There was a strange sort of distance involved with my life as a cladist, just by virtue of the ways in which my world worked. It was a constant, something that I'd noticed shortly after uploading, something that had stuck with me ever since. It shouldn't be the case that I would feel distance from what I was doing just because a fork was off doing something else in my stead, right? I would be getting all of their memories, after all. Everything they experienced would be come something that I would experience, too.
And the memories here on the System were something far more than what they were back phys-side. Yes, they were imperfect: they collected the same sorts of impressions, attached the same amount of meaning and emotion to time and place. They were eternal, though. I could browse back through the life that I'd lived as Reed and as Marsh before that and pull together as exact a picture of what had happened as though it had happened only some hours ago.
Nevertheless, there was a distance that came with experiencing two things at once. If I sent out a tracking fork to, say, go on a date with someone that I'd accidentally developed feelings for through an ill advised merge while both our down-tree instances attended a meeting with phys-side, intellectually, I wouldn't expect that I, as the down-tree, would feel some sort of distraction from the meeting at hand, as though I were looking over the shoulder of someone else. I wouldn't expect that I would feel like I was living two lives at once, because that was specifically what forking was used for, right? It let us live two lives at once and yet still feel singular about the whole thing.
But here I was, confronted with the very real sense of distance I was feeling from this conversation between the representative sample of clades and phys-side.
*Or maybe I'm just anxious,* I thought.
The topic of the conversation certainly had its share of anxiety-inducing power. We'd gathered once more in the room with the AVEC stage, finding our seats around the oblong table that had long since started to become familiar, while Günay and Jakub joined us from the L<sub>5</sub> station.
