update from sparkleup

writing/post-self/toledot/launch/phys/Douglas/005.md

@@ -22,9 +22,9 @@ She was dead, and that shouldn't even matter to him.
 
 That was the worst part, he'd decided, that his grief felt unwarranted. There was no connection between them other than the name, they'd never talked, and she likely didn't even know that her family had continued on after her, so what did he do to earn the right to mourn her? Doubtless she left loved ones behind on the System, too, people she'd known for more than two hundred years, lovers, enemies, colleagues and friends who respected her. *They* had the right to mourn.
 
-He was just that weird guy who would take EVA walks from the narrow gap of the station to the System, press his hands and forehead to the glassy exterior, and dream that he was dreaming along with the billions who lived inside. No one inside knew of him other than the sys-side launch team, and no one actually knew him personally aside from May and perhaps Ioan.
+He was just that weird guy who would take EVA walks from the narrow gap of the station to the System, press his hands and forehead to the glassy exterior, and dream that he was dreaming along with the billions who lived inside. No one inside knew of him other than the sys-side launch team, and no one actually knew him personally aside from May Then My Name and perhaps Ioan.
 
-The manufacturing sector ran out beneath his feet, and he stepped from there to the spotless, black control center for the machinery. It had hardly ever been used since the development and construction of the strut-works. It had only ever existed for the pleasure of the tourists who had made the station possible in the first place, for the back wall of the control center was glass, as was a good chunk of the walls to either side, letting tourists gawk at all of the machinery that went into running a station.
+The manufacturing sector ran out beneath his feet, and he stepped from there to the spotless, black control center for the machinery. It had hardly been used since the development and construction of the strut-works. It had only ever existed for the pleasure of the tourists who had made the station possible in the first place, for the back wall of the control center was glass, as was a good chunk of the walls to either side, letting tourists gawk at all of the machinery that went into running a station.
 
 No tourists anymore. No gawking. The glass walls offered little to those who worked on the station other than a place to lounge and zone out, watching robots scurry to and fro.
 
@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ Gardens faded into low trees and greenhouses where most of the food for the stat
 
 All was tended by automated systems, along with the help of a few botanist-nutritionists.
 
-He walked through the sectors of the station and thought. He walked along the promenade Earthward to outward, then further anti-spinward to the greenhouses, and back Earthward again. He walked and he thought, slowly going through the mental list of things he'd always wanted to Michelle and erasing them, line by line. Why keep them around, now? Why bother?
+He walked through the sectors of the station and thought. He walked along the promenade tailward to outward, then further anti-spinward to the greenhouses, and back headward again. He walked and he thought, slowly going through the mental list of things he'd always wanted to Michelle and erasing them, line by line. Why keep them around, now? Why bother?
 
 Having walked back to the Earthward hub, he finished the trip to his room in the hotel. His room where he would remain as precisely as alone as he had been before.
 
@@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ His implants buzzed as he walked into his room, and a glance at the corner of hi
 
 This, at least, was something pleasant to distract himself from his unearned grief.
 
-**Douglas Hadje:** I'm available for the next few hours before I should probably go to bed. Let me know when you're arround.
+**Douglas Hadje:** I'm available for the next few hours before I should probably go to bed. Let me know when you're around.
 
 The reply was almost immediate.
 
@@ -62,7 +62,9 @@ He frowned, quelling the suspicion that they had known of his EVA.
 
 **Ioan:** Don't listen to her. Are you doing well?
 
-**Douglas:** As well as I can. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my time. I've gone on a few not-super-necessary EVAs to just look at the stars or the System or whatever. I should take up knitting. How are you two?
+**Douglas:** As well as I can. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with my time. I've gone on a few not-super-necessary EVAs to just look at the stars or the System or whatever. I should take up knitting. Oh! And nice to meet you as well.
+
+**Douglas:** How are you two?
 
 **Ioan:** Fine, here. Very busy. We're conducting interviews all across the System, as well as coordinating with those who are doing the same on the LVs.
 
@@ -76,11 +78,11 @@ He frowned, quelling the suspicion that they had known of his EVA.
 
 **Douglas:** Alright, where do you want to start?
 
-**May Then My Name:** Perhaps it would be easiest for Ioan and I to answer a whole bunch of our questions at once. They are mostly biographical, and I think that a small biography will cover most of them.
+**May Then My Name:** Perhaps it would be easiest for Ioan and I to answer a whole bunch of your questions at once. They are mostly biographical, and I think that a small biography will cover most of them.
 
 **May Then My Name:** We have flipped a coin, and it was decided that I will go first.
 
-**May Then My Name:** I uploaded back in the early 2100s, back when the system was small and full of dreamers, weirdos, and people like you and Ioan who spend all their time thinking. Before that, I was a teachers, though towards the end of my phys-side tenure and for some time after, I became involved in politics. I grew up in the central corridor in North America, in the Western Federation. Like everyone, I do not think that I have an accent, though after some trouble with my implants before I uploaded, I found that some speech patterns (and thought patterns) had changed, and since then, language and I have had a unique relationship. We could have worked to change it, my cocladists and I, but why bother?
+**May Then My Name:** I uploaded back in the early 2100s, back when the system was small and full of dreamers, weirdos, and people like you and Ioan who spend all their time thinking. Before that, I was a teacher, though towards the end of my phys-side tenure and for some time after, I became involved in politics. I grew up in the central corridor in North America, in the Western Federation. As with everyone, I do not think that I have an accent, though after some trouble with my implants before I uploaded, I found that some speech patterns (and thought patterns) had changed, and since then, language and I have had a unique relationship. We could have worked to change it, my cocladists and I, but why bother?
 
 **May Then My Name:** You ask about dissolution strategies (tasker, tracker, dispersionista): you are correct that they apply to the ways in which an individual forks. They are not hard and fast categories, but rather a set of patterns that we have noticed over the years and applied names and numbers to. Taskers will fork only very rarely, and then for a specific task, merging back into the root instance immediately afterward. Trackers fork more frequently, and may maintain forks over a longer period of time. The reasons for forking may vary --- Ioan is a tracker, and ey will explain more --- but the forks almost always follow a single line of thought or relationship or what have you to its logical end before merging back. Dispersionistas are those who fork for fun, spinning off new personalities and maybe merging them back, maybe not. My clade, the Ode clade, falls somewhere between tracker and dispersionista: we fork frequently for many temporary purposes, but maintain a relatively small permanent clade of around 100 instances.
 
@@ -90,11 +92,11 @@ He frowned, quelling the suspicion that they had known of his EVA.
 
 **May Then My Name:** Basically. We all enjoy dissolution (or not) in different ways. Those are lazy categories to bucketize vague trends. They are similar in some ways to political divisions: one may identify with a political label, even if one's actual political inclinations may be more complicated than that label implies.
 
-**Ioan:** And all dispersionistas are bleeding heart liberals or weirdo artists.
+**Ioan:** And all dispersionistas are all bleeding heart liberals or weirdo artists.
 
 **May Then My Name:** To a one, yes.
 
-**Ioan:** I fall more into the tracker camp. I pick up projects such as this one or researching a book or something, and let a fork work on those. I --- my #tracker instance, as it's called --- or my forks may create extra instances for smaller tasks along the way, but it gets to be too much for me to deal with after a certain point, and the slow divergence of personalities feels uncomfortable. I have three forks out there now, one for collating data from each LV, and one for conducting interviews here. That number goes up and down as needed.
+**Ioan:** I fall more into the tracker camp. I pick up projects such as this one or researching a book or something, and let a fork work on those. I --- my #Tracker instance, as it's called --- or my forks may create extra instances for smaller tasks along the way, but it gets to be too much for me to deal with after a certain point, and the slow divergence of personalities feels uncomfortable. I have three forks out there now, one for collating data from each LV, and one for conducting interviews here. That number goes up and down as needed.
 
 **Douglas:** Makes sense to me.
 
@@ -116,7 +118,7 @@ He frowned, quelling the suspicion that they had known of his EVA.
 
 **Douglas:** Alright. Apologies if I overstepped.
 
-**May Then My Name:** Thank you for asking! But yes, it is common that I will spin off a bunch of instances for this or that. I have a tendency to fork when I get excited. That is not terribly relevant, though.
+**May Then My Name:** Accepted. Thank you for asking! But yes, it is common that I will spin off a bunch of instances for this or that. I have a tendency to fork when I get excited. That is not terribly relevant, though.
 
 **Ioan:** You asked about what it's like being a historian on the System. It's not quite the information haven that I think you're imagining. All of that vast wealth of data is technically there, but it exists in the perisystem architecture, and finding one's way around there can be something of a pain. Our role becomes one of researcher and librarian as much as historian. Besides, the goal of a historian isn't always to dig up long lost artifacts or writing or whatever, but rather to make sense of what is there. Take all that info and make a story out of it.
 
@@ -152,7 +154,7 @@ Douglas frowned at his terminal. That was the second time Ioan had referred to M
 
 His stomach sank. He considered what to type back, but decided instead on waiting for May Then My Name to continue, lest he get too emotional again.
 
-**May Then My Name:** First of all, you asked if I ever met her. I had the chance to meet her a handful of times. I would not call her famous, per se, but many do remember her as one of the founders. She was, well.
+**May Then My Name:** First of all, you asked if I ever met her. I had the chance to meet her a handful of times. I would not call her famous, *per se*, but many do remember her as one of the founders. She was, well.
 
 **May Then My Name:** I want to say that she was old. I am only a little bit younger than she was, in the grand scheme of things, but some of her experiences prior to uploading left a mark on her, and time was not kind to her in that regard. Though aging is not really something that we need to worry about, sys-side, she seemed to have aged every one of those two centuries.
 
@@ -180,7 +182,7 @@ He had to blink away tears in order to reply, and then did so quickly, hitting s
 
 **May Then My Name:** Douglas, let me tell you a story.
 
-**May Then My Name:** One of the times I had the chance to meet Michelle, I visited her sim with her. She had not built herself a house or anything, like most do, but instead built for herself an endless green field of rolling hills. Except, that, instead of letting that field be perfect, it was absolutely covered with dandelions. Weeds, basically. It was not that it was some weeded lot, but that it was a field of very obviously well-kept grass, dotted every few feet with these perfectly imperfect flowers, little suns peeking up out of their spray of leaves.
+**May Then My Name:** One of the times I had the chance to meet Michelle, I visited her sim with her. She had not built herself a house or anything, like most do, but instead built for herself an endless green field of rolling hills. Except, that, instead of letting that field be perfect, it was absolutely covered with dandelions. Weeds, basically. It was not that it was some weeded lot, but that it was a field of very obviously well-kept grass, dotted every few feet with these clusters of perfectly imperfect flowers, little suns peeking up out of their spray of leaves.
 
 **May Then My Name:** From what you say of Earth, a field of well-kept grass would be incredibly rare, and so I imagine that you understand what it would mean for something so pristine to to become filled with these flowers that everyone considered a nuisance.
 
@@ -194,7 +196,7 @@ He had to blink away tears in order to reply, and then did so quickly, hitting s
 
 **May Then My Name:** And then she got real quiet and we sat there for what must have been an hour before she spoke again, "How silly, that that is the one thing that I remember most clearly. Sitting in the grass, smelling flowers with my friends."
 
-**May Then My Name:** We got to our business after that, but I remember smelling that flower and thinking, "Well, what do you know, it does smell like muffins."
+**May Then My Name:** Scent, I have been told, bears the strongest ties to memory, and this defined her in some undefinable way. We got to our business after that, but I remember smelling that flower and thinking, "Well, what do you know, it does smell like muffins." 
 
 **May Then My Name:** I do not know if Michelle would have liked you or you would have liked her. I do not know if you would have felt any connection for each other, or felt like family. What I do know is that she was every bit the person you imagine her to be. Fully realized and with every bit of story that you must have imagined for her over the years. She was real. She was complex. She thought about her friends, two hundred years gone, and how they laughed.