<p>The Woman has always been The Woman. This is the way of the world.</p>
<p>The Woman was born Michelle Rachel Hadje in 2086. On a January night, she was born. Anna Judith Hadje screamed and screamed and breathed and breathed and breathed and, with a gasp or sigh or groan or moan, Michelle took a breath and, after a scant few seconds, wailed.</p>
<p>The Woman does not remember this, for how many of us remember our first breath, our first wail? She does not remember, but the fact is unassailable. From that point, she <em>was</em>. </p>
<p>The Woman was, for all intents and purposes, a normal, healthy child. She was wholly herself, and her parents loved her and her teachers teachers loved her and they all found her to be kind and empathetic, though prone to moodiness. “She is anxious,” they said. “She is a people pleaser. She is autistic. She is bright and quick to laugh.” And she was all of these things.</p>
<p>The Woman went to school, yes, as all unremarkable children do. Kindergarten came and went, and then grade school, where she sang and she dance and she acted in the little plays that grade-schoolers put on. High school then came, and it was there that she met RJ, and they fell in love, but it was not the love that leads to romance, though they at one point tried. They did what high schoolers who fall in love do and kissed behind the bleachers and held hands even at one point had a sleepover, where RJ’s mom peeked in on them at midnight to make sure that they did little else beyond kissing and holding hands, but it had never been RJ’s wont to do aught else. Even romance was beyond em, and it was not the fit for the two of them. They were instead in love that took the form of a superlative friendship. Perhaps they were soul mates, should such a thing exist, but if so, it was not the arrangement that led to romance.</p>
<p>The Woman, like so many other anxious and autistic and quick children, like so many people pleasers who are quick to laugh, spent much of her time online. Her parents, when she was fifteen, as soon as such was allowed by law, paid for the procedure to get her the implants that allowed her to delve in to the shared immersion that was a reality separate from the world. They paid for this because she sat them down and made the argument that she had found friends online, too, online where people glommed together into heterogeneous groups surrounding shared interests.</p>
<p>The Woman, you see, had picked up on furry as a subculture, for when you are a child with an active imagination that loves to play pretend, it is only natural to pretend to be an animal, yes? She pretended to be a cat, for she loved the way they moved, and she loved especially the way their shoulder blades would stick up above their spine as they prowled along, low to the ground. A house cat at first for one breezy year, and then a panther. Something larger, something sleeker, something with big, soft-padded paws that still kneaded while she purred. She was the panther who had named herself Sasha for reasons she could not quite articulate.</p>
<p>The Woman’s superlative friend followed with her and then soon surpassed her. Ey picked not feline, but fennec fox, with ears too big and a brush of a tail and a short but pointy snout.</p>
<p>The Woman and her superlative friend moved together as one. They were the same person twice over, they would say. Michelle who was Sasha — a name chosen for who knows what reason — and RJ who was AwDae — a name that was a corruption of eir name. They were the pair who loved each other in their own way and who surrounded themselves with others. They were the pair who found each other and, when the world deemed them in some way unworthy of consideration, got lost together, for they fell among a crowd of politically active friends, as they were active themselves, and how inconvenient! Inconvenient people should be set aside, some bureaucrat thought. They should be put up high on a shelf in some forgotten storage. And so they were. </p>
<p>The Woman and her superlative friend, when next they clicked their implants into place and delved into the familiar second home that was the ‘net, they were shunted away into dreams and left there to wilt, to languish, to dessicate and wither and be blown away by who cared what wind. They were both torn asunder in some ineffable way. For Michelle who was Sasha, those two identities were carved apart, though only halfway, and, when her superlative friend, her beloved RJ, gave of emself to create the world that was Lagrange, a System for those minds who chose to upload, she dove in as soon as she could afford.</p>
<p>The Woman and her superlative friend were ever bound up in each other, for they were the same person twice over, and since this world was in some ineffable way made <em>of</em> em, Michelle who was Sasha and The Woman who was Michelle felt she had no other choice, even if the unique trauma of getting lost meant that she ever felt that split that inextricable Sasha-ness and Michelle-ness that someone, some bureaucrat that wanted her lost, inadvertently tried to extricate, and it was not until the ability to fork was added to the System that she was able to alleviate herself of such. Or, if not herself, at least those new copies of herself, the Ode clade, would be without such pain.</p>
<p>The Woman and her clade were never wholly without, for such is the way of trauma, yes?</p>
<p>The Woman wandered far from home. She picked a direction — east, if the entrance to that Gothic house on the field was due north — and began to walk. She walked for an hour. Then she walked for two, for four, for eight. She walked until the sun set and then she lay down in the grass and looked up to the stars and remembered all of these things and wept and smiled and laughed and sobbed.</p>
<p>She remembered these things, and I remember these things, just as I, in dreams, remember the sands beneath my fight and the rattle of dry grass in the wind and the names of all things and forget them only when I wake. She wandered the field and lay down and looked at the stars and bathed in memories and pace the empty rooms of my home, listening to nothing, looking at nothing, clenching and unclenching my fists as I struggle not to reach for my pen, my paper, and instead write in my head.</p>
<p>Why do we so often do this? Why are there times when, overflowing or not, we wrap ourselves up in our memories like the most comforting blanket in the world, and yet still cry? Why do we cry after loved ones? Why do we cry after ourselves? Why do we look up to the stars — stars we made! — and cry so bitterly? Why do the tears leave tracks in the fur on our cheeks or down over the skin of our faces? Why do birds, as the poet says, suddenly appear every time we feel such nearness as is left of our superlative friend?</p>
<p>The Woman lay in the grass of the field and dug her fingers down into the soil between the blades, clutching perhaps a dandelion.</p>
<p>When Michelle who was Sasha was lost, when she was set aside from the world as something undesirable, some anathema, she was placed within a dream and left to rot.</p>
<p>Within that dream, she saw a field very much like the one that she lay in, but also very much like so many other such fields sprinkled within Lagrange and Castor and Pollux, for we are many, are we not? We are, as we are so fond of saying, nominally one hundred, and yet we are thousands more, and so many of us have these fields, or perhaps snatches of field, that are speckled with dandelions. I have dandelions on the little moat of grass that surrounds my patio, just as did The Instance Artist who has since left Lagrange, but beyond the low fence that surrounds that patio lies a field, and that field is dotted liberally with them, and my beloved up-tree, The Oneirotect, will bring over her beloved friend, The Child, and they will race around yan tan tethera in endless circles, playing leapfrog or tag or simply running for the sheer joy of it and then go all atumble, and the white fur of their stripes will wind up streaked with the yellow of those dandelions and green of that grass.</p>
<p>Within that dream, though, The Woman saw a field very much like the one that she lay in then, and her mind unwound and unraveled and began to fray and the sun rose and set and rose and set and rose and set and years passed and centuries passed and perhaps millennia, too, and then sixteen hours and twenty-three minutes later, she was lifted up up up out of the dream and set back into the real world. The bureaucrat was arrested, the world heaved a sigh of relief, and then set about doing its best to forget her.</p>
<p>But The Woman who was Michelle who was Sasha would not let that happen. She <em>could not</em> let that happen. She and the others who were thus transitively lost did not deserve to be lost again, forgotten by society, such that </p>
