After True Name returned to her room — or, more likely, out to her field to set up camp — May said, “If I may say, that was really fucking weird, and I do not want to talk about it at all.”
Ey laughed. “You certainly may. Weird as hell and I need a break.”
That last part wasn’t strictly true, ey knew. Ey’d be ruminating over it until they went to sleep, and likely well into tomorrow. Still, ey agreed that it wasn’t a topic for talking about at the moment. The chances they’d just wind up talking in circles, rehashing the same topics over and over again, was too high, and ey could do that mentally just as well.
So, instead, they relaxed together on the couch, May with her head in eir lap while ey read and she worked on this or that, or whatever it was that she did when her eyes lost focused and she hummed quietly to herself. She’d once called it ‘going into screen-saver mode’, which didn’t sound totally accurate to what ey knew of her when ey’d looked up the reference, but ey still teased her about it every now and then.
Quiet nights were good, though, and ey was pleased to just spend the rest of this one in comfort.
Sleep, however, brought restless dreams. Not nightmares, certainly; they weren’t even bad dreams in any common sense of the term. They were, to the last, plagued with a sense of waiting and unease. Ey dreamt of waiting for unspecified news, sitting on uncomfortable benches in weirdly crowded lobbies. Ey dreamt of May being out of the house on some errand longer than she had said she would be. Ey dreamt of not having enough information.
All the same, ey woke well rested and made it to the coffee pot before either of the skunks, so ey was able to claim ten minutes of solitude standing before the picture windows and looking out into the slowly lightening yard and the field beside it. Ey could see True Name poke her snout out from her tent, disappear, and then, a few minutes later, start trudging her way back toward the house.
“Good morning, Ioan. Oh good, thank you,” she mumbled, making a bee-line for one of the mugs of coffee that sat, steaming, before the coffee machine.
“Morning. Sleep well?”
She shrugged noncommittally. “I slept, I am well-rested enough.”
They watched the morning head toward full brightness in silence after that, em still standing before the windows and her sitting on the couch, more focused on her coffee than anything.
“You have once again failed to bring me my coffee,” May grumbled from the bedroom door. “I am going to file a petition to have you censured with the leadership of the System.”
“Ey did not bring me my coffee, either, my dear,” True Name said mildly. “And until recently, I was in such a position.”
May stopped mid-shuffle, snorted, then mumbled an apology and padded to the kitchen to grab her own mug before taking Ioan by the hand and dragging em over to the beanbag so that she could lay down with em.
“Are you two up to talking about meeting with Jonas?” True Name asked. “I will pay in another pot of coffee and breakfast.”
Ioan shrugged. “Sure.”
“After that second coffee, yes,” May said.
Breakfast, it turned out, was a Scandinavian affair, or so ey imagined. Dense, dark bread, a tray of cheeses and meats, and a separate tray of vegetables both pickled and fresh. It was strange to call a meal such as breakfast ‘refreshing’, but the word fit quite well. Quite good, and both of the skunks certainly seemed to appreciate it, eating the lion’s share of the food, though May also swiped up side plate of bacon to go with it.
May nodded towards True Name, grinning. “Alright. Payment accepted. You may begin.”
True Name nodded. “I had an idea as I was walking last night. Or perhaps it is only a sliver of an idea. I suspect that it will not even get me out of whatever it is that he has planned, but if might soften the blow.”
They both nodded.
“My guess is that, if he wants me to ‘step aside’, as Zacharias said, then he would like me to truly disappear. He would like me to essentially never be seen again.”
“Thus the assassination attempt,” Ioan said.
“Yes. He wanted me to disappear and build up a little bit of mystery because then he would be able to be publicly seen mourning, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam,” she continued, rolling her eyes. “The usual nonsense, I mean. I do not think his plans B through M will be any different. They will all involve me no longer being a part of this and in such a way as to make him come out feeling the victor.”
“And I’m assuming you’d like to avoid that if possible.”
“Him feeling like the victor? Yes. I really do mean that I would need to disappear in his definition of victory. I would be effectively dead, if not actually. I would be restricted in who I would be able to speak to, I would have to remain out of public sims, and so on. He would not ask me to retire. Disappear.” She hesitated, swirled the last of her coffee in the bottom of her mug, and added, “At least, that is what I would do. It would mean less attack surface for the reactive elements we have been tracking.”
“And your plan would, what, subvert that?” May asked. “I have a suspicion I know what it is, but I would like to be sure.”
“I suspect you do, yes. I will offer him the option of me changing from what I was to such an extent that I will no longer be the True Name that either he or the System expects.”
“Is this about me merging down, then?”
She shrugged. “I do not think that that is a requirement, here, though that question was on my docket for the day. I suspect that I have already changed enough with End Waking’s merger. I would just need to prove it to him somehow. That is where my plan ends, however.”
Ioan sat back in eir chair, arms crossed as ey mulled it over. If she was right — and ey suspected that she was — then there would likely need to be a change in form and a change in name to go along with the change in attitude. After all, that’s how Zacharias had gotten as far as he had, right?
Ey couldn’t picture her as anything other than a skunk or perhaps whatever version of Michelle she remembered, though, and certainly couldn’t picture her named anything other than True Name. Would she also have to change her speech patterns? They weren’t totally identifiable, but now that ey thought about it, even Zacharias had shared many of them. She was an Odist through and through — more so than any other ey’d met — and all of the forking and reinforcing that May had done to grow her sense of empathy didn’t seem like something that she’d willingly undergo, either.
But perhaps that’s what she’d meant by a sliver of a plan. They still had plenty of time to sort that out, at least, and perhaps she’d come up with a way that would actually work without changing herself so much that she’d cease being who she was.
All the same, ey wasn’t sure that her simply incorporating End Waking was quite the type of change that Jonas would appreciate. She acted different, spoke different, and ey was sure she felt different about her work than she had, but eir suspicion was that Jonas didn’t want anything left of her that could possibly be of any threat to his power. Her incorporating End Waking’s extreme distaste for the politics of the System might be enough, it might not be, but that was a big risk to take.
Ey’d apparently been silent long enough that the two skunks had drifted off into their own conversation. At least ey’d not been mumbling.
“Welcome back, my dear,” May said when ey leaned forward again to grab eir coffee.
Ey grinned. “Thanks. Was a nice trip. Don’t mean to interrupt or anything, though.”
She shook her head. “We were talking of changes.”
“Any conclusions?”
“Not particularly, no,” True Name said. “There are certain levels of change that I find unacceptable, is all.”
“Right. I was thinking similar. It needs some work, but I can at least see where you’re coming from with it.”
She nodded. “I will continue to explore. When the time comes, I may ask for your help workshopping some ideas.”
The conversation wound down from there, with True Name heading out to walk her prairie or poke around in the water or whatever it was that she was doing.
As though inspired, May and Ioan both moved outside as well, claiming the bench swing on the balcony, sitting on it sideways and facing each other, legs all tangled up. The warmer spring weather ey’d brought about for May while she was overflowing had seemed appropriate once they’d returned, so ey’d left it for the time being. Perhaps ey’d get one more big snow in before letting spring proper settle in.
“What were things like back in 2155?” ey asked.
May tilted her head, blinking a cone of silence into place. “When I merged last?”
Ey nodded.
“I had just forked the third time. There had been more relationships, of course, ones that ended before I had the chance, but this was the third time that I had settled into something comfortable enough to let it last. I was crushed and not particularly excited about merging down, but I had not diverged quite as much by then.”
“Not as much empathy?”
She laughed. “Too much, perhaps. It took a while for me to settle on a comfortable amount.”
“Too much? How on Earth did that work?”
“I was a fucking mess at all times. I cried at the drop of a hat.”
“You still cry a lot,” ey observed, then laughed when she poked at eir knee.
“Yes, well. I had attributed it at the time to simply being torn up over no longer being in a relationship. My fork was happy, I was heartbroken. In the end, though, I think that my goals were starting to drift from hers. I was diverging in more fundamental ways than either of us had expected.”
“And the next time she asked, you just said ‘no’?”
She nodded. “She asked me to consider it, and then the topic simply never came up again. I think that she was already expecting to write me off after the merge in systime 31.”
“Did she wind up expressing her own emotions differently from that merge?”
She opened her mouth as if to reply, then closed it again, frowning. “I was going to snap at you,” she admitted. “But you bring up a good point. She did not. What emotions she expressed, real or not, came more earnestly to her. She was more able to express empathy, even if it was in a very True Name fashion. She did not accept my merges — or any of those from others in her stanza — as blithely as she did End Waking’s.”
“I imagine the circumstances were a bit different,” ey said. “Why were you going to snap at me?”
“I thought you were going to ask me to merge down.”
Ey shrugged. “I hadn’t gotten that far in the thought process. Is it something you’re still uncomfortable with?”
“I do not know, my dear. If you had asked me just then, I would have said no. If you had asked me five minutes before then, I would have said yes.” She patted eir knee, smiling. “But I will endeavor not to snap at you either way. How about you, though?”
“Much the same, I think. Your answer has me wondering, though, if she was more intentional about a merge like that, it could work. She could have some of your memories of emotions that she thinks might help while still respecting your privacy.”
“And that is why I did not snap at you. It is a good point, my dear. She would not have my memories wholesale, and with what memories and personality traits and whatever else goes along with a merge, she would hopefully wind up with a synthesis as she says, rather than a replacement. She would still have all 226 years of being True Name, and all those years of being End Waking, just that she would also have some of me in there.”
“Is that something you could talk her through?”
She looked thoughtfully out into the yard, at the faint greening of the lilac branches. “Perhaps, yes. We would have to be very deliberate about it, but it should be possible.”
Ey nodded, watching the skunk’s gaze drift in and out of focus, the way she would occasionally chew on her lip when thinking. Watched, and thought about what such a synthesis would look like. There wouldn’t be any concrete changes in eir partner, but what would this new restless, unsettled True Name look like with yet more memory heaped onto her? Ey knew ey could never know the whole of May and that ey was biased besides, but she seemed so much more happy and comfortable than her down-tree instance, even before End Waking’s merger. More comfortable, feeling less of a need to dump all of her energy into forward motion. What would that look like with True Name?
Ey watched her think. Watched her and thought about how much ey loved her, watched and wondered if such a True Name would also sit and think and chew on her lip.
“Do you want to?”
May started from her own reverie. “Hmm?”
“Regardless of the mechanics or how comfortable you are with it, is this something you’d even want to do?”
She nodded readily. “Yes. That is the source of all this stress for me over the last few days. I want to, it is just the reality that is working against me.”
“Why?”
“Why do I want to?” She laughed. “Because I like who I am and I do not like who she is, but that does not mean I do not like what she can become. I want her to be happy and to feel love and to slow the fuck down for five minutes. I do not know for sure, and I acknowledge there’s a value judgment here, but I strongly suspect that these will only ever be good for her.”
Ey leaned forward enough to snag one of her paws and give it a squeeze. “Guess we’re of one mind on that, then. Or at least mostly so; you have a better sense as to what goes into the emotional side.”
She smiled gratefully and gave eir hand a squeeze. “Well, when she returns, we can expand on our thoughts.”
They didn’t have to wait long.
Shortly after they went back inside to pull together a snacky sort of lunch, True Name returned from her trip out in the prairie and bowed to them, saying, “I have had some thoughts that I would like to run past you.”
“As have we,” Ioan said, gesturing her to a chair. “Good timing. What were you thinking?”
“It is perhaps more for May Then My Name to answer, though I will appreciate both of your input.”
The skunk nodded for her to continue.
“You have mentioned in the past that you forked to cement emotional patterns that led to your divergence. I think that I have wound up doing that to some extent, but only ever subconsciously. With how much specificity were you able to pick what it was that you were modifying?”
May glanced to Ioan, then shrugged. “I worked in very small steps. I forked dozens of times to change very small things. Being deliberate about it made it essentially as fine-grained as I needed.”
“Alright. That helps quite a lot, actually. I was considering how much I might be able to change without losing who and what I am. If I can change some of my own habits, maybe the end result will still be something that I am happy with, but with enough difference to get Jonas off my back. I am not yet sure what those habits might be, but it is an option, at least. I have been trying to catalogue what it is about myself that can go, as it were.” She smiled wryly, “But yes, doing so deliberately is probably for the best.”
“That’s actually what we had been talking about,” Ioan said, looking to May for confirmation that it was alright to continue.
“A deliberate merge,” she said, picking up from where ey’d left off. “One that will keep us comfortable in our privacy while also giving you the opportunity to build upon what you are.”
“Really? That is not what I was expecting to hear.”
They both nodded.
There was a long silence, then. Both May and Ioan watched True Name as she stared up at the ceiling, unseeing.
“And you are okay with that, Ioan?”
Ey nodded. “I think so. I don’t wholly understand the mechanics of it, but you’re the dispersionistas. I trust you two to have that covered.”
She nodded and looked to May.
“If you are alright working with me through the process, then I am okay with it.”
“Are you?” Ioan asked.
True Name smiled lopsidedly. “So long as I can fork beforehand just in case, why the fuck not? I am already not what I was.”
May scoffed and shook her head. “‘So long as you can fork’? Jesus, True Name. Of course you can fucking fork. 108 instances with daily reconciliation, and she asks if she can fork.”
They laughed.
“Well,” True Name said, shrugging. “Fuck it.”