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<title>Zk | Qoheleth --- 2305</title>
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<h1>Zk | Qoheleth --- 2305</h1>
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<p><span class="tag">writing</span> <span class="tag">novel</span> <span class="tag">chapter</span> <span class="tag">fiction</span> <span class="tag">scifi</span> <span class="tag">post-self</span> <span class="tag">qoheleth</span></p>
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<p>Transcript of Node: <a href="http://35.165.134.227/node/bea0cf302fcd00863f0c67a91b1a75c0e4ba4863">[bea0cf302fcd00863f0c67a91b1a75c0e4ba4863]</a> with descriptive text by #d5b14aa.</p>
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<p><em>The footage shows two persons. One of them has to be Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled, who is an up-tree branch of the Ode clade, eighth stanza. No one else has ears that big, nobody else can somehow speak in italics. The other took some research, but I am confident that ey is an instance of Ioan Bălan, a historian and writer. Ey is a tracker, but only just, as eir habits tend toward few to no long-running instances. This instance is either #tracker or one tasked to this project.</em></p>
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<p><em>The two persons are sitting outside of a cafe, from whom I obtained this footage. They are in conversation. Going to sit down and watch this.</em></p>
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<blockquote>
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<p><strong>Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled</strong>: Thank you for your letter, Ioan. Lots of really good stuff in there, most of which I had missed simply out of nearsightedness.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan Bălan</strong>: You’ve got me hooked on this project, I have to say. It’s fascinating stuff.</p>
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<p><em>Dear grins at this.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong> We — that is, some other Odists down-tree from me — have come up with some further hints about the message.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Oh? Anything good?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: I suppose it depends on your definition of good.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: [snark, good natured] Oh great. Excited already. [more earnest] The fascination continues. Well, let’s have it.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: So, one of us did an exhaustive search of some records and found an old archive server running somewhere.</p>
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<p><em>Oh goodie. Better start gearing up.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Wait, start at the top. What were they searching?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: They were searching for the block of encrypted text — not what was in it; they cracked that long ago. They searched for the encrypted text itself, and they came across an archive server.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Old node boxes? Wow, even I feel crusty using one of those, and I’m a historian.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: [laughter] They found the archive server though, and there is a bunch of intriguing stuff on it. New, old, the whole thing. There is stuff from ages ago, shortly after we got here, and stuff from a few hours ago.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: You’re kidding. Newly created stuff?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: I know. It is ridiculous.</p>
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<p><em>The fox’s ears flop when it gets excited and shakes its head, never noticed that. It is kind of cute.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Never met anyone who could actually get one working well enough to add new nodes. So the encrypted text was in a node on the server?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Yes. It is still there. [pause] Just sent the URI.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: I…well, I’ll have to take it at your word that it’s the same as the one you found earlier, I’m not going character by character.</p>
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<p><em>Dear seems a little frustrated at this. About Ioan’s slowness? I know I would not compare the files. It sounds exasperated.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Of course, Ioan. I promise it is the same, though. Needless to say, we found a crusty old archive with the block on it, and there are other public nodes on there as well. I am guessing a bunch of private ones, too.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Anything good in those?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Nothing…penetrable. It is all fairly opaque. To me, at least.</p>
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<p><em>Ioan grins at this.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Thus us meeting?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: [nodding] Yes. The only bit that I have any insight into is the deck listing, which I think might be another bit of old encryption–</p>
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<p><em>Ioan groans aloud, at which Dear grins.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: My sentiments exactly. It is another encryption scheme which relies on a deck of cards for a stream of random numbers. I have not dug into it in years because the decryption process is so slow, but there may be a node on that box containing the encrypted text.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Want me to have a look, then? The techier stuff is going to go right over my head, you know that.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: It is not all tech, promise. I just want you to give it a read and see what you pick up from it, you know? Put your amanuensis hat on and just spend some time experiencing.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: You think highly of me. No complaints, of course, but I feel I have to ask, why can’t someone from your own clade fill this role?</p>
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<p><em>Dear is quiet. Struggling for words? Our Dear? This must have hit it hard.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: We…differ. The Odists, I mean.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: “Differ”? Within the clade?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Yes. A hallmark of Dispersionistas is that we treat each of our forks as fully-realized individuals. We may have a shared past, but from the point we fork onward, we grow ever further apart.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: I assume you mean more than just a matter of increasing conflicts.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Yes. Although we Odists limit our instances to the one hundred available names, we still consider ourselves Dispersionistas as we never merge back down-tree. But, that aside, we also want someone out-clade for this. <em>I</em> want someone out-clade for this.</p>
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<p><em>Ioan seems taken aback.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Do the other Odists not like that I’ve been brought on?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Of the ones who know, most are fine with it.</p>
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<p><em>Now frustrated/confused.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: “The ones who know”?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: You have, of course, noticed that you have not interacted with any of my cocladists. I have told some about hiring you, but not all.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Alright, I suppose. If you’re independent, then I guess it makes sense that I be your amanuensis rather than the clade’s.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Yes. Perhaps more evidence that we are split on how to tackle this in the first place. Different camps, different strategies, infighting. Ioan, you have to understand that, when a clade gets old, it starts to get a little batty.</p>
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<p><em>Calm down fox, I’m working on it. Not so frantic.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Some clades try to get around this by keeping a certain core group of instances — talking mostly Dispersionistas, mind — in a setting that keeps them as sane as possible. Something that feels very ‘normal’. Or maybe some are researching forking from earlier points, from down-tree, rather than from where they are now.</p>
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<p><em>It furrows its brow.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: We do not. First of all, we started way too early on for that to be a thing. We trusted that change itself would keep us sane, that as instances diverged, especially with mutation algos in place, they would change enough to keep us from falling apart.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: And that didn’t work?</p>
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<p><em>Long pause.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: It kind of worked, I will put it that way. I feel fairly well rounded, as much as that means, and I am sure those across the clade from me do too, but it is complicated. You might not recognize my cocladists as Odists without knowing beforehand. It is like having a very close sib that was raised by a different family in a different sim.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: More different than you’d expect, then?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: ‘Expect’…fits strangely for this. The problem is that they are still <em>us</em>, and we are still them. Clades are families of separate individuals in a lot of ways, but you must realize that, in the end, they are still one individual. We are more different than one individual should be. Does that make sense?</p>
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<p><em>It does, Dear. That’s why I’m doing this.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: I guess so. [pause] So some of your clade would prefer I not be a part of this?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: More than that. They feel that investigating the matter of the Name being written is too risky, too close to investigating the Name itself.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: I don’t know how I would respond to that.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: That is my field, Ioan. Do not worry about it.</p>
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<p><em>Ioan holds up eir hands, looks apologetic. The fox has tilted its ears back.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Sorry, Dear. I hope I’m not overstepping at all.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: [calmer] Do not worry about it. It is okay, I promise. It is just that we are really good at arguing, so I have been dealing with that quite a bit the last few days. That is why I hired you; I am relegated to an administration role so I am a bit on edge. Let’s get back to the archive server, yes?</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Sure thing. Where did you say your cocladists had found it?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Just in a search. I do not quite know the details about how. Assuming just a text search of the perisystem. Not too sure on the terminology; I bought into being an artist pretty hard. All that knowledge is in exos.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: [laughter] No worries there, Dear. I’m trying to keep up with you is all. I was just wondering if they found anything else.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: You mean like the other nodes on the server?</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: I’ll poke around at those, look for ties and such. I was more wondering if they’d found anything in their search that didn’t meet the relevancy threshold for them. Stuff like back-links to the server, or anyone talking about this Qoheleth. Hebel. Whichever.</p>
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<p><em>Silly name. Oh well. Dear looks taken aback.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: I had not really thought to ask. I do not suppose they did, though. Do you think it is worth having them search around more? Lowering the, uh, relevancy threshold? [laughter]</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Yeah, I think so. Though now that I’ve got it too, I can do some of that digging myself. I want to see who likes the Tanakh so much as to name themselves that. And why ‘kemmer’.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: I…well, it’s complicated and out of scope, but it relating to fluidity of gender is relevant to the clade as a whole. Very big for us, if only at a remove. I have opted out.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: So I noticed. It makes sense, though.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: I am glad someone is thinking about this stuff. You are sounding more like a–</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Private investigator?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: [laughter] I was going to say historian, sounding more like an historian every time we talk. But you never know, maybe you would make a good PI.</p>
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<p><em>That was fast! I may have less time than I had thought. Dear’s lovely, and it’s totally right: on the other side of the clade, there are some who’d not like this kind of digging. Too entrenched. Too Conservative.</em></p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: I can’t tell whether or not I should be flattered.</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: It is a good thing. Just keep digging, and we will too. I will be about. Got a few more things to wrap up to finish the current gallery exhibition, but after that, I am just going to work on this — with you if you do not mind — and try and figure out what is even happening in the clade. Do keep in touch, yes? Ping me whenever.</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Will do. [pause] Wait, you’re an instance artist, right?</p>
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<p><strong>Dear</strong>: Yes. Why do you ask?</p>
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<p><strong>Ioan</strong>: Why don’t you fork to work on both at the same time?</p>
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<p><em>Dear shrugs, grins, quits. Very lovely fox. Really quite lovely.</em></p>
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<p><em>No time to dawdle watching Ioan try and figure out up-tree instances, though. Must be getting ready. Quit this instance, flush the server of extraneous crap to guide Ioan a little more effectively — yeesh, how old is some of this stuff? Need to re-encrypt a bunch of it anyway — and maybe get ready for some visitors.</em></p>
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