Ioan: What would you suggest that others experiencing System Freeze do?
Rosemary: Don’t wait for it to solve itself, and don’t wear yourself out searching. You can just make whatever interest group you want, and if one exists, just be willing to get folded into it. You won’t even have to lie. [laughter] But that’s just the start. If you don’t actually want to keep up with the interest group long-term, that’s fine, your only real goal is to start meeting people, then things start to thaw.
And so here ey was, hunting down those who had uploaded specifically for the money that it would leave their families and friends back phys-side. Their stories were, ey figured, just as valid as anyone’s. They were just as valid as eir own, for had ey not done the same? Here ey was, interviewing those like emself.
+These were the people who had moved to the system out of some sense of not just a better life for themselves, but one for those whom they had left behind. Ioan had had few enough ties back to eir family phys-side after uploading — only enough to ensure that the payments had gone through and that they were alright — and then none since then.
+Eir hope in undertaking this exercise had been to learn a bit more about the time between Secession and Launch, about what had lead to the demographics of a System that had decided to hurl large portions of itself out into space. Was it something perhaps borne of the sentiment of the population that had grown in the intervening years? Was it something that had always been there?
+When ey had come up with the list of questions, ey had intended to divine why those who had uploaded had found the System attractive. Was that, perhaps, what had driven the desire for the launch?
+And yet now, it seemed like that was, at most, a secondary effect.
+So much was going on that had gone on before and so many of the same actors were involved, that although these interviews had been interesting in and of themselves, it seemed doubtless that such had had any notable affect.