Bumpnumbers

content/read/056.md

@@ -1,75 +1,133 @@
-# Ioan Bălan --- 2326
+# True Name --- 2125
 
-"We're nearing the point of this project where we're considering pulling together all of our notes. We have quite a bit already, certainly enough for an overview, and if we decide to do a second volume as a deeper dive, we can consider that later." Ioan smiled to the skunk across the table from em, one ey had so many reasons to fear. "So this interview is mostly meant to wrap everything up, fill in a few gaps here and there. Does that sound alright?"
+The Council of Eight met before the news of the secession amendment passing was published in the perisystem news feeds for those who tracked such information sys-side. They agreed, without even needing to talk about it, that it would be nice to have a small celebration of success before everyone was doing it. Something comfortable, cheerful, with friends.
 
-"Of course," True Name said, smiling. "I have read over the summary that you sent me, and it looks fairly complete, but I will answer any question you ask."
+To that end, they met at Debarre's house, a low, rambling house plugged squarely into the side of a hill, walk-out basement looking out over a wooded lawn. The neighborhood had several such houses, widely spaced, where a few of Debarre's friends that he'd met both on and off the System had set up a comfortable living, enough space to be alone, enough friends to make it worthwhile.
 
-Ioan collected eir thoughts for a moment, testing eir pen's nib against the paper. "Right. Okay. The first thing I'd like to ask is that, well, you've given us a good bit of information about your why, how, and when for many of the things that you did around Secession and Launch. I think we've got an idea of what, too, but it seems almost too big to grasp at a glance, so I'd like to know who all was involved.
+The plus-side of the house, in particular, was that the patio for the walk-out basement was beneath an overhanging deck, protecting the occupants from the slow but steady snowfall.
 
-"I am assuming you mean in more detail than just us and the Jonas clade, yes?" She tilted her head when Ioan nodded, apparently considering the best way to answer. "I, like Jonas Prime did for his clade, acted as the point of contact for the Ode clade in this endeavor. However, Jonas's methods tended toward that of a hydra: he coordinated with all of his instances working on various aspects only as much as was required to keep them from stepping on each other's toes.
+"I don't understand why you had to make it cold," user11824 grumbled.
 
-"I was much more akin to the central nervous system for the Odists. The Bălan clade has interviewed Why Ask Questions, End Waking, and May Then My Name, but the entirety of my stanza was working for me at one point or another--"
+"It's New Years day, dude." Debarre laughed. "It's supposed to be cold."
 
-"May is in your stanza," Ioan said, frowning.
+"Fucking Americans, I swear to God. I'm from New Zealand. New Years is not cold."
 
-True Name winked, then continued, "But there were several others from other stanzas, as well. Praiseworthy and Qoheleth, yes, but many of the first lines and several of their initial forks helped out quite a bit. Even Hammered Silver, in her own way, helped. She kept Michelle company, helped her throughout the long years, They grew quite close, and through her, I was able to accomplish what I required from Michelle."
+The wandering discussion took place around a chiminea radiating warmth. An indentation had been made in the side of the clay body of the fireplace into which a kettle had been placed, mulled wine slowly simmering. True Name found it immensely enjoyable. It reminded her quite a bit of winters with her grandparents on the east coast. Made sense, of course, given where Debarre was originally from.
 
-"Is that the difference between the liberal and conservative elements of the clade? The ones who were under your employ and aligned to it, and those who weren't?"
+"I like it," Zeke rumbled. "I only ever got to see snow once, and that was in Yakutsk when I was uploading."
 
-The skunk laughed openly. "They are silly names, are they not? There are hardly categories so neat, Ioan. We cannot even make a spectrum, can we? All of us had our different jobs, as mentioned. Praiseworthy provided her services as propagandist between productions. Qoheleth rewrote the memories of the System itself, and though he suffered for it, he was good at his job. Hammered Silver sat with Michelle, Why Ask Questions and Answers Will Not Help managed the phys- and sys-side politics, and End Waking kept his fingers in the finances. That is hardly a spectrum from liberal to conservative, is it?"
+The three S-R Bloc goons laughed. "There's not that much snow out there," one of them said. "But I'm glad you got to see it at least once."
 
-Ioan shrugged, waited for her to continue.
+The bundle of rags nodded appreciatively, extending a pseudopod of an arm to ladle more of the wine into his mug.
 
-"As you will," she said, grinning. "If there is to be a divide between liberals and conservatives, then, it must be in the scale of their thoughts, of their actions. Those who you and Dear and, who knows, perhaps even May Then My Name call conservatives think on the scale of centuries. Their thoughts are bound up at the level of species, their actions work on a global scale. More than a global scale, for the System is not on the globe, and the LVs are well on their way out of the solar system now, are they not?"
+"Where's Jonas?" Debarre asked True Name.
 
-"And the liberals think too small?" Ey shook eir head, adding, "I guess that's a value judgement. The liberals think smaller? Like on the individual scale?"
+"Running late, I guess. I am not his keeper."
 
-"Oh, you had it right the first time. The liberals think too small. They are completely welcome to, of course. Take Dear and Serene, for instance. It is in no way wrong for them to think about the work that they do. They consider the ways in which sims and instances affect those that interact with them, and then they play on those effects like a finely tuned instrument. It speaks to a level of...how should I put this? It bespeaks a showmanship that I --- that Michelle and the owner of the Name, for that matter --- could not hope to achieve. They are the consummate performers.
+"I know, I just figured since--" He was interrupted by a muffled doorbell as someone entered the sim, followed by Jonas (Ar Jonas, True Name guessed) ambled around the side of the house to join them.
 
-"But what can they do with that? What use do they believe they are to the System? I do not mean that in a simple utilitarian sense, or at least not only in that sense, but I wonder if they, as artists, consider the end goals of their work. Do not let Dear tell you otherwise, it is an artist, and a very fine one, but all its art accomplishes is all any art accomplishes. It is transgressive without being subversive. It does not move the population to greater goals."
+"*Et voilà,*" she said, grinning.
 
-"Isn't that okay though? For an artist, I mean. Art doesn't always have to inspire our societies to better themselves or our societies, does it?"
+"What?" Jonas laughed. "What'd I do?"
 
-"Of course not," True Name said, smiling. "Art can be all of those things and still be fine. It can be an endeavor that adds to the world around it, even if it does not push it to realize greater capabilities. That is the opposing view to the conservatives. The names do not fit, do you see? The conservative elements of the Ode clade are those who steer and guide and lead and always hunt for greater potential. The liberal elements of the Ode clade are the artists dropped within, the storytellers, the landscape artists, the lovers and dancers and actors. The conservatives forge, the liberals hone. Both of us live wholly in the work that we have before us, and both of us love what we do."
+"You were late, Debarre was worried, I was bored," user11824 drawled.
 
-Ioan's hand brushed across eir page in an even cadence as she spoke, and when ey reached the end of the line, ey paused, formulating eir next question. "Where did all of this come from?"
+"Well, sorry about that. Just checking in with our contact phys-side. He's depressed."
 
-"Can you expand on that?"
+Zeke began ladling a cup of the heated wine for Jonas. "Why was he depressed. It passed, didn't it?"
 
-"This," ey said, waving eir hand at True Name, at the page. "To hear tell from the other Odists, this work began essentially as soon as you were forked off from Michelle. Each of you seemed to individuate immediately, whereas it took Codrin far longer to do so. Years, even. Even after the name change, after ey moved in with Dear and its partner, ey still could have just as easily been a Ioan. From the way it sounds, you ceased being Michelle as soon as you were instantiated. Where did that come from?"
+"Yeah, well, apparently he's getting pressure from the NEAC government. They're happy enough about the bill passing, but they want to control his DDR participation going forward. He's just mopey."
 
-The skunk looked thoughtful for a moment, then closed her eyes. The look of concentration on her face grew, and then, for a few short seconds, she became like Michelle. Ey saw, for the first time in years, that wavering between Michelle and Sasha, those waves of skunk/human/skunk/human/skunk that washed over her form, and always on her face, that look of exhaustion, of the concentration needed to hold it together.
+Debarre growled quietly, tail bristling out. "The DDR was a fucking mistake, anyway."
 
-And as True Name focused on recalling that bit of Michelle that lingered from the past, she forked off copy after copy of herself, each instance lasting only a fraction of a second, but throughout the display, Ioan saw the ways in which they differed. First, a Michelle would flick into existence, and then a Sasha. First, a skunk that looked happy, then a human that looked to be in agony. Always in flux, always tied to whatever it was that True Name must have been experiencing at that point.
+"Yes," True Name said. "But it got us this, at least, and now we do not need to worry about it again."
 
-And then, it was over.
+Debarre shrugged.
 
-The skunk puffed out a pent-up breath, laughing and fanning her face with a paw. "That was way fucking harder than I remember it being. I have not tried that trick in decades."
+Zeke asked, "So when does it all come into effect?"
 
-Ioan blinked, frowned. "You differ because of when it was that Michelle forked?"
+"The 21st, same day as the launch," Jonas said. "We shouldn't notice anything except maybe a jump in systime if there's any downtime getting us set up."
 
-"That is part of it," True Name said, catching her breath. "I read your notes, do you remember what it was that Douglas said about having a fever?"
+"What's the chance of that happening?"
 
-Ey prowled through the exo ey had devoted to this project, rifling through files of memories, then recited, "I had a very high fever, and when it was at its worst, I felt as though I was being offered a chance to peek behind a curtain, or at least see the shadows moving around backstage beneath the hem of it."
+"Around five percent."
 
-"Do you imagine that what Michelle was feeling at any time, or at least on any particularly bad day, was any different?" Her expression darkened. "When you are lost, when you are locked in your mirrored cage, any cord that tied a thought to reality or your concept of self is slowly severed. Michelle was lucky. She was in there for sixteen hours, she was told, and she still came out like this. Many of her thoughts remained tethered, enough for her to continue to live and exist in the world for a little while, but the longer she lived, the more of those frayed cords began to break, and she was not just, as Douglas put it, "granted a glimpse of some thinner reality", but she found herself stuck there.
+"Chance of data loss?"
 
-"When she forked, wherever she was, that was what we became. The state of her mind in flux, her body in flux, became the state that led to us. Perhaps I was pinned to a memory, however fleeting, of the political systems that led to her getting lost. Perhaps Praiseworthy was pinned to memories of playing a role in a play."
+"Less than a tenth of a percent."
 
-Ioan scribbled furiously to keep up, as the skunk's language flowed more easily and became more flowery.
+"And catastrophic failure?"
 
-"But this is just speculation, Mx. Bălan. We do not know why we differ so much, but we do, and that is the best guess we have. The evidence you have just seen is all we have to back it up, but you have seen what was borne from it. All of the stanzas have their role, and mine just happens to be that of politics. We influence people. It is just what we do."
+Jonas grinned. "There were a lot of zeroes before that six, I can tell you that. I didn't count them."
 
-"Which is why your stanza was able to dive so easily into their associated tasks. They had your memories, of course, but they also had that same drive."
+True Name added, "It would have to require not only the launch going wrong, but the backup System failing, and from what our friends say, it is far away from the launch site."
 
-She beamed at em. "Precisely. I will not enumerate them all, but you can, if you like, think of them as a microcosm of that conservative-liberal spectrum, with me at the conservative end, working on the scale of centuries and populations, and your May Then My Name at the other, liberal end."
+"In the North, yes. Launch site is in Western China."
 
-"What did May do? What was her task?"
+Zeke nodded, sipped from his wine, and rasped, "Best we can hope for, then."
 
-"That is for her to tell."
+user11824 shrugged. "It'd be a boring as hell end. Are we going to have a big celebration or anything?"
 
-"No, True Name. You're here, it's your story. You promised me that you'd expand on the question of who, and I want you to live up to that promise now." Ey was surprised at the anger in eir own voice. There was a tightness in eir chest, an anxiety, an emotion somewhere between protectiveness and betrayal, stemming from the answer that hovered over the table, there in eir house. Eir and May's house, now. May, who had left on some drummed up errand as soon as True Name had arrived, a look of what ey could only describe as torment on her face. Ey *knew* ey should ask her, rather than True Name, and yet... "What did May do?"
+"I do not see why not," True Name said. "We can get a few of the sims to set up fireworks and we can spread the word through perisystem news."
 
-She stood from her chair and walked around the corner of the table to where ey remained stubbornly seated. "If you do not wish to be unhappy with the answers to difficult questions, Ioan," she said, tousling eir hair. "Then you do not need to ask them."
+"We can celebrate now, too," Debarre said, grinning. "I went through all this fucking trouble and we're talking shop. Drink your wine, warm your hands by the fire, *literally* anything but more shop talk."
 
-She smiled down to em. In that smile was a plastic kindness, and in that kindness was a loathing ey could not fathom. And then she quit.
+And so they did. They talked, they stayed warm around the chiminea, and they drank. Debarre was the first to get truly drunk, breaking into Auld Lang Syne. When no one joined in, the weasel laughed and danced around the ring of council-members, calling them all boring, which got a grin out of even user11824.
+
+As the evening wore on and, one by one, the rest of the council joined Debarre in his drunkenness, the conversations grew more earnest, more heartfelt. Several toasts were made. The final one was to, per True Name, "The chance to do whatever the fuck we want."
+
+After that, they agreed to meet the next day and give statements for the wider celebrations, and then all headed back to their home sims.
+
+Others headed back, perhaps. But after an appropriate delay, True Name let the drunkenness fade and went, instead to Jonas's apartment. Two of the Jonases were sitting on the couch, talking possibilities for the next year.
+
+"Well?" one of them asked. Prime, she supposed.
+
+"Well, we made it," she said, slouching on the stool Jonas had long since added to the furniture once the skunk had started coming by regularly. "And now we can finally work on something else."
+
+He laughed. "Getting bored of the same old secession arguments?"
+
+"Oh, I have been working on other things on the side, do not worry, but it will be nice to do so more openly."
+
+"Tell me about them."
+
+She thought for a moment, tallying up the ones she was comfortable discussing with Jonas. "The three big ones are, I think, ensuring stability and growth via financial and political means, which I have other instances currently working on. The second is disrupting and then disbanding the Council--"
+
+Jonas sat up straighter at this.
+
+"--in order to give us more latitude to do our work without having to run it by others. It is not like the System needs any governance, anyway."
+
+"Any *open* governance," Jonas corrected.
+
+"Of course. There will still be work to do."
+
+"And what's the third?"
+
+"Finding any patterns that we have left in our wake and smoothing them out. The first step will be convincing Yared to upload. He is less dangerous up here. I do not expect that to be difficult."
+
+Jonas nodded. "Makes sense. Do you think we've left many patterns?"
+
+She shook her head. "No, not yet. But I think it best to get in the practice. I would like to begin to think on the scale of centuries, and if we are to do that, I think it best to shape history both as we go and in retrospect."
+
+"Good plan," he said, slouching back into the couch and grinning.
+
+The skunk grinned back, far more toothily, her tail giving a lazy swish. "And if you are thinking of calling me a politician, I would like to cordially invite you to consider the consequences of your actions."
+
+"Fine." He laughed, rolling his eyes. "So, are you at least happy with the way things are going?"
+
+"I am pleased, yes. It is a good first step. There is almost no chance of the decision being reversed down the line, and if we make it another fifty years, the concept of the System or any individuals living here remaining under the wing of any national entity will have left the collective subconscious. It will also work to our advantage that there is no un-uploading. An irreversible process that lands one in a place that appears to have no influence on the outside world will nullify the arguments of many of our detractors."
+
+"Just ensure they upload, right."
+
+True Name nodded. "Yes. And once the Council is out of the way, we should be good to go."
+
+"And how do you propose to do that?" he asked.
+
+"It will be easy enough. Just take on more and more responsibility under the guise of helping out, start accepting less and less assistance, then begin suggesting that, since it is all going so smoothly, maybe it is not needed anymore. If we work with phys-side techs in order to drop the reputation cost of forking and sim creation, that will also help."
+
+"Think any of them will complain?"
+
+"Not until it is too late, and by then, it will all be too difficult to form another Council, right?"
+
+Jonas nodded. "Works for me. Shall we start divvying up tasks, then?"
+
+The skunk nodded. "There is much to be done."