Yared Zerezghi — 2124
Yared Zerezghi: I’m going to come clean right up front: I shouldn’t be telling you this.
Jonas: Okay hold up.
Jonas: Before you actually tell us, I want to know why.
The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream: As do I.
True Name: I am sure you have your reasons, but if you need us to talk you out of it, we can do that, too.
Yared: Uh. Well, I wasn’t -specifically- told not to tell you, but I was left under the impression that I shouldn’t be talking to you about this sort of stuff. It’s kind of sensitive. Still, I’ve done my reading, and the line to the System is about as secure as it gets, and after all this time, I trust you well enough that you’ll not do anything crazy with the information, and that it’ll probably help you in the end, as you work through all this sys-side.
Jonas: What, that you’ve been working with a government official who is making you steer the DDR towards considering secession?
Yared: …
Yared: What the hell?
Yared: Yes, but how the hell did you know that?
True Name: Jonas has been waiting to drop that on you for some time now. He is currently laughing his ass off. You will have to forgive him.
Yared: I’m just more shocked than anything.
True Name: I mean, I am also laughing my ass off.
Jonas: I promise it’s not out of cruelty, we just made a lucky guess, and I’ve been wwanting it confirmed. Your tone at the start said it all.
Yared: I guess I’m relieved.
Yared: But also a little scared that everyone else has figured it out, too.
Jonas: I wouldn’t count on it. Maybe some have, but few enough that they’ll likely be laughed down as crackpot conspiracy theorists.
True Name: Thank you for confirming this with us, though. It will help us work together more consistently between sys- and phys-side.
Yared: That was my thought, as well.
Jonas: Was that all you were going to tell us?
Yared: Most of it. I was just going to ask your help for the next step, afterwards. I’m -definitely- not supposed to be doing that.
Jonas: Fair enough. How does this all work, anyway?
Yared: I meet up with my handler, of sorts, on a somewhat regular basis, and we talk through the current sentiments, and then someone on his team will slip me a note specifying how I should steer my next post. Sometimes I’ll write two or three posts on the subject, just so they can keep an eye on the response, then I’ll get the next note.
Jonas: And this handler. Are his initials YD?
Yared: Okay, now you hold up.
Yared: I need to know how you guys figured this out.
Jonas: Politician, remember?
True Name: We noticed the contents of your posts starting to shift, then started considering possible sources that might be guiding you. That led us to councilors, and from there, we were able to sift through who is on the council and come up with a short list of names. Yosef Demma just happened to be at the top.
Yared: You still have me worried that others have this all figured out. Jonas, convince me not to worry. You’re the politician, I’m the scared DDR junkie trying not to get stoned to death. Or worse, have my DDR account banned.
Jonas: Alright, I’ll try. I promise, no stoning. The number one advantage that we have is an entire team of handlers working with you and on essentially no other projects. That means we have the resources to send a few of them chasing after this hunch that someone was steering you, do some textual analysis, find the patterns, then do some digging into NEAC politics, looking for people with both the resources, the motive, and the personality to pull it off.
Jonas: Remember, that most of this team were phys-side politicians, too, so we have that head-start. The worst you have to worry about is the WF or S-R Bloc doing the same with their own people after they find out.
Yared: Multiple phys-side politicians?
True Name: Multiple Jonases.
Yared: Oh! There are multiple forks working on this?
Jonas: Of course!
Jonas: Does that soothe your fears?
Yared: I think so, yeah. Do you agree with Jonas on this, True Name?
True Name: Having spent a considerable time with him and some of his forks, I trust him on this, yes.
True Name: Now, can you tell us as much as you are comfortable about councilor Demma, your relationship with him, and what you suspect are his goals?
Yared: Well, we meet for coffee regularly, like I said, and usually drink it in his car while his driver takes us around town. He seems like a nice, older gentleman, and pretty trustworthy. I suspect that’s a bad sign in a politician.
Jonas: No comment.
Yared: Well, either way, he’s nice enough to me, and I guess that’s probably why he’s made it as far as he has. I think his motives basically boil down to the fact that the System has diverged considerably from the culture of any of the political entities left phys-side, both by virtue of who winds up there, and the obvious reasons of not sharing any of our concerns around trade goods.
True Name: He is not wrong, but I do not think that is motive enough.
Yared: I don’t either. I suspect that he’s not keen on something about the System where it is, whether that’s its location in the S-R Bloc or that it remains a multinational entity where uploads retain their citizenship back phys-side. Maybe he just wants to make it a separate nation in order to allow it to be a place to send refugees, asylum seekers, and so on. Or maybe he wants to restrict emigration.
True Name: Those are all good potential reasons, yes. Do you have any hints as to which may be the most likely?
Yared: Not particularly.
True Name: Alright. Keep us up to date, then.
Jonas: What was your most recent message from Demma and his people?
Yared: That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.
Jonas: The thing that you’re not supposed to do. Right.
Yared: Right. The message was: “Gently broach the subject of secession. Keep it only to one sentence, and only as an offhand remark. Make it sound like it was sys-side’s idea.”
Jonas: Wow, that’s not exactly subtle.
True Name: Seems like a bit of a dick move.
True Name: But that is coming from someone sys-side, so perhaps he sees it differently. My assessment is that he might not actually be wrong on this. If he pins it on us but does it gently enough, it can be seen as a situation where both parties are happy to agree on something. It will have to be done carefully, however. If it is suggested too strongly or too early, we risk the possibility of backlash for seeming too eager for secession, as though we are rebelling. If it is not suggested strongly enough, some might see it as secession being forced on us. Jonas? Thoughts?
Jonas: I think you’re spot on for the DDR. Yared, has any mention of secession come up in the forums yet?
Yared: Only a small handful, but given that this topic is starting to be taken up on the governmental level, that amounts to almost none. That said, I’m seeing quite a few people taking to the launch idea, which they’re now equating to something equivalent to secession — they’re calling it separation from earth or resource independence, stuff like that — as well as more talk about international rights, given that sys-side individuals technically retain their citizenship, which makes the System something like international waters.
Jonas: Clever clever. That might be far enough to drop some very subtle hints. I’m not sure about the word ‘secession’ yet, given some of its past connotations. You’ve suggested that we have the nature of nationhood, but you might try pushing harder on referring to us as a nation, a national entity, a nation-state, and so on. Maybe even use ‘statehood’.
True Name: Do you have anything written yet?
Yared: Sure, one sec.
Yared: We continue to circle around this discussion of individual rights as though we are debating the individuality of those sys-side. It’s important to understand, though, that this is a distraction from the actual point. Many have mentioned that those who have uploaded, whether or not they are individuals, are no longer analogous to humans (there’s that speciation argument again!) and one quippy wag even put it, “Who cares if they’re individuals? They can’t even vote!”
Yared: This is quite true, my dear wag. They can’t vote. They have no say in our political affairs out here, and we technically have no say in theirs! How could we? I mean, sure, I bet some of them read DDR posts and wonder what the hell is going on out there? But consider what their politics must look like to us. What would we vote on? Whether or not they must post signage that their sims allow non-euclidean space? Is it okay for you to try and impersonate someone when you can become like them to exacting detail (except for, surprise, their individual personality)?
Yared: I think we’re still split pretty evenly on speciation. Even I am. One day, I’ll think, “Sure, they may be fundamentally different from us, but they still think like us. They still reason like humans. Except for the biological differences, such as they are, they still are.” Other days, though, I’ll wake up and think, “We we have no common frame of reference with these people. They’re just too different.”
Yared: This actually came up in a few conversations with my friends sys-side. It sounds like they share some of that ambivalence toward speciation. They can’t interface with phys-side as we can, and we can’t interface with sys-side as they can, so how could they even be considered the same species as us? And yet here they are, taking place in a political debate as filigreed and baroque as any other, and doing so with the same rational minds that we have. “At this point,” one of them said as we laughed over another fruitless debate. “I’m not even sure we should be discussing individual rights with governments that have no way of knowing how we work. We might as well just secede and end the discussion full-stop.”
Yared: But who knows if speciation will even wind up playing into it, in the end. I’ve noticed that, even though we remain split on the topic, tempers have cooled on both sides. I’m surprised — pleasantly so! — to see this agreement building even in Cairo; I know that many of my compatriots there bore apathy or even antipathy towards the system after previous dealings between NEAC and the S-R Bloc. We’re no longer at each others throats about whether or not they’re so fundamentally different from us that it requires some strange new way to think of them as individuals.
Yared: And honestly, that’s my hope, right? I think that whether or not they’re humans, whether or not they’ve got their own customs and social structure, whether or not they’re even a separate country, even those who are falling on the side of speciation are starting to refer to them in terms of individuals. “Them.” “How many of them.” “Who in there even thinks X” All of these are ways that we refer to individuals, and, you who are still arguing this belabored point that they should have no choice on what is done with their personalities once their bodies are gone, you are now thinking of them as what they are: individuals.
Yared: That, my friends, feels like progress to me. We are starting to come to an understanding of what the system is, whether it’s a home for the disaffected and dying, an international forum where individuals can truly live together, or a country in its own right, is home to thousands of individuals, each with their individual lives, individual reasons, individual feelings. They’re people. The System is their home. We cannot take that from them without violating their individual rights.
Yared: Vote for the granting of rights. Vote yes on referendum 10b30188
Jonas: Well written as always, Yared.
True Name: Agreed. You have quite a way of agreeing with people just enough to make them feel like you might actually be on their side, and that perhaps they ought to work toward the same goal.
Yared: Thank you both. What do you think about the secession angle?
True Name: It is a little blunt. It feels a bit forced, the way it is just stuck in there. Perhaps you might soften it from “We might as well just secede”, to something more like “We would have better luck running our own government”, something like that. I agree with Jonas that there is fear bound up in the word ‘secede’, and the phrase “better luck” implies a humorous remark.
Jonas: Yeah. You want us to be soft, kind, approachable, that sort of thing, especially if you’re going to use your current tactic of “agree with them enough to get them to fight for you”. We want to seem like good people who deserve our individual rights, that to not grant them would be, at best, a real shame, and at worst, an affront to their ideas of freedom.
True Name: This is especially true, given that very few phys-side are acting as our voices. They are arguing on second- and third-hand accounts, such as your own. To them, uploads are this mysterious entity that they might struggle to actually comprehend. You will have to, perhaps ironically, humanize us for them. We have to seem like we can still joke around, still hurt, and still feel the full range of human emotion.
Jonas: You’ve seen True Name and I joking around, after all.
Yared: Yeah. So what do you think about: “At this point,” one of them said as we laughed over another fruitless debate. “I’m not even sure we should be discussing individual rights with governments that have no way of knowing how we work. We’d have better luck running our own government. We can herd our cats, they can herd theirs.”
True Name: I like that. I am enough like a cat to be difficult to herd.
Jonas: Confirmed. Getting her to do anything she doesn’t want to do is fucking impossible.
True Name: I prefer to think of myself as ‘staunchly independent’, thank you very much.
Yared: Haha
Yared: Actually, how about I include some banter into the post?
Yared: “At this point,” one of them said, as we laughed over another fruitless debate. “I’m not even sure we should be discussing individual rights with governments that have no way of knowing how we work. We’d have better luck running our own government.”
Yared: To which the other replied, “We can heard our cats, they can herd theirs,” thus spawning a good five minutes of cat-herding jokes, wherein we unilaterally decided that cats were, to put it politely, staunchly independent. And, you know, I think that applies to them as much as it does to us.
Jonas: I like it! It’ll need a bit of cleaning up to make it flow a little better in context, but I trust that that’s something you can do on your own.
Yared: Of course.
True Name: I am sorry to make such a cat out of you in this situation, Yared. You are being herded by two different camps, us and your councilor friend. Our goals align for now, for which I am grateful, but I understand that having both parties tell you not to tell the other about them is uncomfortable.
True Name: On that note, it is probably best not to tell Demma about this conversation.
Jonas: Seconded.
Yared: Thirded. I don’t know that he’d have my head on a platter if he knew that this conversation had taken place, but I don’t know that he wouldn’t, either.
Jonas: We don’t want that, we like you too much.
True Name: I was going to say that you are too useful to us, but I will grudgingly agree that we do rather like you.
Yared: I’m pleased to hear that!
Yared: I’ll get this polished and posted. What’s next on your side?
True Name: Jonas will likely be snooping around for news and schmoozing where appropriate. I will be focusing on how to present this in the most empathetic, understandable way possible to the Council and other interested parties. I need to sell it to the System.
Yared: Does that mean you’re for secession, then?
Jonas: If the L5 launch goes through, yes. If not, then it becomes more complicated, and we likely -would- have to move to international waters.