After the assassination, with no one to lead and no reason to remain, the rest of the Odists and their friends left. Dear's pacing wound down. It eventually stopped, shoulders sagging.
*"Come on, let's go back."* Then it turned and addressed some others near by, mostly from the same stanza, by the historian's guess. *"Any of you are welcome, too."*
It was Ioan, Dear, Serene, and Praiseworthy --- the first line of the stanza and down-tree instance from Dear --- who wound up back at the house. They entered the sim twenty meters from the front door, where Ioan had originally arrived so long ago. Those few days ago. They trudged slowly up to the house.
Dear's partner greeted them at the door, silent. Perhaps Dear had sent ahead a message, for they greeted the group and then stayed out of the way. They disappeared and returned shortly with mugs of coffee.
The four witnesses slumped into the couch. A universal sigh. Dear and Serene leaning against each other, and Dear's partner claimed on a stolen dining-room chair nearby.
*"One of the conservatives played their hand. She brought along an assassin, and as soon as Qoheleth revealed his reasoning for revealing the Name, the assassin acted and then quit. My guess is that Qoheleth hadn't forked and won't be heard from again, and that Guōwēi, the assassin, was a fork of someone unsuspecting. Someone who will 'mysteriously' experience problems merging back. No culpability for its #tasker or #tracker instance."*
Ioan waited for one of those ebbs in the rhythm of the silence before clearing eir throat. "Perhaps it's too soon, but may I ask after everyone's well being? Their thoughts on the matter?"
Praiseworthy shrugged, looking what Ioan thought might be glum, though her gestures and expressions took additional work to decode. She was another animal, though of some form different from Dear and Serene. Black fur, white stripes retreating up along her snout and over her head. Thick tail that looked delightfully soft. Many of the clade matched her more closely than they did Dear. "I'm not surprised, really. Not happy, but not surprised."
It was a moment in responding before it nodded. *"I'm with Praiseworthy. I'm not surprised, but not happy. Kind of pissed, actually,"* it said, smiling sardonically. *"That was short-sighted of them, though, because I have a hunch that Qoheleth was right."*
Dear shot a glance at its partner, laughed. *"You two get along, I see. Yes, it does. I think I did it, too, unless there's some association I missed. Can't remember it for the life of me."*
"So how do you feel about the assassination?" Ioan asked.
*"I'd prefer that not be the only means of death, of course. Perhaps the primary way should be through...ah, suicide is not the best word, but it's what I mean. Through choice, just like Qoheleth's old name."*
*"It's like I said. Batty. They're all batty."* It stared at its paws, one of them brushing through Serene's forearm fur. *"It's like some sort of Methuselah syndrome, or reverse Alzheimer's. Instead of being doomed to forget, we're doomed to remember. Doomed to remember everything. We can't forget, and it all gets to be too much for one mind."*
*"The origin of the system came from the lost, from the turmoils of the early twenty-second century, though one could perhaps trace roots further back into the twenty-first. Prior to the system, the 'net on Earth required engaging with through another thing called exocortices. Implants along the spine, with tendrils trailing along nerves."*
Serene and Praiseworthy both reached up to rub at the backs of their necks.
*"And the lost, those unlucky few, wound up trapped in a dream, mirrored between cerebral cortex and exocortex. They --- we --- were trapped along with all the knowledge that had been cached in those early exos."*
"You mean they kept the name to refer to something similar?"
Dear shrugged. *"I suppose. All that we experienced in that dream also wound up cached in those implants, and it was that cache that helped the engineers on the early system to construct the shared dream that is the system today."*
Ioan ground eir palms against eir slacks. This information, this dump of the past, was doing nothing to quell the anxiety of the previous hour. "Right, okay. How are they only an iffy fix to forgetting?"
*"You're still stuck with the knowledge that they exist and their inventory, yes? That's why I can't forget **that** the Name exists. I can't forget my origins or that there's an exo containing them. One which I can't forget. Not unless I go through the whole shitty process again --- sorry, Serene, it wasn't pleasant. I could forget that bit of knowledge, but then what? I'll have the knowledge that I have an exo that I can't access pointing to something of dire importance. Can you imagine that feeling of lingering dread being a constant factor in life?"*
The fennec laughed and shook its head, ears flopping about. *"Trust me, I don't either. I don't think many do. I just think we need death, or something like it, as part of the system. Death. Fear of death. Needs and reasons to survive in the face of an inevitable end."*
*"We need a way for an individual to end. We also need a way to create new individuals, so perhaps they should be related. Qoheleth called it breeding, but it could just as easily be a way of ending one individual and having them live on as another."*
