And through it all, hundreds of Odists and Jonases worked behind the scenes to ensure that every potential possibility was summarized and provided to the team through meeting after meeting, presentation after presentation, quiz and questionnaire.
Every time Codrin thought hey, this is almost like–, ey was brought up short by all of the ways it wasn’t. It was organized and guided, but without the careful precision that ey now knew to be the case for the History. It was hectic and ad hoc but without the spur-of-the-moment surprises that came with Perils.
Consequently, ey kept finding emself stumbling when presented with a pattern that fit one project and then failed to fit completely.
-At last, though, they had dotted all of the ‘i’s they could find and crossed all the ‘t’s that they could think of and gathered — forks of them gathered, at least — to begin the final preparations.
+At last, though, they had dotted all of the ‘i’s they could find and crossed all the ‘t’s that they could think of and gathered — the #Artemis forks of them gathered, at least — to begin the final preparations.
The five of them trickled into the boardroom. They’d been told to dress ‘nice, but comfortable’, which didn’t change anything for True Name. Why Ask Questions had dressed in a matching outfit. Tycho had swapped out a plaid flannel shirt for a very plain white one, but remained in his jeans. Sarah had opted for a blouse and slacks that fit well with her middle-aged, mid-career psychologist aesthetic.
It left Codrin feeling somewhat overdressed for the occasion, but ey shook it off as best ey could. A few years prior, ey’d written a short paper on traditional clothing styles that had been ported into the System, many of which had seen a resurgence, up where cost was no longer a barrier. Ever since, ey’d taken to dressing in various levels of traditional Romanian garb from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for this project, that meant an embroidered, wide-sleeved blouse and a simple, ankle-length wrap-around skirt, over which was layered a fotă, an over-skirt rather like an apron in rich, embroidered red, with a simpler panel of fabric hanging from the back.
Ey had even braided eir hair. Ah well.
“Alright,” a Jonas said. He held a clipboard with a checklist he appeared to be reading from. “Greetings. True Name?”
-They proceeded down the line, each reciting their version of the greeting.
+They proceeded down the line, each reciting their version of the greeting while an instance of Answers Will Not Help judged and corrected them.
“I find it interesting,” Sarah had mentioned when she had first started her work on the limited set of the language they were set to learn. “That we are given classes of modifiers to use. It’s like an eroded form of grammatical gender, or perhaps a caste distinction that has lost its power dynamic.”
“This ‘worker’, ‘leader’, ‘neutral party’ business?” ey had asked.
At this, Dear had perked up. “How do you suppose it has lost its power dynamic?”
@@ -36,14 +36,15 @@“What do I get?”
“There’s no prefix for ‘weirdo’. Sorry, Dear.”
Ey recited eir greeting when eir turn came, but only from the most automatic portion of emself remaining. The rest was spent thinking about how much ey’d miss eir partners. How much ey’d miss home.
-Jonas ticked a box on his clipboard. “Fork and tag your new instances #Emissary.”
+Jonas ticked a box on his clipboard. “Fork and tag your new instances #Castor.”
Codrin and the two Odists doubled up immediately. Sarah Genet took a few seconds, and Tycho apologized profusely thirty seconds later when he was finally able to manage the feat.
“I’m still not used to it, sorry.”
Jonas waved away the comment. “You’re fine, Tycho. Not everyone is True Name.”
Both instances of the skunk made a rude gesture at him.
“Yeah, well, fuck you too.” He laughed. “Alright. The rest of the tasks will be specific to each group, so–” He forked, and the new instance continued, “–#Emissaries, with me to Emissary Staging#553a49c. The rest to Artemis Staging#ad89ae3.”
-Ey lingered for a few seconds and thought. One thing this project had that none of the others had had was the feeling of stepping away from home and leaving it behind completely. There would be no coming home for dinner after a day of interviewing or researching. There would be no returning to the tightly controlled chaos that had become the comforting dynamic among eir polycule. Ey stood, watching the others step away, including the other version of emself, and soaked in the sensation of longing.
+Ey lingered for a few seconds and thought. One thing this project had that none of the others had had was the feeling of stepping away from home and leaving it behind completely. There would be no coming home for dinner after a day of interviewing or researching. There would be no returning to the tightly controlled chaos that had become the comforting dynamic among eir little family. Ey stood, watching the others step away, including the other version of emself, and soaked in the sensation of longing.
When ey stepped through to the DMZ staging sim, ey was greeted by a nearly identical boardroom to the one ey had just left. There were, ey noted, far more whiteboards lining the walls, not to mention far more Odists and Jonases at work just beyond.
+Ey was instructed to create a #Assist instance to leave behind and ferry messages, who was led off to some other briefing.
“We have an hour,” Jonas said. “So let’s finalize our plans for information gathering.”
Codrin pulled out a chair at the table and sat between Tycho and Sarah. “Will this be mostly on Tycho?”
The astronomer shrugged. “We’re the science side, yeah, but we can exchange all the math we’d like without meeting like this. I think it’d be better to say that we’ll be talking about the differences in how we learn and proceed through science. It’ll be good to learn what we can, and I plan on asking a ton of questions, but it’s almost more Sarah’s arena.” He grinned, added, “Don’t get me wrong, though. I’ll still be more in my element than Tycho#Emissary.”
@@ -51,10 +52,9 @@“And I observe.”
She nodded. “As always, yes, though I do not believe you will need to remain silent. Feel free to ask your own questions.”
“What will you do?”
-The skunk smiled and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “What I do best, my dear Codrin. I will guide the lines of questioning, perform risk analysis, and assess lines of control and weakness.”
+The skunk smiled and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “What I do best, my dear. I will guide the lines of questioning, perform risk analysis, and assess lines of control and weakness.”
Ey had been prepared to make a mental note to pull apart her answer to come up with a way to divine her true intentions, but so honest was her answer that ey was wrong-footed into silence.
-They talked through a few more plans, though there was nothing that they had not already covered on the docket. Another short language quiz. First questions they’d ask. A quick run-down of what textual descriptions of their races they had sent — firstrace seemed to be a sort of flexible synthetic creature equally comfortable on two or four legs, secondrace a relatively short being on two legs covered with a coat of fur, thirdrace what sounded like a sort of lizard, though it wasn’t clear if they walked on two or four legs, with fourthrace sounding surprisingly human.
-They’d been startled by the System’s inability to receive anything but text, so the descriptions had seemed hasty. Something to ask about, Codrin thought.
+They talked through a few more plans, though there was nothing that they had not already covered on the docket. Another short language quiz. First questions they’d ask. A quick run-down of what textual descriptions of their races they had sent. They’d been startled by the Castor’s inability to receive anything but text, so the descriptions had seemed hasty. Something to ask about, Codrin thought.
All five of the party sat up with a start from a sensorium message, a little thrill of adrenaline, alerting them to the time.
Codrin was startled at the lack of fanfare that their departure received. The Jonas who had been running the debriefing waved, and none of the others in the room did more than look over their shoulders as they were shunted over to the DMZ and ey was left blinking in the dappled sunlight of the meeting area.