Codrin Bălan#Castor — 2325

While he didn’t quite have the singular ability to immediately make em like him as many of the Odists seemed to, Codrin found emself immensely charmed by No Jonas.

“I got the short end of the stick.” He laughed, gesturing Ioan into what appeared to be a living room of an apartment quite similar to the one ey had interviewed True Name in. A little less perfect, a little more lived-in. “Jonas Prime decided to name all of his instances with a syllable, I got stuck with No, of all things. I’m sure there are sillier ones, at least. We Jonas? Oi Jonas? Just call me Jonas so we don’t get confused.”

Codrin grinned and sat on a reasonably comfy — if slightly ratty — chair across the table from the couch that Jonas flopped down onto. “I suppose there has to be some scheme for dispersionistas to use to keep track of each other that isn’t just the default random string of letters and number.”

“Of course! You know the Odists. I should’ve done something like that. Take an old rock song and name myself after each of the lines.” He shrugged. “But no, I think they’ve got a lock on that idea. This one’s inventive enough without being too annoying. Usually.”

“They do pull it off quite well,” ey said, pulling out eir pen and paper. “Though some of their short names work better than others. I like Dear, and I think True Name works well as a…well, name.”

“Oh? Did you talk with her?”

“Yes, she was the last Odist I interviewed, actually. At least, here on Castor. The Codrin on Pollux is interviewing others, and my down-tree instance on the System is taking yet another path. This way, we get a good spread while transmission times are short.”

“How is Ioan, by the way?” Jonas asked, winking at Codrin. It was a sly enough way to let em know that he’d done his reading.

“Oh, well enough. We’ve all been stressed in our own ways.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m curious, though, in what ways do your stresses differ?”

Codrin tilted eir head. “Well, Codrin#Pollux recently had a dinner party with some other Secession-era people. Some from the Council of Eight, and a Yared Zerezghi, who was apparently important phys-side.”

“Ah!” Jonas said, grinning. “How is Yared? Though I guess you weren’t there.”

“He sounded alright. He told a story about how he worked with politicians both here and phys-side.” About you and True Name, Codrin thought to emself.

“We spent a lot of time working together, yeah. Nice guy. Did Codrin#Pollux have much to say about Debarre and user11824?”

Ey froze in the middle of eir note-taking.

Jonas held up his hands. “Just a guess. Ezekiel never leaves his border of Jerusalem, the Russians are gone, and I doubt Dear would’ve let True Name visit.”

“Good guess, then. They all certainly sound interesting. Debarre seems nice, user11824 seems weird. Ey also talked to me about eir interview with Ezekiel, which was apparently quite prophetic.”

Jonas laughed.

“And Ioan is getting hounded by strange historians while also doing eir best to keep up with interviewing the Odists.” Ey hesitated, considering whether to pass on the warning that Ioan had received from End Waking, then decided to plow ahead. “One of them told em to be careful interviewing you, that you’d control the whole thing.”

“Did he now? Well, I suppose I will. It’s one of those second nature things, you know. I apologize if that sounds sinister, I promise it isn’t. I do as Jonases do, just as you do as Bălans do, and that is to speak to the things that interest me. I’m just better than others at ensuring that that happens.”

Codrin nodded as ey wrote. “Alright. Are you okay if I start asking questions, then?”

“Of course, ask away.”

“First of all, and I’m not sure how well this applies to a dispersionista such as yourself, but did you — No Jonas — leave an instance back on the L₅ System?”

“Oh, sure. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to, you know? I figure there’s enough of us Jonases up here to have our fun, and plenty back down down on the System to keep things interesting.”

“Did any of you invest entirely in the Launch?”

“Yeah, a few of the A branch did. And before you ask, plenty stayed behind, too. It was all pretty well organized. We figured out who was doing what and then followed the plan.”

“Was there any particular rhyme or reason to it?”

Jonas waved a hand vaguely. “Basically just who was specializing in what.”

“Was there any danger for those who specialized in stuff back on the System coming up here?” ey asked.

“Terminal boredom?” He laughed. “Really, though, there’s stuff that needs doing there and it’s better to be efficient.”

“Do you think they’ll miss the excitement of the journey?”

“We all have our jobs to do, Codrin. System politics aren’t like those back phys-side. There’s no reason to slack off and not do your job just to have some fun when you can send a fork to do the same for you and then enjoy all those memories, right? No3 Jonas is out on a date right now, actually.”

Codrin nodded as ey jotted down the answer. “I suppose it’s the same as with me and Ioan. At least to an extent, the Odists also infected us with their hopeless romanticism.”

“Of course they did. That’s what they’re built for. A life in theatre primes one to keep a tight focus on manipulating emotions. They’re all incredibly focused on stories, aren’t they? All of the interesting ones, at least.”

“There are boring Odists?”

Jonas shrugged. “Michelle and Sasha were boring. Those who stuck around with her or focused on their little art projects, they were pretty boring.”

Codrin frowned.

“Don’t get me wrong, of course. I like them all! Delightful, to the last, but I’m the dangerous politician, remember? All those I find interesting are the ones who tickle all my politician instincts. It wasn’t an insult.”

“Alright,” ey said, quelling a low rise of anger; after all, if Dear was anything, it was one keenly focused on its art projects. “Either way, thanks for answering. The next question I had was about your involvement with both Secession and Launch. Were you involved in both?”

“Oh, more heavily in Launch than Secession. I was forked slightly after Secession, but there was still work to be done. I did a lot of wrangling of notes, data collection, stuff like that. For Launch, I did the same, just front-loaded. It’s some of the boring work that goes into politics, but work that still needs to be done.”

“And in between the two?”

For the first time since the interview, Jonas grinned in earnest. It was writ so plain across his face that the shift cast all of the previous smiles in doubt. “You’ve been getting some interesting answers to your questions, haven’t you, Codrin? All of the Bălan clade has, I mean.”

“Why do you ask?” ey said, digging eir heels to keep from being dragged into a defensive stance.

“You got to that question surprisingly fast.”

Codrin nodded, waiting Jonas out.

“Between Secession and Launch, I was pretty boring. I did some data collection for some of the other work that was going on. Phys-side is always changing, beholden as they are to the whims of Earth and the restrictions of being tied to a single body in a single location.”

“So you followed that? Kept up on the data gathering?”

He nodded. “Yeah, that was my area of focus. Some of the others were digging around sys-side, but life changes much more slowly here without those external factors. We kept on working with the Odists, too, as I’m sure you’ve heard. There was much to do.”

“It certainly sounds like. Did you or your clade guide much beyond Secession and Launch? I know that there was some work done surrounding the finances of uploading in the mid to late 2100s. Were there other areas of activity?”

Jonas leaned back against the couch, toying with a loose thread at one end of it with his fingers. “Here and there, yeah, but I’m not really the person to ask about that. I’m sure one of you will get into it with True Name, or maybe even snag some time with Jonas Prime.”

Codrin nodded and made a note to that effect.

“You have to understand though, Codrin, none of this was like some sort of shadowy conspiracy, like you may be thinking. We did what politicians do: we represented our constituents and duked it out — metaphorically, of course — with other politicians.”

“Are we your constituents?” ey asked. The words were out of eir mouth before ey had time to consider it.

Jonas laughed, shaking his head and tugging that fiber on the couch all the looser. “In a way, yes. We may be a separate legal entity, but we don’t work the same. We’re not a government. There are no representatives. We don’t vote. Better to say that the System is our singular constituent. You are our constituents only in the sense that there are still some who have to work on keeping the System going. We’re the ones who organize with the phys-side engineers to keep everything ticking along. We’re the ones who ensure that new uploads are smoothly integrated. We’re the ones who ensure that the System keeps growing.”

“Keeps growing? Can you expand on that?”

“It’s nothing complex. The larger a system — that’s system with a lower-case ‘s’ — is, the more stable it is because it tends towards stasis. This applies to political systems, as well. The Western Fed and the S-R Bloc kept their stalemate for god knows how long because they were too large to do anything but, and the only reason they stopped was that they were each subsumed into even larger political entities.”

“So, if I’m understanding you right, keeping the population of the System growing over time–“

“Not just the population,” Jonas interrupted. “The capacity. The complexity.”

“–the more stable it is because it tends toward stasis?”

“You put it more succinctly than I did.”

Codrin waggled eir pen at Jonas. “I’m the writer out of the two of us, you’re the politician. What do you mean by stasis, though?”

“If we were phys-side, conservatism would probably be the word one would reach for, if only because the sheer burden of legislation grows exponentially complex with the size of the small-s system that all of the other aspects of the system start to fall under its branch.

“Here, though, we tend towards stasis. It’s a type of stability that implies a cessation of change. It’s not a bad thing. Boring, maybe, but boring is safe. Still, it’s only a tendency, and it approaches that point asymptotically. The bigger the system, the smoother things run because the rough spots and sharp edges are harder to feel. It needs to be gardened and nourished. That’s all we do.”

After ey caught up taking down eir notes from Jonas’s short speech, Codrin sat in silence for a bit, considering the next path to take on the interview.

“Do you have any other questions?” Jonas asked. “Not to rush you or anything. I’m just wondering if I should fork to get some work done.”

“Just one more, I guess. Not one of my prepared ones, but you’ve given me a lot to think about. How does Launch fit in with your concept of stasis? That feels like an awful big change. It even decreased the population of the System back home.”

Jonas shook his head, chuckling. “I’m not the one to ask that one, Codrin. I’ve specialized way too much into data analysis. You can ask True Name about that, or Jonas Prime. I’m just parroting things we talked about a century and a half ago.”

“I will, I’m sure, but can you give me your best guess? I’d still like to hear it,” ey said.

“Best guess? The System was deemed stable enough to undertake the launch project, and the project was deemed likely to produce a secondary stable society. Beyond that, beats me.”

Codrin nodded and, seeing Jonas begin to rise, stood from eir seat, shaking the offered hand.

Jonas saw em to the door, saying, “I hope I didn’t add to your stress, Mx. Bălan. You’re doing good work, and I hope it’s also enjoyable.”

“It’s certainly intriguing. You’ve given me a lot to think about, and I’m sure Ioan will agree.”

“Of course. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask.” He smiled to Codrin, and the smile was the least earnest ey had seen yet. “And I look forward to seeing what you come up with.”

It wasn’t until Codrin was back at the house on the prairie, back with eir family, back where ey was comfortable enough to work on transcribing eir notes, that ey came across the phrase that had left em so wrong-footed during the interview.

Ey frowned, stood up, and paced around eir office for a few minutes, stopping at the end of each circuit to stare out at the prairie beyond the windows. Ey was starting to feel as though there were coils of some sort wrapping around em. Thick, fleshy things that squeeze around eir middle, bound eir hands, held em silent. They did not kill em, did not force em to move, to watch. They did not force em do do anything. They just held em there, letting em know that, at all times, they were present.

So ey sat at eir desk and wrote a footnote for eir transcript that ey’d send back to Ioan and May Then My Name.

Check my work, Ioan. As you have read, Jonas asked what each of our stressors were, and I mentioned a sentence or two about each of us and what we’d been doing that had been keeping us busy.

You’ll notice that, for you, when talking about End Waking, I said, “One of them told em to be careful interviewing you, that you’d control the whole thing.”

His reply: “Did he now?”

I don’t think I messed up the transcription, and you know as well as anyone that our memories are all there for our perusal. I’ve thought and thought and thought on it. I shouldn’t doubt, and yet I do, so check my work.

I said “one of them”, and Jonas said “did he now”. I asked Dear, and it said that there were relatively few male Odists in the clade (“one fewer, now”).

Did you tell anyone that you were interviewing End Waking other than May Then My Name? I don’t mean to cast doubt on either of you. I think you feel just as bound up in this as I do, but I need some clarification as to how Jonas knew that you had interviewed one of those relative few. I need that clarity. I think we’re beyond wants, now.