diff --git a/writing/post-self/marsh/009.md b/writing/post-self/marsh/009.md index c97ba1cc..e69de29b 100644 --- a/writing/post-self/marsh/009.md +++ b/writing/post-self/marsh/009.md @@ -1,126 +0,0 @@ -I was left that night with a sense of having taken a step forward. It wasn't completion by any stretch, I hadn't made any dramatic decisions, hadn't changed anything, really, except getting dinner with a polycule and talked about feelings. - -I had made that small decision, though, the decision to continue to think about these feelings on Dry Grass lingering after the merge. - -The immediate outcome of this was a hug and a conversation. The hug came from Dry Grass after dinner. She asked, I said yes, it was a mix of awkward and pleasant. The conversation came when I got home and spoke to Hanne. - -"Wait, you kept the *whole merge?*" she said, laughing. "I mean, I guess I can't blame you with all that was happening, but still, why didn't you just discard it." - -I shrugged. "I'm not totally sure. I don't remember that night very well. Not that I forgot, I mean, just that everything happened so quickly and was so scattered that that's all the memories are, too. I think I was worried that maybe I'd disappear, too, or that Tule would, or Sedge." - -Hanne's expression fell, replaced by something far more serious. "Okay, *that* much I can definitely understand. Is this the only real fallout of the whole merge?" - -"I guess. There's a bit of fussing about intraclade relationships in there, which, okay, another thing to consider, but I love all my cocladists at least as family, so it doesn't feel too bad to me. I definitely love all my up-trees." - -"There's quite a jump between loving like family and loving like a partner, though." - -I nodded. "Not denying that, just that I think Tule had...well, it's not that he didn't love the rest of us, he just didn't think of the rest of us all that often. Not as often as I do." - -"Well, fair enough. Everything else was just boring, then?" - -"Pretty much. Good food, dates with Dry Grass and Cress, playing around with music." - -"And what's the practical fallout for you?" she asked. - -"You mean in terms of Dry Grass?" - -She nodded. - -"I don't know yet. I'm still feeling kind of split on my feelings. Having memories of her as an acquaintance clashing with memories of her as a partner is still too stark a difference." I snorted. "Not to mention this all feeling like a distraction from all of the other problems at hand. Worrying about what she means to me feels like energy not being spent on trying to figure out what happened." - -"You're all such workaholics." - -"Guilty, I guess." - -She grinned, reached over and patted the back of my hand. "Well, whatever. I trust you'll overthink things and then come to a conclusion after a lot of bitching, and we'll keep talking about it." - -"Right," I said, laughing. "Of course we will." - -I spent the rest of the evening at home, lounging on the couch while Hanne slouched over my lap and asked me to play with her hair. While I did so, we both focused on our own thoughts or internal work. I spent much of that time in idle sensorium conversations, trying to get a better picture of the state of things. - -Sedge had gone to sleep for a bit, but as she woke up, she caught me up on news from when she'd been dozing. The politicians had drafted a letter explaining what had happened on a technological level to post on the largest of the perisystem feeds. Much of it was information that we'd gained from the AVEC session with the phys-side techs, explaining that nearly 1% of the System had been wiped out and deemed unrecoverable via phys-side means, that there had been a mass crashing event, that the world was assumed stable and the issue had been patched. - -Conspicuously missing was any mention of a CPV attack, any mention that everyone — all 2.3 trillion of us — had crashed, or that messages were being gated and censored. Sedge explained that the last had included some gentle untruths. Rather than this being a political effort, this had been phrased as "slowly bringing Lagrange up to full capacity". It wasn't wrong, *per se,* they really were working on bringing the feeds up to full capacity; it's just that the problem was political rather than technical. - -Dry Grass, in our own conversations, explained that there were already rumors flying about, and that these were being subtly steered by Odists, Jonases, Selena, and, to a lesser extent, what she called 'the opposition party', a group of clades led by Debarre who had settled into an uneasy truce with the other group. Rumors were being nudged away from "an attack by the Artemisians" and towards "solar flares or a power failure". - -Rush, meanwhile, had latched onto Serene and talked her into letting ver follow along as she took a tally of all of her sims and those of her friends, seeing what remained and what had been marked as abandoned. While ve had always been one for exploring, seeing ver lock onto an interest this hard was new. Ve admitted quite quickly that it was something of a coping mechanism, something to do that wasn't fret about what had happened to our world. - -The longest conversation I had that night was with Lily. I had initially been surprised by how chatty she was, but the surprise mellowed as she went on. - -*"I just want to make sure that all of my grouchiness isn't getting in the way of me keeping up to date,"* she said. *"Dry Grass has...well, it's actually been really cool, all that she's doing, so I definitely respect her"* - -*"You just don't want to be around her?"* I asked. - -There was a shrug, felt rather than seen. *"I guess not. It's just hard for me to let go of, even if I'm committed to at least trying to do so."* She laughed. *"But yeah, I don't want me hiding away to mean I'm not kept in the loop."* - -*"Well, Sedge–"* - -*"I don't mean the logistics, Reed."* I could hear the smirk in her words. *"Or not* just *the logistics — Sedge has been keeping me up to date, yeah — but just keeping up with the rest of you. Cress and Tule are glued to her side, which, fair enough. Sedge has found her in with the rest of the politicians through her. You've been hanging out with her. Rush is off gallivanting with some other Odist..."* - -I sighed, steeled myself. *"Well, yeah, fair enough. I've been spending time with her because I got pulled into being a bit of an organizer for everyone else, and because I kept Tule's merge."* - -*"You did? God, now* you're *going to wind up glued to her side, too,"* she replied after a moment of parsing out the ramifications. She laughed, though I couldn't judge just how earnest it was. *"But hey, it is what it is, right? This is why I want to keep up with you all. I'm out here trying to check in on friends, too, I don't want to wind up losing sight of the clade."* - -*"Yeah, I get that. I really appreciate it, too."* - -We chatted for a while longer before I noticed that Hanne had started to doze off, and I nudged us both to bed for the night. - -My dreams were scattered, disorganized. In some of these scattered images, everyone who had gone missing suddenly returned, but unchanged. Sometimes they were mute. Sometimes they never smiled. Sometimes they were completely normal, but missing some integral memory, something that made them _them._ - -Other images throughout the night veered away from fear and into grief. Marsh was gone. They were _gone._ There was a hole in the world that would never be patched, and my dreams lingered on that lack. In my dreams, there was a literal hole in the world, a blackness that ate all light, and we could do nothing to avoid it. It was in the way of wherever we most needed to go. - -The morning greeted me with a rising sun, another mug of coffee, and a queue of messages to work through. - -These last fell into three camps. Several were messages from friends that were well-wishes for the work at hand, offers of condolences for the loss of Marsh, suggestions for things to try. These were all shelved for later. At some point, I'd have the spoons to respond to them, but certainly not now. - -The second camp were ones surrounding the grief and loss of others. These were messages from friends that relayed stories of their own losses. Partners disappearing mid-conversation. Friends no longer sitting across from them at the bar. Games interrupted, now, apparently, never to be completed. These I mostly passed on to Sedge. My emotional bandwidth was running thin. Too many dreams. Too many strange floods of stranger emotions over the last few days. - -The final camp I eventually tagged 'work'. These were a handful of messages, mostly from Sedge and Dry Grass, that pertained to plans for the rest of the day, items on various checklists that they wanted help ticking off. - -I read these more slowly. Where there were questions, I answered as I could or, if not, delegated to the rest of the clade or other friends. Where my own attention was requested, I gave my opinions as I had them. - -I'd apparently been tapped as one of the organizers, a sort of liaison between our two clades, one who, as one of the messages hinted, had his shit together in a way that the rest of the clade did not. I counted myself flattered, though it also rankled that that had become my defining feature while I felt like I was only flailing, trying to pin down emotions while kicking myself for not doing more to directly address the clade's own problems. How could I be a manager when I couldn't even figure out my own problems? - -I put a halt to that line of thinking by repeatedly telling myself that my problems were now almost universal, that the feelings around Marsh being missing were now feelings that were being felt by millions, if not billions, of people all over Lagrange. - -After finishing my message triage, my coffee, and the making of the bed, I stepped out of the bedroom, only to find the rest of the house empty. A note on the table from Hanne explained that she was meeting up with yet more friends from her construct artistry group. - -I sighed. - -No distractions, no reason to stick around, nowhere I wanted to visit. Might as well head back to Marsh's study, one part of the *de facto* headquarters for much of the response to this mass crashing event, and catch up with those who had taken charge. - -"Reed," Dry Grass said, bowing informally and immediately leading me gently by the elbow out of Marsh's study, explaining as she went. "We are preparing for a meeting coming up in about half an hour. Messages are being sent from in there. I would not wish to distract the senders. Please step to Workroom#22a2392c in the future." - -"Oh? This representative sample meeting?" - -She nodded. "Yes. I am pleased you are here; I would like the Marshans well represented, as well." - -"Sure, if you say so," I said, shrugging. "I'm still not really clear on what exactly it is." - -"It is intended to be a sample of clades from across the System that have been hit in various ways. You are here, with your root instance gone. We are here, to represent the founders who have been hit to a lesser extent, yet who have experience being without a root instance. Andréa C. Mason#Central of the CERES clade will be there. They lost nearly seventy thousand instances." - -"Jesus," I murmured. "I remember you mentioning that on the first day, and I still can't quite get over that number." - -"Neither can I," she said, gaze drifting down and to the side. "This corruptive event hit everyone differently, and with such numbers as we have here on Lagrange, some clades were bound to get hit far harder than others. Debarre will be there as well, both as a political figure as well as a member of a clade of about one hundred that lost zero instances." - -"So it's just a bunch of clades getting together to talk about what happened?" - -She shrugged. "What happened. What to do. What to ask for." - -I frowned. "'Ask for'?" - -Dry Grass guided the two of us through the workroom, picking up more instances as we went with a gentle tap to the shoulder. "I do not mean to speak of reparations, though that may at some point come into play. What we might ask for are reassurances. We might want fixes. We may want greater visibility into the day-to-day running of the System. SERG may request–" - -"SERG?" - -"System Emergency Response Group. They may request greater access to the lower levels of the System's functionalities." She smiled faintly, tapping one last person — Debarre, it turned out — on the shoulder. "I am having to ramp up on all of this quite quickly. I stepped away from my role as systech a long, *long* time ago, with a long-lived up-tree taking over my role." - -"They can't merge down?" - -"They no longer exist, Reed." - -"Oh," I said dumbly, averting my gaze. - -She rested a hand on my shoulder. "It is okay," she said, smiling reassuringly. "Or, well, it is not okay, but I understand. You did not know. I am dealing with the loss by burying myself in work. On that note, let us join the others, yes? I have ACLs enough to set up the room better." - diff --git a/writing/post-self/marsh/017.md b/writing/post-self/marsh/017.md index 29365564..182a865d 100644 --- a/writing/post-self/marsh/017.md +++ b/writing/post-self/marsh/017.md @@ -323,3 +323,5 @@ Silence fell again as we drank. We all looked around at each other, searching for answers in each other's faces. I let the moment linger. There was, as always, a pressure on me as the oldest to speak up, to be some sort of, if not leader, then at least wrangler-of-opinions. "Start processing, I guess," I said at last. "Send letters to the LVs, catch up with friends, spend time with loved ones, and start processing whatever the world has become." + +----- diff --git a/writing/post-self/marsh/index.md b/writing/post-self/marsh/index.md index d0273647..4a96ec3b 100644 --- a/writing/post-self/marsh/index.md +++ b/writing/post-self/marsh/index.md @@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ NB: It's frankly astonishing how few cats there are in this story. Fix that. * [o] [014](014) --- Reed and Hanne talking, Reed admits to starting to grieve now that things are calming down, expresses doubts about reconstruction --- 1775 * [o] [015](015) --- Date with Dry Grass, talking about reconstruction --- 2002 * [o] [016](016) --- Discussing social changes both phys- and sys-side, improvements on the table, someone digging into Artemisian archives, Reed decides to go through with cross-tree merge --- 3975 - * [.] [017](017) --- It doesn't work, there is only them, no Marsh, Vos gets *very mad*, clade admits it's time to start grieving proper --- 3619 + * [o] [017](017) --- It doesn't work, there is only them, no Marsh, Vos gets *very mad*, clade admits it's time to start grieving proper --- 3619 * [.] Epilogue --- Life after * [.] [018](018) --- (~8 months later, a letter from Marsh#Castor or #Pollux expressing grief, coming to terms with letting go of the past, conversation 2 with A Finger Pointing (and other Odists) about being a clade without a root)