## Codrin Bălan#Castor --- The Bălan clade

> systime 222 (2346)  
>
> Castor---Lagrange transmission delay:  
> 30 days, 20 hours, 22 minutes
>
> Castor---Pollux transmission delay:  
> 61 days, 18 hours, 8 minutes
>
> Castor---Artemis transmission delay:  
> 7 hours, 38 minutes


Ioan, Codrin#Pollux, and Sorina,

I've been nudged by both Dear and, of all people, True Name to write you with an update of life in Convergence. I've attached a longer report, but here's a quick, far more subjective summary.

We copied the entirety of our sim into Convergence wholesale. Dear transferred ownership of the one on Castor back to Serene during a little party we had. It said that it was to apologize for wrecking the last one, and that it would try to be more careful with the new one, but that she'd better take care of the Castor version for now. It made a whole big show out of it, because of course it did, but it was a fun party all the same.

Nothing about our sim feels any different, which, on writing it, makes perfect sense. It's a duplicate down to the subatomic level.[^meansanything] However, the world that's available to us when we try to move between sims is far, far from the same. There are fewer places, yes, but it's all much more organized. They've decided to set up a central hub with five spokes, each 'belonging' to a race. The hub and spokes --- essentially long pedestrian malls --- act as the primary public/common areas for everyone. It's not that there aren't public sims outside of this, but these are always at the top of everyone's mind when they think about going out.

Along each spoke are all sorts of shops, restaurants, entertainment venues, and doors leading to larger public spaces. It started out as a non-euclidean type thing, where you would see a walkway between two shops leading out into a park that would clearly take up most of the spoke itself until too many people complained and the walkways were opaqued with a sort of curtain that depicted what was beyond. In addition, every doorway that would lead to a violation like this has been set up to give a slight tingle when transiting, just as an added signal. I haven't found it too much of a problem, but some voices were quite loud.

The actual population of Convergence isn't all that large. There are a few million humans, about a million each of secondrace (who call themselves Dehoudevav, which is just 'second people') and thirdrace (whose name I'll never be able to pronounce, much less write, but who the Artemisians, predictably enough, call Dehoudeves, or 'third people'). Nearly every member of fourthrace (Dehoudever, natch) elected to join after learning about how our System is based around forking rather than skew, though this only totals a million or so.

Firstrace, then, is the outlier. Only about a thousand of them have joined us. None have provided anything more than a vague answer as to why, too. Our best guess is that only one from each 'clade' (or whatever structure is implied by their names) joined us with the exception of Turun Ka and Turun Ko due to their role in the discussions. They sound like they like us alright, they just didn't sound very interested in joining us beyond that scope. No one seems to be able to make heads or tails of their actions.

That said, they've all been incredibly polite, even kind. One of them, Anin Li has teamed up with Sarah and I as we work on knowledge share around therapeutic practices between races. As I'm also learning that for the first time, I've got a mountain of work ahead of me.

I say 'they' above, but that goes beyond just the firstracers. Given the similarities in just how each race is polite, I imagine that there was an expectation that this is how life must exist after convergence, or, more likely, all who decided to join were briefed on how to interact during convergence. Certainly just about everyone I've run into speaks at least a little bit of our *lingua franca*, though I know that many of us are learning Nanon as well.

All the same, it feels like we're all being very careful around each other, still feeling out our boundaries. I have at least gotten the chance to introduce Dear and █████ to the other emissaries (even Iska, who stuck around long enough to view one of its shows, but didn't stay; they seemed confused and unnerved). Dear and Turun Ko have gotten on well, surprising no one.

The document will have a whole lot more that you'll likely find interesting, but I just wanted to pass on some more personal impressions as well.

I mentioned that True Name suggested that I write to you all about this, which was honestly a little strange. Not strange in that she's been talking with me --- we see each other nearly every day and have fallen into a professional relationship --- but that she pulled me aside to have a really quite earnest discussion about it.

I've seen enough of her with all pretense stripped away to know what her true earnestness looks like, and this was *almost* that. There's definitely still something going on under the surface.

Her explicit reasons for wanting me to send this to you are that she says the sentiment and mood have some striking similarities to the early days of the System. "There is a sense of a new thing here, and it is a thing that we are left to build into our own new world," she said.

I can see what she means, too. Even though we can go back to Castor at just about any time (though we've been told that, starting soon, that will be very heavily rate limited until they work out a better solution to the separate reputation markets), it very much does feel like we are a new colony. We've found ourselves in a truly empty space along with people we've never met, and it's up to us to build something that works.

Still, she, her stanza, and Jonas are hardly absent. They seem to be putting out gentle feelers among all five races for how all of this works. I don't get the sense that they're looking to guide it in any dramatic way, but there's a tension beneath the surface that I can only just pick up on. Political structures differing between Convergence and Castor would put the rate-limiting at the border in a new context.

All of this is based off one conversation, though, so I'll keep you all up to date as best I can.

I miss you all. Pass on my love.

Codrin#Castor

[^meansanything]: If that even means anything on the System.
