update from sparkleup
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Madison Scott-Clary
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<p>The first interview of note that Codrin Bălan conducted was with an author who had chosen to invest completely in the launches, leaving no one behind. </p>
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<p>At first, Codrin wondered why it was that this author had chosen to be a part of the interview process, why it was that Dear had recommended him. He seemed, on the surface to be entirely uninteresting. He was an author. That was that.</p>
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<p>His name was Martin Rankin, and while Codrin had not read any of his works prior to the suggestion, ey had certainly heard the name in the various literary circles that ey trawled on occasion. A man prone to grand literary gestures, one who leaned heavily on the twisting of endless sentences, ceaseless streams of fragments, prose that bordered on florid even by Codrin’s relatively flowery standards. Ey knew that ey was prone to many of the same pitfalls, but this man took it to an extreme that they found unreasonable.</p>
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<p>Codrin, to prepare for the interview, had read two of Rankin’s books. They were not without their merit, as might any such book be that garnered so much attention, but they still took plenty of work to get through. He wrote most often about contemporary life within the system in all its deliriously boring intricacies.</p>
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<p>Codrin, to prepare for the interview, had read two of Rankin’s books. They were not without their merit, as might any such book be that garnered so much attention, but they still took plenty of work to get through. He wrote most often about contemporary life within the System in all its deliriously boring intricacies.</p>
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<p>That said, much of his work was bound up in a sense of magical realism that was, ey had to admit, enticing. This was something that Codrin had never managed to capture emself, and so ey set aside some time to study the ways in which Rankin used surrealism to enhance the story at hand without distracting.</p>
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<p>Martin Rankin was exactly as ey had expected. There was nothing about him that did not shout Martin Rankin. He wore his identity on his face, on his chest, in the way his hands moved across the table as they talked, there at the cafe, there sitting out on the street, there sipping their coffees.</p>
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<p>“So, you are the illustrious Codrin Bălan.” His voice was imperious, veering dangerously close to pompous, looking over the rim of the demitasse appraisingly at em as he sipped espresso.</p>
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<p>Something about the man grated. Ey wasn’t quite sure what it was at first, whether it was the self-assured way he spoke, or the self-aggrandizing expression he wore on his face. It was nigh intolerable.</p>
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<p>All the same, ey tried eir best to keep up eir smile as ey spoke. “And you’re Martin Rankin. It’s a pleasure to finally get the chance to meet you in the flesh. Thank y–“</p>
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<p>“What a curious choice of phrase, in the flesh.” His tone was droll, bored. “Have you stopped to think of all of the little idioms we bring with us from ‘phys-side’? Even that term! Phys-side. It spells out very plainly that we do not exist in that form any longer. We exist in <em>opposition</em> to it. ‘Sys-side’ contains no such sense of our abstract existence.”</p>
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<p>Ey nodded, smiling ingratiatingly. The man was clearly used to having the chance to expound on his own ideas, and anything that anyone else had to say was of secondary importance — if it was important at all. Ey decided to lean into that. “What a beautiful way to put that. Do you think that the same applies to the dichotomy between L<sub>5</sub> system and launch?”</p>
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<p>Ey nodded, smiling ingratiatingly. The man was clearly used to having the chance to expound on his own ideas, and anything that anyone else had to say was of secondary importance — if it was important at all. Ey decided to lean into that. “What a beautiful way to put that. Do you think that the same applies to the dichotomy between L<sub>5</sub> System and launch?”</p>
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<p>The simpering tone appeared to appeal to Rankin’s sensibilities, as he smiled down to Codrin with all the patronizing disdain of <em>bless your heart.</em> “I do believe so. What can we say but ‘launch-side’ and ‘sys-side’? Do those truly say anything about our existence here? We are hurtling out into space at some terrifying speed, driven by the momentum imparted by the spin of the station and the deliciously thin membranes of those solar sails. Ah! What a journey on which we have decided to embark! We lucky few. Those back on the System know nothing of our experiences out here, even if they have also decided to join. There is no way to accurately transmit that experience through text alone.”</p>
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<p>Hiding a grimace behind a sip of eir own espresso, Codrin jotted down the author’s words. The first thing that Rankin had done upon meeting up with em had been to make a similarly patronizing comment about the anachronistic nature of pen and paper. Ey had supposed at first that ey’d met a fellow admirer of fine pens, fine paper, and the joy of beautiful inks.</p>
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<p><em>Alas.</em></p>
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<p>“It. It’s doing quite well.”</p>
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<p>“Right, right. <em>It</em> always did have such a strange way of moving through the world.”</p>
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<p>“If we could–” Ey cut emself off and recomposed eir plastic smile. “I’ve heard that you are working on a project that capitalizes on this. Can you expand on that?”</p>
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<p>“Of course! Of course. I will always help a fellow writer.” He set his cup aside and made a grand sweep of his arm. “You look around you, and you see so many going about their lives as they might have otherwise. Even I am guilty of the dalliance of getting up, drinking coffee, perhaps sitting and reading a while. We lucky few–” Codrin knew that some two and a half billion personalities were on the launches, but ey declined to comment. “–can draw so much inspiration from a project on so grand a scale. My project is one that utilizes the base nature of a personality embedded in a system that cares not for consistency between its two constituent parts.</p>
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<p>“Before I disappeared from the L<sub>5</sub> system, I wrote an outline for a new book describing the universal feelings of exploration that are bound up in this endeavor, and now I am working writing the book which follows that outline. My counterpart on the Pollux launch is doing the same — he had better be! — and we are sending the results of our labors back to the System to an editor who is a most trusted companion, and he is compiling them into a single book which will serve to showcase the similarities and differences that one mind can hold when it has lost a unifying sense of self!”</p>
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<p>“Of course! Of course. I will always help a fellow writer.” He set his cup aside and made a grand sweep of his arm. “You look around you, and you see so many going about their lives as they might have otherwise. Even I am guilty of the dalliance of getting up, drinking coffee, perhaps sitting and reading a while. We lucky few–” Codrin knew that some two and a half billion personalities were on the launches, but ey declined to comment. “–can draw so much inspiration from a project on so grand a scale. My project is one that utilizes the base nature of a personality embedded in a System that cares not for consistency between its two constituent parts.</p>
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<p>“Before I disappeared from the L<sub>5</sub> System, I wrote an outline for a new book describing the universal feelings of exploration that are bound up in this endeavor, and now I am working writing the book which follows that outline. My counterpart on the Pollux launch is doing the same — he had better be! — and we are sending the results of our labors back to the System to an editor who is a most trusted companion, and he is compiling them into a single book which will serve to showcase the similarities and differences that one mind can hold when it has lost a unifying sense of self!”</p>
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<p>Codrin wrote quickly, not just to keep up, but also to keep eir eyes on the page and away from the by now nearly dancelike gestures that Rankin was using. Ey wondered just how much of it was a conscious decision to be witnessed (and thus perhaps a deeply ingrained need to be seen and not forgotten), and how much of it was some innate characteristic of this certain, special type of asshole.</p>
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<p>“Does that make sense, my dear Codrin?”</p>
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<p>“Oh, yes. Yes it does, Mr. Rankin.”</p>
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<p><em>“They do not need to be. They are all the same.”</em></p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-11-17</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2021-12-20</p>
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</footer>
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</main>
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<script type="text/javascript">
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