Codrin Bălan#Pollux — 2325
The messages between LVs and the L5 System were flying as fast and as thick as possible, given the nearly day and a half transmission time between the station and the launches. It was enough time for Codrin to sit and stew and plan.
The sheer amount of information that was being generated by the Bălan clade and all of their Odist assistants and lovers was enormous, and so much of it was so important, so meaningful, so weird that there was little else ey felt ey could do. There was no clarification that any one of them could offer the other that would take the form of a conversation, something immediate. Instead, they each had to wait three days for a response to a query. Messages became letters, rather than conversations.
So there was nothing to do but go for it. Ey spent as much time as ey could digesting all of the stories, the stories of True Name and Jonas, the stories of the Odists and Yared. Ey had talked as much as Dear was willing to talk, and so there was nothing for it but to pack eir pen and paper and head to the high-rise apartment in the middle of the city that ey’d been directed to.
Ne Jonas greeted em at the door and grinned wide, “Codrin! Wonderful to see you!”
Ey didn’t know what ey expected, but it was certainly not this. Both Codrin#Castor and Ioan had described Jonas as handsome to the point of being almost annoyingly so. The tall, blond, chiseled features type.
Here before em, though, was a rather plain, unremarkable man. He was not forgettable as user11824 was, he was simply middle aged, bookish, and completely…average.
Nevertheless, Codrin liked him at once. He was not attractive, but his attitude was unfailingly kind. Not avuncular, per se, but perhaps the friendly professor that everyone likes, even when they fail his class. Maybe it was the button-up shirt and jeans, maybe it was the way he smiled, the way he talked. Maybe it was just the whole of him. The everything that made Ne Jonas Ne Jonas was perfectly crafted to appeal to that of the academic in Codrin.
“Ne Jonas, yes? Thank you so much for having me over.”
“Of course, of course! Just Ne, though. I’m less of a Jonas than the rest.” He walked into the apartment and around the corner, beckoning Codrin with. “Tea, though? It’s just Earl Grey, but hey, it’s something.”
The kitchen that Codrin had been led into was of a style that felt old even to em, who had uploaded nearly a century back. Wooden chairs, well worn. Wooden table, scratched and dinged. Tile floor, the grout black from years of dirt and grime ground into it.
“Uh, sure. I’ll take a cup.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Just cream, please.”
“Oh…” Ne sounded crestfallen. “I have skim milk, is that okay?”
“Sure, I’ll take it.” Codrin laughed, watching the older man putter around the kitchen. Meanwhile, ey pulled out eir pen and paper to take notes. “You know, you’re not at all what I expected, I have to say. I was all geared up to be talking to some hot-shot politician in front of some sleek desk or whatever, not sharing tea around a table.”
Ne turned a dial on the stove to start the kettle, frowned, and then pulled a lighter out of a drawer in order to light the gas when the igniter did not. “Not all Jonases are alike, Codrin.” He grinned over his shoulder. “Most of them are, of course. You would’ve gotten the politician treatment from just about any other Jonas, but some of us got tired of that snazzy life and opted for something a little simpler.”
“What led you to do so?”
While the kettle crawled to a boil, Ne turned, leaning back against the counter and smiling to Codrin, arms crossed over his chest. “I think it was the pressure of it. It’s not that I’m not still doing my work, but when you look like that, you feel like you have all the pressure of your job resting on your shoulders. Changing my appearance, changing the way I lived, well, it made me actually start enjoying work again, rather than it being the job that owned me.”
“I think I can understand that. I used to own the academic look pretty hard, back when I was Ioan. Over time, though, as my work and home life shifted, I found that I felt less comfortable in that state and more comfortable in, well.” Ey gestured at emself, eir tunic and sarong.
“Do you think you became less of an academic and more of something else?” Ne asked.
“That’s a good question. I don’t know that I ever really was an academic. I was an investigative journalist, more than anything. I was a writer who fancied emself a historian. Now, I guess I’ve shifted more to the creative side, maybe. A lot more writing, a lot less history, at least up until this project.”
“Think living with an Odist helped in that regard?”
Codrin nodded. “Dear’s very…well. It’s very itself. Not sure how else to put it. But it’s also been good at getting me out of the comfort zone that I’d found myself in up until then. It was a good zone, and I’m glad that Ioan still has that, but I also like what I’m doing now.”
They were interrupted by the rising whine of the kettle, which Ne pulled off the burner. He turned off the stove and filled two mugs, which he brought to the table before grabbing a carton of milk from the fridge.
The tea was a perfectly acceptable Earl Grey. The milk was unremarkable. The mugs were mismatched and stained with a dark patina from decades of use. It was comfortable and charming in all its imperfections.
“So, what is it that you’re doing now that you feel better doing in this form?” ey asked, nodding to Ne.
“I’m a little like you, I guess. I’m the one who takes all of the history and draws it together into a big picture. From there, I ensure that the rest of the clade — at least, the rest of the clade that’s working on this project — remains on the same page and doesn’t diverge too far. I’m the clerk to Prime’s executive.”
“Is that why you look like a cross between a professor and an author?”
Ne grinned between puffs of breath over his steaming mug. “Yes. It’s hard to reconcile that job description with looking like some high-powered attorney or movie star or whatever they’re looking like these days.”
“You don’t see them much?”
He shook his head. “We mostly correspond through writing and media messages.”
Codrin nodded. “The best form of communication, if you ask me.”
“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” Ne Jonas laughed, sipped at his tea, winced, and set the mug down again. “But here, look at me, I’ve gone and steered the conversation to other topics. I want to make sure that I get to your questions. What do you have for me?”
It almost felt a shame to move on to what Codrin knew were some topics that might be difficult or tense, but ey supposed it was as good a time as any. “Well, first of all, has your clade been keeping you up to date on the status of this project? I don’t want to make you feel like you’re repeating yourself.”
Ne nodded and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “You’ve interviewed No Jonas and Jonas Prime from our clade, and from the Ode clade, you’ve interviewed Dear, Why Ask Questions, True Name, End Waking, and May Then My Name. You’ve also interviewed Ezekiel, Debarre, user11824, Yared Zerezghi, Sadiah, Brahe, and dozens of others who fall below the relevance threshold. I believe your counterpart on Castor is interviewing True Name today for a second time, as well. Have I missed anyone worth talking about?”
Codrin had paused, mug of tea halfway between the table and eir lips, and stared at Ne throughout the litany.
“I don’t imagine I have,” he continued, smiling. “You’ve talked about the influence of the Jonas and Ode clades in Secession and Launch, the ways in which we have interacted with phys-side both financially and politically in the last two hundred years, the work we did around Launch, our reasons for enforcing stability and divesting our resources to maintain continuity, and the concerns we hold around the Dreamer Modules. Correct? You may sip your tea first, though, if you’d like! Don’t let me stop you.”
Ey set the mug carefully back onto the table, startled to realize that eir hand was shaking and eir breath coming shallow. Suddenly, ey saw the sim for what it was: a carefully prepared presentation, something constructed from top to bottom to appeal specifically to Codrin and those like em. The same, too, applied to Ne Jonas, whose entire personality was built around engendering feelings of camaraderie in those interested in history and stories.
“That…that’s about the whole of it, yeah,” ey said hoarsely. “How did you know all of that?”
Ne laughed, stealing another sip of his tea before responding. “Oh, I’ve told you that already, Codrin! It’s my job to draw together all of the threads and pull together the big picture. I don’t know how the specifics get to me, that’s not my job. I just piece them all together. The big picture here is that you and yours are building the history of the System from start to Launch, and you’re finding out just how much story there is. You, like so many others, were comfortable in that boring stasis, as well you should have been, and now you’re coming to terms with something new, something actually exciting, and you’re waking up to it. This goes way beyond Qoheleth’s stage play about memory; this is about the very foundations of your life.”
Codrin forced emself to take a sip of the tea. It was thin, with the skim milk in it, and ey couldn’t actually taste it for the pounding of eir heart. “Well,” ey said, struggling to maintain calm. “That actually crosses several of the questions I had prepared off my list as either answered or irrelevant.”
“Have you come up with any new ones?”
“Uh…some. The first is: why are you letting us even continue with the history project if you’re aiming to keep stability within the system? Won’t all of this coming to light impact that at all?”
Ne brightened. “Oh, that’s a good one! The answer is twofold. Part one relates to something the No Jonas said to the other Codrin: stability is a thing that needs to be gardened and maintained, that there is no true stasis, but stability approaches that point like the man in Zeno’s Paradox. This is a form of that gardening. When you have a rose garden or topiary, you know, you must cut away bits of it, but when you do, the whole becomes all the healthier and can last for years and years in the state you like it best. It may seem like a traumatic event to trim back roses. After all, you are cutting away good growth, aren’t you? But that’s how you get beautiful roses, year after year.
“That’s what we’re doing with this project. We’re introducing a slightly traumatic event to make the stability of the system — that’s lower-case s, there, I’m talking of the sociopolitical system of those on the three capital-S Systems — stronger. Does that make sense?”
“I suppose,” Codrin said. “You’ve done the cost-benefit analysis and determined it’s worth continuing on with, right?”
“Yes, precisely that,” Ne said.
“And what’s the second reason?”
“The second reason is related to what Jonas Prime said to Ioan: humans, uploaded and not, need something to dream of. They need some better version of the life they live to hope for in order to feel comfortable. No one is happy for long in bliss, Codrin.”
Ey blinked, sitting up straighter. “You mean you need some trauma like this sys-side in order to give people more bliss to aim for?”
“Precisely that.” Ne sipped his tea now that it had cooled and nodded approvingly. “There is much madness in the Ode Clade, but that’s what we suspect nudged Qoheleth over the edge. If you can’t forget anything and all that you can remember is bliss, then bliss begins to feel like torture. His role was to think long term. He was working on the timescale of decades and centuries on shaping the perceived history of both of our clades, so he was already up to his ears in memory. This project of yours will instill a little bit of terror in the hearts of everyone. Not enough that they will rebel, of course. In well over ninety percent of cases, they won’t do anything at all with the information, but it will tick up their anxiety a notch. Pain, anxiety, the need for something greater, these are all essential for survival. Without them, the world would be an impossibly dangerous place. Your history and May then My Name’s mythology will put a dent in that bliss and make it less appealing. Does that make sense, too?”
Codrin finished taking down eir notes and sipped eir tea, mulling it over. Eventually, ey nodded. “It does, yeah. We could thwart you by not publishing this project, but I guess you’ve already done the analysis on that and know that we won’t.”
“You guess correctly, yes. ‘Thwart’, though, is an interesting choice of words. Do you feel like these are some evil plans that we hold?”
“A little. It’s very dramatic. Very much like those supervillains who believe that there are core problems with the world, and if only they could just fix them, life would be so much better.”
Ne laughed. “There are core problems with the world, Codrin. I’ve just enumerated several. You misunderstand, though. The core problems with the world aren’t the absolutes that your supervillains deal in. They’re the ways in which life struggles to maintain stable growth, and like I and my cocladists have said, the goal is not to solve those problems, but to garden around them and make them smaller problems. There is no solution to the question of what makes a stable and continuous world. That’s the asymptote. All we can do is hew as close to that ideal as we can.”
“I think that many phys-side would be pretty upset by that, though, right? If they learn that you’ve been pulling strings from the System to ensure that everything keeps going the way you want, won’t they rebel against that idea?”
“There are two things working against that supposition,” Ne said. “The first is that you misunderstand me when I say that we’ve done the cost-benefit analysis of your project and determined it beneficial. It’s beneficial to both sys- and phys-side for exactly the same reasons, though the mechanics may be different. The second is that you are misjudging just how in over your head you really are with all that we’ve done, including phys-side. As soon as Launch started and as soon as you were nudged to start the project — don’t frown, Codrin, you should’ve seen this coming — whispers were sent down the wire from the System to Earth to ensure that they would have the proper reaction to your work.”
Codrin sat, silent, and stared at the man across from em. The man who had just admitted to subtly influencing billions of lives over hundreds of years through an organization made up entirely, ey assumed, of two clades. Hundreds or thousands of instances of two individuals.
“I suspect we’re about done with the interview, but you must understand, Mx. Bălan, that we are the end product of phys-side life. Stability demands that we think that way. It demands that we think of all those billions of people back on Earth as part of our garden. Not the rose bushes, but the vegetables. They are the crop that we harvest to stay alive, and therefore they must be tended with as much love and care as the roses.”
The room felt like it was elongating, stretching away from em as Ne spoke, as ey capped eir pen and got to eir feet, as ey gathered eir papers. The room was elongating and eir vision dimming around the edges.
And still Ne Jonas sat, smiling kindly up to em. “That, my dear Codrin, is the big picture.”