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update from sparkleup

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Madison Rye Progress 2024-06-26 21:56:16 -07:00
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writing/post-self/marsh/004.html
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@ -237,8 +237,8 @@
<p>&ldquo;Why?&rdquo; In All Ways asked. Her expression had shifted from upset to unnerved.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The goal is to use us as a synecdoche for the System. By tallying the percentage of missing instances within our extended clade, we may have a guess as to how many on the System might be missing. We are working with other clades who are doing the same thing, and by averaging, perhaps we will wind up with an approximate number for Lagrange as a whole.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Another, longer silence followed. By now, more of them were sitting in the grass. There were more tears, more open crying.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The number&hellip;&rdquo; Need An Answer began, then cleared her throat. &ldquo;The number of missing instances for those here is eleven. For the total respondents in the clade as a whole, there are twenty-eight missing instances.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;With a population of 2.3 trillion instances, we are looking at a loss of approximately 48.1 billion souls,&rdquo; Dry Grass said. Her voice sounded as confident as it had all morning, but her expression was aghast.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The number&hellip;&rdquo; Need An Answer began hoarsely, then cleared her throat. &ldquo;The number of missing instances for those here is eleven. For the total respondents in the clade as a whole, there are twenty-eight missing instances.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;With a population of 2.3 trillion instances, we are looking at a loss of approximately 48.1 billion souls,&rdquo; Dry Grass said. Her voice sounded as sure as it had all morning, but her expression was aghast.</p>
<p>Silence fell for a third time. Silence except for sniffles.</p>
<p>My own were included, as were Sedge&rsquo;s and Tule&rsquo;s. The number was unimaginable. 48 billion! Yes, many of those instances were ephemeral, merely those sent out on errands or to enjoy multiple parties to ring in the new year. How many did not matter, though. Even if only one percent of those who were lost were long-lived instances, that was still 480 million dead.</p>
<p>The loss of Marsh suddenly felt insignificant, and with that feeling of insignificance came an anger, a despair. </p>
@ -292,7 +292,7 @@
<p>&ldquo;Ye-e-es,&rdquo; I allowed. &ldquo;So maybe it was a virus or something. CPV that affects everyone doesn&rsquo;t exist, does it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Silence and headshakes around the pagoda. The contraproprioceptive virus — the one sure way to kill anyone on the System — only seemed to work when tailored specifically to an individual&rsquo;s sensorium, disrupting their sense of proprioception until they either dissipated and crashed or quit out of agony. Not only that, but, from what I&rsquo;d learned from the stories that came out surrounding it a few decades back, it had to somehow pierce the skin, to breach that sense of physical integrity, before it could do it&rsquo;s awful job of unwinding a person entirely.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Well, if this&hellip;attack or whatever was deliberate and we don&rsquo;t know anything about <em>how</em> it was done, do we know anything about who might have done it?&rdquo;</p>
<p>Sedge leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s always been a bunch of people who hate uploading. Sometimes it&rsquo;s because they feel like we&rsquo;ve abandoned Earth, sometimes it&rsquo;s because everyone makes Lagrange out like some sort of heaven while Earth is still kind of hellish. Even after all the work they&rsquo;ve gotten done in the last fifty years, even with a lot of the climate shit either halted or actively starting to improve, Earth has hardly gone back to what it was like back before the industrial revolution or whatever.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Sedge leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s always been a bunch of people who hate uploading. Sometimes it&rsquo;s because they feel like we&rsquo;ve abandoned Earth, sometimes it&rsquo;s because everyone makes Lagrange out like some sort of heaven while Earth is still kind of hellish. Even after all the work they&rsquo;ve gotten done in the last fifty years, even with a lot of the climate shit either halted or actively starting to improve, Earth has hardly gone back to what it was like before the industrial revolution or whatever.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Yeah, but hate it enough to destroy it? Kill billions and billions of people?&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not sure they think of us as people.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Lily snorted. &ldquo;&lsquo;Not as people&rsquo;,&rdquo; she sneered. &ldquo;Sorry, Sedge, I know it&rsquo;s not on you. You&rsquo;re probably right. I&rsquo;m just feeling like shit now.&rdquo;</p>