Once upon a time there was–

"A king?" my little readers will immediately say.

No, children, you are mistaken. Once upon a time, there was a woman. She was not a fine woman, not a prize to adorn your arm or to set beside you at the head of a grand table, but a simple woman — the kind we pass on the street and imagine some plain home life for. She has a house, one might think. There are floors and walls and windows, there are tables and chairs and sofas and beds. There is a shower and a claw-footed bathtub. There is a creaky step — the eighth — that she always swears she will fix.

We must imagine such a woman happy. We must imagine that she has friends and that she goes and drinks okay wine or maybe strange cocktails with them at the most absurd bars. We must imagine that she comes home, wobbling slightly with each step, with some other simple woman on her arm. We must imagine them kissing.

We must imagine these things because they are not true.

I do not know how it happened, but one cloudy day, she was asking after her friend and then her mind was turned all in on itself, was wrapped and folded three times, turned, and then wrapped and folded thrice more. Some malicious baker kneaded and kneaded and kneaded, and when next she woke up, sixteen hours and twenty three minutes later, her mind remained in some unknown, integral way tied up into knots.

But that was three hundred years ago.

The woman wanders the world some few times a month, stepping out into unknown nowheres and known somewheres to be seen, to be perceived as still existing. I do not know why she does this, but it is important to her that someone witness her existing. It is a ritual she follows around like a little puppy: she will not know what will happen when she first does it properly, but she hopes it will be something wonderful.

The woman has many rituals. 

She has rituals for eating food, for feeding the vessel in which she makes her home. There is no order in which she properly consumes food, she may consume it in any order, but there is an order in which she must appreciate food. You must understand: she must do this for everything she takes into her body. She must look at it before she touches it, must touch it before she smells it, must smell it before she eats it, and before all of these she must say a prayer.

She has rituals for getting dressed, for clothing the form with which the world sees her. She must choose a garment that fits her body and one that fits her mood. You must understand: every time she gets dressed, there is a moment of scrying into her deepest self and estimating how it is that she feels that day. And should her mood change, should those feelings shift, she will find her clothing itchy and uncomfortable, and if her form becomes not what it once was, her clothing will become uncomfortably tight or perhaps she will disappear down into the folds of fabric.

She has rituals for entering a room, for passing through a door. She must touch the door frame beside her shoulder, must brush her fingers against the wood or stone or metal or some more abstract substance. You must understand: she has to do this for every door she walks through, and for this reason, there is a door in the house where she lives that was built by a friend of her friend that leads directly out into a city. She opens the closest door and steps out onto a concrete sidewalk lined with trees and passers by, where the sun shines bright and the air burns cold in her nostrils and the dry leaves skitter anxiously about her feet. As she steps out, she can brush her hand to the door frame.

I do not know where these rituals come from, and perhaps some of my readers will immediately say, "OCD? Does the woman have obsessive compulsive disorder?"

No, friend, I do not think she does. I know that there are obsessions within her, yes, and I am sure that these rituals feel compulsory, but there is something different about the woman. She is too present. She is too much herself, too human, too embodied within her vessel as it spirals out of control, too stuck in her mind as it twists in on itself. She is not struck by a disorder, she is struck by a constant overwhelm, a constant overflowing.

The woman uploaded when she was overflowing. She lived within that overflow for years, for seven years she was overflowing, she was trapped within her mind and within the vessel of her body, and she lived as best she can as her body spiraled out of control. 

Readers, you must understand that she was in so many ways whole still! 

She campaigned for herself and for the others as damaged as her, but I think this was borne out of trauma and desperation as much as it was care for her loved ones lost and found.

She campaigned after uploading for individual rights for uploaded minds, before they were even cladists