The shift from the universal sorrows of Lagrange to the immediate and personal sorrow of grieving over Marsh had been evident every time I found myself alone, disentangled from the rest of the clade, from Hanne and Dry Grass and problems larger than myself. Now that we were all gathered here, though, all the Marshans and a few close others standing around a simple black sphere, that sudden immediacy of loss clutched at my throat and would not let me go.
The sphere, we’d been told, was all that remained of Marsh. It was their core dump. It was what remained of their corrupted existence here on Lagrange.
On examination, more information became available. The closer I looked at it, the more I seemed to know. The data was something less than visible, something more than remembering. Staring at the sphere was a process of discovering, of learning that it was a core dump, that it was one belonging to Marsh in particular, that it had been created in the first seconds of 2400, that it was marked as unrecoverable, that its nature was one of corruption, that it was tainted with the remnants of contraproprioceptive virus. So much information flew at me that I couldn’t tell what it all meant, not least of which because the more I learned, the more the tears clouded my vision and the black sphere became a hole in the world.
In our world.
In my world.
There was some part of me that had hoped, however foolishly, that Marsh was simply locked in some enhanced cone of silence somewhere, working on this or that, rejecting all incoming sensorium data. Dry Grass, however, assured us that this was not the case, though, that eir name had been all but wiped from the System along with all of the rest of their existence, and then offered to bring us to their core dump.
The room in which the cores were stored was beyond vast. It was an unending space, a three dimensional grid With the cores stored at one meter intervals in all directions. The default spawn point was a floating platform in the middle of a vast sphere, devoid of cores, right in the center of it all.
“The room is set to dark; no one can see us or touch us, no matter how many instances were here,” Dry Grass said quietly, then smiled wryly. “We could scream bloody murder and no one would hear, and yet it has the feeling of a graveyard, does it not?”
None of us spoke.
“Right,” she whispered, expression falling.
“How do we get to their core?” I asked
Dry Grass gestured to a faint circle embossed in the floor, then stepped within its bounds. “Marsh of the Marsh clade,” she said. “Dry Grass of the Ode clade on behalf of the Marsh clade, systech ID #338d842.”
There was a quiet chime of acknowledgment and, in the direction that Dry Grass faced, a black ring formed opening out onto some other part of the sim, hundreds of the untold billions of cores filling the view. The platform drifted slowly towards the portal, and then through.
The cores were insubstantial spheres, ghostly, translucent. Little double handfuls of whispy lives cut short.
All except one.
Right before the platform sat one core more real than the rest, a matte Eigengrau with a faint blue haze around it. The platform drifted forward until it rested at the center before Dry Grass at chest level, us Marshans — along with Pierre and Vos who had also joined us — parting to make way for it.
As the platform came to a stop, the blue haze disappeared and one more chime of acknowledgement sounded. “Marsh of the Marsh clade,” an androgynous voice spoke. “Crashed via CPV January 1, 2400, 00:00:03. Core deemed corrupt and unrecoverable by automated process, confirmed by an instance of In The Wind of her own clade, systech ID #88aa6e8.”
“An instance of…” Dry Grass started, then blanched. “How many instances of In The Wind existed during this process of confirmation?”
“520,000,” the voice said. “A total of two billion instances have been marked as confirming corrupted cores.”
“And none of her were recovered?”
“There is one core for In The Wind of her own clade. The clade directory lists no up-tree instances.”
“Where is–”
“Dry Grass,” Lily growled through gritted teeth. “Shut the fuck up.”
She hesitated, some complex set of emotions crossing her face, bowed unsteadily, and then moved to stand by Cress, Tule, and I. Whether intentional or not, she stood so that Lily was blocked from sight by the three of us.
It had to be intentional, and that fact, seeing her cowed for the first time in my memory — mine and Tule’s — had me bristling. Both Tule and Cress appeared to be biting back responses of their own.
For her part, Lily remained tense, standing rigid and still. Even as she began to cry, she did so without moving, without making a sound, tears simply welling up and coursing down her cheeks. “Rush,” she croaked.
Looking anxiously between Lily and Dry Grass, ve nodded slowly. “Alright,” ve murmured, then stepped forward and tentatively touched the sphere. “I had some words prepared, but I’m not sure I can remember them all.”
Sedge sighed and stepped forward to join ver. “Hey, it’s alright,” she said, resting her hand on vis wrist. “Just talk to them if you want.”
Ve clutched at the sphere, though it remained stolidly immobile. “Uh…okay,” ve mumbled. “I guess I’m just sorry this happened. Sorry in a commiseration way. Sorry that we’re here at all, standing around like a bunch of jerks while you’re…uh, gone, or whatever.” Ve trailed off with a nervous laugh, shoulders sagging. “But I’ll miss you, Marsh. We all will. We’re all here, you know. All of your clade. Pierre and Vos are here, too, and Dry Grass, all wishing that you were here with us. I’m sorry you’re not, I’m sorry you didn’t get our merges first.”
Cress sniffled. Lily continued to stare blankly ahead through her tears. None of the three of us immediate up-tree instances had managed to merge down.
When Rush didn’t continue, Sedge leaned to hug awkwardly around vis shoulders. Ve stiffened, returned the hug, and then stepped away from the sphere again, rubbing vis hands against vis shirt.
Sedge took her turn resting her hands atop the core. She stood a while in silence, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Finally, she said, “Twenty-three billion dead, but you were ours.”
She opened her mouth to continue, shook her head, and then stepped back to join me, Tule, and Cress. Pierre moaned softly, slouching against Vos’s side.
Tule began to step forward, but Lily held up a hand. “Stop,” she whispered. “Not you. Not yet.”
“Lily, I–”
“Not yet,” she repeated, then stepped forward. Rather than rest her hands gently on the sphere of the core dump, she clutched it tightly. Her face contorted into a grimace, but she spoke through the tears, through whatever emotion it was that held her in its grip. “You died. You were killed. You were killed by those who thought we were less than them, who thought they could control the world to such an extent that our lives became nothing to them. Just so much garbage.”
I saw Dry Grass wince out of the corner of my eye. Whether Lily was talking about the collective that had seen fit to attack the System, this Our Brightest Lights Collective, or the Ode clade and all of their supposed machinations wasn’t clear to me, but Dry Grass certainly seemed to take the words to heart. I held out my hand to her, but she shook her head subtly.
“Our lives were nothing, so your life was nothing, too,” Lily continued. “Now here we are, like Rush said, standing whatever’s left of you like a bunch of jerks who get to live on. Who the fuck cares that some huge majority gets to live on while so many people are just fucking…gone?”
She looked as though she wanted to say more, but her words petered out and she simply stared, unseeing, at the core she held onto. Finally, she let go of the sphere and stumbled back to where she had been standing before.
I started to step forward next, eyes locked on Lily.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Vos first.”
“What the–”
“Shut up. Vos first.”
I glanced over to Vos, who was glaring at Lily. “What are you doing, Lily?”
“Go,” she said hoarsely.
“If you don’t want to be here,” Vos said, voice flat, dangerous. “You can leave.”
“I want you to fucking go,” Lily snapped. “I want to hear about Marsh from someone who knew them better than any of us, these last however many decades.”
“First Cress, now Reed?” She scoffed. “Do you think they don’t know about Marsh?”
“Certainly not as much as you did, if they’re all dating one of them!”
“Get out.”
“It’s not your–”
“Get out!” Vos shouted. “Get out get out get out!“
Pierre fell to his knees, clutching his head in his hands. The movement seemed to startle Lily to awareness and, with a stricken look on her face, she stepped from the sim.
Unsure of what drove me to do so, I forked and quickly followed her, guessing that she had returned home. I’d let my down-tree instance stay to say his words, to hear everyone else’s.
My guess was correct, as there she was, already whirling on me at the notification of my arrival. “Oh, fuck you, Reed. Don’t even give me a chance to lock the door!” she shouted.
“Lily, what the fuck is wrong with you?” I hollered back. “You can’t just cut Tule, Cress, and I out of Marsh’s fucking funeral just because you don’t like Dry Grass!”
“Fucking watch me.“
Although I immediately regretted it, I slapped her across the cheek. Hard. I think I regretted it even in the moment, as soon as I felt my hand move. “No,” I said. “I won’t watch you try to rip the clade in two just like that, just like it’s your choice for the rest of us. It’s not like either Sedge or Rush care.”
“Well they fucking should!” she yelled, clutching at her cheek. “They fucking should. You heard what they said. You heard it first-hand, even! 8-stanza-1, right? You read the books, you know as much as the rest of us. I don’t fucking care if True Name is Sasha or whatever now, she’s the one who fucked this whole thing up. She’s the one who lied and manipulated all of us. What are we supposed to do about that? Huh?! Christ, that hurt…”
“Nothing, Lily! Jesus Christ. You act like the whole Ode clade just ruined everything.”
“They did!”
I followed after her as she stomped into the kitchen, watched as she grabbed a glass and somehow managed to angrily fill it with water from the faucet, still rubbing her cheek where I’d struck.
“They really didn’t,” I sneered. “You…what, read the History and decided that, without exception, they’re all fucking evil? Even after everything? Even after all the other books explained what happened?”
“Fuck the other books,” she said, more to the faucet than to me. “Fuck the Ode clade, and fuck you too. Fuck you and fuck Cress and fuck Tule. It’s really fucking sad, watching you three get taken for a ride, the same manipulation that fucked us all.”
Her anger still burned hot, I knew, but not as much as it had when first we’d arrived. I just needed to outlast it. Doing so by parking myself in my own anger probably wasn’t the best way to do it, but it felt too good, too cathartic to let go of. “We’re not getting taken for a ride, whatever that means. We’re just grown up enough to realize that a bunch of actors did what actors do and pretended.” I scoffed. “They pretended, Lily. That’s just what they do.”
“So it’s just a game, then?” she shot back, though I could tell she was flagging. “Just a game that led to a bunch of fucking psychos killing billions of people?”
“They lost people too, Lily. So True Name did some stupid stuff back in the early days; what of it? She explained it all, said how much of it was just playing at politics without doing much beyond making us look interesting to phys-side. Now a bunch of them are dead and–”
“Two of them are dead,” she grumbled. “Two and however many up-trees.”
“Yeah, real lives, Lily.”
Her shoulders slumped and she finally settled into silence. After a moment, she drank down the water in three coarse gulps, leading to her coughing and spluttering.
I waited it out.
“Look at us, Reed,” she said, laughing humorlessly. “Fighting at a funeral like a real fucking family, and me swallowing my water wrong like a real fucking idiot.”
I sighed. “Right, yeah. Are we at least done, though?”
She waved away the glass and nodded. “Yeah, sure. I’m going to stay here, but I’ll try to at least keep this to myself in the future.”
“I’d prefer if you got over it,” I said, trying to keep the anger from creeping back into my voice. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere.”
She shrugged, chin already drooping to her chest as anger was replaced with something that looked perilously close to exhaustion. I wondered, not for the first time, if the rest of the clade was struggling with sleep as much as I was. “No promises. Pretty fucking hard to let go of,” she muttered. “But I’ll try.”
“Well, alright. Just no more shouting, at least. Do you want to come back to the gathering?”
She hesitated, shook her head, and then sighed. “I probably should.”
“You definitely should. Just let us do our thing, and listen, I guess.”
She nodded. “Can you ask Vos if I can come back, at least? I was afraid she was going to deck me,” she said, then smiled lopsidedly at me. “Not like I escaped that particular fate.”
I winced. “Yeah. Sorry about that, Lily.”
“Nah, it’s okay. I was being kind of a bitch.”
“No comment.” I sent off a sensorium ping to Vos and got a halfhearted shrug in response. “I think you can come back, though. Probably best to just chill, though, right?”
“Yeah, okay.”
I took her hand in mind and sent a message to my down-tree to recall us to the sim, blipping into being close to where we had stood when we left. Lily trudged back to her place and I quit to merge back down.
I merged the memories of the fight with Lily wholesale, letting them mingle with Vos’s words of love and loss. There was a part of me that regretted it, that they should be so tainted, but both sets of memories were important.
Pierre declined to speak.
That left just Cress, Tule, and I. Cress went first, stepping forward to rest her hands against the core, and then resting her forehead against the back of its hands. “There’s too much bullshit going on, so here’s a story.
“Back when Reed, Lily, and I were forked, Marsh was still presenting cis male, and so the three of us were to be the aspects of them that went in different directions. Lily headed back cis fem, Reed went back to the trans masc presentation we had phys-side, and I went somewhere neutral.
“I started out with they/them pronouns, leaning into androgyny as I’d always pictured it, something more tomboyish than anything, but over time, that began to drift, and I decided that ‘neutral’ was the wrong answer to the question of gender. Gender was the wrong question. Fuck it, I say.” It laughed, shrugging. “The next time I merged down, Marsh sent me a message that was just them laughing, then requested that we use they/them for them.”
It straightened up again, smiling. “So you see? It’s all my fault they wound up how they did.”
The rest of the clade grinned. Both Vos and Pierre laughed.
After Cress, Tule stepped forward and stood for nearly five minutes in silence. The wait began expectant, but before long, everyone gathered around the core bowed their heads one by one, settling into something more contemplative. The silence spoke as much as Sedge and Rush’s sorrow, Lily’s anger, Cress’s humor.
When he stepped back, I sighed. “Guess that leaves me,” I said. I could feel exhaustion pulling at my cheeks, pressing against my temples. When I touched the core, I was surprised to find it cool to the touch, dry, almost dusty. “I don’t want to say anything, but Tule already covered that base. I guess you’ve all talked a lot about the past, so I’m not sure I have much to add. I guess I’ll just say that I hope we can find a way forward that doesn’t lead to us feeling terrible forever.”
There were a few nods around the circle, though Pierre only buried his forehead against Vos’s shoulder.
“So I don’t know. Let’s just keep being good to each other, and keep finding ways to stay on top of things.” My words sounded hollow, emotionless. I decided to lean into that feeling directly. “I’m having a hard time connecting emotions to my words, here. I think it’s all super overwhelming, so I guess all I can do is just hope that that’s not always the case.”
Sedge, Tule, and Rush, my up-tree instances, all leaned forward to rest their hands on my shoulders.
“It’s incredibly you to just think about how to manage stuff going forward,” Lily said, no ire in her voice. “That’s just kind of your role in this whole thing, huh?”
I laughed, feeling some of the pressure in my chest fade. “Right, yeah. Manager of the enterprise.”
“Pretty sure that’s me, actually,” Sedge said. “Though I guess I got it from somewhere.”
We all laughed.
We drifted away in small clumps after that. Pierre and Vos returned to Marsh’s home — their home, now — along with Sedge, who said she was going to head back to work. Rush nudged Lily off to a bar, stating that it was high time at least some of us got roaring drunk.
The four of us who remained — me, Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass — stood in silence for a while. There seemed to be little point in saying anything as we processed this impromptu funeral. All that needed to be said had been said, or if not, then it had at least been put on hold in the face of our overwhelming emotions.
I thought of the stages of grief, of Lily’s anger, of the sadness so many of us lingered in, of the bargaining that I knew we all held within us. Perhaps there was some way to get Marsh back. Perhaps there was something we could yet do. Perhaps some combination of the core that remained and all of our memories could lead to some solution. Perhaps this new cross-tree merging held some promise after all.
“I want to see In The Wind,” Dry Grass said eventually, her first words since Lily had told her to shut up. “I want to see what remains, and then I want to go lay down with the three of you, if you will have me.”
I blinked, standing up straighter. “Me?”
She nodded. “If you will have me.”
I thought of so many complex emotions that had plagued me over the last few days — the memories of love, the way they clashed with my memories of distance, the memories of Lily burning up with hatred — and, finally, nodded. “Yeah. Let’s see In The Wind’s core, and then get out of here. Anything to help out after all this will be good.”