# Codrin Bălan#Pollux --- 2325

Codrin was, as ey supposed everyone must be, primed to hunt for patterns.

The Odists, as much as they tried to resist it, were as beholden to living within a pattern as any other group of individuals. Perhaps more so than other clades, but certainly well within the realm of societies, or even families. It wasn't just that they were all weird --- though they were --- nor that many of them fit the mold of either the human or skunk versions of Michelle Hadje --- though that was certainly true. It was a matter of bearing, of how they carried themselves, of how they expressed themselves. Not all were as excitable as Dear nor as affectionate as May Then My Name, but all of the ones that ey had met had the same walk, the same smile, the same sensation of quiet when they were quiet and the same way of speaking when they spoke.

The differences, then, were in the details. Where Qoheleth had opted for the biblical look, May Then My Name had decided on a comfortable softness that befitted her similarly comfortable, soft nature. And where Dear had wholly owned a look that somehow managed to be both painfully well-dressed and playful, the woman before em exuded all of the casual cool of one who was relaxing on a summer Saturday. It was a weekend look, and ey could not find any other way to describe it.

Ey was surprised when ey had been contacted by her, rather than the other way around.

> Hey, there is this neat bar I know. Come check it out, and we can chat there.
>
> --- Why Ask Questions, Here At The End Of All Things of the Ode Clade

It came as a letter. An actual, honest-to-goodness letter, slipped under eir door (which is how the sim decided to interpret it), written in a rounded hand on yellow legal pad paper.

Ey spent nearly five minutes just staring at the letter, turning it over in eir hands, inspecting the writing, the ink (shitty ballpoint, ey had noted with distaste), the creases. Ey could make neither heads nor tails of it. It was incredibly Odist while at the same time being totally unique.

When ey showed it to Dear, the fox rolled its eyes and handed it back.

*"She is a shithead."*

"A shithead?" Ey laughed. "How so?"

*"She just is. That whole stanza is made up of assholes."*

"Should I be careful or anything?"

*"No, no. You will like her, I promise."*

Codrin refolded the note and tucked it into a pocket in eir tunic. "You sound less than fond of her."

The fox shook its head. *"Not at all. I like her quite a bit, but I like her because she is good at making others like her."*

"Aren't you all, though?" Dear's partner called from the couch. "Look at what May Then My Name is doing to poor Ioan."

*"Yes, but she is particularly good at it, and that is why she is a shithead. She is more like some strange inversion of May Then My Name. It is a matter of intent."* It grinned at Codrin and took eir hand in its paw to give the back of it an affectionate lick. *"You do not need to be careful, though. She is harmless to any one individual, and any harm that she might cause to a group will be welcomed with open arms and all of the love in the world."*

"Sounds charismatic."

*"That is not quite the right word, but it will suffice."* It laughed, pushing Codrin's hand away again. *"Go on, then. Enjoy. If it is the bar that I am thinking of, you will doubtless have a good time."*

"And will I get more of this story that keeps coming up?"

Dear turned back to its desk where it had been working. *"Oh yes."*

And so here ey was, sitting across a trestle table from woman dressed from a weekend, up on the roof of a car park, drinking a very spicy, very clammy Caesar while she laughed about how terrible her cocktail was.

"Is it really that bad?" ey asked.

"Here! Here, have a sip. It is atrocious."

Ey took the glass and sniffed it warily. It smelled of citrus. Ey took a sip, tried to swallow, but began coughing violently instead. "What...what the hell is in that?"

"Neutral spirits, at least ninety percent, lime zest, and enough seltzer to make it not burn on the way down."

"Not burn?" Codrin said around an ice cube. The spice of eir Caesar didn't hold a candle to the alcoholic heat of the drink.

"That is what they said."

"Then they failed miserably."

She laughed, earnest and joyful. "That is precisely what they excel at, here. How is your drink?"

"Very heavy on the clam. I think there are some frozen into the ice cubes."

She reached out for the drink, and ey shrugged, sliding it over to her. She took a sip, made a sour face, then dipped her fingers into the glass to fish out one of the shellfish ice cubes to crunch on. The sour face turned to one of disgust.

The move was so innocent, so playful, that eir first reaction was to laugh rather than get upset at someone's fingers in eir drink. Ey liked her at once, then grudgingly admitted to emself that, yes, she was kind of a shithead for just how effortlessly she had made em laugh, not three minutes into meeting her. 

Once ey had eir drink again, ey asked, "So, why did you invite me here?"

"You are doing your thing with Dear, are you not? Your..." She spun her finger in the air as she pulled up the word she was looking for. "History? Your myth? It is so fascinating! There is so much story to be had after two hundred years. Creation, Secession, Launch; so much happened around those and between them, and sure, there are timelines and dry textbooks and whatever, but this! You are one of the first ones who is actually pulling a story out of it."

Ey grinned. "That's the hope, yeah. I was originally going to just make it about Launch, but there are more parallels between Secession and the launch than I'd expected."

"There are, yes. And you know, I wonder if we will start thinking of the launch in the same way as Secession. You can almost hear the capital-S in Secession, and now I hear it in Launch."

"Perhaps. Maybe we'll just do it from here and the L<sub>5</sub> System or Castor will do something else."

"Mmhm." She grinned at em. "I have already heard from Castor via the System that we are starting to diverge in pretty major ways."

"I've heard similar through Ioan, yeah. I'm happy to share what I have, though. You're the first other Odist that I've talked with about this aside from Dear and May Then My Name."

"May! Oh gosh, what a delight. Has she already tricked Ioan into falling in love with her?"

Codrin laughed. "Tricked?"

"Do not get me wrong, I do not think that she is disingenuous about it or that her intentions are anything but pure, but I have yet to meet a single person who has not fallen at least a little in love with May after spending any considerable length of time with her."

Ey nodded, stirring eir drink with the too-large stalk of celery. "That's fair. And for what it's worth, yeah, I think she has. I don't think ey's ready to admit it yet, but yeah. Your whole clade is like that, you know?"

Why Ask Questions adopted a look of indignation. "Are you accusing me of being manipulative? Codrin Bălan, I would never! All I did was figure out that you really like nice paper, nice pens, and hand-written notes, find the best way to subvert that, invite you out to a bar that would clearly pique your interest, and beguile you into talking about your down-tree instance falling in love over terrible drinks."

"What?" Ey laughed. "Did you really do that?"

The offended look slipped into a proud one that bordered perilously close to smug. "Of course. But I also did want to meet you. I really am a fan of this project, and I wanted to be a part of it, if you will have me."

"Well, alright. I'm happy to hear that other Odists are interested in it. I've been asking a few rote questions and then letting a conversation develop from there. Is that alright?"

"Of course!"

"First up, I have yet to check, but did you invest entirely in the launches, or is there still a fork of you back on the System?"

"Oh, I left a fork back there. I am not nearly so brave as you and your family. And before you ask, that is who I have been communicating with to relay messages between the two LVs."

"Are your...well, let me back up. What are your roles? Jobs, interests, whatever."

She laughed, shrugging. "I do not really have one at the moment. I helped a little with the launch, and rather a lot with Secession. My job was basically to work with crowds. I love talking one on one like this, but I always feel guilty actually manipulating individuals --- and not just the basic research I mentioned earlier. Crowds are another story. I can get a whole restaurant singing a song together whether or not they are drunk."

"Dear did mention that you worked at scale, yeah."

"The fox also probably called me a shithead."

Codrin, caught in the middle of a sip of eir drink, coughed. 

"Of course it did! What an asshole. I love it for that."

"To be fair, it also told me I'd like you immediately, and I do, so at least there's that."

Why Ask Questions preened, saying, "Why, thank you. I am flattered. To get back to your question, though, yes, my goal was working crowds. I helped heavily with the campaign for Secession sys-side. My cocladist, Why Ask Questions When The Answers Will Not Help, was tasked with managing much of the phys-side campaigning."

"And you did similar during the launch?"

"Yes. May worked the technical side, I worked the campaign side. There was little work to be done sys-side, though. Most everyone was on board immediately."

Codrin nodded, "I don't remember much in the way of arguments against the launch."

"I like an easy job every now and then."

"Was Secession that much more difficult?"

She leaned back from the table, twirling her drink thoughtfully. "I suppose, yes. It is not that there was not support for it, sys-side, but before we had seceded, the political situation was far more complicated. The System needed to agree to secede just as much as the governments outside needed to agree to allow us."

"This was back when the Council of Eight was a thing, right?"

"Mmhm. It was their --- our --- last big work. We did a good job at getting everything set up so that it would just run, then we stepped back. The goal was always to guide rather than to govern, as I am sure you have heard."

Codrin nodded. "Ezekiel put it almost the same way."

"He is here?"

The sudden intensity of her gaze, the drop of her smile, the sharpness of her voice made Codrin sit up straighter. "Yeah. I interviewed him a few weeks back. Why?"

"I am just surprised that he agreed to come along on the launch at all."

"He invested entirely, actually."

"Oh did he?" She smiled tightly, sipping at her drink and wincing. "Well, how about that."

"Why did you not expect him to be on the launch?"

"You met him. He is not the person that he used to be. None of us are, I suppose, but he has lost some core aspect of his being. He lost what made him Zeke when he became Ezekiel."

"It was a pretty surreal experience," ey admitted. "Was he also a part of the plan for Secession?"

"Not really, no. That was mostly our clade and the Jonas clade."

"Was the Council of Eight really a council of eight clades?"

She laughed, then held up her finger to her lips. "Do not tell anyone. It was specifically not to be that, but the workload around Secession grew out of proportion for the two of us who were focusing on it, so we forked in the background to get all that we needed done. It was all above board within the Council, but no one else knew."

Codrin nodded and, remembering some of the caginess that Dear had shown, asked, "Do you want me to keep that part out of the history?"

"Oh, goodness no. Please keep it in! I may not be manipulative, but I am careful. I will not tell you anything that I do not want to wind up in your project."

"Dear said that if I pressed any one Odist too hard, they'd resent it and start lying."

"I suspect that it is right in that, too," she said. "But I will not let our conversation get to that point. I will just make you move on to the next question."

Ey nodded, considering eir next question. "So, how much did the clade work together back then?"

"It differed from person to person. Praiseworthy --- Dear's down-tree instance --- was keen on working with all of us, while some others essentially talked to no one. I did not talk to many of them at first, given that I was...well, it was not so much that I was not supposed to exist, that I was not supposed to be playing a role. At first, I looked almost exactly like my down-tree instance so that we might be mistaken for each other. I decided that I was done being a skunk some years after, though."

"Are you still in touch with your down-tree instance?"

She nodded eagerly. "Oh yes, we talk quite often."

"And she was the one who was organizing the campaign?"

"She and Jonas, yes. We played our silly little game of politics, and then after Secession, we had no reason to go so hard at it, so we simply became friends."

"While I'm on the subject, did you talk much with Michelle?"

"Next!" Why Ask Questions said gleefully, waving her glass at em.

"What? Oh! Right, okay." Ey let the thread drop and prowled through eir mental list of questions. "Alright. I talked a little to Dear about what the mood was like before and after Secession. I have my own experiences from before and after the launch, but I'm curious what yours were. Was the launch exciting to you? Just another day's work?"

"True Name was to organize Launch as she did with Secession, so I suppose it was a bit of both. We were all excited to have a fun project on our hands, and it was a lot of work, even if my role was easy. When the launch actually happened, we had our own little party separate from the fête that you and yours put on." She raised her glass. "The drinks were far better."

Ey laughed.

"It has calmed down since then, as I mentioned. There is little to do, and what remains of our stanza launch-side has started to drift apart once again. We are all friends, but we are coworkers first and foremost, and when we do not have to be at work, we will not be."

"You hang out with other friends, then?"

"Hang out, drink, go for long walks on the beach, watch plays --- did you know that Time Is A Finger Pointed At Itself has put on some really interesting ones? Michelle was a theatre nerd before she uploaded. She put much of that on hold after the whole getting lost kerfuffle and all of the politics that went into the first years after uploading, but still that desire sticks with us."

"Stepping back a second, you said that True Name was to organize the launch. What did you mean by that?"

"I would like to say 'next', but I will answer this question, and then perhaps we can just enjoy the day for a little while. Does that sound alright, Mx Bălan?"

Ey frowned, but nodded all the same.

"One of the last things that Michelle did with each of the stanzas was to give us all a task. Ours was not actually so specific as "See about launching mini versions of the System into space", so much as "Do something big, help us divest"."

"What did she mean by 'divest'?"

After a moment's silence, Why Ask Questions leaned forward, set her drink down next to Codrin's, then picked eirs up instead. "Come on. Can you believe that, in all of the years that I have been coming here, I have never actually seen the bottom level of the parking garage? I bet that it is full of rats and unexplainable puddles on concrete, reflecting harsh lights. I bet it is all sorts of murdery. Bring your drink."

She winked at em, and with that, the interview was over.

