update from sparkleup
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Madison Scott-Clary
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<p>“Alright, close your eyes.”</p>
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<p>Ey did so, and when Brahe instructed em to open them again, the sudden change in the sky was, indeed, a little dizzy-making. The entire field of stars had changed, and where there had been warped but familiar constellations, there was now a deeper blackness, brighter stars, and far more of them. Far, far more. “What is this?”</p>
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<p>“A different view. A more powerful telescope looking at a patch of sky that we’ve never had a chance to see from this angle. One compounded from hours of exposure. I have no idea how exact it is, though, as it’s all interpreted through the perisystem infrastructure, but it’s still doing a slow sweep of the sky at a high enough magnification that the star field is completely different from what we’re used to.”</p>
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<p>“I wouldn’t have thought thought that that would’ve had such an impact on me,” ey murmured. “I felt like I was falling for a moment.”</p>
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<p>“I wouldn’t have thought that that would’ve had such an impact on me,” ey murmured. “I felt like I was falling for a moment.”</p>
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<p>Brahe sighed. “I did, too, the first time, and even now I’m not sure why. I think it’s the mix of contexts. Here we are, looking out to space from the westernmost edge of the Western Fed, and yet all of the stars are different. They progress in such strange ways as the telescope searches on its automatic pattern.”</p>
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<p>“It’s uncanny.”</p>
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<p>“A good word, yeah. It’s like looking out on an alien sky, but even that misses the strangeness of so many stars. An alien sky, but as seen from the context of Earth. Firs, moss, a light breeze, dampness soaking into your trousers, and an alien sky. Did you have the chance to visit the L<sub>5</sub> station before you uploaded?”</p>
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<p>They had walked back around the patio and into the main house and Dear’s partner surveyed the scene of various foxes in various states of activity or various moods, then walked up to one scribbling on a notepad at its desk, grabbed a fistful of fur and loose skin at the nape of its neck in their hand, lifted the fox to its feet, and shook it gently. All of the forks that had been littering the house quit in an instant.</p>
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<p><em>“Oh, is it dinner time?”</em> It had looked bedraggled, limp, unsteady, and a glint of some intensity that Codrin had never seen before hid in its eyes.</p>
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<p>“Yeah. Come on. Codrin knows a place.”</p>
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<p>There had never been a full explanation of what it was that happened, but as they dined on plates of dumplings, steamed buns, noodles, and tacos, the fox’s heckles began to lay flat, and the erratic twitching of its tail slowed to a more familiar calm. It had spent most of the dinner peering around curiously and talking their ears off.</p>
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<p>There had never been a full explanation of what it was that happened, but as they dined on plates of dumplings, steamed buns, noodles, and tacos, the fox’s hackles began to lay flat, and the erratic twitching of its tail slowed to a more familiar calm. It had spent most of the dinner peering around curiously and talking their ears off.</p>
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<p><em>“Sometimes I overflow,”</em> is all the fox had said when pressed.</p>
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<p>Even after nearly twenty years, though, Codrin had yet to gain the knack of telling the original instance of Dear when that many were running around, and so when the fox began to ‘overflow’ once more, ey sought out its partner in their own workshop and waited until they reached a stopping point before saying, “I think it’s time for dinner.”</p>
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<p>As usual, they were able to hunt down the root instance and shake it back to reality. Whenever the fox was grabbed by the scruff, it went limp, and the shake was usually something of a rag doll affair. At first, Codrin had worried that its partner was hurting it, but as ey was welcomed into their relationship, ey learned that the fox counted it as a pleasure.</p>
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<p><em>“No, you are a ways off from me resenting you, but you are perilously close to me lying to you.”</em></p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-10-19</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-11-17</p>
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</footer>
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</main>
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<p>“Ioan, I am not the one who is supposed to be asking questions,” she chided.</p>
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<p>“Right, sorry. It’s a little bit cabin fever, I guess. I’ve spent an awful lot of time cooped up in the house and just sending forks out to run the interviews. It’s one thing to remember being outside, but another still to have to make that memory align with not having left the house in days.”</p>
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<p>The skunk nodded, picking a pebble from near her paw and tossing it into the lake. “I understand. It think that I am perhaps more comfortable inside than you are, but I am still happy that you brought me here.</p>
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<p>“Glad you like it. It’s an abandoned sim that I visited decades back and still had the coordinates to. It reminded me of how my grandfather described his time in Slovenia.” Ey crumpled of the wrapper to eir sandwich and returned it to the backpack that ey’d brought with. “It’s just good to get out and change contexts, I guess.”</p>
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<p>“Glad you like it. It’s an abandoned sim that I visited decades back and still had the coordinates to. It reminded me of how my grandfather described his time in Slovenia.” Ey crumpled the wrapper to eir sandwich and returned it to the backpack that ey’d brought with em. “It’s just good to get out and change contexts, I guess.”</p>
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<p>May nodded.</p>
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<p>“It’s just…” Ey frowned, hunting for the words. “It’s just that we have limitless time and limitless space and all the creativity we could hope to use, and still I sometimes feel trapped, as though I’m stuck in this tiny, constrained space where I can barely move and can’t hope to stretch out. Does that make sense?”</p>
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<p>“It is not a feeling I share, but I can see how one might,” May said, carefully shifting the backpack from between them to the other side of her so that she could lean against em. “It is the feeling one gets when one asks “is that all there is?” and the answer comes back “yes, of course”.”</p>
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<p>“Now, take me home and talk about something — anything — else for the rest of the night.”</p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-10-30</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-11-17</p>
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<p><strong>Yared:</strong> I think we’re still split pretty evenly on speciation. Even I am. One day, I’ll think, “Sure, they may be fundamentally different from us, but they still <em>think</em> like us. They still reason like humans. Except for the biological differences, they still are.” Other days, though, I’ll wake up and think, “We have no common frame of reference with these people. They’re just too different.”</p>
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<p><strong>Yared:</strong> This actually came up in a few conversations with my friends sys-side. It sounds like they share some of that ambivalence toward speciation. They can’t interface with phys-side as we can, and we can’t interface with sys-side as they can, so how could they even be considered the same species as us? And yet here they are, taking place in a political debate as filigreed and baroque as any other, and doing so with the same rational minds that we have, even if only at one remove. “At this point,” one of them said as we laughed over another fruitless debate. “I’m not even sure we should be discussing individual rights with governments that have no way of knowing how we work. We might as well just secede and end the discussion there.”</p>
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<p><strong>Yared:</strong> But who knows if speciation will even wind up playing into it, in the end. I’ve noticed that, even though we remain split on the topic, tempers have cooled on both sides. I’m surprised — pleasantly so! — to see this agreement building even in Cairo; I know that many of my compatriots there bore apathy or even antipathy towards the system after previous dealings between NEAC and the S-R Bloc. We’re no longer at each others throats about whether or not they’re so fundamentally different from us that it requires some strange new way to think of them as individuals.</p>
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<p><strong>Yared:</strong> And honestly, that’s my hope. I think that way whether or not they’re humans, whether or not they have their own customs and social structure, whether or not they’re even a separate country. Even those who are falling on the side of speciation are starting to refer to them in terms of individuals. “Them.” “How many of them.” “Who in there even thinks X” All of these are ways that we refer to individuals, and, you who are still arguing this belabored point that they should have no choice on what is done with their personalities once their bodies are gone, you are now thinking of them as what they are: individuals.</p>
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<p><strong>Yared:</strong> And honestly, that’s my hope. I think that way whether or not they’re humans, whether or not they have their own customs and social structure, whether or not they’re even a separate country. Even those who are falling on the side of speciation are starting to refer to them in terms of individuals. “Them.” “How many of them.” “Who in there even thinks X?” All of these are ways that we refer to individuals, and, you who are still arguing this belabored point that they should have no choice on what is done with their personalities once their bodies are gone, you are now thinking of them as what they are: individuals.</p>
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<p><strong>Yared:</strong> That, my friends, feels like progress to me. We are starting to come to an understanding of what the System is, whether it’s a home for the disaffected and dying, an international forum where individuals can truly live together, or a country in its own right, is home to thousands of individuals, each with their individual lives, individual reasons, individual feelings. They’re people. The System is their home. We cannot take that from them without violating their individual rights.</p>
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<p><strong>Jonas:</strong> Well written as always, Yared. </p>
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<p><strong>True Name:</strong> Agreed. You have a way of agreeing with people just enough to make them feel like you might actually be on their side, and that perhaps they ought to work toward the same goal.</p>
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