Champagne tinted evenings faded, as they do, into brandy-colored nights. Amber nights and fireplaces for the hell of it, me and Hanne settling in for a little bit of warmth for that last hour, not quite decadence and a ways off from opulence, but still a plush couch and a fire and snifters slightly too full of liquor.

We shared our warmth, sitting side by side on the couch, and we continued to talk, talking of the year past, of years past beyond that, and of however many we decided were ahead. A hundred years? Two hundred? Only five? I made an impassioned argument for five more years of life, then laughed, changed my mind, and say I'll never die. Hanne said she'll live for precisely two hundred, give up, and disappear from Lagrange. She'd fork at a century and never speak to that version of her again, that exact duplicate, and should that instance decide to live on past two centuries, so be it, but she'd decided her expiration.

I scoffed. "What? And leave me behind?"

"Of course. Can you imagine six score years with someone? Absolutely miserable." She rested her head on my shoulder and shrugged. "We're a ways off from that, I think I still like you now."

"You think?" I draped my arm around her shoulders. "Still not sure?"

"I'm sure I think I like you."

I laughed. "Yeah? Well, what can I do to cement your opinion of me? What can I do to make you sure that you like me?"

"There's a whole laundry list," she said, sipping her brandy.

"Pop one. I could use a goal for 276."

Hanne held up her glass appraisingly. "Well, we could work on your taste in liquor."

I snorted. "What would you rather I drink?"

"Scotch."

"That always struck me as so manly, though."

"Sounds fake."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure it is, but we're beholden to stereotypes."

She poked me in the side, grinning. "You must be drunk if you're using words like 'mawkish' and 'beholden'. Let's see. You could introduce me to Marsh, maybe."

I shook my head. "That's not on me, you know that. We have a one-way relationship."

"But they're your down-tree instance! You're patterned after them. You talk every year *at least* once, right? You'll talk to them later tonight, right? You have for the last hundred."

"No, probably not. If I hear from them directly, anything more than just a ping, I'll know something's gone horribly wrong." I leaned back — carefully, what with her head resting on my shoulder. "Like I say, it's a one-way relationship. All I do is live my own life, right? I stay in touch with the rest of the clade to greater or lesser extent, but Marsh has their own life."

"They have several."

"Right. We all fork, we all merge back down to whoever our down-tree instance is, and since I was forked from them, I merge down directly. They get all our lives, one year at a time, but we don't really get anything in return."

I could hear the frown in her voice. "How miserable."

"What, our relationship?"

"Just...them. How miserable they have to be, right? They live their life doing whatever, spending their whole year remembering the previous year from, what, five instances?"

"Six. Me, Lily, Cress, Rush, Sedge, and Tule."

"That's another thing you could do: be a little less weird."

I chuckled, kissed atop her head. "Uh huh. Love you too."

"But I was saying they have to be miserable. They chill out in their house and spend their days remembering yours, you and your cocladists, and just living vicariously through you all."

"That's not all they do. They sing. They have Vos and Pierre, right? They spend time with their partners. They go to Vos's plays. They have friends over. They sing a *lot*. They cook–"

"Are they as bad a cook as you?"

"Oh, worse, according to Tule's girlfriend. Truly terrible."

She laughed.

"They have a full and fulfilling life, is what I'm saying. They're happy, it's just that their happiness doesn't include communication with their up-tree instances."

"Why not?"

I yawned, slouched down further on the couch along with Hanne. "They very specifically want us to live our own lives. They don't want us to just be other versions of them. They can make all of those they want for their little tasks. They specifically want us to be something other than what they are so that they can experience that on their own terms."

"Don't see how that's any different," she mumbled. Sleep threatened, even with some time left before midnight. "You all merging down like that is just doing the same thing in reverse, You're making them a version of you all, even if you're not just a version of them."

I turned that thought over in my head, held it at arms length, let the light of the fire shine through the fog of champagne and brandy onto it to admire just how strangely it was shaped. "Well, huh."

"See? You're so weird."

"I guess we are," I said, smiling and nudging Hanne upright once more. "No dozing off, now. Not yet."

She grumbled and rubbed at her face. "Sorry if that came off as rude. I guess it's just outside my understanding."

I scooted up onto the couch, myself, sitting cross-legged to face her. "It's okay. It's not wrong, even, I just don't think it's wholly right, either. It's a matter of intent. Our intent is to live our own lives to the fullest, and it's their intent to let us do so and yet still be able to experience that at one layer of remove. We've been doing it for a century, and it's worked out well enough since then. If all this–" I waved around the room, feeling the gentle spin of drunkenness follow the movement, "–is just a dream, if we're all doing our best to dream in unison with each other, then I think intent may be all that we have, right? However may billion or trillion people have uploaded are all trying to dream the same dream together, all mixed up and poured into the same System, we have to form what meanings we may on our own."

"I think we broke two trillion instances a while back. I don't know how may uploads, but I don't think it's hit a trillion yet."

"Right. Sorry, guess I'm kinda rambly when I'm drunk."

Leaning forward, she gave me a light kiss. "It's okay, I like it when you ramble. Just don't lose track of the time."

23:45.

I started to nod, then stiffened as I felt first one, then another set of memories crash down onto me. "*Fuck.* One of these...days I'll convince...them to give me some warning...sec..."

Hanne laughed and shook her head, standing from the couch to go get herself a glass of water.

I closed my eyes to turn down one of my senses, setting the sweet-smelling glass of brandy aside to rid myself of another as best I can. I sat and spent a moment processing, savoring the memories. Rush had merged down first; ve had split off a new copy of verself, and then the original had quit. On doing so, all the memories ve'd formed over the last year fell down onto me, ready to be remembered like some forgotten word on the tip of my tongue: all I needed to do is actually remember. Clearly, Tule had already forked and merged back down into Sedge, as their combined memories piled yet more weight on me. Three sets of memories — two from my direct up-tree instances and one from a second-degree up-tree instance — rested on my mind, ready for integration.

There'll be time for full perusal and remembering later. It was rapidly approaching midnight, and I needed to get the memories sorted into my own, interleaved and zippered together into as cohesive a whole as best I can manage, all conflicts addressed — though with as separate as their lives had been until then, there was thankfully quite little in the way of conflicting memories — so that, shortly before midnight, I could fork, myself, let that new copy of me live out the next year with Hanne, with all their joys and sorrows, while the original instance quit and let all those memories — those of Rush, Sedge, Tule, and myself — fall to Marsh to process, savor, and treasure for themself.

I heard Hanne return, heard her climb back onto the couch before me, felt her press a cold glass of water into my hand.

Five minutes left.

Three.

23:58, and I opened my eyes and smiled. "Well, seems like it's been a pleasant enough year for everyone involved, though I'll deal with all the rest of that later."

"It continues to amaze just how good you are at that."

"What, merging?"

She nodded.

"It feels pretty straight forward for me," I said. "I just...remember it all, and when memories or outlooks on life don't line up, I choose mine."

She laughed. "Still, far better than I am at it."

23:59.

"Practice, maybe," I said. "But hey, happy New Year."

"Is it time, then?" she asked.

I nodded, willed away the drunkenness, took a sip of water, and, with a rush of intent, brought into being beside us a new instance of myself. Exactly the same. *Precisely*. Had such a thing any meaning to an upload, we would be the same down to the atomic level, to the subatomic. All of the memories, all of the personality, all of the history.

For a fraction of a second, at least. From that point on, we began to diverge, each remembering things differently. The Reed that still sat on the couch saw Hanne from *this* angle, yet the one that stood beside the couch saw her from that. The one that sat on the couch felt the fire on his cheek, the one standing felt it on his back.

"Alright. I love you, Hanne Marie. I'll miss you."

She rolled her eyes. "Tell Marsh I said–

<div style="height: 150vh"></div>

"See? You're so weird."

"I guess we are," I said, smiling and nudging Hanne upright once more. A flash of *déjà vu* struck me squarely in the right temple, a headache amid the buzz of alcohol. "Hey now, no falling asleep on me."

"Right, sorry. Still, uh...still fifteen minutes." She grumbled and rubbed at her face. "Sorry if that came off as rude. I guess it's just outside my understanding."

I scooted up onto the couch, myself, sitting cross-legged to face her. "It's okay. It's not wrong, come to think of it, I just don't think it's wholly right, either, you know? It's more a matter of intent. Our intent is to live our own lives doing as we will rather than as they would, and it's their intent to let us do so — and by not interfering, even with communication, *force* us to do so — and yet still be able to experience that almost like a dream. They forked us off a century ago, me, Lily, and Cress, and we've been doing it for the last century, and it's worked out well enough since then. They're more than just Marsh, now. They're Marsh and all of us. If all this–" I waved around the room, feeling the gentle spin of drunkenness follow the movement, "–is just a dream, if we're all doing our best to dream in unison with each other, then I think intent may be all that we have, right? However may billion or trillion people have uploaded are all trying to dream the same dream together, all mixed up and poured into the same System, we have to form what meanings we may on our own."

"I think we broke two trillion instances a while back. I don't know how may uploads, but I don't think it's hit a trillion yet."

"Right. Sorry, guess I'm kinda rambly when I'm drunk."

Leaning forward, she gave me a light kiss. "You know I like it when you ramble. Just don't lose track of the time." She stood up straight again and squinted out towards nothing. "Weird. *Déjà vu.*"

23:45.

I started to nod, willed away the drunkenness, then stiffened as I felt first one, then another set of memories crash down onto me. "*Fuck.* One of these...days I'll convince...them to give me some warning...sec..."

Hanne laughed and shook her head, stepping away from the couch to go get herself a glass of water.

I closed my eyes to turn down one of my senses, taking one more sip of the sweet-smelling brandy before setting it aside to rid myself of another two as best I could. I sat and spent a moment processing, savoring the memories. Rush had merged down first; ve had split off a new copy of verself then the original had quit. On doing so, all the memories ve'd formed over the last year fell down onto me, ready to be remembered like some forgotten word on the tip of my tongue: all I needed to do was actually remember. Clearly, Tule had already forked and merged back down into Sedge, as their combined memories piled yet more weight on me. Three sets of memories — two from my direct up-tree instances and one from a second-degree up-tree instance — rested on my mind, ready for integration.

There would be time for full perusal and remembering later. It was rapidly approaching midnight, and I needed to get the memories sorted into my own, interleaved and zippered together into as cohesive a whole as I could manage, all — or, at least, almost all — conflicts addressed (though with as separate as their lives had been until then, there was thankfully quite little in the way of conflicting memories), so that, shortly before midnight, I could fork and quit, myself, letting that new copy of myself live out the next year with Hanne, with all their joys and sorrows, while my original instance quit and let all those memories — those of Rush, Sedge, Tule, and myself — fall to Marsh to process, savor, and treasure for themself.

I heard Hanne return, heard her climb back onto the couch before me, felt her press a cold glass of water into my hand.

Five minutes left.

Two.

23:59, and I opened my eyes. "Well, seems like it's been a pleasant enough year. I'll deal with all the rest of that later."

"Is it time, then?" she asked.

I nodded, took a few long gulps of water, and, with a press of will, brought into being beside us a new instance of myself. Exactly the same. *Exactly*. Had such a thing any meaning to the uploaded consciousness, we would have been the same down to the atomic level, to the subatomic. All of the memories, all of the personality, all of the love and hate and past that made us *us*.

For a fraction of a second, at least. From there, we began to diverge, each remembering things differently. The Reed that still sat on the couch sees Hanne from *this* angle, and yet the one that stood beside the couch sees her from that. The one that sat on the couch felt the fire on his cheek, the one standing felt it on his back.

"Alright. I love you, Miss Hanne Marie. I'll think of you often."

She rolled her eyes. "No you won't. Tell Marsh I said hi."

I laughed and, as the clock strikes midnight, willed myself to quit.

Then frowned.

"Something wrong?"

I held up a finger and closed my eyes. Once more, I thought to myself, *I'm ready to quit*, then then willed that to be reality. 

Rather than the sudden nothingness that should have followed, I felt the System balk. Resist. I felt an elastic sensation that I'd never felt before. There was a barrier between me and the ability to quit. I felt it, tested it, probed and explored. It was undeniably present, and though I sensed that I could probably have pressed through it if I desired, it was as though Lagrange desperately did not want me to quit. It didn't want the Reed of now to leave the System.

"I can't."

"You can't?" Hanne tilted her head, then leaned forward to take one of my hands in her own. "I mean, it's okay if you don't want to. I don't think Marsh will mind if you're a few minutes late. Hell, you can even send them a message saying you don't want to this year. I think they'll–"

"No, Hanne," I said, carefully slipping my hand free so that I could stand. I needed to pace. I nodded to my new fork, who quit. I declined the merge. "I mean I can't. I'm not able to. It's impossible. Or possible, but– wait, hold on."

It had been more than a decade since I'd done so, but if ever there was a time, this was it. There were very few reasons that the System would try to stop an instance for quitting and one of them...well, no– It'd been more than a decade since I had broken the communication embargo, but I sent Marsh a gentle ping.

Or *tried* to, at least.

All the ping was was a gentle nudge against the recipient's sensorium, a sense that someone was looking for them, was seeking them out, was just checking if they were free, if they were even there. From the sender's side, it felt like a gentle touch, a brush of some more metaphorical finger against the symbolic shoulder of the recipient, a reassurance that they were indeed there.

But there was nothing. I felt nothing. No sense of Marsh. Attempting to send a sensorium ping to someone that doesn't exist just felt like daydreaming. It felt like a silly, pointless imagining, as though one was imagining that they could touch God on the shoulder or shake hands with the devil.

I frowned, pinged Hanne.

"What?" she said, her frown deepening.

"Hold on, one more sec."

00:02.

I thought across the clade, thought of one of Marsh's other forks. Pinged Lily.

The response was immediate, words flowing into my consciousness through some sense that wasn't quite hearing. *"What's happening? I can't–"*

Pinged Cress, the other fork. Asked, *"Cress? Can you–"*

*"What the fuck is happening?"* came the panicked response.

*"My place,"* I sent back, followed by my address. I repeated the message to Lily and, on a whim, my own up-tree instances, Rush, Sedge, and Tule.

00:04.

Cress arrived almost immediately along with Tule — they shared a partner, so it made sense they'd be together for the evening — leading Hanne to start back on the couch. "Reed," she said, voice low. "What is–"

Lily arrived next, already rushing forward to grab my shoulder. "You can't either?" she said, voice full of panic.

Before I could answer, Sedge and Rush arrived. The living room became quite crowded, all five of the other instances of the Marsh clade clamoring over each other to talk to me, the first long-lived fork from Marsh.

"Reed!" Hanne shouted, standing and stamping her foot. She spoke carefully, and I could hear anger just beneath that tone. "What happened?"

The rest of the clade looked to me as well, and I quailed under so many gazes. "I can't quit. I can't merge down. I can't reach Marsh. They–" my voice gave out and I had to take a shaky sip of water. "They're not on Lagrange, as far as I can tell."

00:07.

<!----->

Silence fell thick across the room. The clade — Marsh's clade — stared, wide-eyed. Their expressions ranged from unsure to terrified. I couldn't even begin to imagine what expression showed on my face.

"Okay, no, hold on," Hanne said, shaking her head and waving her hand. She appeared to have willed drunkenness away, much as I had, as her voice is clear, holding more frustration than the panic I felt. "Did they quit? They couldn't have, right? You just pinged them earlier today."

I nodded.

"And they said nothing about quitting?"

"Nothing."

Hanne glanced around the room, singling out Marsh's other two immediate up-tree instances, Cress and Lily. Both shook their heads.

"I was just talking to them about an hour ago, actually." Lily said. "They and Vos were wrapping up the first part of the night's celebration and they were going to–"

"Vos!" I shouted. "Shit, sorry Lily."

It took a moment for Vos to respond to my ping. *"Reed? It's been a bit. What's up?"*

*"Is Marsh there?"* I sent back.

*"I don't know. I figured they were in the study waiting on you. I just made us drinks, but they're not in there now. Is something wrong?"*

*"Can you ping them?"*

There was a short pause, followed by a sensorium glimpse of a familiar room, that study from so long ago, every flat surface that wasn't the floor covered in stacks of unread books. Empty.

*"What's happening?"* Vos sent. There was an edge of caution to her voice, the sound of a thin barrier keeping anxiety at bay.

*"Pierre?"*

*"One second."* Another pause, and then, quickly, *"Wait, can we just come over? What's your address?"*

I messaged over the address, and a few seconds later, Fenne Vos and Pierre LaFontaine arrived holding hands, leading to another yelp from Hanne. 

"You must be Vos! Hi," she said, preempting any of Marsh's up-tree instances. "Do you know where Marsh is?"

Some small part of me looked on in admiration. Hanne had kept much of the panic that was coursing through me and my cocladists out of her voice. I could feel a shout building within me and I knew from past experiences with Vos and Pierre that that would only make things worse.

"We didn't see them around," Vos answered, that barrier between caution and worry seemed to be giving way. "Why? If you're all here, I'm guessing something happened."

"Have you been able to ping them?"

Both Vos and Pierre shook their heads.

The sight of Cress and Tule bowing their heads to whisper to each other caught my eye, and a moment later their partner, a stocky woman with curly black hair, appeared between them, looking as though she'd come straight from a party, herself. I felt a muffled pang of affection for her, lingering emotions from my up-tree instance's memories.

"Stop!" Hanne said, then laughed nervously at the silence that followed. She gestured absentmindedly, pressing the bounds of the sim outward to expand the room. It had started getting actively crowded. "You're doing it again, Reed."

"What?" I tamped down indignation. "Sorry, Hanne, there's a lot going on."

"Right, I get that, but can you start at the beginning for those of us outside the clade? What did you mean, you don't think they're on Lagrange?"

At this, both Vos and Pierre took a half-step back, looking startled.

00:11

I spent a moment composing myself. I stood up straighter, brushing my hands down over my shirt, and nodded. "Right. I'm sorry, love. When midnight hit, I forked and tried to quit as usual. I couldn't, though. The System wouldn't let me."

Cress and Tule's partner, I Remember The Rattle Of Dry Grass of the Ode clade, stood up stock straight, all grogginess — or perhaps drunkenness — from the party fleeing her features.

"That's only supposed to happen when quitting would mean the loss of too much memory, though. The root instance can barely quit at all in the older clades–" Dry Grass winced. I did my best to ignore it and continued. "–because the System really doesn't like losing a life if it won't be merged down into a down-tree instance."

"So, you couldn't quit because..." Hanne said, urging me on.

"Well, I imagine the same is true for anyone with lots of memory inside them. If there's no one to merge down into, it just looks like...like..."

"Like death," Dry Grass said darkly. "It looks like death. You could not quit because, to the System, you and all of your memories would die, and the System is not built for death. That is what it felt like, is it not? It felt like you could not possibly quit without pushing the weight of the world uphill?"

I frowned. "Perhaps not all that, but it certainly felt like I was trying to push against something really hard. It didn't feel like it was impossible like anything else the System would prohibit, it just felt like I was being forced away from that option."

"Like death," she muttered again. Vos begins to cry. "Marsh is not on the System, then, no."

"So are they...is Marsh dead?" Pierre whispered, his own voice clouded by tears. Vos towered over him — over all of us, really — and had always seemed as though she could weather a storm better than any stone, but now, even she looked suddenly frail, fragile in the face of the loss they were all only talking around.

"They are not on the System," Dry Grass and I echoed in unison.

"How can you be sure, though?" Hanne asked. "You can't merge down, sure, and you can't ping, but could they just be in some locked down sim or a privacy cone or something? Can those even block merges?"

Lily shook her head. "Not that I know of, no. I don't think anything blocks a merge."

"Nothing blocks merges, correct," Dry Grass said. "That would leave potentially much in the way of memory lingering with nowhere to go, and the System does not work that way."

Slowly, all within the room began to face her rather than me, at which I breathed a silent sigh of relief. That I was the oldest fork of Marsh's didn't necessarily give me any more of the information that they all so desperately craved. Dry Grass was more than a century older than I was, however, and if anyone might have answers...

"How do you know, love?" Tule asked.

"I worked as a sys-side System tech."

Cress laughed. It sounded forced. "And you never thought to tell us?"

"This was before you were born, my dear. Before Marsh's parents were born, even. It was a long time ago, and I have since moved on."

"Well, is there a way to find out what happened?"

She frowned down to her feet as she thought. "It used to be that there were rotated audit logs for events like forking and quitting. I do not know if those are kept any longer, though, given how large they would get in a very short amount of time. Perhaps?"

"Well, how do we check those?" Rush said, speaking up for the first time since that initial clamor of voices.

Dry Grass spread her hands helplessly. "I do not know. Again, it has been two centuries since I worked as a System tech. The technology has changed much. I would need access. I would need time to remember. Time to research."

"Do we even *have* time?" Lily growled at her, frustration apparently winning out over panic. Cress and Tule both gave her a sharp glance.

00:15

"I do not know. I am sorry," Dry Grass said, bowing. "I will fork and read up as fast as I can. May I remain here?"

"Please," Cress and Tule said in unison. Sedge, Rush, and I, along with Marsh's partners, all nodded. Lily did not. Hanne only frowned.

Dry Grass bowed once more, forked, and the fork stepped from the sim to, I suppose, go lose herself in the perisystem architecture, hunting down what information she could. They could only hope that she still had the permissions to find what she needed.

"Hey, uh," Sedge said into the uncomfortable silence that fell once more. "Has anyone checked the time?"

Everyone tilted their heads almost in unison. It was more a habit than anything, hardly a required motion, but the habit that Marsh had formed so many years ago had stuck with all of the Marshans throughout their own lives.

Systime 277+41 00:17.

"Wait, what–"

"277? But–"

"It says 2401, too!"

Everyone talking at once quickly grew overwhelming. I shook my head, covered my ears with my hands, then, remembering that I was standing in the middle of a small crowd, tried to mask the movement by turning it into running my fingers through my hair.

"Okay, one at a time," I said, having to speak up to drown out further exclamations. "I'm seeing 277+41. Everyone else seeing the same thing?"

Nods around.

"Any, uh..." I swallowed drily, looked around, and grabbed the glass of water that still sat, neglected, on the table beside the couch. After a careful sip, I tried again. "Any ideas as to what might have happened?"

Silence.

"Well, has anything like this happened before?"

Everyone in the room turned to look at Dry Grass, who shrugged helplessly. "Not that I can remember. The closest would be periods of downtime. It has happened a few times over the centuries. There was a few days of downtime while Lagrange was being set up during Secession, a few hours here and there."

"But not, what...thirteen months?" Cress asked.

"I have never seen that amount of time lapse, no."

Tule piped up, saying, "Nothing on the perisystem about anything like this happening before, but holy shit are the feeds going off."

"Really?" I asked, then laughed. "Sorry, stupid question. Of course they are."

"And?" Rush said, impatient. "What are they saying?"

"It's pretty much this conversation repeated a million times over. I think a lot of people doing the same sort of thing we are. A lot of talking about the jump in time, about trying to quit and..."

Vos frowned. "And what?"

"Well, I mean," Tule stammered. "Same thing, I guess. Nothing."

Dry Grass tilted her head, then nodded. "Another fork is keeping a tally. Missing instances are now numbering in the thousands."

Vos took another half-step back. "Wait, *thousands?*"

"It is proving difficult to keep up with the feeds," she said, speaking slowly. Perhaps still receiving updates? "One of me is just reading the feeds and marking a tally every time a missing instance is mentioned."

"Thousands, Jesus," Hanne whispered. "I should check in on Jess. And probably–"

She started as Pierre sagged briefly against Vos, then either quit or left the sim. "He...I mean..." Vos began, shook her head, and then followed suit.

*"Do you two need anything?"* I sent to Vos. *"Or just space and quiet?"*

*"The latter,"* she replied after a few long seconds. The sensorium message was so clearly sent between sobs that I had to swallow down the same sensation rising in my throat.

"Give them some space," I mumbled against that awkward pressure in my chest. "So, okay. What's the whole story again? Midnight hit and suddenly it's thirteen months–"

"Thirteen months and ten days, almost exactly," Sedge corrected.

I sighed, nodded. "Right. Midnight hit and the date jumped forward and now there are thousands of–"

"Tens of thousands," Dry Grass said, then averted her gaze. "Apologies."

"It's alright. Tens of thousands of people missing. The feeds are going nuts. What about phys-side? Anything from them?"

"I have not been looking. I am uncomfortable with phys-side. There is a reason I am no longer a tech."

"I'll take a look," Rush said. Ve forked quickly, the new instance almost immediately disappearing as ve stepped from the sim. "Though I'm not as fast at it as you are."

"Anything from Castor or Pollux? Or Artemis? It's only a few months round trip, definitely less than thirteen. We don't really talk. I don't have anything from any of the Marshans on the LVs."

"Shit," Dry Grass whispered, expression falling. "Yes, there is."

When she didn't continue, Lily stamped her foot, growling, "And? You can't just leave that hanging there! I don't fucking get you Odists, you're always–"

"Lily!" Tule and Cress said as one.

She made a show of regaining her composure, movements overly liquid as she straightened up and brushed a lock of hair out of her face. "Sorry."

An awkward silence lingered, overstaying its welcome. Eventually, Dry Grass's shoulders slumped. "You do not need to apologize. The messages will only affirm your feelings about my clade. The eighth stanza continues to manage the flow of information in–" She cut herself off and dug her hands into her pockets, an oddly bashful gesture. "I should not be telling you this, understand. I am not even supposed to be in contact with them, Hammered Silver would have my head if she knew, but Need An Answer has been in contact. Please do not share any of this." 

"'Eighth stanza?'," Hanne asked.

"Yes. One hundred of us, each named after a line in a poem broken into ten stanzas," she said. "The eighth is–"

"True Name," Lily said through gritted teeth.

"Sasha," Dry grass corrected, then shook her head. "Apologies. Yes, that is the stanza focused on...politics and information control."

Lily pointedly looked away.

"They continue to manage the situation, I mean, and, from the sounds of it, they are describing it as an issue with the Deep Space Network and the Lagrange station. There are few mentions of the Lagrange *System* itself. I can read between the lines as well as any of them, though, and I do not think this is true. At least, not wholly."

"Wait," Cress said. "So they're saying that there's a problem with the DSN and the station? How do you mean?"

"There are a few messages from over the last thirteen months, but they are queued up as though they have been held until now. There has been no contact between the LVs or Artemis and Lagrange." There was a pause as Dry Grass's gaze drifted, clearly scanning more of those messages. "Most messages have been discarded...only a few from the Guiding Council on Pollux plus a few clades on Castor...have been let through...outgoing messages are ungated..."

"There's a bit about that in news from phys-side, actually," Rush said, looking thoughtful. "Communications failure on the Lagrange station. Something about aging technology. The DSN was also having problems so a few new repeaters were launched. Some from the station, even."

"But nothing about the System?"

Both Rush and Dry Grass shook their heads.

"What did you mean about reading between the lines, though, love?" Tule asked.

"The messages are very stilted. There is panic beneath the surface. That they mention so little about Lagrange is as telling as if they were to say they did not know. They *do* know, they are just refusing to talk about it over messages."

"Why?" Lily asked. While there was still an edge to her voice, genuine concern covered it well.

"'Information security and hygiene'. At least, that is what they would say were I to ask. Even if the messages were to fall into the wrong hands, sys- or phys-side, they would not show anything else having happened. I am of them, however. I can read some of the words that were not written."

"But news from phys-side says the same thing," Rush said.

She shrugged, another sheepish motion, and looked away. "Do you really expect that we are receiving unfiltered information from phys-side?"

I stole a glance at Lily. She looked to be spending every joule of energy on keeping her mouth shut.

There had been an enormous row within the clade when first Cress, then Tule, had gotten in a relationship with a member of the Ode clade. Most of the Marshans had largely written off the stories of the Odists' political meddling as overly fantastic schlock, yet more myths to keep the functionally immortal entertained. Even if they had their basis in truth, they remained only stories.

Lily, however, had had an immediate and dramatic reaction, cutting contact with the rest of the clade — including Marsh — for more than a year. She had even refused to merge down for years until tempers had settled.

Hanne spoke up. "Listen, can we maybe give this a few hours to play out? I need to sleep, and if Reed doesn't take a break, he's going to explode."

The others laughed. I felt a twinge of resentment. Shouldn't they be dumping all of their energy into this? Shouldn't they all fork several times over and throw themselves at the problem? Still, it was true enough, and if they stood around the living room spinning their wheels any longer, tempers would continue to flare.

"Yeah," I said. "Give me at least four hours. I'll do a little digging and grab some sleep, then maybe we can meet up somewhere else and talk through what we've learned."

"I'll keep digging at phys-side news," Rush said. "Want to help, Sedge?"

She nodded.

Tule and Cress nodded as well. "We'll help out Dry Grass," Cress said.

"Lily?"

"I'm just going to get some sleep," she said stiffly. "Sorry for yelling."

Cress shook its head, leans over, and hugged her. "Take the time you need."

"Right. Let's meet at a park or something in the morning. Hanne will kill me if you all pile in here again," I said, at which Hanne nodded eagerly. "And I imagine things are going to be really weird out there, so I don't want to pile into a bar or whatever."

"Really, really weird," Sedge muttered.

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