much as you are comfortable about councilor Demma, your relationship with him, and what you suspect are his goals?
>
> **Yared:** Well, we meet for coffee regularly, like I said, and usually drink it in his car while his driver takes us around town. He seems like a nice, older gentleman, and pretty trustworthy. I suspect that's a bad sign in a politician.
>
> **Jonas:** No comment.
>
> **Yared:** Well, either way, he's nice enough to me, and I guess that's probably how he got me working for him. I think his motives basically boil down to the fact that the System has diverged considerably from the culture of any of the political entities left phys-side, both by virtue of who winds up there, and the obvious reasons of not sharing any of our concerns around trade goods.
>
> **True Name:** He is not wrong, but I do not think that is motive enough.
>
> **Yared:** I don't either. I suspect that he's not keen on something about the System where it is, whether that's its location in the S-R Bloc or that it remains a multinational entity where uploads retain their citizenship back phys-side. Maybe he just wants to make it a separate nation in order to allow it to be a place to send refugees, asylum seekers, and so on. Or maybe he wants to restrict emigration.
>
> **True Name:** Those are all good potential reasons, yes. Do you have any hints as to which may be the most likely?
>
> **Yared:** Not particularly. He's mentioned them all in passing.
>
> **True Name:** Alright. Keep us up to date, then.
>
> **Jonas:** What was your most recent message from Demma and his people?
>
> **Yared:** That's what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.
>
> **Jonas:** The thing that you're not supposed to do. Right.
>
> **Yared:** Right. The message was: "Gently broach the subject of secession. Keep it only to one sentence, and only as an offhand remark. Make it sound like it was sys-side's idea."
>
> **Jonas:** Wow, that's not exactly subtle.
>
> **True Name:** Seems like a shitty thing to do.
>
> **True Name:** But that is coming from someone sys-side, so perhaps he sees it differently. My assessment is that he might not actually be wrong on this. If he pins it on us but does it gently enough, it can be seen as a situation where both parties are happy to agree on something. It will have to be done carefully, however. If it is suggested too strongly or too early, we risk the possibility of backlash for seeming too eager for secession, as though we are rebelling. If it is not suggested strongly enough, some might see it as secession being forced on us. Jonas? Thoughts?
>
> **Jonas:** I think you're spot on for the DDR. Yared, has any mention of secession come up in the forums yet?
>
> **Yared:** Only two or three times, but given that this topic is starting to be taken up on the governmental level, that amounts to almost none. That said, I'm seeing quite a few people taking to the launch idea, which they're now equating to something equivalent to secession --- they're calling it separation from earth or resource independence, stuff like that --- as well as more talk about international rights, given that sys-side individuals technically retain their citizenship, which makes the System something like international waters.
>
> **Jonas:** Clever. That might be far enough to drop some very subtle hints. I'm not sure about the word 'secession' yet, given some of its past connotations. You've suggested that we have the nature of statehood, but you might try pushing harder on referring to us as a nation, a national entity, a nation-state, and so on. Maybe even use the word 'statehood' directly.
>
> **True Name:** Do you have anything written yet?
>
> **Yared:** Sure, one moment.
>
> **Yared:** We continue to circle around this discussion of individual rights as though we are debating the individuality of those sys-side. It's important to understand, though, that this is a distraction from the actual point. Many have mentioned that those who have uploaded, whether or not they are individuals, are no longer analogous to humans (there's that speciation argument again!) and one wag even put it, "Who cares if they're individuals? They can't even vote!"
>
> **Yared:** This is quite true, my dear wag. They can't vote. They have no say in our political affairs out here, just as we have no say in theirs. How could we? I mean, sure, I bet some of them read DDR posts and wonder *what the hell is going on out there?* But consider what their politics must look like to us. What would *we* vote on? Whether or not they must post signage that their sims allow non-euclidean space? Is it okay for you to try and impersonate someone when you can become like them to exacting detail (except for, surprise, their individual personality)?
>
> **Yared:** I think we're still split pretty evenly on speciation. Even I am. One day, I'll think, "Sure, they may be fundamentally different from us, but they still *think* like us. They still reason like humans. Except for the biological differences, they still are." Other days, though, I'll wake up and think, "We have no common frame of reference with these people. They're just too different."
>
> **Yared:** This actually came up in a few conversations with my friends sys-side. It sounds like they share some of that ambivalence toward speciation. They can't interface with phys-side as we can, and we can't interface with sys-side as they can, so how could they even be considered the same species as us? And yet here they are, taking place in a political debate as filigreed and baroque as any other, and doing so with the same rational minds that we have, even if only at one remove. "At this point," one of them said as we laughed over another fruitless debate. "I'm not even sure we should be discussing individual rights with governments that have no way of knowing how we work. We might as well just secede and end the discussion there."
>
> **Yared:** But who knows if speciation will even wind up playing into it, in the end. I've noticed that, even though we remain split on the topic, tempers have cooled on both sides. I'm surprised --- pleasantly so! --- to see this agreement building even in Cairo; I know that many of my compatriots there bore apathy or even antipathy towards the System after previous dealings between NEAC and the S-R Bloc. We're no longer at each others throats about whether or not they're so fundamentally different from us that it requires some strange new way to think of them as individuals.
>
> **Yared:** And honestly, that's my hope. I think that way whether or not they're humans, whether or not they have their own customs and social structure, whether or not they're even a separate country. Even those who are falling on the side of speciation are starting to refer to them in terms of individuals. "Them." "How many of them." "Who in there even thinks X?" All of these are ways that we refer to individuals, and, you who are still arguing this belabored point that they should have no choice on what is done with their personalities once their bodies are gone, you are now thinking of them as what they are: individuals.
>
> **Yared:** That, my friends, feels like progress to me. We are starting to come to an understanding of what the System is, whether it's a home for the disaffected and dying, an international forum where individuals can truly live together, or a country in its own right, is home to thousands of individuals, each with their individual lives, individual reasons, individual feelings. They're people. The System is their home. We cannot take that from them without violating their individual rights.
>
> **Jonas:** Well written as always, Yared.
>
> **True Name:** Agreed. You have a way of agreeing with people just enough to make them feel like you might actually be on their side, and that perhaps they ought to work toward the same goal.
>
> **Yared:** Thank you both. What do you think about the secession angle?
>
> **True Name:** It is a little blunt. It feels forced, the way it is just stuck in there. Perhaps you might soften it from "We might as well just secede", to something more like "We would have better luck running our own government", something like that. I agree with Jonas that there is fear bound up in the word 'secede', and the phrase "better luck" implies a humorous remark.
>
> **Jonas:** Yeah. You want us to be soft, kind, approachable, that sort of thing, especially if you're going to use your current tactic of "agree with them enough to get them to fight for you". We want to seem like good people who deserve our individual rights, that to not grant them would be, at best, a real shame, and at worst, an affront to their own ideas of freedom.
>
> **True Name:** This is especially true, given that very few phys-side are acting as our voices. They are arguing on second- and third-hand accounts, such as your own. To them, uploads are this mysterious entity that they might struggle to actually comprehend. You will have to, perhaps ironically, humanize us for them. We have to seem like we can still joke around, still hurt, and still feel the full range of human emotion.
>
> **Jonas:** You've seen True Name and I joking around, after all.
>
> **Yared:** Yeah. So what do you think about: "At this point," one of them said as we laughed over another fruitless debate, "I'm not even sure we should be discussing individual rights with governments that have no way of knowing how we work. We'd have better luck running our own government. We can herd our cats, they can herd theirs."
>
> **True Name:** I like that. I am enough like a cat to be difficult to herd.
>
> **Jonas:** Confirmed. Getting her to do anything she doesn't want to do is fucking impossible.
>
> **True Name:** I prefer to think of myself as 'staunchly independent', thank you very much.
>
> **Yared:** Haha
>
> **Yared:** Actually, how about I include some banter into the post?
>
> **Yared:** "At this point," one of them said, as we laughed over another fruitless debate. "I'm not even sure we should be discussing individual rights with governments that have no way of knowing how we work. We'd have better luck running our own government."
>
> **Yared:** To which the other replied, "We can herd our cats, they can herd theirs," thus spawning a good five minutes of cat-herding jokes, wherein we unilaterally decided that cats were, to put it politely, staunchly independent. I think that applies to them as much as it does to us.
>
> **Jonas:** I like it! It'll need a bit of cleaning up to make it flow a little better in context, but I trust that that's something you can do on your own.
>
> **Yared:** Of course.
>
> **True Name:** I am sorry to make such a cat out of you in this situation, Yared. You are being herded by two different camps, us and your councilor friend. Our goals align for now, for which I am grateful, but I understand that having both parties tell you not to tell the other about them is uncomfortable.
>
> **True Name:** On that note, it is probably best not to tell Demma about this conversation.
>
> **Jonas:** Seconded.
>
> **Yared:** Thirded. I don't know that he'd have my head on a platter if he knew that this conversation had taken place, but I don't know that he wouldn't, either.
>
> **Jonas:** We don't want that, we like you too much.
>
> **True Name:** I was going to say that you are too useful to us, but I will grudgingly agree that we do rather like you.
>
> **Yared:** I'm pleased to hear that!
>
> **Yared:** I'll get this polished and posted. What's next on your side?
>
> **True Name:** Jonas will likely be snooping around for news and schmoozing where appropriate. I will be focusing on how to present this in the most empathetic, understandable way possible to the Council and other interested parties. I need to sell it to the System.
>
> **Yared:** Does that mean you're for secession, then?
>
> **Jonas:** If the L<sub>5</sub> launch goes through, yes. If not, then it becomes more complicated, and we likely *would* have to move to international waters.