Ioan and May walked hand-in-paw along the rim of a lake. It had settled neatly into a bowl formed by three peaks, and around it wound a deer-trail, which was only wide enough to permit them to walk side by side half the time. For the rest of the hike, Ioan walked in front, guiding May, pointing out roots, and eventually helping her clamber up onto a rock out-cropping at the point where the lake drained into the lands below through a chattering creek.
There they sat to eat their lunches and talk.
"I had no idea that you enjoyed hiking."
"Oh goodness no. I hate it." Ey laughed. "But it's the only way to get to this rock."
They sat in silence for a while, the sun warming their backs as it slid down toward the peaks that ey supposed must be west.
"Why did you bring me out here, Ioan?"
Ey lazily scanned the far shore of the lake, picking out the places where the deer trail dipped shyly down to the edge of the water before darting back up into the trees.
"I needed to focus on something further away than a piece of paper," ey said at last. "Further than the lilacs in the yard."
"And the interviews you have done have not helped?"
Ey shrugged.
"Cabin fever, perhaps?"
"Maybe, yeah."
"Ioan, I am not the one who is supposed to be asking questions," she chided.
"Right, sorry. It's a little bit cabin fever, I guess. I've spent an awful lot of time cooped up in the house and just sending forks out to run the interviews. It's one thing to remember being outside, but another still to have to make that memory align with not having left the house in days."
The skunk nodded, picking a pebble from near her paw and tossing it into the lake. "I understand. It think that I am perhaps more comfortable inside than you are, but I am still happy that you brought me here.
"Glad you like it. It's an abandoned sim that I visited decades back and still had the coordinates to. It reminded me of how my grandfather described his time in Slovenia." Ey crumpled of the wrapper to eir sandwich and returned it to the backpack that ey'd brought with. "It's just good to get out and change contexts, I guess."
May nodded.
"It's just..." Ey frowned, hunting for the words. "It's just that we have limitless time and limitless space and all the creativity we could hope to use, and still I sometimes feel trapped, as though I'm stuck in this tiny, constrained space where I can barely move and can't hope to stretch out. Does that make sense?"
"It is not a feeling I share, but I can see how one might," May said, carefully shifting the backpack from between them to the other side of her so that she could lean against em. "It is like when one asks "is that all there is?" and the answer comes back "yes, of course"."
"Yeah," ey murmured. As May rested her head against eir shoulder, ey turned her head to place a kiss between her ears. Ey did not remember when ey had first started doing that, but it had long since become habit. Every time ey remembered that it had been an act that was out of character for em until May moved in, some part of em raced around in circles to try and find out what had changed and why.
*It's just...May. That's just how she is,* ey kept reminding emself. *There is no explaining an Odist.*
"It's been happening more and more since the idea of the launches first started to take off. It happened before, of course, but I think coming to the understanding that this isn't exactly all there is, that there's also stuff outside the System and far away from the Sun...well, it just kind of rubbed my face in it. "You're stuck here, Ioan Balan," it says. "You're not going to be on the launch, and even if you were, that wouldn't be you. There'd be no merging of experiences.""
May laughed. "I find freedom in that. Not only will I not have to do any of that work, but I will also get to be one of the shitheads that stays behind."
"And that's a bonus?"
"Of course it is, dear. When was the last time you had the luxury of staying behind? Of *having* to stay behind?"
Ey frowned.
"Do not think too hard, Ioan. I can tell you now that it was before you uploaded." She sounded as though speaking from a dream. "That was the last time that you could have made the choice to stay behind. It is some of Dear's beloved irreversibility. You cannot un-upload. You cannot upload part of the way. Now, though, you're here. If you're busy working and a friend is throwing a party, why, just fork! You do not need to worry about whether or not you need stay behind or join them. You can do both."
"But with the launch, you had the decision to stay behind."
"Yes, it was a new experience. New in these last two centuries."
"You're so weird," ey said, then laughed as she elbowed em in the side.
"We are both weird." She poked at eir thigh with a claw. "That includes you, my dear. We both stayed behind, and we both sent along cocladists so far diverged from us that they might as well have become new individuals."
