Codrin Bălan#Artemis — 2346

The pattern-matching portion of eir mind could not stop making comparisons between previous projects ey had been involved in. On the Perils of Memory had been a fairly disorganized affair, begun hastily and over far too soon, leaving the conclusion feeling outsized for the duration of the events at hand. An Expanded History of Our World (or On the Origin of Our World when taken with May Then My Name’s An Expanded Mythology of Our World) had been a vast, sprawling affair that was fairly well organized throughout, though transmission times toward the end began to hinder coordination.

This, then, lay somewhere in between. While the news had been sudden and the pace nearly frantic, it had been nothing if not organized. What had begun as a simple message had turned into a sudden flurry of activity, where dozens of forks from four clades coordinated to plan around eventualities, discuss linguistic profiles, and work with Sarah Genet in her role as psychologist to discuss weak spots in the team and areas where they could shore each other up during the talks.

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 felt 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 and crossed all the ‘t’s that they could think of and gathered — 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 clothing 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, looking 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?”

“Rehasiër munachla achles eslosam.“

An instance of Answers Will Not Help standing by Jonas nodded approvingly at statement.

They proceeded down the line, each reciting their version of the greeting.

“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?”

“Well, ‘leader’ and ‘worker’ as classes have that, sure, and maybe that remains in a boss-subordinate sense, I haven’t gotten that far.” She had gestured down at the paper she was studying. “But ‘neutral party’? I checked, and there are words for ‘mediator’ and ‘juror’ and the like, but none are related to the prefix they’ve given. I think Codrin will be a worker, no matter how neutral eir job actually is.”

“So I use the…uh, echles form?”

She had nodded. “You and Tycho. I’ll get the uchles one.”

“What do I get?”

“There’s no prefix for ‘weirdo’, sorry, Dear.”

Ey recited eir greeting when eir turn came, but only form 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.”

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.

When ey stepped through to the DMZ staging sim, ey was greeted by a nearly identical board room to the one ey had just stepped away from. There were, ey noted, far more whiteboards lining the walls, not to mention far more Odists and Jonases at work just beyond.

“We have an hour,” Jonas said. “So lets 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.”

“Correct,” True Name said. “Tycho will be asking questions on math, physics, and astronomy, Why Ask Questions on biology, and Sarah on language, but her other duty will be to observe how they answer and glean the different ways in which they learn and communicate to see how they tick and where our common ground lies.”

“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 do 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.”

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 essentially human.

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.