update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/marsh/010.md

@@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ I'd had little to do with sim manipulation beyond simply expanding or reducing b
 
 About twenty people had shown up. It didn't seem to be twenty clades — there were two Odists, after all, with Dry Grass and another from the eighth stanza, Why Ask Questions When The Answers Will Not Help — but the audience remained diverse. Only about half appeared to be human of some sort, with the Marshans, Odists, and Jonases accounting for most of those. I suppose it made sense, given the Odists' social circle, but that didn't quite tally with what I knew of Jonas's role in the leadership of the System. He didn't strike me as a furry.
 
-When asked over a sensorium message, Dry Grass replied, *"The eighth stanza has been slowly tamping down on Jonas's role over the years. He has not been nearly as grounded as he once was."* She cast a slight smile in my direction, adding, *"Too singularly focused, perhaps. All work and no play makes Jonas go fucking batty."*
+When asked over a sensorium message, Dry Grass replied, *"The eighth stanza has been slowly tamping down on Jonas's role over the years. He has not been nearly as grounded as he once was. Prime quit in grand fashion some years back, and the rest are beginning to recognize that."* She cast a slight smile in my direction, adding, *"Too singularly focused, perhaps. All work and no play makes Jonas go fucking batty."*
 
 I stifled a laugh. It probably shouldn't have been funny, but the absurdity of the comment clashed just right with the mirrored absurdity of the situation. Probably best not to laugh in front of everyone.
 
@@ -184,7 +184,7 @@ The systech chuckled nervously, nodding. "Well, alright. Then yeah, Jonas has it
 
 "And who is this 'someone'?" Selena asked. "The phys-side feeds are being ungated, but it's a firehose of information to sort through to try and find anything of use."
 
-"Yeah, I think they — The System Consortium — clamped down pretty tight. I'm just learning about this myself, since I just got access to the files a few hours ago. Let's see..." She frowned, continued in the tone of someone reading aloud, "Okay. The Our Brightest Lights Collective claimed responsibility for the attack exactly thirty seconds *before* it occurred via a message to every executive on the System Consortium board, as well as several major feeds, all of which were censored before being made public. The OBLC named the mechanism, provided a detailed timeline of events, and offered a list of names of individuals — or "individuals", I guess — and their roles in the execution of this plan. All one hundred members of the collective have been apprehended, though in the past year, two have managed to end their own lives."
+"Yeah, I think they — The System Consortium — clamped down pretty tight. I'm just learning about this myself, since I just got access to the files a few hours ago and news from Earth's been censored. Let's see..." She frowned, continued in the tone of someone reading aloud, "Okay. The Our Brightest Lights Collective claimed responsibility for the attack exactly thirty seconds *before* it occurred via a message to every executive on the System Consortium board, as well as several major feeds, all of which were censored before being made public. The OBLC named the mechanism, provided a detailed timeline of events, and offered a list of names of individuals — or "individuals", I guess — and their roles in the execution of this plan. All one hundred members of the collective have been apprehended, though in the past year, two have managed to end their own lives."
 
 Answers Will Not Help spoke up during a break in the recitation. "Is there more information on this collective? Are they conservatives? How tight is their integration? Do they mimic clades like the old-style collectives?"
 
@@ -202,11 +202,11 @@ Dry Grass let out a surprised laugh. "Wait, you *patched out CPV?* Entirely?"
 
 "Well, yeah, we kind of had to, otherwise we'd either have to reconstruct everyone with a memory of crashing, or  the same thing would keep happening every time the perpetrator was reconstructed. It took us a good four months of total System downtime working all three shifts to get it done."
 
-Jonas Ko, one of the two Jonases sitting at the table, had been steadily frowning more and more through the conversation, resting his chin on folded hands. Finally, he sat up straight and looked to Answers Will Not Help. "Hey, can I?"
+Jonas Fa, one of the two Jonases sitting at the table, had been steadily frowning more and more through the conversation, resting his chin on folded hands. Finally, he sat up straight and looked to Answers Will Not Help. "Hey, can I?"
 
 The Odist let out a groan and kneaded the heels of her palms against her eyes for a moment before leaning back in her chair. "Fuck it. Why not? Might as fucking well."
 
-Both forked, and the up-tree instances stepped around the table to face each other. Jonas Ko summoned up a small pocket knife, explaining as he did so. "So, if you've read any of the scandalous works about us, you can probably guess that we all have CPV mixed up for each other. It's nothing as grand as the stories make it sound like, though; just a way for us to keep each other in check and occasionally play around."
+Both forked, and the up-tree instances stepped around the table to face each other. Jonas Fa summoned up a small pocket knife, explaining as he did so. "So, if you've read any of the scandalous works about us, you can probably guess that we all have CPV mixed up for each other. It's nothing as grand as the stories make it sound like, though; just a way for us to keep each other in check and occasionally play around."
 
 Before anyone had a chance to ask any further questions, he swiped out with the knife, catching Answers Will Not Help in the cheek, leaving a gash that quickly welled up with blood. There was no noise from the Odist for a few moments before she finally let out a shaky breath.
 
@@ -272,7 +272,7 @@ Dry Grass smiled proudly over at us. *"And you love it, my–"*
 
 She cut off as Günay cleared her throat. "Alright, I have a list of changes", she said, and began reading off a list that appeared in translucent letters against the front of the AVEC stage area. "CPV was patched out; ACL permissions were hardened for sim isolation, allowing for locking cladists *in* sims as well as out of them; storage was optimized; some physical components were replaced, no clue which; AVEC improvements; Ansible improvements; merging improvements; and SERG tools refined. There's a slew of others we're waiting on confirmation from you all before implementing: improvements to perisystem clade listing that would provide better statistics on who all is extant, which I guess has privacy ramifications; a solution for splitting the physical components of the System hardware was successfully tested, but that will mean production and deployment time, as well as downtime; limited per-sim Artemis-style skew; and some political tools to reduce anarchy."
 
-"'Reduce *anarchy?'*" Jonas Fa said, snorting. "Fuck off with that."
+"'Reduce *anarchy?'*" Jonas Ko said, snorting. "Fuck off with that."
 
 She held up her hands defensively. "Hey, like I said, it's just a change, and I'm just a tech."