<p>I followed Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass back home.</p>
<p>The three of them lived in a narrow brownstone of sorts, full of the dark wood and plush carpets that I knew well from Marsh’s house, though the walls were lined — in some places all but completely covered — with paintings. The vast majority were of landscapes skillfully done in watercolor or acrylics, but each of which was interrupted with a shape of black so deep that it seemed to eat any and all light around it. Beyond just reflecting zero light, it pulled greedily at light that even got close.</p>
<p>Also spaced out through the house were various <em>objets d’art</em> I recognized from Hanne’s work. Dry Grass explained that both paintings and art were from her cocladists Motes and Warmth In Fire. “My little ones,” she called them, which fit well, given what I knew of Warmth In Fire.</p>
<p>She sounded proud of them, as a mother would of her children, which took me a minute to piece together. There were no shortage of family dynamics within the System — after all, old and young alike upload, and upload dates can be decades or centuries apart — though it was relatively rare that they were so strong within a clade where everyone was by necessity the same age. What guardianship we Marshans felt over Cress, the smallest among us, only barely seemed to scratch the surface of the depth of Dry Grasses feelings over And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights and Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire. We were protective of Cress, she was hanging artwork on her fridge door and walls.</p>
<p>Proud, yes, but the overriding exhaustion — physical and emotional — kept her expression muted and heavy, and she soon requested that we lay down as we had planned.</p>
<p>The bed up in the second-storey bedroom was already wide, but Cress and Tule pulled on either edge to stretch it out by another half meter or so while Dry Grass all put faceplanted onto the mattress. She elbow-crawled her way up until her head was at least resting on a pillow before letting out a muffled groan.</p>
<p>Cress and Tule followed after, moving as though they knew the parts they were to play. Dry Grass’s pillow was quickly shifted up into Tule’s lap while Cress settled beside her, rubbing on her shoulders. I knew from Tule’s memories, still slotting their way in along with my own, that this was a somewhat regular occurrence.</p>
<p>I stood awkwardly by until Cress chuckled and gestured at the open space beside Tule up near the head of the bed. “Just relax, Reed.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Dry Grass mumbled. “You do not need to do anything, there is no pressure. We are all just here to unwind, yes? Among friends, yes? I would like to think that this includes you, my dear.”</p>
<p>“Right,” I said, forcing a chuckle of my own as I awkwardly clambered up onto the bed, leaning against the headboard and hugging my knees against my chest.</p>
<p>We sat — or lay — in silence for a while other than the occasional small noise of contentment from Dry Grass.</p>
<p>Even as we stayed in silence, and Cress and Tule doted on their partner, this woman I had such strong feelings about foisted upon me out of nowhere only a few days prior, I struggled to disentangle my thoughts on the events of the day.</p>
<p>The longer I thought about it, the more surreal the act of having a funeral in the midst of such a disaster felt. Our gathering of nine people standing around an all-but-featureless black orb somewhere in a grid of yet more featureless black orbs was small. Nine people had stood around that core dump: six cocladists, two partners, and a systech who also happened to be a partner of two of those cocladists.</p>
<p>It was so small, and yet even if there had been a hundred people there, a thousand, it would have felt vanishingly tiny in that vast, open space. 23 billion orbs set into a grid, and this one was ours, our double handful of grief.</p>
<p>It was so small, and that vast, open space remained silent, empty. The settings on the sim were such that we would only ever see or hear ourselves in there. There might well be billions of others struggling with their own double handfuls of grief, and yet it would only ever be us.</p>
<p>There was more grief to be felt there, layered beneath the exhaustion, confusion, responsibility, and however many more complex emotions had been caked on top. There would come a time when the ability to simply grieve would be laid bare, I knew, and soon, but it was not yet.</p>
