An epistolary community, ey thought, and smiled.
Ioan sat across a long table from Joseph Chace Prime, a cup of cooling coffee next eir notepad. Chace talked, and Ioan listened.
-“I was the first of my meeting to upload. There were only about fifteen of us, and we were all getting old, all struggling to face a world moved on. I had cancer, so it seemed a natural choice to come here and complete what work I had left in me.
-“Despite the loose eschatology of the friends, the desire for leaving the world better than when you had entered it, I was still not eager to pass on. So much still to do and see. As an academic, I’m sure you understand.”
+“I was the first of my old meeting to upload. There were only about fifteen of us, and we were all getting old, all struggling to face a world moved on. I had cancer, so it seemed a natural choice to come here and complete what work I had left in me.
+“Despite the loose eschatology of the friends, the desire for leaving the world better than when you had entered it, I was still not eager to die. So much still to do and see. As an academic, I’m sure you understand.”
Ioan smiled and nodded. “Always another project, yes.”
-“Of course. So I uploaded. It was early on in the history of the system, so it was a painful and gut-wrenching process. I do not know if that has changed.” He paused and then laughed at some expression on Ioan’s face. “I suppose it hasn’t. Either way, when I uploaded, despite regular messages to my meeting, I felt somehow locked away from my community, something that I had toiled to build from the ground up after leaving my parents.
+“Of course. So I uploaded. It was early on in the history of the system, so it was a painful and gut-wrenching process. I don’t know if that’s changed.” He paused and then laughed at some expression on Ioan’s face. “I suppose it hasn’t. Either way, when I uploaded, despite regular messages to my old meeting, I felt somehow locked away from my community, something that I had toiled to build from the ground up after leaving my parents.
“To be without a community is a strange feeling. It’s not just a feeling of loss, but one of needs and expectations not being met. I always felt like I was missing something, like I had a space inside me that needed filling.”
“Were you not able to find one here?” Ioan asked.
-“I have friends here, of course, but nothing filled quite the same role. And no, to preempt your next question, I was not able to find any other Quakers here. We are not Luddites, but it was early on, you understand, so the community was small and largely based around a certain exploratory techiness that doesn’t often permit religion.”
+“I have friends here, of course, but nothing quite the same. And no, to preempt your next question, I was not able to find any other Quakers here. We are not Luddites, but it was early on, you understand, so the system was small and largely based around a certain exploratory techiness that doesn’t often permit religion.”
Ioan sipped at eir coffee and thought for a moment before guessing, “So you forked. You made enough copies of your personality to have your own meeting.”
Chace Prime nodded. “It was unintentional at first. I had forked to work on a separate project while I continued on the one I was embedded in, and after a few months, wound up getting in a conversation with my fork about what life had been like before. We reminisced and went our separate ways.
“This continued two or three times before the idea solidified. I continued to fork as needed and talk with my up-tree instances, merging them back into myself only rarely.” He sighed, “When you’re old and lonely, you’ll take any conversation that you can.”
Ioan gave this comment the kind silence it seemed to demand.
-“Anyway, there were four of us, the other three descended from myself but sufficiently changed by their independent experiences so as to start to feel like new people and not just duplicates. It was Beta who suggested we try having a meeting for worship. A joke at first, but it wound up dredging up all sorts of comforting, communal memories, and so we all agreed to just keep meeting.”
+“There were four of us, three descended from myself but sufficiently changed by their independent experiences so as to start to feel like new people and not just duplicates. It was Beta who suggested we try having a meeting for worship. A joke at first, but it dredged up comforting, communal memories, and so we all agreed to just keep meeting.”
“Did you ever fork specifically for the purpose of building this…uh, congregation?”
Chace laughed. “A few times, I’ll admit. Rather, I forked for things that probably didn’t require it. A research interview I promised myself I was too busy to actually attend. A dinner function I didn’t want to go to anyway. Just little things that didn’t need another copy of myself, but that would simply add to the meeting.”
“So how does being a meeting of one differ from what you remember?”
He looked thoughtful. “I would say that we agree on more, but that’s not quite true. I think the set of things we agree or disagree upon tend to differ from a more heterogeneous collection of individuals. The process of individuation is slippery and ill-defined, but we are starting to experience it in the various shiftings of focus and changes of mind.
-“We Quakers are perhaps overly fond of the phrase ‘the light of God in every one’, but that has been a common meditation of mine over the last however many years since we began this experiment. That light is in every person, but when your self is duplicated and remolded into a new individual, does that person count as a new ‘one’, in the sense of that phrase? We have to accept that the light of God is within them, but is it the same light as its progenitor? Does that light shift and change along with us as our differing experiences lead to individuation?”
+“We Quakers are perhaps overly fond of the phrase ‘the light of God in every one’, but that has been a common meditation of mine over the last however many years since we began this experiment. That light is in every person, but when your self is duplicated and bound into a new individual, does that person count as a new ‘one’? We have to accept that the light of God is within them, but is it the same light as its progenitor? Does that light shift and change along with us as our differing experiences lead to individuation?”
“Have you come to any conclusions?”
“I don’t know.” Chace Prime shrugged.
-Epsilon, who had rejoined us after a conversation with a few other Chaces, piped up. “I was briefly of the opinion that the qualities of that light within each of us did not matter, but I’ve since fallen away from that opinion. If the light is meant to guide us in our testimony, and if we accept that our testimony will change with our experience, then that guidance must change as well.”
-Prime added, “I waffle about whether or not it matters, but the more I understand this new form of community, the more I think that having differing testimonies and paths leads to a fuller experience.”
-Ioan set eir pen down and finished eir coffee in the silence that followed.
+Epsilon, who had rejoined them after a conversation with a few other Chaces, piped up. “Once, I thought that the qualities of that light within each of us didn’t matter, but I’ve since fallen away from that opinion. If the light is meant to guide us in our testimony, and if we accept that our testimony will change with our experience, then that guidance must change as well.”
+Prime added, “I still waffle about whether or not it matters, but the more I understand this new form of community, the more I think that even a meeting of one is still just that: a community.”
+Ioan set eir pen down and finished eir coffee in the silence that followed, the table collectively lost in thought. A silence lacking the spiritual weight, yet as kind and companionable as the one they had just shared.
Finally, ey asked, “So, if you had to boil your actions down to a goal, what would it be?”
Prime and Epsilon looked at each other, expressions mirrored to an uncanny degree.
It was Prime who spoke. “We have, up until recently, been focused on recalling that sense of community through our meeting of one, just Joseph Chace in communion with himself. I think it might be time to branch out, though, and perhaps open the meeting to others.”