Part 1 — Conversation
It’s been about three and a half years since the fourth convergence, the meeting of the Artemesians with Castor. Life has taken a bit of a swing toward the adventuresome as news and new technology trickle their way back down to Lagrange, the original instance of the System in orbit around Earth. Technological changes include finer-grained ACLs that control permissions on various bits of the System, allowing for opaqued or visually secure cones of silence, limits on sensorium messages, etc.
During those three years, Ioan Bălan has been getting coffee with The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream of the Ode clade once a month. While the relationship between True Name and…well, everyone has been kind of strained, it was particularly tense between her and Ioan’s partner May Then My Name Die With Me of the Ode clade, who, for years, struggled with feelings of hatred towards True Name. Although that hatred has softened towards resentment, these monthly coffee dates, where Ioan and True Name just chat and then work on their own projects, have been meant to keep avenues open between the two, since neither May nor True Name have given up hope on figuring out a path forward. They always seem to talk about each other to Ioan, and it kind of feels like they want to move forward, but they can’t yet find a way.
Oh, speaking of projects, Ioan is working on adapting eir book On the Perils of Memory (the story of Qoheleth) for the stage, True Name is prepping the System on the political side for the technological advancement that will allow audiovisual communication between the System and Earth instead of just text, and May is working on a monologue about being built to love.
Ioan and May are just incredibly gay together, and it’s painfully sweet, but I promise it’s a legit plot element.
Meanwhile, after a windstorm blew a tree over and crushed his tent and impaled his leg on a branch, Do I Know God After The End Waking has interrupted his months of solitude and called his boyfriend Debarre back to help him rebuild the tent in a new location. They’re also pretty gay, but, like, in a super stoic way because E.W. can’t emote and Debarre is a weasel and thus made of angst. May stops by their sim to visit and a) complain about the fact that True Name is in eir life, b) fret about why this still feels important, and c) flirt with Debarre (who is Very Gay™) to make him uncomfortable.
Ioan heads out to Arrowhead Lake — the abandoned mountain lake sim that ey discovered decades back — for a walk to try and tease apart eir own feelings on being the bridge between May and True Name. Ey worries that ey has this urge to fix things in relationships, whether or not ey actually can (or whether or not those involved even want that). Ey’s been fretting about this for a while, and even May has picked up on it, as she mentions when they go out to dinner afterwards. She suggests that this is maybe something that has always been the case for em, and that em uploading to provide eir brother Rareș with the subsidy funds was a way for em to ‘fix’ the situation as best ey could.
True Name and Ioan have agreed that their next monthly meeting should be on Secession/Launch day, January 21 (yes I chose my birthday, no I am not sorry). This time, though, True Name arrives looking terrible, paranoid, like she hasn’t slept in days, hasn’t showered in a week, and hasn’t changed her clothes in even longer. She says that she’s been struggling, but that she and Jonas Anderson, the other behind-the-scenes leader of the System, have a ‘gathering’ later in the day. Weird choice of words, but that’s what he said. As part of that, she’s distracted with the fact that her instances are going to merge down before the gathering to reduce conflicts. Partway through this, one merge has learned that Jonas is looking for her, which is weird, because he knows she’s with Ioan. The merges suddenly stop, though, along with all communication with her instances. She leaps to her feet, looks around the coffee shop, and sees the same assassin that killed Qoheleth walking toward them, so she grabs Ioan’s hand and yells for em to take her ‘somewhere, anywhere’. Ey tries taking her home, where they find the same assassin struggling with May, who forks, grabs the both of them, and yanks them to Arrowhead Lake. May is furious, and True Name caught in the middle of panic attack. She susses out that Jonas just tried to assassinate her.